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People's Century: Lost Peace [VHS] Review

People's Century: Lost Peace [VHS] Overview

Educational public performance rights are now available! The First World War bathed the new century in blood: Nine million lost their lives in a merciless war of attrition. A whole generation was traumatized by the horror of the trenches—and vowed that war would be a thing of the past.

Lost Peace revisits the popular hopes and experience in the years following World War I—and the looming threat of a new nationalism: despite Woodrow Wilson's promise of a "people's peace," old prejudices refused to die and nationalist passions again began to rise. Defeated nations were left out in the cold, resentful and unreconciled. Fascism and militarism spread while pacifist movements fought an increasingly unsuccessful rearguard action to preserve the dream of peace. By the late 1930s, people had to choose between avoiding war at all costs, or talking up arms to resist aggression. Fifty-five million lives were about to be lost in a second world war.

The people remember: Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, Yankee isolationism, German reparations, American volunteers fight the Spanish Civil War, invasions by Mussolini and Hitler.

People's Century: Lost Peace [VHS] Specifications

World War I bathed the new century in blood. Nine million lives were lost during four years of the worst slaughter the world had ever seen. A generation was traumatized by the horror of the trenches, and the world's leaders vowed that peace was here to stay.

Spanning the years 1919 to 1936, this compelling episode of the Emmy Award-winning People's Century series chronicles how the elation following the cease fire ("the prettiest piece of paper I ever saw," states one American soldier) inexorably dissolved as the world rearmed itself for a war that would claim the lives of 55 million.

The narrative of the failure of the League of Nations to stop the rise of fascism is interwoven with the memories of a diverse group of eyewitnesses from around the world. Recalling the United States' retreat into isolationism, one American soldier remembers returning to his farm after the war. "We wasn't interested in any foreign countries," he states. "We was interested in our own selves and home."

We experience the springtime of hope that greeted the birth of such new nations as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. One Czech woman recalls her mother weeping, "We have freedom."

But it was short-lived. In 1935 Italy defied the League of Nations and invaded Ethiopia. Germany annexed Austria. Japan conquered Manchuria. The storm clouds of war were on the horizon, and the world once again raced to arm itself. "I would never have thought that we would be stupid enough to go to war again," remarks a former French soldier. "I never thought I would be called again 20 years later." --Donald Liebenson

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