ABSTRACT
The twentieth century was an age of massive conceits, devised by ideologues who entertained heady dreams of bending history to suit their will. In the end, colossal fascist and Marxist ambitions produced not Utopia but Auschwitz and the Gulag. Modern man’s effort to replace the one true God in whom he had lost faith with a god of his own devising produced only carnage and suffering. The consort of hubris was catastrophe. If there is one lesson that deserves to be drawn from the bloodstained decades stretching from 1914 to 1989, surely that is it. Americans contributed mightily to the destruction of these false gods. In the course of doing so, various architects of US policy, beginning with President Woodrow Wilson, nourished their own heady dreams, hardly less ambitious than those of the Marxist and fascist true believers whom they resembled in spirit….
