There you go again being selective in what you decide I have written. This is starting to get tedious but here goes…

I did not simply write that “American economic woes were responsible for the Great Depression” I wrote that the Great Depression was “largely fuelled” by American economic woes, which allows for a variety of factors that contributed to the cause and the continuance of the Great Depression across the world, of which, as a historian I’m sure you are aware, there is active debate.

What I find troubling about what I infer to be your broader perspective is its wish to exonerate the USA from all responsibility for events that unfolded elsewhere in the world during the interwar years and your disrespect for alternative views amongst Medium’s “Wokedom”.

Whichever economic theories about the causes of the Great Depression you wish to ascribe to involving for example, underconsumption, money supply, Federal Reserve monetary policy, tariffs and restrictive trade policies, population decline, etc, you cannot write out America’s role in the events that unfolded in the twenties and their relationship to the Great Depression and subsequently, the Second World War.

For example, the international debt structure after the Great War saw former American allies repaying wartime debts to the USA, which were drawn from reparation payments made by Germany, which in turn were funded by private loans from the USA and the UK, which were largely withdrawn in the run up to and during the start of the Great Depression.

The overarching cause of the crash was the significantly overheated American economy during the twenties caused by cheap money flowing into consumer spending in the largest economy in the world (where total debt to GDP levels had reached 300% at the time of the Depression), which led to a reduction in consumer spending and investment. The UK’s desire to reintroduce the Gold Standard at pre-war fixed currency exchange rates helped to spread the economic woes of the USA to Europe.

The post war recovery may well have concealed other dark aspects of Europe’s development (as you suggest), but they were brought to the fore by the Great Depression’s impact, which led to Hitler’s ascendency. The fact that Mussolini had ascended to power ten years earlier does not change this, in fact it seems to me to be largely irrelevant.

I hope you get a good night’s kip soon.