PS: Let's treat everyone with some theoretical knowledge benefits

In 1908, although Song Xiaofei rejected Kaiser Wilhelm II's proposal to form an alliance to attack India, and China was neutral between the Central and Entente powers, Wilhelm II still chose to start a war, brazenly sent troops to invade Belgium, and declared war on France, which was also equivalent to waging war against Britain and the Entente.

The reason why Germany is so crazy to start a world war at all costs is ostensibly because of Kaiser Wilhelm II's personal arrogance, and because Germany wants to compete with Britain for colonies and sea power, but in fact, Germany wants to get rid of the curse of the "golden cross". It was a time when the economy was everything, and in 1908, when the world was on the gold standard, the economic problem was the gold problem.

"Gold! Yellow, glowing, precious gold! It can turn the black into white, the ugly into beautiful, the humble into noble, the old into a young man, and the coward into a warrior. "In the third scene of the fourth act of his famous tragedy "Timon of Athens", the great English dramatist William Shakespeare uses the mouth of the fallen suburban Timon to lash out at gold, but also reveals the great magic of gold! 、

From the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century, in the eyes of European mercantilists, wealth was money, money was gold, and gold was the only real currency. Therefore, if a country wants to be rich, it must sell as many goods as possible to other countries in exchange for gold; At the same time, buy as little as possible from other countries, so that gold does not flow out.

The "Golden Cross" originated in 1896. American William. Jennings. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Brian shouted the "Golden Cross" speech that resounded all over the world: "You cannot press the crown of thorns on the eyebrows of laborers, and you cannot crucify mankind on the cross of gold!" ”

Brian, the Democratic presidential candidate who is deeply versed in economic theory and far ahead of his time, speaks to all capitalist countries of this era, whether established or new. None can help but face the secrets.

Germany's desire for a "land in the sun", its enthusiasm for a decaying country like Ottoman Turkey, in the final analysis, was due to the cursed "golden cross", because all economic development is inseparable from money, and Bismarck did not bring alchemy to Germany.

Unlike gold. Paper money is not real money, whether it is a mark or a dollar. It is nothing more than a "currency symbol" guaranteed by state credit and bank credit, which is mandatory under the provisions of the law. As soon as the credit of the state and the bank ceases to exist, then its meaning as a monetary symbol disappears. This is why, during the economic crisis before World War II, paper marks were used by the Germans to burn stoves. Because at this time. A hundred-dollar mark is worth less than a piece of paper.

But gold is different, it is naturally the world's currency, so gold, as a value scale, can ensure the stability of value, and in the era of the gold standard, when the banknote and gold are pegged, the banknote itself has its own gold content, so it also ensures that the exchange rate changes and fluctuates slightly.

From 1816, when Britain entered the gold standard. France, Germany, Russia and other major Western countries have successively pegged their currencies to gold. The exception is the United States, where the dollar is on a double gold and silver standard. Other words. Reserves for the U.S. dollar include both gold and silver. Gold and silver maintain a relatively fixed price ratio. The United States did this on the one hand because the development of its domestic economy required more precious metals as a guarantee for the issuance of dollars; On the other hand, there were powerful interest groups of silver miners in the southern part of the United States, who claimed that if the United States abandoned silver as a monetary reserve, the collapse of silver prices would even deal a devastating blow to the southern economy.

However, after the banknotes are linked to gold, the number of banknotes that the country can style is linked to the amount of gold, and how much gold can be styled and how many banknotes. Once this ratio is exceeded, the lack of gold-backed banknotes leads to the instability of the monetary system, while the depreciation of the currency represents the loss of national credibility and the collapse of the government. It was at this time that Germany was using the gold standard system pegged to the Mark gold.

After the Franco-Prussian War, France's reparations of 5 billion francs or about 1.4 billion taels of silver exceeded the sum of foreign reparations and loan principal and interest in the late Qing Dynasty in the past 70 years, and this huge amount of money flowed into the nascent German Empire in four years, and the stable mark not only promoted the rapid development of German industry, but also allowed Germany to quickly enter the era of the gold standard. Twenty years after the Franco-Prussian War, when this "dividend" was basically exhausted, and Germany's economic development finally approached the total amount of money that the German banking system could support with gold reserves, deflation caused by falling prices appeared. Germany was no longer a country of small factory owners and conservative Junckers. Monopoly spoilers such as trusts, cartels, and Conzern dominate the German political scene. They need more "real money" to support more banknotes, more credit.

Then the problem arises, the development of German capitalism needs money, and the amount of money issued represents purchasing power, and the development of German capitalism brings about an increase in the amount of wealth, and the increase in the amount of wealth requires the issuance of more money. However, there is no gold in Germany! The absence of gold would lead to an inability to increase the quantity of money, and a sharp increase in the quantity of commodities would lead to a fall in prices and a decrease in wages. The value of the entrepreneur's loan to produce commodities is an important basis for the bank to judge the survival status of the enterprise and decide whether to recover the loan. In a downward price channel, once banks start to stop making new loans, the more they try to recover the loans, the more they can't get them back, and then the crisis spreads from the real economy to the financial system, and then to the world through the trading system. This is the lingering "curse" that capitalist society faced in the age of the gold standard, leading to periodic economic crises.

Since capitalist society has periodic economic crises, why do most countries in the world choose the capitalist market economy? Because in a capitalist market economy, money means the power to allocate resources. As a result of the capitalist market economy, the scope of commodities has expanded unprecedentedly. Therefore, to master money means to master resources; The power to allocate resources means the "freedom" to fulfill one's own desires. In a society. When money becomes the basic tool for satisfying wishes, it is unimaginable that this power stimulates people's activities, because it constantly satisfies people's various ** while constantly stimulating new **.

One of the basic propositions of economics is that resources are scarce, while human beings are unlimited. In fact, the core problem of a society and economy is how to allocate resources. In society, "more monks and less porridge" is absolute. So how should these scarce resources be allocated? Equal distribution is certainly not possible, and the result of this economic equality is that everyone has no incentive to produce. As a result, everyone is poor. So who should be the lucky one to have "porridge" to drink? Different societies had different solutions: slave societies relied mainly on violent plunder; On the basis of violence, feudal society strengthened hierarchical order and blood relations; The capitalist system, which is characterized by a commodity economy, is mainly carried out by the free market, which is a relatively civilized way. Then, legislation is passed to enforce the guarantee that there is no monopoly. Reduce forced buying and forced selling.

That's it. In the capitalist market, limited resources come in the form of a dazzling array of commodities. The condition for obtaining these goods is that there is enough money to pay the price. In legal terms, the transfer of rights is conditional on the payment of "consideration". Unfortunately, this consideration, the price of the commodity, is determined by supply and demand in the market.

In the market, buy and sell freely. Price signals are a reflection of supply and demand. In general, if the supply of such a commodity cannot increase with the increase in price. At the same time, if it is difficult for people to find substitutes, some people who are determined to own these goods will force a considerable number of competitors to give up by constantly selling high prices. Therefore, to master money is to grasp the right to obtain limited resources in the market.

In the market economy, this kind of satisfaction based on infinite ** is the source of power that drives people to turn seemingly impossible things into reality. That's how money motivates people. For any economy, the effect of such incentives is enormous. The success of capitalist society lies in the fact that this incentive is brought to the extreme. On the one hand, anything that satisfies people's ** is turned into a commodity that can be exchanged for money in the market; On the other hand, more and more money is constantly creating new **. Thus, as one can see, the capitalist market, like by magic, "has created in less than a hundred years more wealth than all previous generations combined".

How, then, can capitalist countries in general prevent economic crises? One way to do this is to increase the country's gold reserves through trade or plunder. Mercantilists believed in exporting their own goods through trade in exchange for foreign currency, allowing gold and silver from other countries to flow into their own countries, and reducing the purchase of foreign goods, so that gold and silver could remain in their home countries as much as possible. The easiest way to fix this is to decolonize and plunder.

Why did France recover so quickly after the Franco-Prussian War? The reason for this is that France has a huge colony that is more than 20 times the size of the mainland, and the huge wealth brought by these colonies has allowed France to pay off the huge indemnity that the Qing Dynasty has not paid for 70 years in 4 years, and then recover quickly at the speed of the Germans.

It is also easy to understand why China, under the leadership of Song Xiaofei, has been able to rise rapidly and become a superpower. Due to the well-known history, China's national strength declined to the bottom at the end of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, not only lost the sea, but also ceded land and reparations, and then was burned and plundered, almost perished, under the leadership of Song Xiaofei, on the one hand, China has a large amount of gold and silver reserves, received war reparations from Japan and Russia, and also has a huge capital market and domestic market, on the other hand, China's colonies have also increased greatly, and the land area exceeds more than 17 million square kilometers.

Of course, through trade and plundering of the colonial market, you can also accumulate gold in your hands, but this requires a lot of upfront investment, and the conservative Junkers within Germany will also become an obstacle, but direct mining is different, not only can it directly bring gold, but gold mining will also make more people interested in the colony, when these people start to invest in the colony, it will help Germany to complete the initial investment in the colonial market plunder. At that time, any force that stands in the way of the development of the colony will be crushed in front of interests!

But there is no doubt that this world war was the bloodiest and ugliest atrocity committed by ambitious imperialist countries in order to seize stolen goods. In the most brutal human tragedy since the Industrial Revolution, tens of millions of people from dozens of the most advanced civilized countries fought each other in the most modern war machines. Behind them are hundreds of millions of people who have gone from madness and exhaustion to sustain the fight. Germany as the instigator of the war and a contender for British sea power. There is an unshirkable responsibility.

However, the most direct basis of the competition for sea power is not the fleet, but the competition between factories and workers, that is, the scale of the economy and labor productivity! In other words, the basis of sea power lies in economic power. Once this economic power has changed, struggling to support a goal that cannot be sustained often comes at a cost of self-destruction. End of the 19th century. Britain's economic advantage over other powers, especially the United States and Germany, is shrinking. Or even disappear. As a result, with the change in economic fundamentals, the United Kingdom, which is no longer the largest in the world, has become increasingly unable to control monopolistic sea power, regardless of whether there is a challenge from emerging countries. However, in those days. Few people in Britain are aware of this. From prime ministers to civilians. From the naval marshal to the intellectuals, the illusion of eternal notice of the seas and an inexplicable sense of glory permeated the British Empire, which was the manifestation of that country's strategic misalignment of ends and means over the course of the next century. Therefore, Britain also has an unshirkable responsibility for this war.

Martin Luther, a German religious revolutionary, once said, "Even though I knew that the whole world would be destroyed tomorrow, I would still plant my vine today." This sentence fully shows the serious and persistent national character of the Germans, the national emblem of Germany is an eagle with a sharp beak and sharp claws, the characteristics of the eagle is bravery, and the bronze statues used to decorate German parks, stations and other public places. Most of them were lions, horses, and muscular men, which also showed the strength of Germany. In a word. The Germans will not blindly declare war on the world like the Empress Dowager Cixi of the Great Qing Dynasty! It can be said that the rigorous Germans have made full preparations for this world war, and the call for war is very high, whether it is military, economic, or in the minds of the people.

Militarily, the German Army grew from only about 400,000 men in 1870 to 864,000 in 1908. The country implements a conscription system, all men in the country are required to serve, and the army can reach 2 million people in a single mobilization. The German Navy built 11 armored ships, 63 destroyers, and 23 cruisers by 1903. In 1908, Britain had 8 dreadnoughts, but Germany had 7, becoming the world's second naval power, with 390 warships of all kinds and a navy of 80,000 people. In 1879 it was only 428 million marks, and by 1908 it was close to 2 billion marks. Moreover, the economic strength has increased greatly, Germany's steel production has grown from 1.4 million tons in 1870 to nearly 10 million tons in 1908, coal production has also tripled, and new industries have emerged in Germany, such as chemicals and electronics.

In addition, compared with other European countries, the education of the Germans is relatively developed, the proportion of the educated population is relatively high, and the supply of high-quality soldiers is relatively sufficient. As early as the beginning of the 19th century, most German states passed legislation making compulsory education compulsory for their citizens. In 1871 there were 33,000 primary schools in Prussia with 4 million students, and in 1908 the number increased to 38,000 with 6 million pupils. As a result, the literacy rate in Germany was very high, until the end of the 19th century, for every 1,000 Germans. The school instills in students the concept of loyalty to the monarch and the country, discipline and hard work, and the subject of history is the most important of many subjects, and students are required to familiarize themselves with the history of the country, especially the history of the Holy Roman Empire of Germany. In the 1890s, chauvinist groups emerged in Germany, the largest of which was the Pan-German Association, which preached the theory of Germanic racial superiority, and proposed to seize the colonies of Britain, France and other countries, and then annex small countries in Europe and the United States to establish a large Germanic empire in the world.

So, Kaiser Wilhelm II and a group of German generals had the ambition to start a world war. As early as before the start of World War I, the strategy proposed by German Chief of Staff Schlieffen was to avoid fighting on both the eastern and western fronts, and to implement the method of preemptive strikes and quick defeats. First, concentrate forces to quickly defeat France in 4 to 6 weeks and cut Britain off the European continent, and then turn around against Russia and try to win the war in two or three months. Moreover, emphasizing the offense, Schlieffen believed that offense is the best way to defend, and defense is "the starting point of the end." Germany emphasized a proactive, rapid offensive.

A vigorous world war has begun, and Wilhelm II has opened Pandora's box! The young Hitler also embarked on a road of no return with Germany! (To be continued......) u