History Test 3
Kulaks
The kulaks were a category of affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia and the early Soviet Union. The word kulak originally referred to independent farmers in the Russian Empire who emerged from the peasantry and became wealthy following the Stolypin reform, which began in 1906. The label of kulak was broadened in 1918 to include any peasant who resisted handing over their grain to detachments from Moscow. During 1929-1933, Joseph Stalin's leadership of the total campaign to collectivize the peasantry meant that "peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres more than their neighbors" were labeled "kulaks"
Great Leap Forward
The results of the Great Leap Forward were all too predictable. Peasants with homemade forges and no expertise melted their cooking and farm implements to meet their quotas. The ill-conceived schemes failed miserably. At least twenty million and perhaps as many as thirty million Chinese died of starvation and rural violence in a matter of a couple of years. In a land far too familiar with widespread famine and disaster it was a catastrophe of unimaginable scale.
Second Wave Feminist Movement (1960s)
The rise of suburban culture also played a key role in what has become known as the Second Wave Feminist Movement of the 1960s. (The first wave generally referred to suffrage movements early in the twentieth century.) This movement focused on women's cultural and sexual identities, and their roles as housewives and their lack of access to good careers.
Nuremberg Laws
The two Nuremberg Laws were unanimously passed by the Reichstag on 15 September 1935. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour prohibited marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans, and forbade the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households.
Israel
Unable to find a solution to the bitter wars brewing in Palestine Great Britain asked the newly created United Nations to adjudicate an agreement. It was an important responsibility for the international community and one which was almost impossible to fulfill. The answer, as it had been in India, was a two-state solution in which both Jews and Palestinians would be given their own lands. The borders decided by the UN General Assembly did not satisfy either side. Each state was a convoluted patchwork of parcels linked together by tenuous strips of land. Jews and Palestinians alike were left across the border from 'their' state. Jerusalem, a city that both peoples saw as an essential part of their identity and rights, was to be internationalized. Some on both sides were willing to accept the plan, however flawed, but others were not. The British withdrew and Jews formally declared the creation of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948. War, already underway, intensified.
Charlotte Delbo
When Charlotte Delbo (1913-1985) heard about the fall of Paris to German forces in June 1940 she was in Buenos Aires, touring with a French theater company. She immediately decided to return to her home city. It was a risky, perilous decision but as a devoted Communist she felt it was her job to fight this fascist invasion rather than seek refuge from the growing catastrophe enveloping Europe. Many people like Delbo had to make difficult, life-threatening decisions in how to respond to the horrific wars that enveloped Europe in the 1940s as Germany launched its wars of revenge against the allies that had defeated it in 1918 and against its racial and ideological enemies that the Nazis argued were destroying their country's future. Delbo returned to Paris. She was eventually captured and sent to Auschwitz. There she joined millions of Jews and others who were victims of Hitler's racial wars. Miraculously she survived but few others did; over 6,000,000 would perish in the Nazi death camps.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
When Churchill made his "Iron Curtain" speech, the curtain was metaphorical. Over the coming months and years, however, it became a very real barricade that divided Europe. By 1949 Germany had become split: a democratic republic was formed in the western part and a Communist state in the East. Most of the countries of Eastern Europe were under the watchful control of the Soviet Union. To deter further expansion of the Communist eastern bloc, the countries of Western Europe initiated the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance dominated by the United States' military and nuclear might. Europe's fate was, in many ways, controlled by two non-European superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union.
Pearl Harbor
When Japanese bombers appeared in the skies over Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, the U.S. military was completely unprepared for the devastating surprise attack, which dramatically altered the course of World War II. Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would drive the United States out of isolation and into World War II, a conflict that would end with Japan's surrender after the devastating nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. At first, however, the Pearl Harbor attack looked like a success for Japan.
D-Day
With excruciating slowness and pain, the edges of the Nazi empire crumbled throughout 1943 and 1944. In the summer of 1943 Allied forces landed in southern Italy and Hitler's closest ally, Mussolini, fell from power. The Russian forces continued west and began to regain territory lost in the onslaught of 1941. Germany's allies in the Balkans began to waver in their enthusiasm for collaboration; and in many occupied territories, resistance movements began to challenge Nazi control more effectively. Allied bombers attacked German cities with increasing impunity. On June 6, 1944—which would become known as D-Day—American, British, and Canadian forces finally forced a bridgehead in Western Europe at Normandy, France. The race to Berlin was on--between Soviet forces from the East and Allied forces from the west. Which side would win that race would in many ways determine the post-war world.
Rossenstrasse
refers to a street in Berlin that has a protest happened in 1943. This demonstration was started and sustained by the non-Jewish wives and relatives of Jewish men who have been arrested and targeted for deportation, based on the racial policy of Nazi Germany. The protests continued until the men being held were released. The Rosenstrasee protest was the only mass public demonstration by Germans against the deportation of Jews. The significance is hundreds of German women saved their Jewish husband's lives. This successful outcome of this late protest suggests that if similar actions at an earlier stage had been carried out throughout Germany, they might have halted the increasing destructive course of the German anti-Jewish policy.
Guided Democracy
through the country in 1958 and again in 1994. Trying to weld a diverse land only united by foreign control into a unified nation was also a challenge that faced the new leader of independent Indonesia, Ahmed Sukarno (1901-1970). With hundreds of islands and almost as many languages and ethnic groups Indonesia had long been a polyglot place. Initially Sukarno's popularity as an anti-colonial fighter served to unite Indonesians but over time regional, class and cultural differences began to emerge and he chose to deal with them through increasingly dictatorial control. He called it guided democracy but in reality there was more guidance than democracy during his rule. Unfortunately, it was not uncommon for post-colonial leaders, faced with the multiple challenges of ruling their nations to follow Sukarno's example.
2 Chronological
1919: Publication of A Plan for the Reorganization of Japan by Kita Ikki 1924-1927: Era of Prime Minister Shidehara Kijuro in Japan. 1931: Mukden Incident; Japanese take control of Manchuria January 30, 1933: Adolf Hitler appointed Chancellor in Germany February 1933: Reichstag burns in Berlin; Nazi Party declares marshal law. June 1934: Night of Long Knives; Nazi purge of party and government officials 1935: Passage of Anti-Semitic Nuremburg Laws in Germany 1936: Attempted Military Coup in Japan; Olympics held in Berlin 1937: Japan invades Shanghai and Nanking starting war with China November 9, 1938: Night of Broken Glass, mass attacks on Jewish synagogues and shops.
4 Chronological
1936: Remilitarization of the German Rhineland 1936-1939: Spanish Civil War 1938: German forces take control of Austria and later Sudatenland September 1939: German Invasion of Poland; start of World War Two in Europe June 1940: Fall of France June 22, 1941: German Invasion of the Soviet Union January 20, 1942: Wannsee Conference held outside of Berlin Winter 1942: Battle of Stalingrad; turning of the tide on the eastern front June 6, 1944: D-Day May 8, 1945: End of the War in Europe
The Motorcycles Diaries
Alberto's and Che's trip became the stuff of legends. Many of these legends were constructed by Che himself who wrote a diary of his trip that he later modified and, after he became a famous revolutionary was published as The Motorcycles Diaries (1995). Without a doubt his journey awakened him to the plight of Latin America's poor, indigenous and working-class populations. Without a doubt his experience with the lack of medical facilities made him question the political agenda of the continent's leaders. Yet, to what extent this trip made Che a world famous Communist revolutionary is still much in question.
Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970)
Arab unity found a formidable locus of support in the early 1950s with the emergence of Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) in Egypt. A general in the Egyptian army Nasser and fellow officers staged a bloodless coup in 1952. Nasser's coup deposed the indulgent (he weighed close to 300 pounds) King Farouk who had long been the puppet of British policy. His retirement to the coast of southern France paved the way for Nasser to direct a renewed Egyptian nationalism. Nasser promoted Egypt as a leader of the non-aligned movement and sought support from both the United States and the Soviet Union. Both nations willingly courted the regionally powerful and strategically located country.
Five Year Plan (1930s)
At the same time that Stalin called for collectivization of the Soviet Union's countryside, he also announced a five-year plan for the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union. The main focus of development were the heavy industries--energy production, metallurgy and machinery--and targets were set for dramatic increases in production in each area. In theory the development of these primary industrial sectors would lay the foundation for the future development of secondary industries that would turn the Soviet Union into a land of material plenty. Tractors and plows built in the new factories would allow collective farms to flourish. Machinery would allow for mass production of consumer goods. Citizens of the Soviet Union, its leadership promised (and not for the last time), would quickly enjoy a living standard that surpassed that of the western world.
3 Chronological
August 1937: Japanese forces attack Shanghai December 7, 1941: Japanese Navy attacks US navy at Pearl Harbor. February 1942: President Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066 which allows for the internment of people of Japanese ancestry living in the western states. 1942: Japanese announce Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere
Guest Workers
By the 1960s much of Western Europe, facing a labor shortage, began to actively recruit guest workers from the Iberian Peninsula, southeastern Europe and Turkey to come and take the low-paying, low-skilled jobs. In the 50s and 60s, for example, one-quarter of Greece's labor force worked abroad. Germany had almost 3,000,000 foreign, temporary laborers, mostly single males, living in their country by the early 1970s. While Western Europeans welcomed their labor many were uncomfortable with the foreigners' cultural and social customs. When the period of rapid economic expansion was replaced by a recession in Western Europe in the 1970s the issue of what to do with these guests would become a major source of social and political tension.
The Bay of Pigs Invasion
By the time Che got back to Havana after spending months touring the Communist world Cuba's relationship with the United States was worsening. In April 1961, barely three months after assuming his office the young President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) ordered a group of anti-Castro Cubans exiled in Miami, with CIA-intelligence and military support, to invade Cuba and overthrow the government. The Bay of Pigs Invasion failed miserably. The invasion plans were seriously flawed and Cubans rallied to Castro's defense. Four months after the Bay of Pigs Che was at a meeting for Organization of American states in Uruguay and he sent a note to a US official to be passed on to Kennedy. "Thanks for [the Bay of Pigs]," it said, "Before the invasion, the revolution was weak. Now it's stronger than ever."
Yalta
By the time the "Big Three" met again in February 1945, the war situation had changed dramatically and, as a consequence, the concerns about the post-war order had sharpened significantly. American and British troops were in Germany, and Soviet troops were only forty miles from Berlin. Germany's defeat, while not absolutely guaranteed, seemed likely, thus resolving its fate and that of the rest of Europe was crucial. Stalin again insisted that they convene in a place controlled by his forces and Yalta, a port town in the Crimea, was chosen. For an increasingly weak and debilitated Roosevelt, the trip was arduous, but Stalin liked being in control on his home turf and Roosevelt, still interested in cooperation, assented. The Big Three (Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt) met in 1945 to discuss ways to solve major issue about Poland. In the end, they agreed to a statement promising that the exiled leadership of Polish would be included in a post-war government and that free elections would be held as soon as possible. Stalin's force controlled the country and Stalin promised to Roosevelt and Churchill that a democratic Poland would be present. The significance of this conference for world history is that it basically split up Europe into Soviet and Western spheres of influence. This was the beginning of the situation that would develop into the Cold War.
Berlin Wall
Comparisons of the standard of living between eastern and western Europe in this period, however, are only relevant if these differences were apparent and governments in the East worked hard to make sure they did were not. In 1961, in response to continuing and debilitating flight of young, talented workers from its zone East Germany constructed a wall around West Berlin and along its border with West Germany. This Berlin Wall stemmed the flow of refugees from Eastern Europe and in created a barrier in the exchange of knowledge and news between East and West as well. Secret police monitored the flow of information, opening letters and listening in on conversations to insure the people of the East did not become aware of developments in the West. They created elaborate propaganda offices to convince their people that life was better. In June 1961, the East German government, worried about the increasing flight of its citizens to the West constructed a wall dividing the Communist and western zones of the city. The wall became a symbol of the division of Europe after World War Two. Its collapse on November 9, 1989 symbolized the end of the Cold War.
Final Solution (1941-1945)
Despite his isolation as one of the few Jews still in Germany, despite the chaos of the war, and despite the propaganda of the German information services, Klemperer perceived the situation accurately. By this point, the Nazis were fully committed to the policy of the 'Final Solution'—their euphemism for the destruction of the Jewish people as a race that we have come to refer to as the Holocaust. Final Solution is what we come to know as the Holocaust, meaning Nazis's destruction of Jew people as a race during WW2. Implementing the final solution means murder of all Jews within reach, which was not restricted to the European continent. Jews from across Europe were deported to the death camps to be murdered by poisonous gases because Nazi believe it's the most effective way to achieve mass murder. It has been considered as genocide and the final solution was the culmination of a decade of Nazi policy under the rule of Adolf Hitler.
Fuhrer Führer (was the title demanded by Adolf Hitler to denote his function as the head of the Nazi Party; he received it in 1921-1945)
Despite the significant gains in power for the party, not all Nazis were happy with what they saw to be the pace of the Nazi revolution. Many party faithful wanted more aggressive attacks on Jews and a faster implementation of racial laws. Ernst Röhm, the leader of the Nazi Stormtroopers, the SA, began to openly question Hitler's leadership of the party. On June 30, 1934 in the infamous "Night of Long Knives," party elites--notably Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), the head of the SS, Hitler's personal bodyguard and the most rabid element of the party, murdered Röhm and other members of the SA. Their murder convinced key elements in the army that Hitler could indeed control his own party and they, in turn, could work with the Nazis. When Hindenburg died in August of that year, the army took an oath of loyalty to Hitler personally. Hitler was now der Führer, the unchallenged leader of the state, and the road was now open for the Nazis to carry out their revolution.
MLK
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1969) became the outspoken leader for civil rights in the United States. A Baptist minister Dr. King advocated a Gandhian non-violent activism and stunningly powerful oratory to raise issues of discrimination and poverty that afflicted blacks and other minorities. After years of facing police truncheons and ferocious dogs at marches across the South where blacks were especially ostracized King put his clerical eloquence on full display when he led a march to Washington DC in 1963. There on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, before a quarter of a million supporters, King delivered his "I have a dream speech." He dreamed of a time when racial division would not define American life. "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." Sadly, it was a dream Dr. King did not live to see as he was assassinated in 1968.
Marshall Plan
Economic recovery in both halves of Europe was stimulated by the Cold War. In 1947, the United States invested heavily in Europe in order to staunch the spread of Communism. Officially this program was known as the European Recovery Program and more popularly known as the Marshall Plan, in recognition of the US Secretary of State. By 1952 the US had provided over $13 billion in loans and direct aid to mostly western European countries. (An estimated $200 billion in today's dollars.) Initially Poland and Czechoslovakia received some Marshall Plan funds but Soviet mistrust of the implications of these handouts only strengthened Soviet resolve to tighten their control over their sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. In 1949 it established Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. Comecon compelled Eastern European countries to coordinate their production around Soviet demands. While shutting off these countries to the West it did meant that they had markets for their generally inferior products and, in turn, the USSR subsidized them with cheap fuel and food.
Blitzkrieg
Eight days later, on September 1, 1939, Hitler abrogated his non-aggression pact with Poland. Germany launched a massive campaign of military terror and overwhelming force known as Blitzkrieg or 'lightning war.' It was the horror of Guernica writ large. German dive-bombers, tanks, and mechanized infantry decimated the undermanned and ill-equipped Polish infantry and cavalry. They also ruthlessly attacked caravans of Poles fleeing the front, making it clear that there would be no distinction between combatants and non-combatants in this war of annihilation. Soviet forces rushed into eastern Poland to 'stop' the German advance. Stalin claimed that they did so to protect the Poles but the reality was quite different. In a matter of weeks, Poland, crushed between the Germans and Soviet Union, ceased to exist.
Existentialism
Existentialism, a philosophical movement that would become very popular in many parts of Europe after the war, held that human beings exist in an absurd world without a God and that they are left to define themselves only through their actions. The experience of hope comes only by "engaging" in life and thereby finding meaning in it. Some found this notion of reality to be liberating; others despaired that there was no larger purpose in life beyond human existence. (shows how people response philosophically to WW2)
5 Chronological Order
February 1945: Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin meet at Yalta to begin to plan for post-WW II order May 8, 1945: WW II ends in Europe August 6, 1945: Atomic Bomb dropped on Hiroshima 1945: United Nations established 1949: North Atlantic Treaty Organization is founded.
The Feminine Mystique (1963)
Feminism in the 1960s was spurred, in part, by the work of Betty Friedan (1921-2006), who in 1957 at her fifteenth college reunion queried her fellow graduates about their experiences since graduation. Many she found, had gotten married, supported their husband's career, moved to the suburbs and raised their children. Many were deeply dissatisfied. "It was a strange stirring," she wrote in a book she later completed about this phenomenon called The Feminine Mystique (1963), " a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries ... she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — "Is this all? The book became an international sensation tapping into shared frustrations of women around the world. In 1966 Friedan helped found the National Organization of Women to advocate for women's rights in the workplace. Part of its goal was to give women alternatives to the life of the suburbs and real opportunities in the workplace. Other parts of the women's movement.
Volksgemeinschaft (1933-1945)
For the Nazis, power was a means, not an end. The central goal of their domestic revolution was creating a Volksgemeinschaft or "People's Community," in which every aspect of German life would be assimilated into the structures of the Nazi state. What the People's Community meant for Germans was succinctly summarized in a speech given by the Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels shortly after Hitler was appointed chancellor. It delivers the information that the collective spirit of the German people was everything, and the individual's personal welfare was important only to the extent that it helped fulfill the goals of the whole. Individual rights and liberties were not important, the state and the party were.
Battle of Stalingrad
Franz Halder could not have been more wrong. Despite the unfathomable destruction of the first months of the war, the German army failed to deliver a knockout blow to Soviet forces. There are many reasons for their military failure. Certainly, one reason is that Hitler became so convinced of his own brilliance and saw the war through such a warped racial lens that he underestimated the abilities of the Soviet peoples to withstand a German onslaught. As the months dragged on, German troops became scattered over a vast front where, not unlike Napoleon's army before them, they found themselves without adequate supply lines and unprepared for the oncoming Russian winter. Fighting 'on the Russian front' became synonymous with hell. In the winter of 1942, soldiers would experience the lowest rung of this inferno at the Battle of Stalingrad. For months German and Soviet forces fought door-to-door in the shattered ruins of 'Stalin's city.' In the end, after suffering staggering losses, the Soviet army succeeded in surrounding a significant portion of the exhausted German army.
Ghettos/Jewish Quarters (1930s-1940s)
From the beginning of the war against Poland, the Germans saw the conflict in the East as a war of race. As part of the Blitzkireg, German troops committed massive, if unsystematic, murder of civilians—Poles and Jews. Second, immediately after conquering Poland and in order to create the necessary living space for German settlement in this area, the Germans forcibly removed tens of thousands of Poles, whom they deemed racially inferior. Jews who survived the initial onslaught were immediately rounded up and sent to ghettos, or Jewish quarters, which were hastily constructed in most large Polish cities. The conditions in the ghettos were atrocious. Greatly overcrowded and with little food, medical supplies, or sanitation, tens of thousands of Jews were compelled to perform essential war work for the Nazi war machine. As German and collaborating forces took control of much of western and central Europe, they adopted similar policies in these areas.
Spanish Civil War
Hitler's audacious decision to challenge the western powers by remilitarizing the Rhineland benefited greatly from the fact that international attention at that time was focused on the Spanish Civil War. This civil war, between the Falangists, fascist militarists led by General Francisco Franco (1892-1975), and the Loyalists, a variety of republican and leftist groups, riveted the world's attention. At stake in Spain was the fate of the young Republic that had been declared in 1931. For the rest of the world, the issue at stake was none other than the future of fascism and its assault on representative governments.
Appeasement
Hitler's focus shifted to the Germans of the Sudetenland. Insisting that he could not sit idly by while his German brethren were abused by their Czechoslovakian 'overlords,' Hitler demanded that Germany be given control of the territory. It was, he insisted, the last territorial claim his government would make. The Czechs refused and demanded that their allies, France and England, come to their defense. Instead, Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of Britain, and Eduard Daladier, the Prime Minister of France, went to Munich and agreed to Hitler's demands. French and British citizens were thrilled that war had been avoided. Those looking back on it have been appalled by this policy of appeasement because it is now clear that the Sudetenland was not the end of Hitler's territorial ambitions, but merely the end of his use of threat and diplomacy to achieve them.
Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact
If the world was flabbergasted by the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact in 1934, they were stupefied by the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in August 1939. Hitler and Stalin, Fascism and Communism—the bitterest enemies whose raison d'être was defined by the need to rid the world of the other—were in bed together. Officially, the pact stated that both parties would refrain from any use of force should either of them "become the object of a war-like action on the part of a third Power." Unofficially, everyone knew that, for whatever reason, Stalin had come to an understanding with Hitler about the fate of Poland: It should cease to exist as an independent country. What was not known, and came to light only when secret parts of the pact were made public much later, was that Stalin and Hitler had indeed worked out a plan for the mutual conquering and division of Poland. Additionally, Hitler promised Stalin a free hand in the Baltic States of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia in return for Soviet shipments of grain and oil for the German army.
The Green Revolution
Improvements in medicine coincided with dramatic increases in global food production. What was later coined the Green Revolution started in Mexico in 1943 when the government, acutely aware of impending famines because of its rapidly growing population and stagnant agricultural economy, opened an agricultural research institute. The institute's goal was to develop new wheat seeds and planting practices to increase production. The project worked spectacularly and from 1943 to the mid-1960s the country went from importing half of its wheat to becoming a major exporter. India developed new strains of wheat and rice that quadrupled yields in two decades. The Philippines tripled yields of rice in the 1960s and 1970s. While few questioned the immediate benefits of the Green Revolution some wondered about the long-term costs and sustainability. While new seeds were part of the agricultural equation they only worked because of increased use of irrigation and fertilizer that had depleted local water tables and, over time, caused problems with pollution and soil degradation. Green Revolution agriculture has also resulted in a decline in plant varieties which make fields more vulnerable to pest infestation. Consequently, farmers have relied on greater quantities of expensive and toxic pesticides to produce yields. Whether or not the Green Revolution is sustainable in the twenty-first century remains a question.
Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity
In 1942 Japan announced the creation of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. When announced, the program called for "independent countries existing within the New Order of Asia." For nationalists like Sukarno and Sung the key phrase in this passage was "independent countries"; for Japanese leaders the operative phrase was "New Order in Asia" in which Japan would become the new colonial overlord in Asia. Asians, Westerners unable to escape the rapid Japanese advances, and prisoners of war were all forced into serving the Japanese military machine. Just how many is difficult to know with any precision, but the number of forced laborers was certainly in the millions. An estimated 750,000 Koreans were shipped to Japan to work in factories, a number that comprised over one-third of all labor in Japan during the war. Some forced labor built railroads and defense fortifications in searing jungles. Others had to dig and haul ore in mines for twelve to fourteen hours each day in conditions reminiscent of the horrors of early industrial society. In the rubber plantations of Indonesia, many natives found conditions harsher than they were under the Dutch.
Pan-Arabism
In 1956, after he managed to consolidate his power and get himself named President, Nasser challenged Great Britain's continuing manipulation of Egypt when he nationalized the Suez Canal. The western powers contemplated taking it back with military force but the threat of the Soviet Union backing Nasser deterred them. Nasser's nationalism was closely linked to Pan-Arabism, the idea that Egypt would be the leader for the rising tide of Arab identity in the post-war period. This message resonated with many peoples across North Africa and the Middle East.
The Test Offensive
In 1969 the Vietnam War, the world and the Beatles all took a dramatic turn. In Vietnam increasing US involvement was met with a surprising attack by North Vietnamese troops deep into the south. Began on the Vietnamese New Year (January 31, 1968), and thus called the Tet Offensive it began to convince the American public that promises the US was winning the war were hollow. Televised reports of the brutal fighting made the reports of the US Army's low "body counts" seem like callous lies. A picture of a South Vietnamese general shooting a suspected Vietcong fighter with his hands tied behind his back made people began to wonder who the real bad guys were.
Mai Lai
In 1969 the Vietnam War, the world and the Beatles all took a dramatic turn. In Vietnam increasing US involvement was met with a surprising attack by North Vietnamese troops deep into the south. Began on the Vietnamese New Year (January 31, 1968), and thus called the Tet Offensive it began to convince the American public that promises the US was winning the war were hollow. Televised reports of the brutal fighting made the reports of the US Army's low "body counts" seem like callous lies. A picture of a South Vietnamese general shooting a suspected Vietcong fighter with his hands tied behind his back made people began to wonder who the real bad guys were. So too did the mass reprisal of the Vietnamese village of Mai Lai shortly after the end of the offensive when a US unit committed mass rape and murder in the village inhabited by mostly women and children. Although Mai Lai was kept quiet for a year it became, for many, the moral turning point in which the US promises of protecting freedom and the innocent were no longer believed.
Intergralists
In Brazil the depression paved the way for the emergence of Getúlio Vargas (1883-1954) as president in 1930. Initially he responded to the unrest by trying to gain the support of Brazil's disenfranchised millions. He extended the vote to all men and women over the age of 21. He also promised land reform in order to help rural workers. But by 1937 he had abandoned most of these reform efforts. As the Depression deepened, he allied with the 'Integralists,' a fascist organization willing to help him suppress growing leftist insurgency in both the cities and countryside. Violent repression of labor unrest became the order of the day.
The European Economic Community (1957)
In Europe another answer to the scourge of war slowly began to emerge in the years afterward 1945. The answer, some leaders suggested, was not the punishment and isolation of Germany but rather integration. A Germany bound to other countries through economic cooperation, they argued, would be less likely to wage war. In 1953, the first tentative steps in this new vision of integration was taken with the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), a consortium of six countries- France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, and Italy- that agreed to coordinate prices and production quotas for these essential materials. In 1957 the ECSC became the European Economic Community (EEC). Membership expanded and eventually included most of western European countries. Economic cooperation deepened as did cultural and political exchanges. Many more students, for example, began to study at universities outside their homeland and In 1990 the EEC evolved into the European Union (EU). War between Germany and its European neighbors has not taken place during this period.
Vichy France
In France, defeat precipitated a profound crisis. Politically, the embattled Third Republic fell and was replaced by a new government under the leadership of General Henri-Phillipe Petain, the French military hero of the Battle of Verdun in World War One. In June 1940, Petain's government negotiated the armistice with Hitler that divided France into the occupied north and east, and the quasi-independent Vichy government in the south and west. Petain always maintained that he negotiated with Hitler to minimize the impact of German occupation on France, but it has become clear in recent years that the Vichy leadership saw German success as an opportunity to transform France, politically and socially. 'Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,' the motto that had defined the goals of republican France since the revolution, was replaced by 'Work, Family, and Fatherland,' a set of values aimed to end the moral decadence and social unrest that Petain felt had undermined France's ability to defend itself from invasion. Vichy leaders also blamed 'foreigners' for undermining French patriotism and almost immediately set out to limit the rights of foreigners—'non-French Jews, and others'—in the new state.
Wannsee Conference
In January 1942 Nazi leaders met at a villa outside of Berlin (later known as the Wannsee Conference) to discuss the unfolding racial war. They debated how mass murder could be carried out more efficiently and systematically. They schemed about ways to ensure the extermination of Jews throughout Europe, not just those in the East. They discussed, in a seemingly cold and rational way, which types of poisonous gases were most effective for mass murder. In the end, the conference confirmed the policy of building "death camps" in the occupied territories of the East—Auschwitz, Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor, and Belzec. Jews from all over Europe were to be shipped to these camps, the fittest used for labor, and the rest immediately killed mass gas chambers. Huge crematoriums, built next to the gas chambers, would burn the evidence of the Nazi insanity.
The Korean War
In June 1950, a North Korean army, supplied by the Soviet Union, crossed the Thirty-eighth Parallel dividing the peninsula, igniting The Korean War (1950-1953). It would become the deadliest conflict of the Cold War. Initially it seemed that the North Koreans would quickly sweep across the entire peninsula but then the United States, acting under the banner of the United Nations, intervened and push it back over the divide. In short order the North seemed on the verge of defeat but Mao ordered his army to come to the defense of its Communist neighbor. By the summer of 1951, a year into the war, both sides were fighting close to the original border. By the time a truce was finally agreed upon in 1953 hundreds of thousands of soldiers and likely over a million non-combatants were dead. Little had changed in the balance of the Cold War except the its human toll.
Rape of Nanjing
In the 1930s Japan launched its own wars of aggression across Asia and the Pacific. In 1937 John Rabe, a German businessman and Nazi party member living in Nanjing, China witnessed the horrific attacks of Japanese soldiers on Chinese civilians that has come to be called the Rape of Nanjing. Along with several others he organized a mission to protect the city's citizens from the vicious attacks of their enemies. Despite their efforts hundreds of thousands perished over the next months and millions would die in China and across Asia in the coming years. Rape of Nanjing refer to the mass murder and mass rape committed by Japanese troops against the residents of Nanjing, then the capital of the China in 1937. Within 6 weeks, although estimates vary widely, many agree that 200,000 to 300,000 people were killed and many tens of thousands of civilians suffered rape and physically abused. Japanese didn't only rape women but kids as well proves their immoral and brutalness. The significance is it highlight the relationship between China and Japan afterwards and the huge psychological trauma Chinese have.
Remilitarization of the Rhineland
In the international sphere as well, Hitler and his advisors believed that many of the international impediments to war had been removed. The remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 had removed French and British forces of occupation from German soil. This had not only given the German army freer rein to prepare for war, it had also greatly bolstered popular support for the Nazi efforts to remove the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles, which had been a key goal of Nazi foreign policy. For Hitler personally, the triumph of the German army as it marched back into the Rhineland, over the objections of many of his generals, convinced him of the weakness of the allies and of his own messianic calling. "That you [Germany] have found me... among so many millions," Hitler announced two days later, "is the miracle of our time! And that I have found you, that is Germany's fortune!"
Che Guevara
In the midst of the horrors of the Great Leap Forward, Che Guevara (1928-1967) visited Mao. Guevara was a key revolutionary leader of the successful overthrow of the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista. He was also a committed Communist and hoped to use his visit to Beijing to win support for the fledging revolution in Cuba. Isolated from the realities of the mass starvation taking place in the Chinese countryside Che was impressed by Mao's ideas of a peasant-led Communist revolution and hoped that this model would fit rural Cuba better than the traditional focus on the urban working class favored by Soviet Communists.
The Beatles
In the spring of 1968 Paul McCartney, one of the members of the world's most famous band, the Beatles, sat at his piano in his Scottish retreat musing over the fate of the group. Barely five years earlier the Beatles had exploded onto the world stage. From their modest roots in Liverpool, England the 'Fab Four' as they would become known- Paul, John Lennon, George Harrison and later Ringo Starr- become a global phenomenon. Crazed fans from Tokyo to New York donned John's signature glasses and changed their hairstyle with each transformation of the group's coiffure. Screaming teenagers drowned out the music at their concerts and passed out from oxygen deprivation. As Paul sat at his piano he scribbled out the lyrics for the song, The Long and Winding Road. The song was a reflection on the band's long meteoric journey; it was also a rumination on the band's future because despite its great success Paul knew that success was wearing thin and their growing involvement in public affairs was pulling them in different directions.
Tryst with Destiny (1947)
India's tryst with destiny, its independence from Great Britain, was indeed a long time coming. Ever since World War One and the Peace of Paris Indian nationalists like Nehru had been convinced that there was little future for Indians as part of the British Empire and that independence from their colonial rulers was the only possible future. Yet, despite increasing anti-colonial agitation throughout the South Asian world in the 1920s and 30s the dream of independence remained unrealized. World War Two changed the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Burdened by a massive air assault to the very heart of the empire in London in 1940 and a challenge to its Asian territories by the Japanese, Great Britain no longer had the financial and military resources to hold on to a colony that was determined to no longer be part of the empire; and overwhelmingly Indians overwhelmingly were of that mind.
Comecon
Initially Poland and Czechoslovakia received some Marshall Plan funds but Soviet mistrust of the implications of these handouts only strengthened Soviet resolve to tighten their control over their sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. In 1949 it established Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. Comecon compelled Eastern European countries to coordinate their production around Soviet demands. While shutting off these countries to the West it did meant that they had markets for their generally inferior products and, in turn, the USSR subsidized them with cheap fuel and food.
Asia for the Asians
Initially, Japan's show of military power against western foes and its promises of "Asia for the Asians," or the idea that its real goal was to liberate Asian peoples from the yoke of colonial control, had great appeal. Nationalists like Achmed Sukarno in the Dutch East Indies, Aun Sung (father of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi) in Burma, and Sudras Bose in India welcomed their enemy's enemy as a friend and promised to raise indigenous forces to aid the Japanese cause. It quickly became clear to these nationalists, though, that the Japanese saw them, not as partners in the war against western colonialism, but as units of the Japanese military and subject to its goals and discipline.
Great Purge
Just as the frenetic chaos of the initial processes of collectivization and the five-year plan were beginning to dissipate, however, the Soviet Union and Scott's life were shattered by the Great Purge. Spurred by growing grumblings in the party concerning his handling of these policies, Stalin once again launched a brutal attack on his rivals. The justification for the purge was the search for 'Kirov's assassins,' those who had been involved in the 1934 murder of Sergey Kirov, the mayor of Leningrad. In reality, Kirov's assassination was merely an excuse for Stalin to rid the party of any potential and imaginary challenges to his totalitarian control of the state. Between 1935 and 1938, two-thirds of the members of the Central Committee--some of them the most prominent leaders of the Revolution of 1917 like Zinoviev and Kamenev--were put on trial, summarily found guilty of treason, and killed. Almost half of the Soviet military leadership met a similar fate.
Night of Broken Glass
Laws were only part of the growing nightmare of Nazi racism. As the 1930s unfolded, violence against Jews became more common and systematic. It reached its apogee on November 9, 1938, when the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish émigré in Paris provided an excuse for the party to carry out a wave of violence and terror against Jews throughout Germany. More than 100 synagogues were burned to the ground. Jewish shops were looted and pillaged. Many Jews were beaten and arrested. The streets of many German cities were littered with broken glass; thus the night of terror became known as the Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass.
Red Guards
Mao called on China's youth to lead his revolution. These cadres of students and workers, called Red Guards were sent off to countryside to finish the aborted Great Leap Forward. They also roamed the cities, with Mao's little red book of aphorisms held aloft like a beacon of light, rooting out theoretical deviancy. Party members who disagreed with Mao fit, intellectuals who chose to express individual views or artists who worked under what some deemed western, bourgeoisie influences were all attacked. So too were religious groups like Tibetan Buddhists whose lands had been occupied by Chinese forces a few years before. The Red Guard attacked all opponents with a zealous fervor. In the mid-1960s the leader of the China Communist Party, Mao Zedong called on the country's young people to take up the banner of leadership and usher in a new era of revolutionary fervor against the older generation.
Bandung Conference
Nehru tried to promote India's development by steering an independent course through the minefield of the Cold War. In 1955 Nehru delivered a keynote speech at the Bandung Conference in which a number of nations, newly freed from colonial control, met to define a "third way" between the US and USSR. Their way was "non-alignment" a call for all nations to respect the independence of others.
The Secret Speech
Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971), who eventually outmaneuvered his rivals and assumed the position of General Secretary of the Soviet Union signaled his distancing from Stalin in 1956 when, as the annual Soviet Party Congress was ending, he ordered the delegates to back to their seats and had the doors closed. For the next four hours he delivered what has become known as the Secret Speech although it never seemed to be intended as such. Khrushchev told his audience that Stalin had committed unwarranted murders against loyal Communists, and had wallowed in the cult of his personality and ignored the collective principles of Soviet leadership. While avoiding acknowledging the massive crimes of Collectivization and the Purges, Khrushchev's speech was, nonetheless, a shock to many delegates who had never heard a word disparaging their former leader.
Kita Ikki (1883-1937)
No one in Japan spoke for the return to the 'Japanese way' more than the writer, Kita Ikki (1883-1937). Ironically, Kita wrote his seminal treatise for his vision of Japan, A Plan for the Reorganization of Japan (1919), while living in Shanghai, China, in the period immediately after World War One. The city, with its fractious politics and western infiltration became an obverse model for what Kita became convinced was Japan's destiny. It was a destiny that domestically emphasized a renewed and very direct bond between the emperor and his subjects, and internationally called for Japan to be the model for and leader of a new age of Asian greatness. For example, in economic terms, he wrote about eliminating the dominant positions of big landowners and promoting the welfare of "all the people." Such reforms, he argued, would give Japanese a new sense of common purpose and national pride that would pave the way for them to lead the country on its historical mission to transform Japan's and Asia's destiny.
1 Chronological
October 22, 1929: Black Tuesday Start of Great Depression in the United States 1930: Getúlio Vargas elected President of Brazil - Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act passed in United States Summer 1931: Bonus Army March on Washington, DC November 1932: Franklin Delano Roosevelt elected President of the United States, beginning of New Deal 1933: Fulgencio Batista establishes a military dictatorship in Cuba
Hiroshima
On April 30, 1945, as Soviet forces fought their way through the rubble-strewn streets of Berlin, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. A few days later on May 8, 1945, war ended in Europe. Almost exactly three months later the war ended in the Pacific. On August 6, 1945, a single U. S. bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped a five-ton atomic weapon nicknamed Little Boy on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In an instant the center of the city was consumed in a fireball of death that immediately obliterated 70,000 of the 76,000 buildings in the city and 70,000-100,000 of its residents. Temperatures at the epicenter reached 5,400 degrees F. People literally melted. A medical report assessing the blast concluded: "Extremely intense thermal energy leads not only to carbonization but also to evaporation of the viscera." In other words, human beings almost instantly became little balls of carbon residue. Three days after Hiroshima a second bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki and seventy thousand more residents became casualties of the nuclear age. A few days later Japan surrendered.
Operation Barbarosa
On June 22, 1941, Hitler ordered the launching of 'Operation Barbarosa' against the Soviet Union, a war of fantastic scale and indescribable brutality. That day over 3 million German troops, 3,600 German tanks, and 2,500 German aircraft crossed the Soviet border and embarked on a front that measured over 2,000 miles. Their mission was to annihilate the enemy by any and all means at their disposal; 'enemy' was understood to mean any soldier, Communist, partisan, or civilian that stood in the way of total German victory. 'Jews,' the German security police declared, were especially prominent among the partisans and were thus particularly marked for liquidation.
Black Tuesday
On Tuesday, October 22, 1929, (later called "Black Tuesday") jittery investors began to 'take profits' from the market. As stock prices began to fall, investors panicked, and over the next several trading days began a selling frenzy that decimated the market. After a panicky weekend over 16 million shares of stock were traded on Monday when the exchanges opened; previously, the record trade on Wall Street had been around 4 million shares. The Dow industrial Average, the key indicator of the stock market, fell almost forty percent in value on that day alone. Thousands of investors, from the great banking barons to the single-family investor, saw their lives' savings wiped out in a day. When banks and other borrowing agencies began to call in loans to cover their own losses on the market, the financial house of cards collapsed and like a tidal wave began to devastate economies around the world. U.S. banks called in their loans from Germany, England, and France, and over the next months the economies in those countries contracted also.
Penicillin
One major reason for the demographic explosion of the twentieth century was developments in medicine and public health that significantly increased life expectancy and reduced mortality in many parts of the world. Microbes and pathogens have always helped keep the human population in check. Smallpox, measles and influenza, and periodic bouts of bubonic plague had been major killers around the world throughout time. But, beginning around mid-century, epidemiologists began to understand the structure of these bacteria and viruses and develop medicines to limit their deadly effects. Penicillin, discovered in the 1930s and then mass produced during World War Two, became a miracle drug to kill bacteria, like staphylococcus, syphilis and gonorrhea, and bubonic plague. In the late 1940s the first vaccine against influenza was synthesized, a vaccine against the crippling disease of polio soon followed as did ones for mumps, measles and chicken pox by the mid-1970s. Smallpox was eradicated in 1980. These antibiotics saved millions of lives, especially amongst the youngest and oldest segments of the population, usually most vulnerable. Access to hospitals, clean water and pre- and post-natal care also led to significant improvements in infant and mother survival.
Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act passed in United States
One reason for the radical collapse of the Cuban sugar economy was the passage in 1930 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in the United States. This act dramatically increased tariffs (on average a sixty percent increase in rates) on the importation of foreign agricultural and manufactured products into the United States, including Cuban sugar. Once half of the U.S. market, by 1933 Cuba's share of sugar import market to the United States dropped to one-quarter. The results in Cuba were, as we shall see, economic and political chaos.
Neo-Colonialsim
Political independence often did not translate to economic independence for the former colonies. Decades in which the production of the country had been transformed in the interests of the colonizer had left many underdeveloped. Long and costly wars of independence left new nations with few resources to rebuild. Colonial rulers had often intentionally left colonial populations uneducated, making it difficult for new leaders to find the intellectual capital they needed to rebuild. Many former colonies now found themselves in a situation of neo-colonialism in which their former masters still dictated their economic fate.
United Nations
Roosevelt had been reluctant to challenge Stalin on the fate of Poland at Yalta because he was increasingly convinced, like his predecessor Woodrow Wilson, that the long-term solution to such issues lay in the creation of a new international body—one that would ensure just and peaceful resolution of international conflicts. He hoped that such a body might mean that Poland's fate would not be determined solely by the reality of Soviet troops in Warsaw. A few months after Yalta, delegates from fifty nations convened in San Francisco, California, to complete the Charter for the United Nations. Key to the structure was a security council designed to supervise military and political problems. The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union were designated permanent members of the council with absolute veto authority over all decisions. China, at the United States' insistence, and France at Great Britain's, were added as permanent members. It remained to be seen whether international institutions, still dominated by the interests of its national memberships and increasingly controlled by the ideology of the Cold War, could promote international cooperation.
Le Chambon-sur-Lignon
Some Jews were saved from the fires of the death camps by luck and the selfless heroism of others. In France, residents of the small town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon risked their lives to save Jewish refugee children and families from detection. Danish citizens helped Jews escape to neutral Sweden as Nazi thugs closed in. In Hungary, Swedish citizen-turned-diplomat Raoul Wallenberg rescued tens of thousands of Jews. Retribution against those attempting to deter the Nazi's extermination plans was severe. When the Gestapo raided Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the spring of 1943, several residents paid for their heroism with their lives. When the Warsaw ghetto rose up against the Nazis, the whole ghetto was burned down and everyone inside killed.
Levittown
The Baby Boom started in United States almost immediately after the end of World War Two as millions of veterans came home and started families. Many, taking advantage of government loans and other benefits, moved into homes that were springing up like weeds in the rapidly growing suburbs outside of America's urban centers. The first suburb was built by on Long Island in 1947. Known as Levittown (after the family who built it) it comprised 17,400 nearly identical Cape Cod houses that in the span of a few years housed over 80,000 residents. Each house had its own appliances and television, a medium which began to dominate popular culture by the 1950s. Most Levittown families purchased their own cars so that the husband could commute to work in the city, and the stay-at-home wife could manage the kids and buy the groceries. (In the mid-1950s the building of a national interstate system would further stimulate the American dependence on, and love of, the automobile.)
The Cuban Missile Crisis
The Bay of Pigs Invasion ended any of Castro's ambivalence about Cuba's future. The US was the enemy and Communism was the answer. Cuba sought Soviet backing to defend itself against any future US threat and Khrushchev answered by agreeing to send nuclear missiles to the island. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the most dangerous period of the Cold War. In October 1962 after he learned of the situation US President Kennedy confronted Castro and Khrushchev in a televised speech alerting the world to their actions, ordering a blockade of Cuba and demanding a removal of all nuclear missiles from the island.
Baby Boom (1950s)
The Beatles road to international fame was built on the foundations of a global demographic transformation, the Baby Boom. Millions of soldiers to returned home and started families, and improvements in public health greatly diminished infant mortality and increased life expectancy in many parts of the world. Young people in unprecedented numbers came of age in the 1950s and 1960s. They came of age demanding access to opportunities in education and employment, and freedom of expression. They insisted on political rights and policies that often conflicted with the expectations and interests of their elders. A cultural, political and economic phenomenon started after the post WW2 period during 1950s-1960. This period of time was characterized by a global demographic transformation where millions of soldiers returned to home and started families, and improvements in public health greatly diminished infant mortality and increased life expectancy in many parts of the world. Young people in unprecedented numbers came of age in the 1950s and 1960s. They came of age demanding access to opportunities in education and employments, and freedom of expression. They insisted on political rights and policies that often conflicted with the expectations and interests of their elders.
Beds Ins for Peace
The Beatles were increasingly drawn to the growing anti-war, anti-establishment student and feminist protests of 1968. John and George especially felt that the band needed to take an active, leading role in the political revolts. John's political evolution was certainly influenced by Yoko Ono (1933), a Japanese artist and feminist who he married in 1969. Ono encouraged John to not simply escape whether through drugs or transcendental meditation but to engage. Friends with members of the SDS, like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, John Lennon struggled to figure out his role in the growing unrest. While his anti-establishment streak and growing activism made him sympathetic to the SDS' calls for greater civic liberalism he rejected their methods. Violence against "the Establishment" was fruitless and would ultimately only destroy those who perpetuated it, John believed. To explain his views he wrote a song, Revolution. "We all want to change the world; But when you talk about destruction; Don't you know that you can count me out." John's and Yoko's alternative to the violence of the SDS and another groups was "to make, love not war." They would stage "bed ins for Peace", in Amsterdam and London after they got married, inviting journalists and fans to watch them lounge in hotel room beds to call attention to their movement.
Song-Revolution
The Beatles were increasingly drawn to the growing anti-war, anti-establishment student and feminist protests of 1968. John and George especially felt that the band needed to take an active, leading role in the political revolts. John's political evolution was certainly influenced by Yoko Ono (b. 1933), a Japanese artist and feminist who he married in 1969. Ono encouraged John to not simply escape whether through drugs or transcendental meditation but to engage. Friends with members of the SDS, like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, John Lennon struggled to figure out his role in the growing unrest. While his anti-establishment streak and growing activism made him sympathetic to the SDS' calls for greater civic liberalism he rejected their methods. Violence against "the Establishment" was fruitless and would ultimately only destroy those who perpetuated it, John believed. To explain his views he wrote a song, Revolution. "We all want to change the world; But when you talk about destruction; Don't you know that you can count me out." John's and Yoko's alternative to the violence of the SDS and another groups was "to make, love not war."
Bonus Army
The Bonus Army were the 43,000 marchers—17,000 U.S. World War I veterans, their families, and affiliated groups—who gathered in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1932 to demand cash-payment redemption of their service certificates.
The Stormtroopers
The Communists were one threat to German society; according to the Nazis, there were others. They argued that the depression was caused by foreign capitalists and commercial interests that wanted to ruin Germany's greatness. In the Nazis' conspiratorial worldview, it was caused by Jewish businessmen and bankers who were seeking to destroy the German economy so that they could reap the plunder. Many Germans, as indeed many throughout Europe, harbored prejudices against Jews and Nazi vitriolic tapped into those prejudices. Many had heard enough stories about greedy Jewish money lenders to accept the plausibility of the Nazi argument. The Nazis promised to 'take care' of those who were destroying Germany and in so doing pave the way for a better future. The Stormtroopers (SA) or Brown shirts as they were known, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, regularly and willingly engaged in brawls with other Communist groups and attacked Jews in public.
Dien Bien Phu
The United States' support of Sukarno's anti-Communist offensive in Indonesia was part of its growing commitment to fight Communist movement throughout Southeast Asia. It was a policy that would draw it in a long and bitter war in Vietnam. At the end of World War Two the Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh had actively sought US support for his efforts to end French colonialism. Using the US Declaration of Independence as a model he crafted a Vietnamese Declaration of Independence in which he appealed to the US' history of democracy and freedom. The US, however, was always skeptical of his Communist ties and unwilling to abandon its French ally. Rejected by the US, Ho fought against French occupation by soliciting aid from the Communist world. In 1954 the French were decisively defeated at the battle of Dien Bien Phu and compelled agreed to withdraw from Indochina. Vietnam was divided between North and South. Ho assumed control of the north and the US began to actively back the South.
Pan-Africanism
The War of Algerian Independence (1954-1962) demonstrated how brutal the process of decolonization could be. British-controlled Kenya was another grim example. There, unlike in India and Palestine where the British pulled out early and mostly willingly, decolonization was a lengthy struggle. The main impetus for Kenyan independence was the Kikuyu people. The largest ethnic group in the colony these famers and pastoralists had long been marginalized by white settlers claiming more and more land. In 1952, motivated by scarcity and the rising Pan-Africanism movement promoting independence in Sub-Saharan Africa, they began to organize and resist. The Mau Mau Rebellion (1952-1960) as it became known (the name is supposedly derived from religious ceremonies carried out by early members of the Kikuyu resistance movement) finally ended when the British granted independence in 1960. Although casualty figures vary widely it is safe to say that while British colonial causalities were small tens of thousands of Kenyans died in those eight years.
The Mau Mau Rebellion
The War of Algerian Independence (1954-1962) demonstrated how brutal the process of decolonization could be. British-controlled Kenya was another grim example. There, unlike in India and Palestine where the British pulled out early and mostly willingly, decolonization was a lengthy struggle. The main impetus for Kenyan independence was the Kikuyu people. The largest ethnic group in the colony these famers and pastoralists had long been marginalized by white settlers claiming more and more land. In 1952, motivated by scarcity and the rising Pan-Africanism movement promoting independence in Sub-Saharan Africa, they began to organize and resist. The Mau Mau Rebellion (1952-1960) as it became known (the name is supposedly derived from religious ceremonies carried out by early members of the Kikuyu resistance movement) finally ended when the British granted independence in 1960. Although casualty figures vary widely it is safe to say that while British colonial causalities were small tens of thousands of Kenyans died in those eight years.
Great Dust Bowl (1930s)
The depression in the United States was exacerbated by a severe drought that turned the Great Plains of the Midwest into a Great Dust Bowl. Once-rich soil turned to a fine silt and blew away, darkening skies as far away as the Atlantic Coast. Farmers, already facing depressed prices, and banks unable or unwilling to loan them money were forced to sell their land for a pittance. Many packed up their belongings on rickety cars and trucks and went to California in search of a new life as the writer John Steinbeck so powerfully portrayed in his famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath:
Japanese Way
The economic and social chaos only deepened in the next few years in Japan as the United States further raised duties on Japanese imports. Many politicians insisted that they needed to more aggressively protect Japan's economic future by a renewed focus on securing interests in China and the rest of Asia. Others voiced opposition to the reformist mentality of the 1920s. What Japan did not need, they said, was liberalization and acquiescence to a western world that had betrayed them. What Japan did need was a renewed sense of national focus anchored in the person of the emperor and secured by a domestic presence of the military--the "Japanese way."
Comfort Women (Started in early 1930s)
The fate of some 200,000 young women, mostly Korean but also from the Philippines, China and many other territories, who were kidnapped or "drafted" into forced prostitution as "Comfort Women" for the Japanese army. Taken from their homes these women were shipped to distant military outposts throughout the Japanese imperium, often raped and then shut in buildings were their life for the next days, months and agonizing years was to have sex with Japanese soldiers. Kim Tokchin, a young Korean woman sent to Shanghai in 1937 recalled having to serve 30 to 40 men/day, six days/week. Fifty women lived with her in her brothel. Beatings, tropical diseases, unsanitary living conditions, and malnutrition claimed many. Social ostracism faced many who survived. Adding to the tragedy was the long denial by the Japanese of their brutal experiences.
