That's the Great Man approach to history, the effects of specific individuals on their times, as influencers, catalysts, leaders ... there's always far more to the picture though, it's been said that times make the man, and you can imagine a fair bit of validity to that as well
Europe was primed for war in 1914, austrians wanted to punish/control the serbs, russians were honour bound to stand behind the serbs, prussians wanted to flex their new industrial muscles and leaned toward some degree of conquest eastwards, french wanted two provinces back and revenge for the humiliation of 1870, british wanted to keep any single power from dominating the continent ... did it 'start' with the killing of the archduke? - hmm, but what if the serb kid had had two more seconds, stronger presence of mind, and/or been a better shot, then instead of Sophie he might have done for Potiorek as planned, preventing the latter from his subsequent promotion of war ... or did it start with the junger Kaiser's jealousy of his grandmother's navy, combined with snubs from Uncle Bertie and Aunt Alexandra ... there are roots to all this, and as in biology you don't get the leaves and pretty flowers without the roots
How would Britain have fared without Churchill, indeed ... still, turn it around - How would Churchill have fared without - 1. the Channel, 2. the nature of the british people, 3. the accumulated wealth of generations, 4. Camm/Mitchell/et al, developers of Hurricane and Spitfire, also their few early supporters, 5. the realisation among the entire anglosphere that the nazis absolutely had to be dealt with, and especially 6. the 1918 failure to take the first war deep into Germany and insist on unconditional surrender, and 7. making a very non-constructive peace treaty and then not enforcing it - that latter two of which paved a path for the nazis in the first place, and thusly helped to 'make' Churchill ... who was pretty much a washed-up ex-politico in 1939, barely making his mortgage payments by writing pieces for whoever paid best ... it all goes together - can't really isolate bits of the story, or particular players, and expect things to work out the same
Economic cycles have human behaviour as principal causes, we should all be able to agree on that ... to what extent it is behaviour of leaders though, as opposed to behaviour of masses of individual players, this will come down to opinion in a lot of cases ... particular actions do matter - Hoover, a brilliant man unfairly maligned in many ways, did sign Smoot-Hawley and let it go through, this severely deepened an already faltering amount of world trade in the thirties, and it did matter a lot ... still, there had been extreme over-production following the war, and unrestrained speculation based on always-gonna-get-better times
At this point broad markets have been rising for what, near ten years, since the last reset brush with reality ... does it matter what la Naranjana does - mmm, no doubt to some degree, but maybe he is more an effect than a cause ... somebody out there said, he's a symptom, not the condition itself
Technology plays a part ... here's Ferguson with a few minutes on the internet compared to the printing press ... [roughly the same effects but faster, with about the same failure to live up to expectations] -
youtube.com
wdo.to - new high, woo-hoo
whn.v - i figured tax-loss would end with an excess of buyers over sellers
bto.to - few cents from a new 52wk hi, calls on this and others like agi, ssl, etc are performing now
svb.to - even old Silver Bull gets an uptick ... whole collection noticeably higher i see, well this is normal ... but what a hole to climb out of eh, pretty close to the disaster of 2015 |
