World War II and its Aftermath PDF

WORLD WAR II AND ITS AFTERMATH Especially for Europeans, the Great War (1914–1918) resulted in a horrific loss of life, economic devastation, and the shattering of multinational empires. Though many hoped that it would be “the war to end all wars,” chaos and political radicalization paved the way for the second—and even more devastating and global—world war in 1939. The Great War would come to be called the First World War. World War II, then, grew out of the bitter experiences of both World War I and the failures of the peace. It also resulted from the aggressive ambitions and racial theories of Germany and Japan. Both states sought to impose racial hierarchies through conquest and coerced labor. By the late 1930s, German and Japanese ambitions to become imperial powers brought these conservative dictatorships (which along with Italy constituted the Axis Powers) into conflict with France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and eventually the United States (the Allied Powers). Compared to the First World War, the Second World War was more global, stretching across Europe, Africa, and Asia; the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean; and the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Belligerents mobilized entire societies, including the colonized, into armed forces and placed enormous demands on civilians. Civilians in places such as India and Greece, Yugoslavia and Korea, Poland and the Philippines suffered terrible hardships, including famines, reprisal killings, and deportations in the course of this war without mercy. Moreover, as aerial bombardment of cities caused colossal civilian casualties, the total war erased the old distinction between soldiers and civilians. Women—as victims and as collaborators, as volunteers and as forced laborers, as workers behind the scenes and as witnesses to the conflict—were involved as never before. They, together with children, the infirm, and the elderly, also swelled the enormous population of refugees seeking safety in the midst of worldwide chaos. World War II also completed the decline of European world dominance that World War I had set in motion. The unspeakable acts of barbarism perpetrated during the Second World War, including the Nazi genocides directed against Jews and others, robbed Europe of its lingering claims of superiority. In the war’s wake, anticolonial movements demanded national self-determination from battered and morally bankrupted European powers. The War in Europe World War II began in September 1939 with Germany’s invasion of Poland and the British and French decision to oppose it. Before it was all over in 1945, much of Europe, including Germany, had been leveled. BLITZKRIEG AND TOTAL WAR Germany’s early success was staggering. After Germany signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in August 1939, Nazi troops overran western Poland; the Soviets then invaded from the east and occupied Poland’s eastern half. Nazis and Soviet invaders murdered or deported thousands of Poles. Hitler then attacked to the west, sweeping across France, Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Holland. Within less than two years, the Germans controlled virtually all of Europe from the English Channel to the Soviet border. (See Map 20.1.) Only Britain escaped Axis control, although Nazi bombers pulverized British cities. Hitler waited to strike to the east until June 1941, when Germany broke its pact and invaded the Soviet Union with 170 divisions, 3,000 tanks, and 3.2 million men—an invasion force of a size unmatched before or since. Here, as elsewhere, the Germans fought a blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) of tank-led assaults followed by motorized infantrymen and then foot soldiers. Kent, 1940. During the Battle of Britain in 1940 English civilians often had to take cover from Nazi bombers at a moment’s notice. In this image, originally published in Life magazine, the children of hops farmers in the southwestern English county of Kent anxiously watch the skies from a hastily dug air-raid trench. Leningrad, Winter 1941–1942. Surrounded by German forces for more than 900 days, the city of Leningrad experienced terrible hunger and cold. Here two women brave the bitter cold to collect the remains of a horse that has died in the street—probably from exhaustion and hunger. The Soviet response was a massive counteroffensive. Stalin threw everything he had into the war. It took a full two years of terrible bloodletting before the Soviets could start to push Hitler’s army slowly westward. At the Battle of Stalingrad, the German army and its allies suffered 1.5 million men killed, wounded, or captured while 75,000 Soviet troops suffered the same fate. Only six months later, the two industrial powerhouses slammed into each other at the Battle of Kursk. The largest tank battle in history, Kursk saw German armored divisions of 2,000 tanks fall to a Soviet tank force twice its size. Before 1944, the Soviets bore the brunt of the fighting but in turn caused more than 85 percent of all German casualties. The British attacked the Nazis in the air and on the sea and, along with American troops, stopped a German advance across North Africa into Egypt. The spectacular D-Day landing of western Allied forces in Normandy on June 6, 1944 (when the Germans had a mere 15 divisions in France, against more than 300 divisions on the Eastern Front), brought the Germans face to face with American, Canadian, and British troops. On April 30, 1945, as Soviet and Anglo-American forces converged on Berlin, Hitler committed suicide. Days later, Germany surrendered unconditionally. At last, the devastating war in Europe—more “total” than any before—was over. Map 20.1 | World War II: The European Theater The Axis armies enjoyed great success during the early stages of World War II. Which parts of the European theater did the Allies control? The Axis? Which countries were neutral in 1941? Where did the major Allied and Axis campaigns take place? What was Germany’s greatest geographic obstacle during World War II? RACIAL WAR AND THE HOLOCAUST The Nazi war was not just a grab for land and raw materials; it was also a crusade for a new order based on race. Hitler considered Slavic peoples to be subhuman and was prepared to kill or starve them to make room for German Aryans. But his most powerful racial hatred was directed at Europe’s Jewish population. Hitler had long talked of “freeing” Europe of all Jews. At the war’s outset, the Nazis herded Jews into ghettos and labor camps and seized their property. As the German army moved eastward, more and more Jews came under their control. At first the Nazi bureaucrats contemplated deportation, but they then ruled out transporting “subhumans” as too costly and settled for starving them and crowding them together in unsanitary ghettos. By the summer of 1941 special troops operating behind the army on the Eastern Front had begun mass shootings of communists and Jewish civilians, and by fall 1941 Hitler and the SS (the Schutzstaffel, or special security forces) were building a series of killing centers. When the German invasion of Russia stalled in the winter of 1941, the German leaders abandoned their plans to ship Jews to locations beyond the Ural Mountains. At a conference in Wannsee, just outside Berlin, in late January 1942, German decision makers finalized plans to kill all the Jews of Europe. This murderous departure from the work camps and ghettos meant a systematic eradication of Jews to clear the way for Nazi settlement in the east and racial purification across Europe. Accordingly, cattle cars shipped Jews from all over Europe to extermination sites in the east where Nazis used the latest technology, including the cyanide-based poison gas Zyklon B, to kill men, women, and children. The largest facility, Auschwitz, combined an extermination center and work camp in a single complex. The deliberate racial extermination of the Jews, known as the Holocaust, claimed around 6 million European Jews. About half of this number died in the gas chambers of concentration camps; the others perished in face-to-face executions or from starvation, disease, or exhaustion. The Nazis also turned their mass killing apparatus against Romani people, gay people, communists, and Slavs, with deportations to the death camps continuing to the very end of the war. Nazi genocides stood as a powerful challenge to European claims that science, technology, and an efficient bureaucracy would make life better for everyone. Lamenting connections between European culture and the Holocaust, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote in 1949, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” COLLABORATION AND RESISTANCE Nazi occupation created massive social, economic, and political upheavals throughout Europe. Hitler established puppet governments that complied with deportation orders against Jews and dissidents. In occupied territories, most people simply struggled to survive and to take care of their families as best they could. A large number of collaborators, however, worked with the Germans, spurred by a mixture of ideology, opportunism, and fear. Hitler’s giant police state also spawned resistance fighters, who opposed German occupiers for varying reasons. Among the resistance movements were both nationalists (who opposed German domination) and communists (who wanted to defeat both fascism and capitalism), who would fight among themselves even after the war was won. The Ovens at Auschwitz (Reconstruction). One of the most horrifying aspects of Nazi behavior during World War II was the attempt to make mass killing efficient, scientific, and hygienic. At Auschwitz, the deadliest of the extermination camps, more than 1 million Jews and other racial and political “enemies” of the regime were murdered according to carefully designed plans. Many of the bodies were then burned in specially built ovens like these so the Nazis could avoid digging potentially unhygienic mass graves and could hide the evidence that genocide was being committed. Still, prisoners and guards at the camp reported enduring the terrible smell of burning flesh and the falling of ash containing fragments of human bones. THE BITTER COSTS OF WAR The war in Europe had devastating human and material costs. This was particularly the case in eastern Europe, where German forces leveled more than 70,000 Soviet villages, obliterated one-third of the Soviet Union’s wealth, and inflicted 7 million Soviet military deaths (by contrast, the Germans lost 3.5 million soldiers) and at least 20 million civilian deaths. German bombing of British cities, such as London, inflicted a heavy toll on civilians and buildings, as did Allied bombing of war plants and Axis cities like Dresden and Tokyo. Urban casualties were perhaps greatest in Leningrad, a city that was surrounded and besieged for 900 days; 900,000 people lost their lives during this struggle. By the war’s end, Poland had lost 6 million people and Great Britain had lost 400,000. (See Analyzing Global Developments: World War II Casualties.) “What is Europe now?” mused British prime minister Winston Churchill. “A rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate.” ANALYZING GLOBAL DEVELOPMENTS World War II Casualties World War II was the most destructive armed conflict in recorded history. This chart lists the number mobilized, military deaths, and estimated total deaths during World War II for some of the countries and colonial regions where the loss of life was greatest. In many cases, civilian casualties are difficult to estimate because of the chaos that reigned both during and after the war. The war mobilized more than 120 million military personnel; more than 20 million died. The death toll of civilian populations was substantially greater. Civilian deaths directly caused by the war, including genocide, bombing, starvation, and disease, are now estimated to range from 30 million to 55 million, or slightly more than 60 percent of total losses; figures vary widely because of the difficulty of arriving at accurate numbers in places where loss of life was extremely high and chaos continued after the war, such as China, the USSR, and India. Historians now put the total human losses at roughly 60 million dead, including the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, more than double the number killed in World War I. World War II Casualties World War IIPopulation Casualties Max. No. Military Estimated Nation in 1939 Mobilized Deaths Total Deaths Population Max. No. Military Estimated Nation in 1939 Mobilized Deaths Total Deaths 8,800,000– USSR 108,377,000 12,500,000 27,000,000+ 10,700,000 14,000,000– China 517,568,000 5,000,000 2,220,000 20,000,000 6,600,000– Germany 69,622,500 9,200,000 5,553,000 8,600,000 Poland 34,775,700 1,000,000 240,000 5,800,000 Dutch East 69,435,000 N/A N/A 3,500,000 Indies 2,600,000– Japan 71,380,000 6,095,000 2,120,000 3,100,000 1,500,000– India 311,820,000 2,150,000 87,000 2,500,000 World War II Casualties Population Max. No. Military Estimated Nation in 1939 Mobilized Deaths Total Deaths 5,510,100 305,000 1,505,000 Yugoslavia 500,000 French 1,000,000– 24,568,000 N/A N/A Indochina 1,500,000 Hungary 9,129,000 350,000 300,000 580,000 France 40,000,000 5,000,000 217,600 567,000 300,000– Greece 7,221,900 414,000 20–35,000 800,000 World War II Casualties Population Max. No. Military Estimated Nation in 1939 Mobilized Deaths Total Deaths Italy 44,394,000 4,000,000 301,400 457,000 United 47,760,000 4,683,000 383,400 450,700 Kingdom United 131,028,000 16,353,659 407,000 419,400 States Philippines 16,000,300 105,000 N/A 118,000 Total World War II Deaths: 60 million (including 6 million Jews) Sources: Data compiled from: Alan Axelrod (ed.), Encyclopedia of World War II, vol. 1 (New York: Facts on File, 2007); Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013); I. C. B. Dear (ed.), The Oxford Companion to World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); The National WWII Museum, New Orleans. Note: Casualty figures vary for most of these countries, in some cases widely. These are at best estimates. QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS Which countries endured the greatest loss of life in World War II, and why? Contrast civilian and military casualties in World War II, and explain why civilian casualty rates were so much higher than military losses. (To arrive at civilian casualty figures, subtract the military death toll from the estimated total death figures.) Why was this particularly the case in colonial territories such as India, the Dutch East Indies, and French Indochina? Compare and contrast the casualties for World Wars I and II. (See the Analyzing Global Developments feature in Chapter 19.) Many historians regard World War I as a greater turning point in European and western history than World War II, despite the latter war’s extraordinarily high loss of life. Why do you think historians would hold to this view? What is your view of the relative global importance of the two wars? The War in the Pacific Like the war in Europe, the conflict in the Pacific transformed the military and political landscape. (See Map 20.2.) The war broke out when Japan’s ambitions to dominate Asia targeted American interests and might. JAPAN’S EFFORTS TO EXPAND Japan’s efforts to expand in Asia were already underway in the 1930s, but the outbreak of war in Europe opened opportunities for further expansion. Japan’s military invaded and occupied Manchuria in 1931 and then launched an offensive against the rest of China in 1937. Although the Japanese did not gain China’s complete submission, the invaders exacted a terrible toll on the population. Most infamous was the ravaging of Nanjing, in which Japanese aggressors slaughtered at least 100,000 civilians and raped thousands of women in the Chinese city between December 1937 and February 1938. After concluding a pact with Germany in 1940, the Japanese seized French Indochina in 1941 and squeezed the Dutch East Indies for oil and rubber. Now the chief obstacle to further expansion in the Pacific was the United States, which already had imperial interests in places like China and the Philippines as well as other Pacific islands. Hoping to strike the United States before it was prepared for war, the Japanese launched a surprise air attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. Now Japan’s expansion shifted into high gear. With French Indochina already under their control, the Japanese turned against the American colony of the Philippines and against the Dutch East Indies, both of which fell in 1942. By coordinating their army, naval, and air force units and using tactical surprise, the Japanese seized a huge swath of territory that included British-ruled Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, and Burma, while threatening the British Empire’s hold on India as well. Japan justified its aggression on the grounds that it was anticolonial and pan-Asian; Japan promised to drive out the European imperialists and to build a new order reflecting “Asia for Asians.” In practice, however, the Japanese made terrible demands on fellow Asians for resources, developed myths of Japanese racial purity and supremacy, and treated Chinese and Koreans with brutality. During the war, Japan put up to 4 million Koreans to work for its empire, forcibly imported another 700,000 Korean men as laborers, and pressed up to 200,000 young women into service as prostitutes for Japanese soldiers. (In a similar move, the Nazi war effort in Europe involved forcing 12 million foreign laborers— including 2 million prisoners of war—to settle and work in Germany.) Map 20.2 | World War II: The Pacific Theater Like Germany and Italy, Japan experienced stunning military successes in the war’s early years. In August 1942, which areas in the Pacific theater were under the control of the Japanese, and which were under Allied control? What does tracing the routes of the Allied offense tell you about the Allies’ main strategy? What geographic factors influenced the American decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war, instead of invading Japan? ALLIED ADVANCES AND THE ATOMIC BOMB Like the Germans in their war against Russia, the Japanese could not sustain their military successes against the United States. By mid-1943, U.S. forces had put the Japanese on the defensive. Fighting from island to island, American troops recaptured the Philippines, and a combined force of British, American, and Chinese troops returned Burma to Britain. The Allies then moved toward the Japanese mainland. By summer 1945, American bombers had all but devastated the major cities of Japan. Yet Japan did not surrender. Japanese Aggression. The brutal Battle of Shanghai (August– November 1937) marked the beginning of what turned out to be World War II in Asia. Claiming to be “protecting” China from European imperialists and expecting a relatively easy victory, the Japanese instead met with stiff resistance from the Chinese troops under Chiang Kai-shek. Here we see Japanese marines parading through the streets of the city after they finally broke through Chinese defenses. About a quarter of a million Chinese soldiers, close to 60 percent of Chiang’s best troops, were killed or wounded in the campaign, a blow from which Chiang’s regime never recovered. The Japanese sustained more than 40,000 casualties. Anticipating that an invasion of Japan would cost hundreds of thousands of American lives, U.S. president Harry Truman unleashed the Americans’ secret weapon. It was the work of a team of scientists who were predominantly European refugees. On August 6, 1945, an American plane dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, killing or maiming over 100,000 people and poisoning the air, soil, and groundwater for decades to come. Three days later, the Americans dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, and on Japan’s western flank the Russians prepared to invade. Within days, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender, bringing the war to an end. Japan’s dreams of East Asian supremacy had been defeated, at the cost of millions displaced, wounded, widowed, and orphaned. Asians, like Europeans, were relieved that six years of globalized horror had finally ended, but neither could guess what transformations the postwar world would bring. Glossary Axis Powers The three aggressor states in World War II: Germany, Japan, and Italy. Allied Powers Name given to the alliance between Britain, France, Russia, and Italy, all of which fought against Germany and Austria-Hungary (the Central Powers) in World War I. In World War II, the name was used for the alliance between Britain, France, and the United States, all of which fought against the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan). Holocaust Deliberate racial extermination by the Nazis of Jews, along with some other groups the Nazis considered “inferior” (including Sinta and Roma [gypsies], Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and people with mental illness), which claimed the lives of around 6 million European Jews. THE BEGINNING OF THE COLD WAR The destruction of Europe and the defeat of Japan left a power vacuum, which the United States and the Soviet Union rushed to fill. Avoiding direct warfare, the Americans and Soviets vied for influence in postwar Europe and around the globe. Rebuilding Europe In Europe, communism and liberal democracy offered competing approaches to rebuilding states and societies after World War II. Many of the interwar democracies had been corrupt or ineffectual, and supporters had to distance themselves from their discredited predecessors. By contrast, communism gained new appeal because its credo promised a clean slate. Many eastern Europeans, reacting to the horrors of fascism and not knowing the extent of Stalin’s crimes, looked to the Soviets for answers. Europe’s leftward tilt alarmed U.S. policymakers. They feared that the Soviets would use their ideological influence and the territory taken over by the Red Army to spread communism. They also worried that Stalin might seize Europe’s overseas possessions and create communist regimes outside Europe. But few wished to fight another “hot” war. As President Truman began advocating a policy of containment to prevent the further advance of communism, an American journalist popularized the term Cold War in 1946 to describe a new form of struggle in which both sides endeavored to avoid direct warfare. Postwar Planning at Yalta. The “Big Three” allies confer about the end of the war at the Black Sea resort of Yalta in February 1945. On the left is British prime minister Winston Churchill, at the center is American president Franklin Roosevelt, and on the right is Soviet premier Joseph Stalin. Truman’s containment policy was tested when the Soviets attempted to seize control of Berlin. Like the rest of Germany, Berlin had been partitioned into British, French, American, and Soviet zones of occupation; but the city was an island within the Soviet zone. In 1948, the Soviets attempted to cut the city off from western access by blocking western routes to the capital. The United States and its western allies responded with the Berlin Airlift, which involved transporting supplies in planes to western Berlin to keep the population from capitulating to the Soviets. This crisis lasted for almost a year, until Stalin relented in May 1949 and trucks once again rolled through the eastern zone. In that same year, occupied Germany was split into two hostile states: the democratic Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in the west and the communist German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in the east. In 1961, leaders in the German Democratic Republic built a wall around West Berlin to insulate the east from capitalist propaganda and to halt a flood of émigrés fleeing communism. The Berlin Wall became the great symbol of a divided Europe and of the Cold War. U.S. policymakers wanted to shore up democratic governments in Europe, so Truman promised American military and economic aid. Containing the spread of communism meant securing a capitalist future for western Europe, a job that fell to Truman’s secretary of state, General George C. Marshall. He launched the Marshall Plan, an ambitious program that provided over $13 billion in grants and credits to reconstruct Europe and facilitate an economic revival. U.S. policymakers hoped the aid would dim communism’s appeal by fostering economic prosperity, muting class tensions, and integrating western European nations into an alliance of capitalist democracies. The Berlin Airlift. In summer 1948, a new currency was issued for the united occupation zones of West Germany. It began to circulate in Berlin at more favorable exchange rates than the eastern zone’s currency, and Berlin seemed poised to become an outpost of the west inside the Soviet occupation zone. The Soviets responded by blocking western traffic into Berlin; the west countered with an airlift, forcing the Soviets to back down in May 1949 but hastening the division of Germany into two countries. Soviet troops had occupied eastern European nations at the war’s end, and both communist and leftist members of other parties formed Soviet-backed coalition governments there. By tricking their moderate leftist allies and repressing their critics and opponents, the communists established dictatorships in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia in 1948. The Americans offered Marshall Plan aid to eastern Europe, too, which Stalin saw as a threat to Soviet security. He felt the same about the formation in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance between countries in western Europe and North America. He believed that the Soviet Union, having sacrificed millions of people in the war against fascism, deserved to be dominant in eastern Europe. In 1955, the Soviets formally allied themselves with Europe’s communist nations in the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance of their own. (See Map 20.3.) Each alliance concentrated military forces (and later atomic weapons) directly at each other. The tense confrontations between NATO nations and Warsaw Pact nations in Europe and other parts of the world in the 1950s and 1960s brought the world to the brink of an atomic World War III. Map 20.3 | NATO and Warsaw Pact Countries The Cold War divided Europe into two competing blocs: those allied with the United States in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and those linked to the Soviet Union under the Warsaw Pact. Which nations had borders with nations belonging to the opposite bloc? Comparing this map with Map 20.1, explain how combat patterns in World War II shaped the dividing line between the two blocs. According to the map, where would you expect Cold War tensions to be the most intense? War in the Nuclear Age: The Korean War The dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 changed military strategies and international relations forever. Spurred by the onset of the Cold War, the Soviets worked hard to catch up to the Americans and in 1949 tested their first nuclear bomb. Thereafter, each side rushed to stockpile nuclear weapons and update its military technologies. By 1960, the explosive power of these weapons had increased so greatly that nuclear war had the potential to destroy the world without a single soldier firing a shot. This sobering realization changed the rules of the game. Each side now possessed the power to inflict total destruction on the other, a circumstance that inhibited direct confrontations but sparked smaller conflicts in parts of Asia where the postwar settlement was murky. In 1950, North Korean troops backed by the Soviet Union invaded U.S.-backed South Korea, setting off the Korean War. (See Map 20.4.) Claiming this violated the Charter of the United Nations, which had been established in 1945 to safeguard world peace and protect human rights, President Truman ordered American troops to drive back the North Koreans. The U.N. Security Council, thanks to a Soviet boycott, also sent troops from fifteen nations to restore peace. Within a year, the invaders had been routed and were near collapse. When U.N. troops advanced to the Chinese border, however, Stalin maneuvered his communist Chinese allies into rescuing the communist regime in North Korea and driving the South Korean and U.N. forces back to the old boundary in the middle of the Korean Peninsula. Across the Korean isthmus, communist and American-led U.N. troops waged a seesaw war. The fighting continued until 1953, when an armistice divided the country at roughly the same spot as at the start of the war. Nothing had been gained. Losses, however, included 33,000 Americans, at least 250,000 Chinese, and up to 3 million Koreans. Atom Bomb Anxiety. Schoolchildren taking shelter under their desks during an A-bomb drill in Brooklyn, New York, in 1951. The Soviets had exploded their first test bomb in 1949. Underground bomb shelters were built in many American urban areas as places in which to survive a doomsday attack. The Korean War energized America’s anticommunist commitments and spurred a rapid increase in NATO forces. The United States now saw Japan as a bulwark against communism and resolved to rebuild Japanese economic power. Like West Germany, Japan went from being the enemy in World War II to being a valued U.S. ally as the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union propelled both sides to shore up alliances around the globe. Glossary Cold War (1945–1990) Ideological rivalry in which the Soviet Union and eastern Europe opposed the United States and western Europe, but no direct military conflict occurred between the two rival blocs. North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) International organization set up in 1949 to provide for the defense of western European countries and the United States from the perceived Soviet threat. Warsaw Pact (1955–1991) Military alliance between the Soviet Union and other communist states that was established in response to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). DECOLONIZATION The disastrous effects of World War II on all empires, including Japan’s prewar and wartime empire and the longer-standing colonies belonging to the European powers, inspired colonial peoples to reconsider their political future. The process of decolonization and nation building, creating national identities to replace previous colonial and precolonial loyalties, followed four patterns: civil war; wars of independence; negotiated independence; and incomplete decolonization. The Chinese Revolution In China, the ousting of Japanese occupiers intensified a civil war that brought the communists to power. The communist movement in China had its origins in the struggle since the early twentieth century to free the country from western domination. Founded in 1921, the Communist Party sought power but was outgunned by Chiang Kai- shek’s Nationalist regime and driven from China’s cities; its members retreated into the interior, where they founded base camps. In 1934, under attack by Chiang’s forces, the communists, led by Mao Zedong (1893–1976), abandoned their largest base and undertook an arduous 6,000-mile journey through the rugged terrain of northwestern China. (See Map 20.5.) In the course of this great escape, glorified in communist lore as the Long March, fewer than 10,000 of the approximately 80,000 people who started the journey reached their destination. Fortunately for the communists, the Japanese invasion in 1937 diverted Nationalist troops and offered Mao and the survivors a chance to regroup. The Japanese forces not only inflicted irreparable damage on the Nationalist military but also further debilitated the capacity of Chiang’s regime to govern areas that had not fallen to the invaders. Nationalist soldiers and citizens alike were often left to fend for themselves and became increasingly demoralized and disaffected. When the Japanese invaders seized China’s major cities but were unable to control the countryside, the communists expanded their support among the vast peasantry. Map 20.4 | The Korean War The Korean War was an early confrontation between the capitalist and communist blocs during the Cold War era. What were the dates of each side’s farthest advance into the other side’s territory? Why was the Korean Peninsula strategically important? According to your reading, how did the outcome of the war shape political affairs in East Asia for the next several decades? Map 20.5 | The Long March, 1934–1935 During the Long March, which took place during the struggle for power between the Nationalist Guomindang and the Communists within China, communist forces traveled over 6,000 miles to save their lives and their movement. What route did the communist forces take? Why did the communists take this particular route? How did this movement affect the outcome of this internal struggle in the long run? The Long March. In China, the Long March of 1934–1935 has been commemorated by the ruling communists as one of the most heroic episodes in the party’s history. This photo shows communist partisans crossing the snow-covered mountains in the western province of Sichuan in 1935. Despite their efforts, the ranks of the party were decimated by the end of the 6,000-mile journey from the southeastern to the northwestern part of the country; fewer than one in eight reached their destination. Mao’s followers cultivated popular support by advocating the lowering of taxes, cooperative farming, and policies aimed at women, such as the outlawing of arranged marriages and the legalization of divorce. Like many anticolonial reformers, Mao regarded women’s emancipation as a key component in building a new nation, since he considered their oppression to be both unjust and an obstacle to progress. Communist expansion in the rural areas during World War II swelled the membership of the Communist Party from 40,000 in 1937 to over a million in 1945. After Japan’s surrender, China’s civil war between Nationalists and communists resumed. But communist forces now had the numbers, the guns (supplied by the Soviet Union and captured from the Nationalists), and the popular support to assault Nationalist strongholds and seize power. By contrast, although the Nationalist government had weapons and financing from the United States, as well as control of the cities, it had not recovered from its defeat at the hands of the Japanese. No match for the invigorated communists, the Nationalists fled to the island of Taiwan, where they established a rival Chinese state. The Founding of the People’s Republic of China. Mao Zedong speaks at a national flag-raising ceremony at Shanghai, celebrating the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. Although most Chinese knew little about the Communist Party, many had high hopes for a new, independent, and liberated China. In 1949, Mao proclaimed that China had “stood up” to the world and had experienced a “great people’s revolution.” Subsequently, many of his ventures proved disastrous failures (see later in this chapter), but China’s model of an ongoing people’s revolution provided much hope in the Third World. (See Global Themes and Sources: Primary Source 20.1.) Negotiated Independence in India and Africa In India and most of colonial Africa, gaining independence involved little bloodshed, although the aftermaths were often extremely violent. The British, realizing that they could no longer rule India without coercion, bowed to the inevitable and withdrew. Much the same happened in Africa, where nationalists also succeeded in negotiating independence from European empires, although, as we shall see, there were notable exceptions. INDIA Unlike China, India achieved political independence without an insurrection. But it did veer dangerously close to civil war. As anticolonial elites in the Indian National Congress Party negotiated a peaceful transfer of power from British rule, they disagreed about what kind of state an independent India should have. Should it, as Gandhi wished, be a nonmodern utopia of self-governing village communities, or should it emulate western and Soviet models with the goal of establishing a modern nation-state? Even more pressing was the question of relations between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority. For the most part, the congress leadership retained tight control over the mass movement that it had mobilized in the 1920s and 1930s. Even Gandhi hesitated to leave the initiative to the common people, believing that they had not yet assimilated the doctrine of nonviolence. Accordingly, Gandhi and the leadership worked hard to convince the British that they, the middle-class leaders, spoke for the nation. At the same time, the threat of a mass peasant uprising with radical aims (as was occurring in China) encouraged the British to transfer power quickly. As negotiations moved forward, Hindu-Muslim relations deteriorated. Whose culture would define the new nation? The Indian nationalism that had existed in the late nineteenth century reflected the culture of the Hindu majority. Yet this movement masked the multiplicity of regional, linguistic, caste, and class differences within the Hindu community, just as Muslim movements that arose in reaction to Hindu-dominated Indian nationalism overlooked divisions within their own ranks. Now the prospect of defining “India” created a grand contest between newly self-conscious communities. Riots broke out between Hindus and Muslims in 1946, which increased the mutual distrust between congress and Muslim League leaders. The leader of the Muslim League demanded that British India be partitioned into separate Hindu and Muslim states if there were no constitutional guarantees for Muslims. The specter of civil war haunted the proceedings, as outgoing colonial rulers decided to divide the subcontinent into two states: India and Pakistan. On August 14, 1947, Pakistan gained independence from Britain; a day later, India did the same. The euphoria of decolonization, however, drowned in a frenzy of brutality. Shortly after independence, up to 1 million Hindus and Muslims killed one another. Fearing further violence, 12 million Hindus and Muslims left their homes to relocate in the new countries where they would be in the majority. Distraught by the rampage, Gandhi fasted, refusing sustenance until the killings stopped. The violence abated. This was perhaps Gandhi’s finest hour. But animosity and fanaticism remained. Less than six months later, a Hindu zealot shot Gandhi dead as he walked to a prayer meeting. Had Gandhi lived, he would not have approved of the direction independent India took. He had already voiced disapproval of industrialization and of equipping the Indian state with an army and police forces. But Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and other leaders of the Indian National Congress Party were committed to building a strong state capable of modernizing India. Accordingly, they backed the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar, who drafted a constitution for a parliamentary democracy that guaranteed basic individual freedoms while equipping the state with substantial powers to foster social equality. Inspired by Soviet-style planned development but also committed to democracy, the new state under Nehru sought, as he put it, to build a “socialistic pattern of society” based on a mixed economy of public and private sectors. Declaring that he wanted to give India the “garb of modernity,” Nehru asked Indians to consider hydroelectric dams and steel plants the temples of modern India. He made his watchwords “education” and “economic development,” believing that these would loosen the hold of religion on Muslims and encourage them to join the national mainstream. He also hoped that the diminished role of religious traditions would improve the condition of women. Such a vision allowed Nehru, until his death in 1964, to guide Indian modernization along a third path. (See Global Themes and Sources: Primary Source 20.2.) Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru, the leader of independent India, sought to create a “mixed economy” of private and public sectors with democracy to chart an independent path for India. This photo shows him speaking at the opening ceremonies for the Bhakra Dam in 1963. AFRICA FOR AFRICANS Shortly after Indian independence, most African states also gained their sovereignty. Except for southern Africa, where minority white rule persisted, the old colonial states ceded to indigenous rulers. One reason for this rapid decolonization was that nationalist movements had made gains during the interwar period. These years had taught a generation of nationalists to seek wider support for their political parties. World War II, then, swelled the ranks of anticolonial political parties, as many African soldiers expected tangible rewards for serving in imperial armies. The postwar years also saw throngs of Africans flock to the cities in search of a better life. As expanding educational systems produced a wave of primary and secondary school graduates, these educated young people and other new urban dwellers became disgruntled when attractive employment opportunities were not forthcoming. The three groups—former servicemen, the urban unemployed or underemployed, and the educated—led the nationalist agitation that began in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (See Map 20.6.) Map 20.6 | Decolonization in Africa African decolonization occurred after World War II, largely in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Find at least four areas that won independence in the 1950s, and identify which former colonial power had ruled each area. What areas took longer to gain independence? According to your reading, what problems and tensions contributed to this uneven process across Africa? Kwame Nkrumah. West Africa’s leading nationalist, Kwame Nkrumah, mobilized the peoples of the Gold Coast and, through electoral successes, convinced the British to confer independence on the Gold Coast, which was renamed Ghana in 1957. Faced with rising nationalist demands, and too much in debt themselves to invest more in pacifying the discontented, European powers agreed to decolonize. The new world powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, also favored decolonization. Thus, decolonization in most of Africa was a rapid and relatively sedate affair. In 1957, the Gold Coast (renamed Ghana), under Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, became tropical Africa’s first independent state. Other British colonial territories followed in rapid succession, so that by 1963 all of British-ruled Africa except for Southern Rhodesia was independent. In these former colonial possessions, charismatic nationalist leaders became the authorities to whom the British ceded power. Many of the new rulers had obtained a western education but were committed to returning Africa to the Africans. Decolonization in much of French-ruled Africa followed a similarly smooth path, although the French were initially resistant. Believing their own culture to be unrivaled, the French treated decolonization as assimilation: instead of negotiating independence, they tried first to accord fuller voting rights to their colonial subjects, even allowing Africans and Asians to send delegates to the French National Assembly. In the end, however, the French electorate had no desire to share the privileges of French citizenship with overseas populations. Nor did African leaders wish to submerge their identities in a Greater France. Thus, France dissolved its political ties with French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa in 1960, having given protectorates in Morocco and Tunisia their independence in 1956. Algeria, always considered an integral part of France overseas, was a different matter. Its independence did not come quickly or easily (as we will discuss shortly). Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba championed the freedom of the Congo from Belgian rule and became the country’s first prime minister in 1960. His call for liberation across Africa frightened White settlers in Rhodesia and South Africa, who schemed with European and American covert operators to sew unrest in the fledgling Republic of Congo. When he turned to the Soviet Union for help, he was toppled in a coup d’état, arrested, and executed on January 17, 1961. The most chaotic and ill-prepared African decolonization unfolded in the Belgian Congo. It would end in a monumental human tragedy: the killing and dismemberment of the only democratically elected prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba. While Britain and France contemplated giving their African colonies independence, the Belgians doubled down on their paternalistic form of colonialism, hoping it would enable them to remain in control. But the Belgians’ stubborn refusal to leave turned a local political vacuum into a violent struggle for power. One last indignity remained for the independent Congo to endure. In January 1961, American covert operators plotted against the Congo’s firebrand leader, Patrice Lumumba. With U.S. covert support, the Congolese army seized him. Then, Lumumba’s captors shot him, burned his body with acid, and buried him in an unmarked grave. In an effort to deprive his followers of a gathering place and a symbol of a better future, Lumumba’s enemies disinterred him, dismembered him, and reburied him along the border with Southern Rhodesia. Léopold Sédar Senghor. Senghor combined sharp intellect with political savvy. An accomplished poet and essayist and one of the founders of the Negritude movement among Francophone intellectuals, he became Senegal’s first president when the country gained full independence in 1960. Promoting Africa for Africans gave way to a mood of despair. The leaders of African independence believed that Africa’s precolonial traditions would enable the region to move from colonialism right into a special African form of socialism, escaping the ravages of capitalism. Without rejecting western culture completely, they extolled the so-called African personality, exemplified by the idea of “Negritude” developed by Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor. (See Global Themes and Sources: Primary Source 20.3.) Negritude, they claimed, was steeped in communal solidarities and able to embrace social justice and equality, while rejecting the naked individualism that Africans felt lay at the core of European culture. Unfortunately, this creed of unity could not make up for deep-seated divides within fledgling nation-states. Violent and Incomplete Decolonizations Although transfers of power in most of Africa and Asia ultimately occurred peacefully, there were notable exceptions. In Palestine, Algeria, and southern Africa, the presence of European immigrant groups created violent conflicts that aborted any peaceful transfer of power—or left the process incomplete. In Vietnam, the process was also violent and delayed, partly because of France’s desire to reimpose colonial control and partly from the power politics of Cold War competition. PALESTINE, ISRAEL, AND EGYPT In Palestine, Arabs and Jews had been on a collision course since the end of World War I. Before that war, a group of European Jews, known as Zionists, had argued that only an exodus from existing states to their place of origin in Palestine could lead to Jewish self-determination. Zionism combined a yearning to realize the ancient biblical injunction to return to the holy lands with a fear of anti-Semitism and anguish over increasing Jewish assimilation. Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state, and they won a crucial victory during World War I when the British government, under the Balfour Declaration, promised a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. But when the British awarded themselves Palestine as a mandate after 1918, they also guaranteed the rights of Palestinian Arabs and sought to mediate between an increasing number of Zionist settlers and their Arab and Christian neighbors. As more Jews settled in Palestine, buying up land and seeking to increase their political influence, tensions rose between Zionists and Palestinian Arabs. Meanwhile, both groups grew dissatisfied with British rule. Arabs resented the presence of Jews, who displaced farmers who had lived on the land for generations, and openly sought their own independent state. The Zionists became especially enraged when British authorities wavered in supporting their demands for greater immigration. After World War II, the pressure for Jewish immigration increased as hundreds of thousands of concentration camp survivors clamored for entry into Palestine, and Zionist militants began using force to attempt to gain control of the state. In late 1947, the British could no longer control the festering region and announced that they would leave negotiations over the area’s fate to the United Nations; in May 1948, the British turned their old League of Nations mandate in Palestine over to the U.N. That body then voted to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish territories. The Arab states rejected the partition, and the Jewish Agency, a nongovernmental agency that supported the immigration of Jews to Israel, only reluctantly accepted it. When the British withdrew their troops in 1948, a Jewish provisional government proclaimed the establishment of the state of Israel. Although the Jews were delighted to have an independent state, they were unhappy about its small size, its indefensible borders, and the fact that it did not include all the lands that had belonged to ancient Israel. For their part, the Palestinians were shocked at the partition, and they looked to their better-armed Arab neighbors to regain the territories set aside for the new state of Israel. The ensuing Arab-Israeli War of 1948–1949 shattered the legitimacy of Arab ruling elites. Arab states entered the war poorly prepared to take on the well-run and enthusiastically supported Israeli Defense Force. By the time the United Nations finally negotiated a truce, Israel had extended its boundaries and more than 1 million Palestinians had become refugees in surrounding Arab countries. Embittered by this defeat, a group of young army officers in Egypt plotted to overthrow the Egyptian regime, which they felt was corrupt and still under British influence. One of the officers, Gamal Abdel Nasser, became the head of a secret organization of junior military officers—the Free Officers Movement. These men had ties with communists and other dissident groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, which favored a return to Islamic rule. They launched a successful coup in 1952, forcing the king to abdicate and leave the country. Then they enacted a land reform scheme that deprived large estate owners of lands in excess of 200 acres and redistributed these lands to the landless and smallholders, who instantly became ardent supporters of the new regime. The new regime also dissolved the parliament, banned political parties (including the communists and the Muslim Brotherhood), and stripped the old elite of its wealth. The Creation of the State of Israel. Standing beneath a portrait of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, proclaimed independence for the state of Israel in May 1948. The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty. This photo shows Egyptian president Nasser signing the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty with the British minister of state in 1954. The agreement ended the stationing of British troops on Egyptian soil and called for the withdrawal of British troops stationed at the Suez Canal military base. But shortly after the last British soldiers left Egypt in early 1956, Britain invaded the country in a vain effort to block Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal Company and to remove the Egyptian leader from power. In 1956, Nasser moved to nationalize the Suez Canal Company (an Egyptian company, mainly run by French businessmen and experts), inciting the Israelis, the British, and the French to invade Egypt and seize territory along the Suez Canal. Opposition by the United States and the Soviet Union forced them to withdraw, providing Nasser with a spectacular diplomatic triumph. As Egyptian forces reclaimed the canal, Nasser’s reputation as leader of the Arab world soared. He became the chief symbol of a pan-Arab nationalism that swept across the Middle East and North Africa and especially through the camps of Palestinian refugees. THE ALGERIAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE The appeal of Arab nationalism was particularly strong in Algeria, where a sizable French settler population (the colons) of 1 million stood in the way of a complete and peaceful decolonization. Indeed, French leaders claimed that Algeria was an integral part of France, an overseas department that was legally no different from Brittany or Normandy. Although the colons were a minority, they held the best land and lived in wealthy residential quarters in the major cities. And although all residents of Algeria were supposedly entitled to the same rights as the French citizenry, in fact the colons, mainly living in the country’s coastal cities, controlled Algeria’s finances and all its public institutions. As elsewhere, anticolonial nationalism in Algeria gathered force after World War II. The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), the leading nationalist party, used violence to provoke its opponents and to make the local population choose between supporting the nationalist cause or the colons. The full-fledged revolt that erupted in 1954 pitted FLN troops and guerrillas against thousands of French troops. Atrocities and terrorist acts occurred on both sides. Mau Mau Rebellion. A large segment of the Kikuyu population rose up against the British colonial occupation of Kenya. This revolt, which began in 1952, was finally suppressed by British arms and Kikuyu “loyalists.” Nonetheless, the Mau Mau Uprising led to Kenya’s independence from British rule. The war dragged on for eight years, at a cost of perhaps 300,000 lives. On the French mainland, the war came as a terrible shock. Many French citizens had accepted the idea that Algeria was not a colonial territory but part of France itself. The colons insisted that they had emigrated to Algeria in response to their government’s promises and that yielding power to the nationalists would be a betrayal. After an insurrection led by colons and army officers brought down the French government in 1958, the new French president, Charles de Gaulle, negotiated a peace accord. The peace, however, led to an exodus. After handing over power to FLN leaders, more than 800,000 colons left Algeria. By late 1962, over 90 percent of the European population had departed. Their catchphrase was “the suitcase or the coffin.” At independence, then, Algeria had a population mix no different from that of the other North African countries. While struggling for independence, the FLN and its Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) became a symbol for decolonizing movements worldwide. Frantz Fanon, who served as a physician and psychiatrist in Algeria and supported the FLN, believed that Algeria pointed the way for countries emerging from colonialism. Yasser Arafat, the champion of Palestinian rights, claimed that the FLN was “the window through which we appear to the West.” (For more on the Third World movement, see below.) EASTERN AND SOUTHERN AFRICA The bloody conflict in Algeria highlights a harsh reality of African decolonization: the presence of European settlers prevented the smooth transfer of power. Even in British-ruled Kenya, where the European settler population had never been large, a violent war of independence broke out between European settlers and African nationalists. Employing secrecy and intimidation, the Kikuyu peoples, Kenya’s largest ethnic group, organized a revolt. This uprising, which began in 1952, forced the British to fly in troops to suppress it, but ultimately the British government conceded independence to Kenya in 1963. Decolonization proved even more difficult in the southern third of the continent, where Portuguese Angola, Portuguese Mozambique, and British Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) did not gain independence until 1980. Women played vital roles in these decolonization struggles. In Egypt, for example, the leading nationalists were all men, but they gained crucial support from educated and modernizing women, many of whom organized impressive demonstrations on their behalf. The wife of Sa’d Zaghlul, Egypt’s most dynamic nationalist figure after World War I, gained a large following and a reputation as mother of the nation. Moreover, during Kenya’s battle against British colonial rule, women supplied the fighters with food, medical resources, and information about the British. Those who were caught ended up in concentration camps and suffered brutal treatment from their prison guards. Yet, once independence was achieved, most women reverted to their traditional subordinate status. South Africa, which held the continent’s largest and wealthiest settler population (a mixture of Afrikaans- and English-speaking peoples of European descent), defied Black majority rule longer than other African states. After winning the elections of 1948, the White Afrikaner-dominated National Party enacted an extreme form of racial segregation known as apartheid. Under apartheid, laws stripped Africans, Indians, and colored persons (those of mixed descent) of their few political rights. Racial mixing of any kind was forbidden, and schools were strictly segregated. The Group Areas Act, passed in 1950, divided the country into separate racial and tribal areas and required Africans to live in their own racial areas, called homelands. Pass laws prohibited Africans from traveling outside their homelands without special work or travel passes. The ruling party tolerated no protest. Nelson Mandela, one of the leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) who campaigned for an end to discriminatory legislation, was repeatedly harassed, detained, and tried by the government, even though he urged peaceful resistance. After the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, in which police killed demonstrators who were peacefully protesting the pass laws, Mandela and the ANC decided to oppose the apartheid regime with violence. Subsequently, the government announced a state of emergency, banned the ANC, and arrested those of its leaders who had not fled the country or gone underground. A South African court sentenced Mandela to life imprisonment. Other Black leaders were tortured or beaten to death. Here, too, women kept resistance flames burning. The most dynamic of these individuals was Winnie Mandela, wife of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Unlike many of the ANC leaders, who opposed the regime from exile, she remained behind and openly and courageously spoke out against the apartheid government. Despite such human rights violations, the Whites retained external support. Through the 1950s and 1960s, western powers (especially the United States) saw South Africa as a bulwark against the spread of communism in Africa. Apartheid Protest. In Johannesburg, South Africans march in the street to protest the new restrictions on African citizens, soon to be known worldwide as apartheid, implemented by the White minority government of Daniel Malan. During the Malan administration (1948–1954), informal discrimination was systematically made law, and all electoral, housing, civil, and employment rights of African citizens were dismantled. VIETNAM The same desire to contain communism also drew the United States into support for a conservative and pro-western regime in Vietnam. Vietnam had come under French rule in the 1880s, and by the 1920s approximately 40,000 Europeans were living among and ruling over roughly 19 million Vietnamese. To promote an export economy of rice, mining, and rubber, the colonial rulers granted vast land concessions to French companies and local collaborators, while leaving large numbers of peasants landless. The colonial system also generated a new intelligentsia. Primarily schooled in French and Franco-Vietnamese schools, educated Vietnamese worked as clerks, shopkeepers, teachers, and petty officials. Yet they had few opportunities for advancement in the French-dominated colonial system. Discontented, they thus turned from the traditional ideology of Confucianism to modern nationalism. Vietnamese intellectuals overseas, notably Ho Chi Minh, took the lead in imagining a new Vietnamese nation-state. Ho had left Vietnam at an early age and found his way to London and Paris. During the interwar period he read the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and he discovered not only an ideology for opposing French exploitation but also a vision for transforming the common people into a political force. He was a founding member of the French Communist Party and subsequently founded the Indochinese Communist Party. After the Japanese occupied Indochina, he traveled to China, embraced the idea of an agrarian revolution, and established the Viet Minh, a liberation force, in 1941. Back in Vietnam, the communist-led Viet Minh became a powerful nationalist organization as it mobilized the peasantry. When the French tried to restore their rule in Vietnam after Japan’s defeat in 1945, Ho led the resistance. War with France followed (1946–1954), featuring guerrilla tactics to undermine French positions. The Viet Minh were most successful in the north, but even in the south their campaign bled the French. Finally, in 1954, the anticolonial forces won a decisive military victory. At the Geneva Peace Conference, Vietnam (like Korea) was divided into two zones. Ho controlled the north, while a government with French and American support took charge in the south. Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh’s formation of the League for the Independence of Vietnam, or Viet Minh, in 1941 set the stage for Ho’s rise at the end of World War II. Here he attends a youth rally in October 1955, just over a year after the victory of his forces at Dien Bien Phu, which resulted in the ousting of the French from Vietnam. Although the French departed, decolonization in Vietnam was incomplete. North Vietnam supported the Viet Cong—communist guerrillas—who combined anti-imperialist nationalism with a land reform program that appealed greatly to the peasants. Determined to contain the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, the United States began smuggling arms to the regime in the south. During the early 1960s, U.S. involvement escalated. In 1965, large numbers of American troops entered the country to fight on behalf of South Vietnam, while communist North Vietnam turned to the Soviet Union for supplies. Over the next several years, the United States sent some 500,000 soldiers to fight the Vietnam War, but peasant support enabled the Viet Cong to continue fierce guerrilla fighting. Even the bombing of villages and the deployment of counterinsurgency forces failed to prevent the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. In 1975, just two years after the final withdrawal of American troops, the South Vietnamese government collapsed. Thus, the process of decolonization varied across regions. Although most of the lands in Asia and Africa had gained independence by the mid-1960s, there were significant exceptions in Africa (South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, and the Portuguese colonies) and in Asia (notably, Vietnam). Although the British and French realized that they no longer had the resources to stem the nationalist tide spreading through the Third World, they tried to use military might to regain control in areas with large European settlements, such as Kenya and Algeria. Here, too, however, local nationalists or communists eventually would seize control, ending direct imperial rule—but not western or Soviet attempts to interfere in the affairs of other states. WOMEN, NATIONALISM, AND DECOLONIZATION Decolonization mobilized women in struggles all over the world. Some of the most dramatic examples of their participation come from colonial Africa. In Kenya immediately after World War I, Kikuyu women assembled outside the prison where the colonial authorities were holding Harry Thuku, the leader of the first African political party in Kenya. The women indeed had much to protest. The British had expropriated substantial amounts of land for distribution to European settlers—land that the Kikuyu believed belonged to them. Land dispossession affected all segments of Kikuyu society, none more profoundly than women, who bore major responsibilities for feeding and looking after their families. Confined to reserves that they considered inadequate for feeding and supporting their families, particularly when the colonial authorities forcibly recruited many young adult males to work on settler estates, the women rallied to support Thuku and denounced colonial authorities for allowing their lands to be seized for settlers. Agriculture and Decolonization. Women pose with their farming implements before hoeing a field of maize in South Africa around 1923. Since men were often recruited for seasonal and mining work away from the village, women took charge of farms. When White settlers encroached on villages for their land, they often pushed women off their plots. Over the years, dispossessed women joined the vanguard of opposition to White and European rule. Much the same happened in 1929 in southeastern Nigeria, where Ibo women and women from other ethnic communities, believing that the colonial authorities planned to tax them as well as men, similarly feared that they would be unable to look after their families. Here, they turned against the British-appointed African warrant chiefs, who served as native-born officers of the empire. Surrounding the homes of these chiefs, the women insulted them and demeaned their manhood. This form of protest, called “sitting on a man,” had traditionally been employed against men who had illegitimately wielded their powers over women, and was revived under British rule. The uprising was perhaps the biggest women’s protest movement in colonial history at the time, covering an area of 6,000 square miles with an estimated population of 2 million. Fifty-five women lost their lives, and the British colonial administration, so deeply troubled by the women’s uprising, abolished the system of warrant chiefs. They even appointed women to serve on African courts. Glossary decolonization End of empire and emergence of new independent nation-states in Asia and Africa as a result of the defeat of Japan in World War II and weakened European influence after the war. Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chinese communist leader who rose to power during the Long March (1934–1935). In 1949, Mao and his followers defeated the Nationalists and established a communist regime in China. Zionism Political movement advocating the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. apartheid Racial segregation policy of the Afrikaner-dominated South African government. Legislated in 1948 by the Afrikaner National Party, it had existed in South Africa for many years. THREE WORLDS World War II and postwar decolonization created a three-world order in which the liberal democratic and capitalist First World and the communist Second World competed for global influence, notably among the newly decolonized Third World states. Possessing nuclear weapons, superior armies, and industrial might, the Soviet Union and the United States had emerged from the war as the world’s only superpowers. As decolonization spread, these Cold War belligerents offered new leaders their models for modernization. On one side, the United States, together with its western European allies and Japan, had developed democratic forms of governance and a dynamic capitalist economy that produced immense quantities of affordable consumer goods. The Soviet Union, on the other side, trumpeted the Communist Party’s egalitarian ideology and its rapid transition from “backward” to highly industrialized. Both the First World and the Second World expected the decolonized Third World to adopt their models. The decolonized, however, had their own ideas about how to modernize. Under Mao’s leadership, China established full autonomy from the Cold War superpowers and implemented its own very radical form of modernization. Other postcolonial leaders, such as Nehru in India, developed unique mixtures of democracy and state planning. But in many decolonized nations in Asia and Africa, economies that had been exploited or left underdeveloped by colonial powers could not leap into industrial development, and they remained economically or politically dependent on western or Soviet states. The First World As the Cold War spread in the early 1950s, western Europe and North America became known as the First World, or “the free world.” Later on, Japan joined this group. Following the principles of liberal modernism, First World states sought to organize the world on the basis of capitalism and democracy. Yet, in struggling against communism, the free world sometimes aligned with Third World dictators, thereby sacrificing its commitment to freedom and democracy for the sake of propping up pro-western regimes. WESTERN EUROPE The reconstruction of western Europe after World War II was a spectacular success. By the late 1950s, most nations’ economies there were thriving, thanks in part to massive American economic assistance. Improvements in agriculture were particularly impressive. With increased mechanization and the use of pesticides, fewer farmers were feeding more people. In 1950, for example, each French farmer had produced enough food for seven people; by 1962, one farmer could feed forty. And as industrial production boomed and wages rose, goods that had been luxuries before the war—refrigerators, telephones, automobiles, indoor plumbing—became commonplace. Prosperity and the dismantling of national military establishments allowed governments to expand social welfare systems, such that by the late 1950s education and health care were within the reach of virtually all citizens. The success of reconstruction blunted the appeal of the communist camp. Levittown. In the decades after World War II, the American population shifted from the cities to the suburbs. To satisfy the demand for single-family homes, private developers, assisted by government policies, built thousands of new communities on the outskirts of urban centers. Places like Long Island’s Levittown (pictured here), made affordable by the use of standard designs and construction, enabled many middle-class Americans to own their own home. THE UNITED STATES While Europe lay in ruins, the United States boomed. The majority of Americans could afford more consumer goods than ever before—almost always U.S. manufactures. Home ownership became more common, especially in the burgeoning suburbs. Stimulating suburban development was a baby boom that reversed more than a century of declining birth rates. Yet anxieties about the future of the First World abounded. Following the Soviet Union’s explosion of an atomic bomb, the communist revolution in China, and the outbreak of the Korean War, fear of the communist threat prompted increasingly harsh rhetoric. In fact, anticommunist hysteria led the Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, to initiate a campaign to uncover closet communists in the State Department and in Hollywood. Televised congressional hearings broadcast his views to the entire nation, compelling elected officials to support a strong anticommunist foreign policy and a large military budget. Postwar American prosperity did not benefit all citizens equally. During the 1950s, nearly a quarter of the American population lived in poverty. But many African Americans, a group disproportionately trapped below the poverty line, participated in a powerful movement for equal rights and the end of racial segregation. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) won court victories that mandated the desegregation of schools. Boycotts, too, became a weapon of the growing civil rights movement, with Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) leading a successful strike against injustices in the bus system of Montgomery, Alabama. Here and in subsequent campaigns against White supremacy, King borrowed his most effective weapon—the commitment to nonviolent protest and the appeal to conscience—from Gandhi. As the civil rights movement spread, the federal government gradually supported programs for racial equality. Anticommunism. As the Cold War heated up, anticommunist fervor swept the United States. Leading the charge against the “communist conspiracy” was Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, pictured here with his aide, the attorney Roy Cohn. Civil Rights Movement. Left: The 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to relinquish her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, led to a boycott that brought Martin Luther King Jr. to prominence and galvanized the challenge to legal racial segregation in the American South. Right: Borrowing from Gandhi’s tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience, protesters staged “sit-ins” across the southern United States in the 1950s and early 1960s, as in this photograph of Black and White students seated together at a segregated lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi. THE JAPANESE “MIRACLE” Japan reemerged as an economic powerhouse in this period. The war had ended with Japan’s unconditional surrender in 1945, its dreams of dominating East Asia dashed, and its homeland devastated. But after 1945, in an attempt to incorporate Japan into the First World, American military protection, investment, and transfers of technology helped rebuild Japanese society. The Japanese government guided this economic development through directed investment, partnerships with private firms, and protectionist policies. By the mid-1970s, Japan, formerly a dictatorship, was a politically stable civilian regime with a thriving economy, enjoying considerable American guidance and the replacement of the emperor’s power with a parliamentary system. The Second World The Soviet Union and eastern European satellites, together with Mongolia and North Korea, constituted the communist Second World. The scourge of World War II and the shadow of the Cold War fell heavily on the Soviets. Having lost 70,000 Soviet towns and villages, 32,000 factories, 82,000 schools, one-third of GDP, and 27 million people, the Soviet Union was determined to insulate itself from future aggression from the west. That meant turning eastern Europe, as well as parts of northeastern Asia, into a bloc of communist buffer states. Soviet Model. The rapid infrastructural development under Stalin was certainly a great feat, though it came at the cost of a great loss of human life. Displayed in this East German poster is a map of new canals constructed in this period as part of Stalin’s Five- Year Plan. THE APPEAL OF THE SOVIET MODEL The Soviet model’s egalitarian ideology and success with rapid industrialization made it seem a viable alternative to capitalism. Here there was no private property and thus, in Marxist terms, no exploitation. Workers “owned” the factories and worked for themselves. The Soviet state promised full employment, boasting that a state-run economy would be immune from upturns and downturns in business cycles. Freedom from exploitation, combined with security, was contrasted with the capitalist model of owners hoarding profits and suddenly firing loyal workers when they were not needed. Soviet propaganda touted protections for workers, inexpensive mass transit, paid maternity leave, free health care, and universally available education. Whereas under the tsarist regime less than one- third of the Russian Empire’s population had been literate, by the 1950s the literacy rate soared above 80 percent. True, Soviet policies did not provide material abundance of the sort that First World nations were enjoying. But if consumer goods were often scarce, in state stores they were cheap. Likewise, while it sometimes took ten years or more to obtain a small apartment through waiting lists at work, when one’s turn finally came the apartment carried low annual rent and could be passed on to one’s children. Because of censorship, few inhabitants of the Soviet zone knew how people lived in the First World, so it was easy to believe in the advantages of the Soviet system. Yet, even when people learned about the prosperity of western Europe and the United States (usually from intercepting forbidden western TV and radio programs), many still contended that the Soviet Union was the more just society. Theirs, they believed, was a land with no racial or class divisions, no drive for foreign colonies, no imperialist wars over markets. If members of the Soviet elite lived in privileged circumstances, their luxurious lifestyles were often well concealed. Indeed, many of socialism’s internal critics did not typically seek to overthrow the system and restore capitalism. Rather, they demanded that the Soviet regime introduce reforms that would create “socialism with a human face.” REPRESSION OF DISSENT Few outside the Soviet sphere knew just how inhuman Soviet communism was, and few within knew the extent of the brutality. Under Stalin, anyone suspected of opposing the regime risked imprisonment, forced labor, and often torture or execution. After the war, Stalin and the leadership tightened their grip. Surviving soldiers who had been prisoners of war in Germany and civilians who had survived enslaved labor at the hands of the Germans—and had therefore seen the better living conditions of the west—were sent to special screening camps. Many disappeared. By the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, the vast gulag (labor camp complex) confined several million people, who dug for gold and uranium and survived on hunks of bread and gruel. Stalin’s successors had to face hard questions, including what to do with so many prisoners, many of whom were incarcerated for fabricated political crimes. This problem became acute when mass strikes rocked the camps in 1953 and 1954, forcing the regime’s hand. In 1956, the new party leader, Nikita Khrushchev, delivered a speech at a closed session of the Communist Party Congress in which he attempted to separate Stalin’s crimes from true communism. The speech was never published in the Soviet Union, but party members discussed it widely and it was leaked abroad. The extent of the arrests and executions under Stalin that Khrushchev revealed came as a terrible shock. Repercussions were far-reaching. Eastern European leaders interpreted Khrushchev’s speech as an endorsement for political liberation and economic experimentation. Right away, Polish intellectuals began a drive to break free from the communist ideological straitjacket. Soon Polish workers organized a general strike in Poznan´—first over bread and wages, then against Soviet occupation. Emboldened by these events, Hungarian intellectuals and students held demonstrations demanding an uncensored press, free elections with genuine alternative parties, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The Hungarian Party leader, Imre Nagy, endorsed the campaign for reform and threatened to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. But the seeming liberalization promised by Khrushchev’s speech proved short-lived. Rather than let eastern Europeans stray, the Soviet leadership crushed dissent. In Poland, the security police massacred strikers. In Hungary, tanks from the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact members invaded, and the Soviet Union installed a new government that aimed to smash all “counterrevolutionary” activities; Nagy was kidnapped, then murdered. After the revolts, Hungary and Poland did win some economic and cultural autonomy; but unquestionably, the Second World remained very much the dominion of the Soviet Union. The Gulag. The Soviet labor camp system was an integral part of the Soviet economy. At any given time, around 3 million prisoners labored in camps, like this one in Perm, Siberia, felling timber, building railroads, or digging for gold. Several million more were forced into exile in isolated locales. During World War II, the gulag population fell drastically, as inmates were sent to certain death at the front or perished from starvation. Between the war’s end and Khrushchev’s destalinization in the 1950s, the gulag system reached its peak, with the imprisonment of German and Japanese POWs, the deportation of entire nations, and the internment of Soviet returnees from German camps. Despite the self-inflicted stains from its crackdowns and arrests of nonconformists, the Soviet Union was undeniably a superpower. In fact, its status surged after the launching of Sputnik, the first satellite, into space in 1957. Students from Third World countries flocked to the Soviets’ excellent education system for training as engineers, scientists, army commanders, and revolutionaries. The updated 1961 Communist Party program predicted euphorically that within twenty years the Soviet Union would surpass the United States and eclipse the First World, but the overwhelming emphasis on heavy industry left terrible scars both on the population and on the landscape. (See Current Trends in World History: Soviet Ecocide.) The Third World In the 1950s, French intellectuals coined the term Third World (tiers monde) to describe countries that, like the “Third Estate” in the 1789 French Revolution, represented the majority of the world’s population but were oppressed. The term became a slogan of resistance and a declaration of autonomy from the other two blocs, the capitalist west and the communist east. The Third World’s defenders believed capitalist countries were too materialistic and were ruled by oligarchic corporations, while they thought communist countries were soulless, godless, and tended toward dictatorship. Third Worlders aimed to defeat imperialism, which they regarded as a sinister force. They also challenged global inequality. By the early 1960s, most of the countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, having emerged from colonial domination, aimed to create more just societies than those of the First and Second Worlds. Their leaders believed that they could even build democratic societies and promote rapid economic development through economic planning. The early 1960s were years of heady optimism in the Third World. Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah trumpeted pan-Africanism as a way to increase the power of African nations in global politics. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser boasted that his democratic socialism was neither western nor Soviet and that Egypt would remain neutral in the Cold War struggle. Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru blended democratic politics and vigorous state planning to promote India’s quest for political independence and economic autonomy. Around Latin America, governments aggressively promoted industrialization and agrarian reform to break their dependence on exports and to break the grip of old elites. LIMITS TO AUTONOMY Charting a third way proved difficult. Both the Soviets and the Americans saw the Third World as “underdeveloped” and as a place where they could showcase their competing virtues. Moscow championed central planning solutions, while Washington, D.C., sought to ensure that market structures and private property underlay modernization. Starting in the mid-1950s, institutions such as the World Bank funded loans for projects to lift societies out of poverty (such as providing electricity in India and building roads in Indonesia), while the International Monetary Fund (IMF) supported the new governments’ monetary systems when they experienced economic woes (as in Chile, Ghana, Nigeria, and Egypt). Yet both institutions also intruded on these states’ autonomy. Another force that threatened Third World economic autonomy was the multinational corporation. In the rush to acquire advanced technology, Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans struck deals with multinationals to import their know-how. Owned primarily by American, European, and Japanese entrepreneurs, firms such as United Fruit, Firestone, and Volkswagen expanded cash cropping and plantation activities and established manufacturing branches worldwide. But such corporations impeded the growth of indigenous firms. Although the world’s nations were more economically interdependent, the west still made the decisions—and reaped most of the profits. CURRENT TRENDS IN WORLD HISTORY Soviet Ecocide Before the twentieth century, the spread of peasant agriculture, as well as settlement in the steppe and forest zones and the hunting of fur- bearing forest animals, brought profound changes to the Russian environment, including soil degradation, deforestation, and depopulation of species. But the environmental impact of Soviet-era industrialization was staggering. No other industrial civilization poisoned its land, air, water, and people so systematically and over so long a time. Scholars have deemed the Soviet environmental catastrophe an “ecocide.” Soviet economic planners and propagandists celebrated the plumes of purple and orange smoke in their skies as evidence of the country’s huge industrial production. Pollution control devices remained unheard of well after their 1950s introduction in Europe and the United States; even when installed in Soviet factories, they were rarely turned on so as not to depress output. Sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and solid phenols in the water, the food supply, and the air caused epidemic levels of respiratory and intestinal ailments, blood diseases, and birth defects. The giant steel plant at Magnitogorsk, once the pride of Stalin’s industrial leap, became a zone of atmospheric and soil devastation 120 miles long and 40 miles wide; inside it, chronic bronchitis, asthma, and cancers attacked the population. In agriculture, the Soviet Union continued to use the insecticide DDT long after its 1972 banning in the United States. In the 1970s, despite the socialist country’s overall development, Soviet life expectancy began to decline and infant mortality to rise. By 1989, Soviet men lived an average of 63.9 years from birth, down from 66.1 in 1965. By the late 1980s, Infant mortality rose to 25.4 per 1,000, roughly the same as in Malaysia, a developing country, and Harlem. Alcoholism also contributed mightily to adverse health trends. The April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster exposed 20 million people in Ukraine and Belarus to excess radiation. Although there was no bomb concussion, the accident spewed more radioactive material into the atmosphere than had been released by the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Chernobyl cleanup claimed around 7,000 lives. Few symbols of Soviet ecocide surpass the Aral Sea—once a huge saline lake at the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Because inflow into the lake was blocked by dams built for wasteful power plants and excess irrigation for cotton production, the lake shrank by two-thirds, giving way to huge white, lifeless salt flats. Soviet cosmonauts, looking down from space in 1975, were astonished to see immense storms of dust and salt over central Asia. Toxic salt rain wreaked enormous damage on human and animal lungs. Yet, despite the human toll, Soviet Uzbekistan, with twice the population of Soviet Belarus, was served by only one-third the hospitals. Beginning in the 1950s, Lake Baikal, the world’s largest body of fresh water, and once among the cleanest, suffered from the construction of factories on its perimeter, especially a cellulose cord plant (for tires on Soviet bombers) and pulp plant (for paper). The threat to Baikal, as well as the Aral Sea catastrophe, sparked grassroots environmental activism in an otherwise tightly controlled Soviet society. Scientists led the way in breaking censorship taboos, and people from all walks of life turned up at unsanctioned meetings and signed their names to petitions to stop the damage and protect the environment. Aral Sea Catastrophe. What was once one of the largest lakes in the world shrank to less than 10 percent of its original size due to the aggressive Soviet construction of irrigation canals in the 1960s to bolster cotton production. Here, a shipping vessel is moored on the bed of the former Aral Sea, in present-day Kazakhstan. QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS Why do you think environmental degradation was so much more severe in the Soviet Union than in western countries? Why do you think environmental awareness developed much sooner in the United States than in the Soviet Union? Explore Further Feshbach, Murray, and Alfred Friendly Jr., Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nation under Siege (1992). Micklin, Philip, N.V. Aladin, and Igor Plotnikov (eds.), The Aral Sea: The Devastation and Partial Rehabilitation of a Great Lake (2014). Weiner, Douglas R., A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (1999). Whether dealing with the west or the Soviet Union, Third World leaders had limited options because they faced pressure to choose one side or the other in the Cold War. To create more subservient client states, the Soviet Union backed communist insurgencies around the globe, while the United States supported almost all leaders who declared their anticommunism. Indeed, to contain communist expansion, the United States formed a number of military alliances. Following the 1949 creation of NATO, similar regional arrangements took shape in Southeast Asia (SEATO) and in the Middle East (the Baghdad Pact). These organizations brought many Third World nations into American-led alliances and allowed the United States to establish military bases in foreign territories. The Soviet Union countered by positioning its own forces in other Third World countries. Nowhere was the militarization of Third World countries more threatening to economic development than in Africa. Whereas in the colonial era African states had spent little on military forces, this trend ended abruptly once the states became independent and were drawn into the Cold War. Civil wars, like the one that splintered Nigeria between 1967 and 1970, were opportunities for the great powers to wield influence. When the west refused to sell weapons to the Nigerian government so it could suppress the breakaway eastern province of Biafra, the Soviets supplied MIG aircraft and other vital weapons. A similar situation occurred in Egypt, a strategic region to both superpowers. After the founding of Israel, Egypt’s new military rulers insisted that their country never again be caught militarily unprepared. Aware of the west’s support for Israel, the Egyptians turned to the Soviet bloc. The resulting arms race between Egypt and Israel left the region bristling with modern weaponry. Thus, Third World nations now confronted a situation that has been called neocolonialism. How were they to apply liberal or socialist models to their own situations? How were they to deal with economic structures and institutions that seemed to reduce their autonomy and limit their development? And how might they escape being puppets of the west or the Soviet Union? No wonder Third World nations grew frustrated about prospects for an alternative way to modernity. By the late 1960s, as the euphoria of decolonization evaporated and new states became mired in debt and dependency, many Third World nations fell into dictatorship and authoritarian rule. Although some dictators still spoke about forging a third way, they did so mainly to justify their own corrupt regimes. They had forgotten the democratic commitments that were made at independence. Most also had been drawn into the Cold War, the better to extract arms and assistance from one of the superpowers. REVOLUTIONARIES AND RADICALS Against the background of bitterly disappointed expectations, Third World radicalism emerged as a powerful force. Revolutionary movements in the late 1950s and the 1960s sought to transform their societies. But while some radicals seized power, they, too, had trouble shaking the existing world order. Third World revolutionaries drew on the pioneering writings of Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). While serving as a psychiatrist in French Algeria, Fanon (who was born in a French Caribbean colony) became aware of the psychological damage of European racism. He subsequently joined the Algerian revolution and became a radical theorist of liberation. (See Global Themes and Sources: Primary Source 20.4.) His 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth urged Third World peoples to achieve catharsis through violence against their European oppressors. THE MAOIST MODEL While Fanon moved people with his writings, others did so by building radical political organizations and undertaking revolutionary social experiments. One model was Mao Zedong. In 1958, Mao introduced the Great Leap Forward—an audacious attempt to unleash the people’s energy. Mao’s program organized China into 24,000 social and economic units, called communes. Peasants took up industrial production in their own backyards. The campaign aimed to catapult China past the developed countries, but the communes failed to feed the people and the industrial goods were inferior. Thus, China took an economic leap backward. By 1961, as many as 45 million people had perished from famine and malnutrition, forcing the government to abandon the experiment. The Great Leap also exacted a devastating environmental cost from the country. The drive for a dramatic—and unrealistic— increase in steel production, for example, led to widespread deforestation, as farmers everywhere made a mad dash to cut down trees for fuel for their backyard furnaces. In some areas, up to 80 percent of forestland disappeared, leading to the severe problems of soil erosion and water loss. Fearing that China’s revolution was losing spirit, in 1966 Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This time Mao turned against his associates in the Communist Party and appealed to China’s young people. They enthusiastically responded. Organized into “Red Guards,” over 10 million of them journeyed to Beijing to participate in huge rallies. Chanting, crying, screaming, and waving the little red book of Mao’s quotations, they pledged to cleanse the party of its corrupt elements and to thoroughly remake Chinese society. With help from the army, the Red Guards set out to rid society of the “four olds”—old customs, old habits, old culture, and old ideas. They ransacked homes, libraries, museums, and temples. They destroyed classical texts, artworks, and monuments. With its rhetoric of struggle against American imperialism and Soviet revisionism, the Cultural Revolution also targeted anything foreign. Knowledge of a foreign language was enough to compromise a person’s revolutionary credentials. The Red Guards attacked government officials, party cadres, or just plain strangers in an escalating cycle of violence. Even family members and friends were pressured to denounce one another; all had to prove themselves faithful followers of Chairman Mao. As chaos mounted, in late 1967 the army moved in to quell the disorder and reestablish control. To forestall further disruption, the government created an entire “lost generation” when, between 1967 and 1976, it deprived some 17 million Red Guards and students of their formal education and relocated them to the countryside “to learn from the peasants.” The Cultural Revolution in China. Left: Young women were an important part of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Here female Red Guards, armed with copies of the Little Red Book, march in the front row of a parade in the capital city of Beijing under a sign that reads “Rise.” Right: In their campaign to cleanse the country of undesirable elements, the Red Guards often turned to public denunciation as a way to rally the crowd. Here a senior provincial party official is made to stand on a chair wearing a dunce cap while the young detractors chant slogans and wave their fists in the air. Given the costs of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, many of Mao’s revolutionary policies were hard to admire. But in spite of the upheaval inside China, the Maoist model had great appeal outside China for people seeking radical alternatives to the three-world order. For example, a young philosopher from Ayacucho in Peru, Abimael Guzmán, traveled to Beij

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