The Treaty of Versailles, which had officially ended World War I, crippled Germany's economy, guaranteeing the country a future of social turmoil which only added to the insecurity the German people already felt. In 1933, The National Socialist German Workers Party exploited this sentiment and took power, installing Adolf Hitler as its leader. With much of the German population supporting him, Hitler spent the next six years re-building the German military while invading and occupying nearby countries such as Czechoslovakia and Austria. Exhausted from the First World War, European countries did little or nothing to confront Hitler, practicing appeasement and negotiation instead of militarily confronting Hitler's army.

When Birney wrote "Vancouver Lights" in 1941 he was already at the end of a decade-long experiment in extreme politics. As World War II approached, Birney become more and more disenchanted with organized revolution and finally managed to distance himself from...