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| Courtesy Lapta Alsancak Çamlıbel Belediyesi |
Yes, it’s our. area, last night. No, the precipitation wasn’t green - just the lighting. And no, it isn’t snow. It’s accumulated hail. Does snow in Cyprus, but usually high in the Troodos Mountains. And this morning the patio and the road in front of us are still wet with last night’s rain and melted hail.
Our reading from the thirties paralleling current events in interesting ways. In Germany Hitler was in the process of achieving absolute political power. A little earlier, in the autumn of 1929, in America the stock market crash had thrown an optimistic country into chaos. Claud Cockburn, then living in Washington while working for The Times of London describes the panic and confusion:
It was one of those situations in which deterioration and collapse are so rapid that even quite sensible policies always seem to be put into operation too late. There were flashes of hope and optimism which, as they flickered out, only emphasized the surrounding gloom. It seems odd, almost ludicrous, perhaps, by hindsight, that the so-called Hoover moratorium—the suspension of payment on all international government debts—should have appeared to enormous numbers of people as equivalent to an announcement that salvation after all is just around the corner, that God, after some agonizing stumbles, is once again marching on.
His description of President Hoover’s simplistic response has a certain resonance in the press situation:
For long years Mr. Hoover had accepted the view that the way things look on the ticker is as important as the way things really are, or rather is the same as the way they really are. Now everything was going up. The depression was over. If it was not over, why was everything going up? I noted at the time that “it was just the sort of public mood that the President likes best—carte blanche and no maddening interruptions from the blundering crowd. He is the Great Executive again, the Great Engineer of modern society, and he has pulled the right lever at last.”
Spoiler alert: The lever was the imposition of high tariffs. Other countries, predictably, retaliated. The effect on world trade was catastrophic. Within ten years the world was at war again.
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