“the story of two men and the two decisions that transformed world history in a single tumultuous year, 1917: Wilson’s entry into World War I and Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution.
The “Perfectibility of man”
In April 1917, Woodrow Wilson, champion of American democracy but also segregation, advocate for free trade and a new world order based on freedom and justice, thrust the United States into World War I in order to make the “world safe for democracy” – only to see his dreams for a liberal international system dissolve into chaos, bloodshed, and betrayal.
That October, Vladimir Lenin, Communist revolutionary and advocate for class war and “dictatorship of the proletariat”, would overthrow Russia’s earlier democratic revolution that had toppled the all-powerful czar, all in the name of liberating humanity – and instead would set up the most repressive totalitarian regime in history, the Soviet Union.
In this incisive, fast-paced history, New York Times best-selling author Arthur Herman brilliantly reveals how Lenin and Wilson rewrote the rules of modern geopolitics. Through the end of World War I, countries marched into war only to increase or protect their national interests. After World War I, countries began going to war over ideas. Together, Lenin and Wilson unleashed the disruptive ideologies that would sweep the world, from nationalism and globalism to Communism and terrorism, and that continue to shape our world today.
Our New World Disorder is the legacy left by Wilson and Lenin and their visions of the perfectibility of man.
One hundred years later, we still sit on the powder keg they first set the detonator to through war and revolution…
both men dismissed those who opposed them as not just wrongheaded or misguided but evil. They could be unbelievably vindictive toward those who they thought were thwarting or betraying them or blocking the path to their chosen paradise on earth. And both could be cunning and unscrupulous when they believed the ends justified the means… By and large, they succeeded in overthrowing those old systems, although what they created instead in their lifetimes turned out to be unqualified disasters.’ — Amazon.com
—See also: Intersectional Torturers by Caitlin Johnstone.
Catholic Critique 