Ticking at the heart of American society all through the 1920s was the mechanism of false prosperity, which was blowing great quantities of air into a bubble of gigantic proportions. The Federal Reserve system set up before the war made financing the war possible – but at what price? The price was setting up a financial oligarchy with near absolute power over the economy – and also setting up the country for the Great Crash of 1929.

The rise of the totalitarian ideologies as challengers to Western liberalism was made possible, first of all, by the Great War, and by the Crash, which was also caused by the very system that had made the prosecution of the war possible. National Socialism and militant Marxism were "blowback" from World War I just as the jihadists of today are blowback from the cold war era.