A review by theendofcinema
The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 by Barbara W. Tuchman

5.0

I'm sure this is the case for any era, but it was hard to read this in the heightened political climate of the last month and not see parallels between the pre-World War I period and our own time. From the entrenching aristocratic elites to the self-fracturing left, to the filibuster fight in the House of Representative to the toothless calls for international cooperation at The Hague. Even the Dreyfuss Affair recalls the Black Lives Matter movement in the way a simple matter of justice becomes perverted by political interests to the point that truth is less relevant than side-taking. Most poignant are the leftists, the socialists and anarchists convinced that capitalism would soon crumble under its own logic, themselves shattering their power on an irresolvable internal squabble between revolution and reform. Turns out that the contradictions of capitalism don't bother it so much, because capitalism doesn't care about logic. Only the left is doomed by internal contradiction.