"If you were unlucky enough to have lived between 1914 and 1945, you may have had the following experience. You might have: watched the slaughter at Verdun or the Somme or the Marne

• or perhaps you witnessed firsthand the Bolshevik terror in Russia

• or observed the black-shirted and brown-shirted hysteria in Italy and Germany

• you may have been one of the starving workers during the Depression of 1929-1935

• or perhaps your family fell victim to Stalin's purges

• or fought in the Spanish Civil War

• you might have ended up in a Nazi concentration camp

• or perhaps you helped destroy whole cities like Coventry or Dresden or Nagasaki

Regardless of where you were at the time, you could not help but notice that the world had become one of violence and uncertainty. It was a world of terror and inhumanity such that this poor globe has never seen. It seemed to many that western civilization, long in the throes of decline, had breathed its last gasp. The values of western civilization once again proved meaningless and all that seemed to matter was irrational impulse and the will to power. By the 1920s and 30s it seemed that Nietzsche's diagnosis of modern man was not that far from the truth (see Lecture 2)." - Steven Kreis