<>1946:European RESULTS OF WORLD WAR TWO AND BEGINNINGS OF THE COLD WAR. Over all Europe "the debris covered the graves of some 35 million people". The figure might more accurately be 45 million deaths. Twenty-five million (possibly 29 million) Soviet citizens died. (This means that over 1519 days, just over 16,458 Soviet citizens died on average every day for nearly four years; 686 every hour. About one out of every seven Soviet citizens were killed in the war, double that fraction for the number wounded. Dead and wounded equaled something like 40% of the population.) A leading American (English-born) historian David Kennedy has written: "More than half of all Europe's war dead were civilians. America lost about 400,000 lives...almost none civilian.... Four years of bitter fighting and Hitler's scorched-earth retreat from the Soviet Union had destroyed 1,700 Soviet cities and towns, 70,000 villages. Three-quarters of the Soviet Union's industrial plant was wiped out, a loss that President John F. Kennedy in 1963 compared with 'the devastation of this country east of Chicago'. In Germany, massive Allied bombing had blocked harbors, blasted bridges and gutted homes. Someone estimated that to clear the mountain of rubble from Berlin would require continuous hauling of 500 freight cars per day for 16 years. In all of Europe, production of food, clothing and other goods had all but ground to a halt. Contraband cigarettes pilfered from the U.S. armies of occupation served in many places as a substitute for currency. England, for 200 years the seat of the world's greatest empire, was impoverished and demoralized, destined never again to play the part of a great power. [...] USA: "record breaking billion-bushel wheat harvests in 1944 and 1945, 196,000 aircraft and more than 40 billion bullets since 1940. Gross national product vaulted from less than $100 billion in 1940 to more than $200 billion in 1945. Corporate profits rose from about $6 billion in 1940 to almost twice that amount four years later. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans had never had it so good--and they wanted it a lot better. [...] Almost in one stroke, the war swept away the blight of economic depression that had afflicted the United States for 12 stagnant years before Pearl Harbor." Roosevelt's best New Deal unemployment rate was 14-plus per cent; in 1945, it was close to 1%. Millions came into the labor market: 3 million housewives, or 30% of total workforce. "The South received a disproportionate volume of defense contracts, including nearly $6 billion of federally financed industrial facilities. These wartime federal dollars helped give birth to the Sun Belt--a region that would in time form the electoral base for assaults on the idea of government intrusion in the economy." Indeed, "the war amplified to unprecedented proportions the role of the federal government in American life." In summary: "Alone among the combatants, America emerged from the global conflict not merely intact, but invigorated." [David M. Kennedy, "War transformed America" [1985my27:ERG]
*--Gerold Frank, The Tragedy of the DP's [displaced persons] [P20:281]
*--Bruno Foa, specialist in Inter-American Affairs and member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, described Europe in Ruins [P20:284 | Notice Foa's stunning disregard for destruction and death in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe (indirectly corrected by editors of P20 on p. 333)]
*--When the English biographer of Winston Churchill, Martin Gilbert, looked back on the role of the Soviet Union in WW2, he made pains to emphasize the remarkable flow of material aide from England and other Allies to the USSR during the war. One set of statistics implied something of the gruesomeness of modern warfare = "Medical supplies were likewise on a vast and comprehensive scale, including more than 10 million surgical needles and half a million pairs of surgical gloves. Other medical supplies, as the Soviet casualties mounted, included 20,000 amputation knives, 15,000 amputation saws, 100 portable X-ray sets, 4,000  kilograms of local anesthetics, more than a million doses of the recently discovered antibiotics, ... sedatives, heart and brain stimulants, 800,000 forceps for bone operations, instruments for brain and eye operations, and a million meters of oilcloth for covering wounds." (One-million meters is 660 miles, the distance from Eugene OR to San Francisco CA and yet 100 more miles further south.) [1985my19:MGW:10]

<>1946:French author, philosopher, pundit and public figure Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) published 1945 speech "Existentialism is a Humanism" [CWC:482-503] and "Existentialism" [CCS:587-608 | CCS,2:873-94 | BMC1:675-9 | BMC4:677-82] and "Materialism and Revolution" [BMC4:766-8]
*--Sartre was scholar and fighter. He participated in the underground French resistance to Nazi rule in France and spent nine months in a prison for that. Sartre built on existentialist teachings of Heidegger, with whom Sartre studied in 1933:1934; Berlin
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[W]

<>1946:German émigré philosopher Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State [P20:293]
*--In this same year, German Historian of broad and enduring European fame, Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954), reflected on what he called The German Catastrophe [P20:308]

<>1946:Russian émigré religious philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev, The Russian Idea. A remarkable 40-year career was winding down
*1946:USA. Émigré Russian scholar George Fedotov published The Russian Religious Mind [cf. KMM:257-81]

<>1946ja10:England, London | United Nations Organization [W] [UNO] General Assembly met for first session
*--The UNO Charter reads, “We the peoples ... determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind [presumably referring to WW1 and WW2 without enumerating the dozens of lesser but devastating 20th-century military episodes] ... reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person”
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*--Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present and Future of the United Nations | This book “rests on the reasonable assumption that whether we approve of the organization’s past record or not, the changes taking place in world society will make us turn to it again the again”
*2006jy21:TLS:4-6 | Rosemary Righter offered a broad “hard-nosed” critique of Kennedy’s optimistic account

<>1946fe:Moscow | USA ambassador to USSR George Frost Kennan sent "Long Telegram" which became the basis for the famous "Mr. X" article [Kennan,Origins] This telegram originated US discussions of the "containment theory" guiding USA relations with the USSR
*--Almost as if in response, a Soviet diplomatic "big picture" quickly emerged

<>1946fe24:1955; Argentina elected Juan Domingo Perón president. His form of statist government lasted nearly 10 years and was called Peronismo, combining certain features of militaristic Fascism with Soviet-style proletarianism and more ancient Catholic authoritarianism. Perón was very popular among wage-laborers and managed a planned economy in ways that were remindful of Soviet 5-year plans or Turkish economic modernization. His wife, Evita, was a movie star who dazzled Argentineans. But autarchic [stand-alone] and protectionist economic policies as well as the pro-labor stance alienated USA
*1946:1949;  Perón speeches [SWH:392-7] 

<>1946mr:Moscow | English charge d'affaires Frank Roberts telegraphed British Foreign Office [Kennan,Origins]

<>1946mr05:USA MO, Fulton | Winston Churchill delivered "Iron Curtain" speech [TXT]
*--Symbolic beginnings of "Cold War" which shaped the destiny of much of the globe over the following forty-five years and led to the creation of two unprecedented "military-industrial complexes"
*--Vast collection of website documents relating to the Cold War, with keyword search [W]
*1941:1949; Documents of US foreign policy [W]
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*--Some of the more interesting general accounts of the Cold War were written by neither Americans nor Russians. EG: French journalist Andre Fontaine, History of the Cold War (2 volumes, NYC:1968-69, 2nd ed. 1970), and his English counterpart, D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917-1960 (2 volumes, 1961)
*--Mexican poet Octavio Paz, One Earth, Four or Five Worlds: Reflections on Contemporary History, a broad interpretation, esp. ch. 2, "Imperial Democracy" and ch. 3, "Totalitarian Empire". Paz wrote the very popular Labyrinth of Solitude (1962) where, among other things, he compared Mexico and other Latin American nations with western Europe
*--If Paz favored the USA in his account, John Strachey, The End of Empire (1960) is more balanced in his criticism. See two chapters (19 and 20, both titled "New Empires for Old?")
*--William A. Williams, American-Russian Relations, 1781-1947 (1952) was the first influential "revisionist" history of American-Russian relations. It sought to correct the one-sided picture of Soviet responsibility and US innocence. Williams measured US responsibility for the military build-up after WW2 and at the beginning of the Cold-War
*--Walter LaFeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945-...., (many editions) has been perhaps the most influential "revisionist" history of the Cold War itself. Williams and LaFeber were both limited by the astonishing fact that they did not use Russian-language sources. Their studies, however critical of the USA, are essentially USA-centric
*--Paul Dukes brought a critical attitude to the comparative study of the cold war, balancing English language and Russian language sources and placing the question in the broadest possible historical context of shared historical experience. Dukes published several studies:
-----The Superpowers: A Short History (2000)
-----The Emergence of the Super Powers: A Short Comparative History of the USA and the USSR (1970)
-----October and the World: Perspectives on the Russian Revolution (1979)
-----The Last Great Game: USA vs. USSR, Events, Conjunctures, Structures (1989). This work was reviewed bitterly in 1992je:AHR 97,3:825-6
-----World Order in History: Russia and the West (1996)
-----Of some interest is the collection of essays in Dukes' honor, Russia and the Wider World in Historical Perspective: Essays for Paul Dukes [DK66.r87 2000] which includes Boris A. Starkov, "Paths to World Socialist Revolutions: West and East":153-67; Sarah Davies, "Soviet Perceptions of the Allies during the Great Patriotic War":168-89; and Jean Houbert, "Russia and Decolonization in Eurasia":190-200
*--John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (1972) is arguably the most balanced account
*--Mark Garrison and Abbott Gleason edited Shared Destiny: Fifty Years of Soviet American Relations (1985) is a joint US/Soviet project with articles on mutual (mis)perceptions (83-145) and a good memoir by George Frost Kennan (1-18)
*--MORE BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THE COLD WAR

<>1946mr15:1951; USSR fourth Five-year Plan actually lasted five years
*--Nikolai Voznesenskii now served as Chairman of the State Planning Commission of the USSR, delivered a "Report on the Five-Year Plan, 1946-1950", but did not survive to see its conclusion

<>1946mr08:mr18:USA, GA Savannah | Inaugural meeting of boards of governors of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund [IMF]
*--World Bank [W]
*--IMF [W]
*--Critical articles on history of World Bank [W]
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*--William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

<>1946mr19:USSR renamed "Commissariats", adopting older term "Ministries". New Sovet ministrov [Soviet (or Council) of Ministers] with Stalin as chairman, replaced old revolutionary-sounding Sovnarkom [Soviet of Peoples' Commissariats] and firmly joined Party and state in single unit

<>1946ap:Manchuria by this time free of Soviet troops (industry stripped). Troops soon out of Sinkiang Province of far western China (and Tungsten mines)

<>1946ap25:jy15; Paris | Allied Council of Foreign Ministers meeting #2. USA Secretary of State Byrnes report [W]

<>1946my26:Czechoslovak elections gave plurality (38%) of vote to Communist Party

<>1946je14:UNO Atomic Energy Commission heard USA "Baruch Plan" for international atomic development authority [RFP2,3:88-92]
*--GO je19

<>1946je19:UNO Atomic Energy Commission heard Soviet plan for international control of atomic energy [RFP2,3:97-9]
*--Soviet response followed by US response

<>1946jy29:oc15; Paris Peace Conference [W]

<>1946se19:USSR kolkhoz (collective farm) reestablished [SGv:356-61]

<>1946se27:Washington DC | USSR ambassador to USA Nikolai Novikov sent 19-page cable to Soviet Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov in which he described the USA in the process of remilitarization and outlined his strategic vision of the unfolding Cold War [TXT] [Kennan,Origins] Compare with 1947jy

<>1946oc:German zone occupied by USSR staged first elections, as described (along with much else of great interest) by ex-Party member Wolfgang Leonhard, Child of the Revolution

<>1946oc23:New York City | United Nations Organization General Assembly met
*1946de05:NYC became permanent headquarters of UNO

<>1946no04:de12; NYC | Allied Council of Foreign Ministers meeting #3 [W]

<>1947:1948; USSR cultural apparatchik Andrei Zhdanov on literature and the arts [RRC1,3:695-704]
*--A Central Committee Decree attacked Anna Akhmatova and others
*1915:Portrait of Anna Akhmatova by Natan Altman

<>1947:Amsterdam | German theorists and culture critics, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, published Philosophische Fragmente [Dialectic of Enlightenment] with a chapter titled "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" [TXT]. Adorno and Horkheimer were bitter critics of the pop-arts
*1941:Adorno launched himself on commercial culture in an essay written with George Simpson, "On Popular Music" [TXT]
*1963:Adorno returned to the topic of commercial culture with a radio address, "Culture Industry Reconsidered" [TXT]
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*1984mr30:Gordon Welty essay on Adorno's critique of pop-arts [W]

<>1947:USA composer and businessman Charles Ives won Pulitzer Prize for his "Fifth Symphony" [Wagar:179]

<>1947:Scottish-born USA political philosopher Robert M. MacIver argued in his book The Web of Government (cf. Georg Simmel) that diversity and multiplicity, rather than unity and harmony, were the essence of liberal democratic society [CCS,1:988-1006]

<>1947ja:AJS published USA anthropologist Robert Redfield's "The Folk Society" which opened with its main hypothesis: "Understanding of society in general and of our own modern urbanized society in particular can be gained through consideration of the societies least like our own: the primitive, or folk, societies" [CCS,1:568-89] Redfield gave new vitality to the late-19th century ideas of Tönnies, Durkheim and Veblen

<>1947fe14:UNO Security Council heard Andrei Gromyko’s critique of Baruch Plan [RFP2,3:92-7] GO mr10

<>1947mr10:UNO Security Council heard US critique of Soviet atomic energy plan [RFP2,3:99-101]

<>1947mr10:ap24; Moscow | Allied Council of Foreign Ministers meeting #4. USA Secretary of State George Marshall report [W]

<>1947mr12:USA "Truman Doctrine" announced [TXT]
*--Full set of documents describes how USA decided to provide military and other assistance to nations threatened by "communist takeover". Greece and Turkey were at the center of attention
*1952:1962; US aid to 90 countries around the world amounted to $50 billion, of which $45 billion (90%) was devoted to military buildup [Zinn:430]
*--US manufacturers of military hardware were able to meet the needs of these military buildups and thus to keep up production and profits in the post-WW2 world. US tax dollars were routed through the budgets of US aid recipients and applied to procurement of US-made military hardware. Particularly among US allies in the "Third World" [ID], ruling authorities now worked strenuously to militarize against their domestic oppositions and against potential international opponents, both packaged together as a "national security threat", namely, "communist takeover"

<>1947mr22:ap28; USSR Foreign Ministry considered the German problem [RFP2,3:104-6]

<>1947je05:USA Secretary of State (General) George C. Marshall (1947:1949; Secretary of State; 1950:1951; Secretary of Defense) announced "Marshall Plan" for US-funded economic recovery of Europe [P20:290]
*--George Frost Kennan (in Garrison, Shared Destiny) summarized meaning of Marshall Plan with accent on European and Japanese economic recovery from the devastation of war. This was the dominant motive of US officials like Kennan and Marshall in the early Cold War period. Kennan contrasted the economic motive with the militarist motive
*--The economic motive sought to restore or create market economies in areas of strategic and economic importance to the USA
*--The militarist motive was based on an inflated national security threat posed by Soviet military power and on a desire to preserve or enhance US power. This fear provided the motive for the creation of NATO [ID] and a shift of attention from civilian economic recovery to military defense and the construction of a huge military-industrial complex. All those who promote this shift, said Kennan, "mistake the Soviet threat for a military one, and feel that there must be a military response, in the form of the NATO alliance"
*1947jy:"European Recovery Program" (Marshall Plan) offered to USSR but rejected. USSR was not excluded, but participation would have been nearly impossible since the Plan was designed for capitalist markets
*--Over $13B distributed in four years. European manufacturing rose 35% and agricultural output 10% above pre-WW2 levels

<>1947je23:USA Taft-Hartley Act backed away from the more progressive features of the Roosevelt "New Deal"
*--As Cold War intensified on the international front, USA retreated from the neo-liberal policies of FDR on the domestic front
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*--Website review of USA labor law

<>1947jy:FoA. George Frost Kennan, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" (so-called "Mr. X" article) [TXT] Compare with views of Kennan's Soviet counterpart
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*--See Decline of the West? George Kennan and His Critics, with a debate by John Lewis Gaddis and Eduard Mark on Kennan’s famous "Mr. X article"

<>1947au:Soviet economist Evgenii Varga interpreted post WW2 world in which non-European peoples would play a decisive role [RFP2,3:159-66]. The drift of Varga's argument was in the direction of establishing the notion of a "Third World" which had become the decisive arena of opportunity and conflict in the post-WW2 era. The presumed First World and the Second World were, in one order or the other, the USSR (Soviet Union and its allies) and "The West" (USA and its European allies). Which was First World and which was Second World was never specified. That was not relevant to the main argument, namely, that the main arena of opportunity and conflict would not be there, between the first and the second worlds and their closest allies. The main arena of opportunity and conflict would be elsewhere in the globe, in Asia, Africa, and Central and South America -- i.e., in the Third World [W]
*--Soviet Views of the Post-war World Economy: An Official Critique of Eugene Varga's "Changes in the Economy of Capitalism Resulting from the Second World War (1948)
*--In this year Russian veteran Mikhail Kalashnikov invented a remarkable weapon, a machinegun, the “Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947”. Kalashnikov was himself wounded in WW2, and was angry and disappointed by the number of fellow Soviet soldiers killed for want of good weaponry. The AK-47 automatic assault rifle was soon acknowledged as the finest, cheapest, simplest and most reliable field weapon of the modern epoch. Over the next half century nearly 100 million were produced and distributed to the Red Army and to all Warsaw Pact [ID] members. The People’s Republic of China adopted its version of the AK-47. Regular and irregular military and paramilitary units throughout the “Third World” picked up the weapon. Afghan warriors used it effectively against the Soviet Army itself in the 1980s. Kalashnikov, in his memoirs, The Gun that Changed the World, wrote, “When I see Bin Laden on television with his Kalashnikov, I’m disgusted, but what can I do about it?”
*--But was the opportunity and conflict in the Third World just a matter of military confrontation? Many assumed so [EG]. But some looked closely at other regions of international development =
*1938:African nationalist Jomo Kenyatta was an early advocate of independence from "Western" colonial/imperialist dominion [SWH:376-81]
*--The political ideology of Kwame Nkrumah illustrated the influence of American, Soviet and European ideas on a Third World leader
*--The Vietnam War and Afghanistan War illustrated how the "Cold" War got "hot" in the Third World
*--The long-term fate of the Congo basin illustrates many features of this new Third World
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*--Jerry Hough, The Struggle for the Third World: Soviet Debates and American Options (1986)
*--Jan Triska, ed., Dominant Powers and Subordinate States: The United States in Latin America and the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe (1986). See especially ch13 "Capitalist Dependency and Socialist Dependency: The Case of Cuba" by Robert A. Packenham [310-41]; ch14 "The Politics of Dependence in Poland and Mexico" by Jeffrey L. Hughes [342-70]; and "Summary and Conclusion" by Jan F. Triska [440-70]
*--Joseph Manfredi, US-Soviet Resource Competition in Central and Southern Africa (1985)
*--Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (ORBIS)
*--Ellen M. Charlton studied women in the Third World, caught between Soviet and US developmental influences [PWT2:396-401 | More on Third-World women confronting European-style modernization, see SWH:427-46]

<>1947au15:India and Pakistan were declared independent of English imperial rule and separate from one another as two sovereign nation-states
*--India independence leader, dissenter, and resistance leader, long imprisoned by the English, Jawaharlal Nehru became Indian Prime Minister [for some of his writings, see CCS,2:776-99]
*1942au:1945mr; Nehru, wrote The Discovery of India, which described in one section India's resentment of British rule [P20:323]
*--Almost a century of struggle against English imperialist rule, stretching back at least to the Sepoy Rebellion, had now achieved its main objective
*--The new independence of India, and then soon China and Indonesia, can be understood in a much broader historical context = the rise and fall of European mercantilist imperialism over the previous 300+ years. Among the big south-east Asian regions still under imperial dominion, Vietnam had to await yet 25 more years
*1948ja30:Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu militant who opposed cutting Pakistan loose from India. Gandhi's nearly 30-year struggle was however crowned with success
*--India as a sovereign and independent nation had very broad global significance

<>1947se:USSR established Cominform [Communist Information Bureau] as umbrella structure over eastern European territories, with Andrei Zhdanov playing a key role [RFP2,3:77-87 and 167-71 | RWP1,3:172-8 | ORW:240-3]
*--Was this in reaction to the "Truman Doctrine" and the "Marshall Plan" [ID], or was it an independent act of Soviet diplomatic aggression? Did the Cominform represent the rebirth of the Comintern [ID]?

<>1947oc:Geneva | Twenty-three nation-states stepped outside the UNO to sign the first General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) [ID]. The agreement was meant to be taken up as a function of the UNO, where it would have come under some degree of global administrative oversight within an International Trade Organization, but that world institution was never created
*--GATT lasted, with expansion and amendment, up to the 1995 creation of the WTO 
//
[W]

<>1947oc:USA Department of State publication Korea’s Independence reviewed international agreements on free and independent Korea (with particular attention to USA-USSR agreements) [Excerpts = RFP2,3:123-34]

<>1947no & de:France was rocked by a general strike, provoked by post-war shortages and wage-labor discontent with the terms of the Marshall Plan
*1948jy:Italy in grip of general strike

<>1947no25;de16; London | Allied Council of Foreign Ministers meeting #5. USA Secretary of State George Marshall report [W]

<>1947no26:USA National Security Act [TXT] created National Security Council [NSC] and Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]
*--WW2 was over, but influential interests in Washington DC felt the USA ought to take these big steps in the direction of something like a "national-security state" to meet perceived and much advertised national security threats, mainly from abroad but also generated domestically
*--The post-WW2 era provided many episodes that could be construed as apparent national security threats to the USA = [EG#1] [EG#2] [EG#3] [EG#4]
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*--A website history of the NSC

<>1948:1951; USA Economic Cooperation Agency (ECA) administered
*1951:1955; Mutual Security Program
*1955:+; Previous organizations absorbed into US State Department as International Cooperation Administration

<>1948:English activist and pundit George Orwell [W] wrote anti-utopian novel which warned of a future characterized as "a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever": 1984 (link is to a good student's edition, with text plus documents and commentary)
*--The significance of this novel derived less from its obvious critique of the USSR and more from its broader critique of managerial political culture and the threat to traditional European values posed by military-industrialism. A central motif of the tale was how ruling elites manipulate public opinion in connection with constant national security threats from vaguely defined but demonic enemies
*--The demon Orwell exposed in this seminal work did not come from the USSR, it simply sank its claws deeper and sooner there than in "The West", and it now threatened Orwell's own island nation (the geographical setting of the novel is England in the future year 1984)

<>1948:English philosopher C.E.M. Joad attacked contemporary "subjectivism" and lamented the failure of common standards, Decadence [BMC4:658-9]
*--In the very same year the English historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, "Our own descendents are not going to be just Western, like ourselves. They are going to be heirs of Confucius and Lao-Tse as well as Socrates, Plato, and Plotinus; heirs of Zarathustra and Muhammed as well as Elijah and Elishah and Peter and Paul; heirs of Shankara and Ramanujah as well as Clement and Origines; heirs of the Cappadocian Fathers of Orthodox Church as well as our African Augustine and our Umbrian Benedict; heirs of Ibn Khaldun as well as Bossuet; and heirs, if still wallowing in the Serbonian Bog of politics, of Lenin and Gandhi and Sun Yat-Sen as well as Cromwell and George Washington and Mazzini" [Civilization on Trial:90]
*--In this book Toynbee also presented an updated version of a lecture he originally delivered in 1926 under the shadow of post-WW1 collapse, "The Dwarfing of Europe". The original troubled lecture was distinctly less comfortable with "multi-culturalism" and more concerned to protect the values of "Western Civilization". This second time around, now in the shadow of post-WW2, the lecture showed the influence of costly victory. Toynbee now was more optimistic and perhaps even aggressive. He sought to encourage those who would launch themselves on a crusade against the USSR, here at the beginning of the Cold War. Throughout the first 32 minutes of the approximately 40 minute lecture, Toynbee used the word "West" over sixty times (in its several standard permutations: Western, Westernization, etc.), at a rate roughly equal to once every 30 seconds. The civilization now said to be "on trial" was "The West". Then, in the final eight minutes of this lecture, as he turned his attention to the new and dominant relationship of the USA to Europe, he dropped the word altogether. He would not, of course, imagine any sense at all in the phrase "Western influence on the USA" or "Westernization of the USA", even though that is close to what he wanted to say. His central theme was the "dwarfing" of Europe next to the two great super-powers, but, to his way of thinking, this was a better time than after WW1 because the USA would protect "The West".
*--Michael Kraus, The North Atlantic Civilization was a collection of documents (with several interpretive secondary essays just to strengthen his argument) intended to describe the "North Atlantic" as a distinct trans-national civilization, more focussed than "Western Civilization" or "The West". Kraus labored in this cause over the first ten years of the military alliance called North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO]
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*--Thomas C. Patterson's vigorously argued Inventing Western Civilization [CB245.p339 1997] seems unaware of the creative "invention" by Russian Slavophiles at least 100 years earlier
*--Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, "Toynbee's Interpretation of Russian History"; Edward Pessen, "Toynbee on the United States" and Theodore H. Von Laue, "Toynbee Amended and Updated", in Toynbee: Reappraisals (1990)
*--GO 1993:USA

<>1948:USA mathematician and computer pioneer Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) published a pioneer work, Cybernetics

<>1948fe:Atlantic Monthly | Walter Lippmann addressed the need for USA to avoid abstract or ideological principles in international politics. The need was for constant political/diplomatic balancing and rebalancing of inevitable clashes of interest among nation-states. US failures since WW1 followed from moments of impractical "ideological" fervor and absence of seasoned this-worldly judgment [RWP1,2:102-13

<>1948fe25:Czechoslovakia fell under USSR dominated Communist Party rule. Defenestration of Jan Masaryk
*--G.E.R. Gedye witnessed the coup [P20:334]
*1950:1954; Political trials [as per 1968:Dubcek Government's Commission of Inquiry, P20:347]

<>1948mr:Cuba, Havana | Charter of International Trade Organization (ITO) adopted, but US and other nations refused to ratify

<>1948ap30:Colombia, Bogotá | Twenty Latin American republics and the United States of America signed the Charter establishing the Organization of American States [OAS] [W]

<>1948je07:London Conference on German problems (USA, England, France, Belgium, Nederland, and Luxembourg) [RFP2,3:106-9]
*--USSR not a participant as western Allies acted alone, bringing increasing pressure to bear on Soviet international relations in the area it now dominated in eastern Europe. USSR responded with its own "Warsaw Conference" (USSR, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania and Hungary). The Warsaw Conference took a position strongly critical of the London Conference [RFP2,3:109-13]
*--A Soviet alliance system was forming up in response to the consolidation of a "Western" alliance system

<>1948je24:1949my; Soviet Union and its Warsaw Conference allies imposed Berlin Blockade for 11 months
*--USA air transport kept American, English, and French zones supplied

<>1948je28:Yugoslavian (Croatian) leader of anti-fascist resistance to Hitler Germany, Joseph Broz Tito expelled from the Cominform. Break with Stalin [RFP2,3:172-85]
*1949no:Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) resolution on Yugoslavia [P20:341]
*--By 1956, USSR and Yugoslavia had established "normal" diplomatic relations [RFP3:517-21]

<>1948au:Andrei Zhdanov death terminated 14-year career of Stalin's right-hand man

<>1948au:USSR ideological botanist T.D. Lysenko came to prominence in agriculture [BMC1:634-7]

<>1948au:South Korea declared independence from Korea. North Korea followed suit the next month
*--USA Department of State publication Korea, 1945-1948 detailed mounting crisis [Excerpts = RFP2,3:134-7]

<>1948fa:USSR Five-year Plan expert Nikolai Voznesenskii disappeared. He had led the Soviet economy through WW2

<>1948de:Polish political parties were dissolved into a single pro-Soviet organization, consolidating Soviet dominance in Poland

<>1948de:Soviet troops out of North Korea. Several months later: USA troops out of South Korea. Korean crisis mounted

<>1948de10:UNO Declaration of Human Rights [TXT]
*--US public leaders explored the opportunities and difficulties involved in the establishment of institutionally enforceable international law and world government, Foundations for World Order. The President and Chancellor of the University of Chicago, Robert M. Hutchins, made an eloquent plea for a constitutional world order [RWP1,3:24-38]
*1950:Grenville Clark, US lawyer and Vice President of the United World Federalists, published A Plan for Peace [Excerpts = RWP1,3:50-85]
*--UNO became a focal point for post-WW2 hopes that unrestrained aggressive acts of sovereign nation-states could be brought under some sort of rule of law

<>1948de23:Hungarian dissident Catholic primate Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty was arrested by Communist authorities. He later described his experience in his Memoirs [P20:351]

<>1949:English Labour Party theorist and government figure E.F.M. Durbin expounded on state planning and socialism in Problems of Economic Planning [CCS:861-78 | CCS,2:317-34]

<>1949:French writer and intellectual Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex [TXT], was an inspiration to women seeking to define their independent identity and role. Her influence was particularly great among European and North American women's movements which had flourished for more than a century [P20:374]

<>1949:USA | Leading American and European Communist intellectuals from previous decades described their disenchantment in The God that Failed
*--Italian Ignazio Silone [CCS,2:580-601]
*--Arthur Koestler [P20:206]
*--Afro-American activist and novelist Richard Wright
*--French novelist André Gide
*--American journalist Louis Fischer
*--English poet Stephen Spender

<>1949ja:USSR announced formation of Council for Mutual Economic Assistance [SEV or "ComEcon"] to manage economic development and relationships among allies of eastern Europe
*--Six years passed before USSR created a military alliance among these proximate and subordinate east European nations in 1955 = The Warsaw Pact
*1959:SEV formal charter included Albania, German Democratic Republic ("East Germany"), Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR
*1961:Albania expelled from SEV
*1962:Mongolia became member of SEV

<>1949mr:Hungarian Communist Party leader and state official Jozsef Revai defined nature of Hungarian revolution [RFP2,3:186-95]

<>1949ap04:USA leading force in creation of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) USA, Canada, Great Britain, France, Nederland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Portugal
*1951:Greece and Turkey
*1955:Federal Republic of Germany ("West Germany")
*1959:NATO Secretary General Paul-Henri Spaak reflected on the 10th anniversary of NATO [P20:320]
*--[W]

<>1949my23;je20; Paris | Allied Council of Foreign Ministers (USA, USSR, England, France) meeting #6, again with the questions of Germany and Austria before them [W] This was the last such meeting for joint diplomatic resolution of post-WW2 problems
*--Three and a half years of Council meetings failed to resolve conflicting interests of WW2 Allies

<>1949au12:Geneva Conventions signed [TXT]
\\
*--Websites [W] [W]

<>1949se:German Federal Republic mounted its first post-WW2 government. Leader of the Christian Democratic Union Party and first Chancellor (1949-1963), Konrad Adenauer, reflected on the principles of his work to advance and protect democratic politics and Christian ideals [P20:305; pay close attention to the editors’ introduction to this section. What do they mean by "Anglo-American"?] Adenauer defended "faith-based" political parties

<>1949oc01:China, Beijing | People’s Republic of China [PRC, "Red China"] proclaimed, with Mao Tse-Tung [Zedong] as President. Mao stated his understanding of events [RFP2,3:211-23] Mao was a talented and trained theorist in the Marxist tradition, e.g., his essay "On Contradiction" [CCS,2:800-19]
*--Peasant/military revolution defeated the "nationalist" Chinese (who were supported by "The West" with the help and urging of USA media mogul Henry Luce). The Chinese Communist revolution chased former rulers and forced them into exile on the Chinese island Taiwan where they relocated what was called Nationalist China. Nationalist China remained a member of UNO, and the mainland government, PRC, was not admitted to membership. USA would not even grant diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of China
*--The century of China under imperialism, beginning in 1839:1842 (with only two decades of slight recovery beginning in 1912) was now at a close. It could also be said that this marked the end of China's 18 year epoch of military chaos that preceded WW2, spanned the war years and stretched into (and contributed to the origins of) the Cold War
*--Chinese industrial modernization now in hands of sovereign authority of the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China
*--The new independence of India, China and Indonesia can be understood in a much broader historical context = the rise and fall of European mercantilist imperialism over the previous 300+ years. Among the big south-east Asian regions still under imperial dominion, Vietnam had to await yet 25 more years

<>1949de:European-wide Socialist International reconstituted itself
*--German theorist Paul Sering (Richard Loewenthal's pseudonym [JANUS]) provided theoretical encouragement in his Beyond Capitalism (1948) [CCS,2:292-316]
*--German-born economist K. William Kapp's The Social Costs of Private Enterprise (1950) also contributed to the post-WW2 revival of Social Democracy in western Europe [CCS,2:195-221]

<>1949de27:Indonesian independence formally recognized, after nearly a decade of intense national-liberationist struggle, first against Japanese imperialist occupation then against re-imposition of Dutch imperialist rule. European imperialism continued to unravel
*--The new independence of India, and then soon China and Indonesia can be understood in a much broader historical context = the rise and fall of European mercantilist imperialism over the previous 300+ years. Among the big south-east Asian regions still under imperial dominion, Vietnam had to await yet 25 more years

<>1950:Average annual alcoholic intake of the Soviet adult=7 litres. More than doubled by 1983:14.6 [Kerblay,Mikhail Gorbachev:15]. In fiscal terms,1984:51B rubles (16% of consumer spending). By 1987:35B rubles. Thus the state lost between 1.5 and 2B rubles in tax revenue. Money flowed to bootleggers

<>1950:London | Russian philosopher Simon Frank published Reality and Man [Edie,3:281-305; 306-14]

<>1950:USA | Norbert Wiener published The human use of human beings; cybernetics and society
*--Same year, American political theorist John H. Hallowell, Main Currents in Modern Political Thought, identified fall from Christian values and spread of secular and scientific ways of thinking as causes of what is called "The Crisis of Our Times"
*1954:Hallowell published The Moral Foundations of Democracy

<>1950:USA | American Economic Association issued report which sought to define the best balance of private enterprise with governmental initiative in order to stabilize the "boom and bust" cycles of the unregulated laissez faire capitalist economy [CCS,2:373-409]

<>1950ja12:USA Secretary of State Dean Acheson confirmed USA defense perimeter in Pacific which did not include Korea or Formosa (Taiwan [ID])

<>1950ap14:National Security Council Report 68 "United States Objectives and Programs for National Security" [NSC 68] [TXT]. The author, Paul Nitze, laid out a strategic vision of the unfolding Cold War: "The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own [?old fanatic faith?], and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world"
*--Dean Acheson [ID] admitted later that the administration felt justified in issuing such a report because there was need to “bludgeon the mass mind of ‘government’”
*--Over the next decades, the USA deliberately and frequently exaggerated the threat to national security posed by the USSR. Truman quadrupled the defense budget, and the “arms race” was on. The USA nuclear arsenal grew to monstrous proportions =
*1950:  1,400 nuclear warheads in US arsenal
*1960:20,000 nuclear warheads in US arsenal
*1966:32,000 nuclear warheads in US arsenal

<>1950my09:French government spokesperson Robert Schuman proposed European Coal and Steel Community

<>1950my23:USA note to USSR on re-militarization of East Germany [RFP2,3:113-14]
*--GO se19

<>1950sp:USSR gripped by bitter ideological dispute about linguistics and the theories of N. Ya. Marr (1864-1934) [CCS:968-89] Stalin made so bold as to enter this technical dispute with his amateur but authoritative views
*--Soviet dissident Roy Medvedev later described Stalin's last years [P20:343]

<>1950je25:North Korea invaded the South in an attempt to reunite the peninsula. Under USA leadership, UNO adopted resolutions against North Korean aggression, formally opening the Korean War (called a "police action" rather than a "war")
*--USSR was not in a position to vote on this critical UNO resolution because it had walked out just before, in connection with the UNO refusal to grant membership to the People’s Republic of China [RFP2,3:137-41]
*1952:I.F. Stone, Hidden History of the Korean War, a compilation of several critical exposés, published over previous months in his newspaper I.F. Stone's Weekly. Stone sought to refute what he took to be false explanations of which side started the Korean War
\\
*--Bruce Cumings (2007no22:NYR:67-8) took a more scholarly approach than I.F. Stone (above), but largely confirmed the dissident journalist's suspicions. The North Korea/South Korea civil war did not just "break out" when one or the other side attacked. It was the result of mounting civil war pressures felt on both sides of the artificial division of the Korean peninsula. For many years, attacks had been mounted on and off by both sides, with South Korea most active in the months leading up to June, 1950 = "Commanders of the respective Korean armies had chosen different sides in the long anti-colonial struggle against Japan [North Korean leaders, working in association often with the Comintern [ID], had led the national resistance to Japanese aggression; South Korean leaders had accommodated themselves to Japanese power], and it should not have been surprising that once they had the means to do so, they would again clash with each other. What is more surprising is the direct American role, during the US occupation of Korea from 1945 to 1948, in putting in power an entire generation of Koreans in the military and the national police who had served Japanese imperialism"
*--Resistance movements during WW2 were often, after WW2 was over and the Cold War raged, denied the fruits of their struggles [EG]

<>1950se19:USA, England, and France (without other "Big Four" ally USSR) signed communiqué on ending state of hostility with Germany and combination of the three western Allied sectors into a new federal republic of Germany [RFP2,3:114-15]
*--GO oc22

<>1950oc22:USSR-led Prague Conference of east European states took stand against se19:communique [RFP2,3:116-17]

<>1950oc25:People's Republic of China entered Korean War to aid North Korea

<>1951:1955;USSR Fifth Five-year Plan

<>1951:English economist Joan Robinson tried to reconcile ideas of Marx and Keynes in an essay "Marx and Keynes" [CCS:829-39] The image of Keynes had come full circle since his earliest days

<>1951:French author Maurice Duverger published a study later translated into English as Political Parties: Their organization and Activity in the Modern State (1959), a theoretical critique of political parties over more than a century. Suggested reading:
* Introduction (xxiii-xxx)
* Mass and "cadre" parties, with observations on the Leninist hybrid, or "devotee party" (62-71)
* Single parties (255-80)
* Party control of nominations and distortion of public opinion (354-92)
* Conclusions (422-7)

<>1951:German professor of philosophy at Heidelberg University Karl Jaspers (having returned to his post after the Nazis threw him out), published Way to Wisdom in which he extolled intense personal involvement and choice [BMC4:682-3]
*--He also wrote Man and the Modern Age

<>1951:German-born political philosopher Hanna Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism
*1958:The Human Condition [translated in 1960 into German with the better title, Vita Activa]
*1959:Lectures on Lessing [CWC:560-83]
*1967:On Revolution
*--Look at UO holdings by Arendt [also, selected essays with particular attention to the Nazi variation on the totalitarian theme in CCS:1037-73 | CCS,2:670-703]
*--Her most controversial work explored the notion that the atrocities of the Hitler era, the viciousness of the Nazis and the fate of their victims, could be understood as tragic examples of a general human inclination toward "the banality of evil"
*1999:In the first decade of political independence from the USSR, many eastern Europeans turned to Arendt for inspiration. For example, the Estonian journal Trames#3,3:141-61 carried an article by Rainer Kattel, “Hannah Arendts politische Öffentlichkeit” [Hannah Arendt's (concept of) political openness]. Kattel reflected mainly on her 1958 and 1967 publications and praised her sense of immediate political engagement as the essence of democracy. The central question of all Hannah Arendt's writings was the tension between community and isolation. Isolation of the individual, or “atomization” of the public, was a characteristic consequence of modern “total statism”. At all times the light of the public and the darkness of the private were in play with one another. Total statism cancels the light of the public and forces individuals fully into the darkness of isolation. Family association, private enterprise so long as it kept a low profile, small independent but innocuous groups might still function, but only in the general darkness of isolation. Arendt explored natal forms of association and identity and contrasted them with public forms. She developed a personal theme of “political Öffentlichkeit”. She took plurality to be the essence of political openness. Interests are varied, thus there should be transparency of governmental acts and free but open mobilization of public interest groups. The political action of either institutions or groups should be awash in “publicity”. That is the meaning of the widely used German term Öffentlichkeit, and it has been used in that sense to explore the meaning of “civil society” from the time of Hegel. In the 1960s it was developed in the theoretical works of Jűrgen Habermas. In the 1980s, political openness in its Russian form glasnost'  was tried by Soviet leader Gorbachev in his futile efforts at perestroika. What made Arendt useful was that she went beyond Habermas (and of course beyond Gorbachev). Habermas' concerns about the media and the possibility of “reasoned discourse in the public sphere” was not enough. Arendt took the question from these high “spheres” of discourse right on down to street level, to concrete “public spaces”, to the everyday actions of governments and people, lifting the issue out of the somewhat self-congratulatory and more confined Germanic or specifically "Western" context and into the life of actual people trying to liberate themselves. At any given moment, open public activism was the only effective check on power, not long historical traditions. Tyranny and plurality were in direct, eternal conflict with one another. Active exercise of political freedom, even where it has never existed before, was the crucial and pan-cultural prescription. Humans are essentially “political animals”, just as Aristotle once said. Without open political action, humans slide back toward being simply animals. That was no more true in the peripheral lands of "Western" culture than it was in the land of Goethe, Hegel and Habermas. Arendt considered a public, here and now -- anywhere and any time -- to be the only source of workable ethics and politics. Arendt believed that the political public alone was capable of restoring humanity in a brutalized 20th-century world. It alone was capable of checking the general flight of “Western” civilization into either private darkness or false transcendence

<>1951:Russian thinker and historian of thought Nikolai Losskii, History of Russian Philosophy

<>1951:UNO | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO] questionnaire, drawn up by Oslo [Norway] University Proefessor Arne Naess, on ideological conflicts about democracy, collated and published as Democracy in a World of Tensions. Naess concluded from the replies of hundreds of world "experts" that "for the first time in the history of the world, no doctrines are advanced as undemocratic" [BMC4:752-7] UNO could be naive in its global optimism

<>1951:USA foreign policy specialist Hans Morgenthau published In Defense of the National Interest in which he warned about confusing two great issues: Russian imperialism and genuine revolution. "American foreign policy ought not to have the objective of bringing the blessings of some social and political system to all the world or of protecting all the world from the evils of some other system. [...] If we allow ourselves to be diverted from this objective of safeguarding our national security, and if instead we conceive of the American mission in some abstract, universal, and emotional terms, we may well be induced, against our better knowledge and intent, yet by the very logic of the task in hand, to raise the banner of universal counter-revolution abroad and of conformity in thought and action at home. In that manner we shall jeopardize our external security, promote the world revolution we are trying to suppress, and at home make ourselves distinguishable perhaps in degree, but not in kind, from those with which we are locked in ideological combat...." [RFP3:431-2]
*--Morgenthau's was a lonely voice of warning about the ill use and damaging consequences of inflated threats to national security

<>1951ap11:USA commander in Korea, General Douglas MacArthur, came out in favor of carrying Korean War into China, directly opposing policy and orders of civilian Commander-in-Chief President Harry Truman
*--General Douglas MacArthur, who had presided over the signing of Japanese surrender at the end of WW2, was fired and forced into retirement

<>1951je:English Foreign Office senior diplomat R.H. Scott wrote to Britain's ambassador in Kabul reporting that the French were suggesting an "obvious solution" to the Afghanistan problem, an "engineered partition". "If there is to be an upheaval sometime, as looks not unlikely, the ultimate disappearance of Afghanistan (as we now know it) might be no tragedy. In modern conditions, Afghan viability may in the long run be doubtful"
*--Behind the English concern was the growing dependence of Afghanistan on Soviet trade and diplomatic support, or perhaps also the growing independence of Afghanistan as it associated with other "Third World" countries to function outside the network of "Western" or Soviet control, thus to throw into question the bi-polar myth that sustained the Cold War

<>1951se:USA Senator Joseph McCarthy attacked Secretary of State George C. Marshall, accusing him of being a communist sympathizer. Marshall soon resigned
*--USA in grip of "McCarthyism" in which many lost jobs and were otherwise persecuted as "subversives". The Marshall accusation was an especially deranged moment in the scurrilous Senator's career. True, newly invigorated military-industrial procurement factions felt threatened by Marshall's emphasis on diplomacy, economic aid and other forms of support for recovering Europe [ID], but McCarthy's accusation was absurd, and would have been seen as such in any ordinary time free of the rising anti-Communist hysteria. At his best, McCarthy made no distinction between dissent and treason, and there were political factions who knew how to take advantage of the atmosphere provoked by the outrageous Senator

<>1951no13:UNO General Assembly heard Andrei Vyshinskii’s objection to international commission on general elections throughout Germany [RFP2,3:118-19]
*--GO de19

<>1951de19:UNO Resolution on investigation of possibilities for general elections in Germany [RFP2,3:119-21]

<>1952:English economic historian and labor party supporter R.H. Tawney published the last of three editions of his defense of liberal democracy against its many different sorts of enemies, Equality (1931:First ed., 1938:Second ed.) [CCS,1:825-43]

<>1952:USA (German-born) Protestant theologian Paul Tillich published The Courage To Be [BMC4:655-6]
*--"Neo-orthodox theology" thrived from the WW1 period, through the tumultuous depression era, through WW2, and into the Cold War
*--Wladimir Weidle [Vladimir Veidle] published English translation of his socio-cultural explanation of why the Russian old-regime collapsed and the Soviet Union arose, Russia: Absent and Present

<>1952mr01:India held first national elections. Pandit Nehru's and Congress Party win 3/4th of seats in the National Assembly
*--India's century and a half under European imperial dominion was over

<>1952jy25:European Coal and Steel Community [ECSC--France, West Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg] came into force, representing the first substantial accomplishment of the pan-European idea
*--Seasoned champion of European unity, Jean Monnet [W], became first president
*1953je22:Speeches before the Joint Meeting of the Members of the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe and the Members of Common Assembly of the ECSC [CWC:553-9]
*--This was a forerunner of the EEC and the matrix out of which the European Union [EU] grew
\\
*--John Gillingham, European Integration, 1950-2003

<>1952jy27:Volga-Don Ship Canal completed, realizing a Russian dream of economic development delayed more than 260 years. The Ottoman Turks were the first to attempt this project nearly 400 years earlier

<>1952au08:German elections commission adjourned indefinitely [RFP2,3:121-2]

<>1952se:oc02; Stalin stated Cold War views [RFP2,3:227-32 | RFP3:433-8 | ORW:244-6]

<>1953:USA. B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior [Read chapter one = TXT]

<>1953:1956; Eastern Europe in the grip of anti-Soviet disturbances
*--1953:Polish émigré in Paris (later he came to the USA) Czesław Miłosz [ID] published The Captive Mind [CCS,2:602-25]

<>1953mr05:Joseph Stalin died [SGv:176-8] Thus ended the spectacular 36-year political career of one of the most influential leaders of the twentieth century
*-- Georgii Malenkov delivered funeral oration which touched on Cold War issues [RFP2,3:153-4]
*--A BRIEF TWO-YEAR COLD WAR THAW FOLLOWED = Eisenhower and Khrushchev
*--1953:Vladimir Polyakov, An Attack on Censorship: The Story of Fireman Prokhorchuk [P20:131] Many dreamt that the post-Stalin USSR might liberalize censorship control
\\
*--Yaram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-1953

<>1953mr27:1st post-Joseph Stalin amnesty for political prisoners [SGv:256-7]

<>1953ap16:USA President Dwight Eisenhower used occasion of Stalin's death to call for end to the Cold War, which he defined largely in terms of expanding arms buildup, robbing the world of peaceful economic development. "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies -- in the final sense -- a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made--if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace". The speech was reprinted in full in official Soviet newspaper Pravda. W. W. Rostow had a hand in writing this speech [RFP2,3:155-6] This was era of broad effort to reinterpret nature of the Soviet "threat". Was it Russian imperialism or Soviet Communism? [RFP2,3:233-88]
*--It was also an effort to explore the dangerous possibility that policies based on national security could themselves be threats to national security

<>1953my:Siberia | Norilsk revolts in GULag system

<>1953je17:GDR ("East Germany") | Liberalization stimulated riots in the streets, put down by Soviet power
*--Dissent vigorous but vulnerable in the uncertain months after Stalin's death

<>1953je27:Korean War armistice. Six-year crisis in Korea over, though Korea remained divided until long after most other areas divided by "Cold War" had been rejoined

<>1953je18:Egypt declared self an independent republic

<>1953jy10:Moscow | Beria denounced and "purged" [SGv:179-81]

<>1953se:Nikita Khrushchev became First Secretary (and Politbiuro member) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The "succession crisis" caused by Stalin's death was on its way to solid resolution

<>1953no:1955no; New Yorker published in serial form four chapters from Russian émigré writer Vladimir Nabokov's fourth English-language novel, Pnin, in serial form
\\
*--Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991)
*--Gennady Barabtarlo, Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov's Pnin (1989)
*--Leona Toker, Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989)

<>1954:USA geochemist Harrison Brown raised social, economic and environmental questions about global modernization in The Challenge of Man’s Future [CCS:643-59 | CCS,2:48-64]

<>1954:1956; USSR "Virgin Lands" campaign extended agricultural cultivation into dry steppe regions

<>1954:Guatemala government overthrown with covert but direct involvement of USA CIA [TXT]

<>1954mr:USSR KGB [F/] (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti; Committee of State Security) created out of earlier security police agencies

<>1954ap:jy; Geneva Conference participants = USA, USSR, Great Britain, France, PRC ("mainland" China), North Korea, South Korea, Vietnam (Viet Minh party [League for the Independence of Vietnam]), Laos, Cambodia
*--The French had been defeated at Dienbienphu and were now driven out of their old imperialist domain, Vietnam
*--"The West", however, was unwilling to give the victorious Viet Minh forces authority over a whole and independent Vietnam. [Compare with Congo events.] Political settlement divided Vietnam into North and South. USA soon provided significant aid to South and worked to move it toward permanent separation and independence from the North. The foundations were "diplomatically" laid for the USA-Vietnam War

<>1954oc03:London conference of nine European nations on question of European Union [EU] agreed on a very provocative plan to bring West Germany into NATO

<>1954oc23:USA, USSR, England and France agreed to end occupation of Germany. On same day, nine-power agreement, building on 1948mr17:Brussels Treaty, created Western European Union [WEU], a military expression of the movement that was heading toward the creation of a very similarly titled "European Union" [EU]. The WEU was a military union. The EU was a political union, more concerned with civilian and economic issues than with "national security" issues
\\
*--WEU website with menu hop to its "history"

<>1954no29:Moscow Conference of east European nations under Soviet dominance, with PRC (China) as observer

<>1954de02:USA Senate adopted resolution censuring Joseph McCarthy

<>1955mr:European Union [EU] ratified by Italy, West Germany and France
*--[W]

<>1955ap18:ap24; INDONESIA | Bandung Conference, formally "Asian-African Conference at Bandung" [SPE2:1030-2]
*--Participants = Afghanistan, Cambodia, People's Republic of China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gold Coast, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordon, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Democratic Republic of Vietnam ("North Vietnam"), South Vietnam, and Yeman
*--Peoples' Republic of China Foreign Minister Chou En-lai addressed Conference. He emphasized that "The Third World" [ID], however different and divided by location on three great world continents, shared similar problems = poverty, backwardness, and exploitation at the hands of the great imperialist powers. The Third World needed to unite its efforts to solve these problems [BNE:317-20]
*--Final Communiqué was published [Excerpted TXT]
*1956my17:Indonesian President Achmed Sukarno addressed the USA Congress  [RWP2:291-301]
*--After more than a century and a half under European dominance, Indonesia was assuming an independent role in international affairs

<>1955my09:Federal Republic of Germany ("West Germany") became sovereign nation-state, combining the US, English and French zones without including the Soviet zone ("East Germany")
*--West Germany in the midst of an "economic miracle" engineered by a pragmatic market-oriented policy largely the result of the efforts of the "neo-liberal" Ludwig Erhard who combined market with social welfare policies and other forms of state involvement with the economy. [CWC:515-27]
*--"Western" allies sought to counter both Soviet and Social Democratic influences in Germany. The Bismarckian legacy of conservative welfarism lived on. It would be possible to say that the forty-year doldrums of European liberalism were now at an end if it weren't for the festering Cold-War militarism =
*--The Federal Republic of Germany joined military alliance NATO, forcing the USSR into a formally militarized relationship with eastern Europe: GO my14

<>1955my14:USSR created Warsaw Pact [W]
*--A direct response to the establishment of NATO and especially the creation of "West Germany" as a NATO state, the Warsaw Pact united "iron curtain" countries in military alliance: Albania (1962:Expelled), Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, German Democratic Republic [GDR], Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the USSR
*--The Warsaw Pact was unstable from the beginning

<>1955my15:Vienna Treaty was signed by USSR USA, England and France. It restored Austrian independence. Soviet troops withdrew from Austria
*--Some were pleased to see easing of Cold War; others felt threatened

<>1955jy:COLD WAR: Winter again. Geneva Four-power meeting involved USA, USSR, Great Britain and France. Disarmament talks broke down. Eisenhower proposed mutual aerial inspection and exchange of information on military establishments. USSR gave priority to weapons reduction. Expanded cultural exchange made some headway (1958 agreement followed). But generally, the "spirit of Geneva" quickly dissipated. Smile of Cheshire cat evaporated as "the last Great Game" -- the Cold War -- got earnestly under way. [ID first "Great Game"]
*--Raymond Aron, The Century of Total War ch8 and 9, "The Atomic Age" and "The Conventions of the Cold War"
*--American strategists sometimes disagreed on this question. On the conflicting global views of George Frost Kennan and Paul Nitze, see T. Von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization:166-178
*--Much hinged on the question of whether NATO ought to be the main face of "The West" in the wider world
*--Lissa Roche, ed., Scorpions in a Bottle: Dangerous Ideas about the United States and the Soviet Union, with essays by leading Reagan-era conservative pundits, the original neo-cons, e.g., Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, and William Bennett. They were anxious to discredit any effort to see "both sides" of the big Cold War issues, especially to condemn any thought that the USA and USSR were quite a bit alike in their Cold War strategies, in their shared hegemony over the world situation
*--One definite similarity, however, was that "military-industrial complexes" within the two superpowers were gaining increasing influence over national policy
\\
*--MORE BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THE COLD WAR

<>1955fa:1956no; USA AL,Mongomery (state capital) | Mrs. Rosa Parks, a 43-year-old seamstress whose skin color made her legally ineligible to ride in the front of a public bus, refused to move to the back. Local black leaders organized a boycott of city buses
*--City leaders had hundreds of boycotters arrested. Many went to jail. Bombs were ignited in four black churches. A shotgun was fired through the front door of the home of The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968). King was an emerging charismatic leader of black resistance to all forms of discrimination. His reputation and his movement spread across the USA. The Montgomery boycott launched a ten-year civil rights struggle, a central component of an emerging US era of dissent and open resistance
*--Within a year, the US Supreme Court ruled that segregated local bus lines were unconstitutional
\\
*--Zinn:442-4

<>1956fe14:USSR. Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party heard Khrushchev’s so-called secret speech [TXT], denouncing Stalin’s "cult of the individual" [kul't lichnosti, generally translated as "cult of personality", thus missing the central point of the critique, the accusation that Stalin substituted his personal self for the general councils of the Party]. Khrushchev assaulted other "crimes of the Stalin era", the most important of which were connected with abuse of the Party and its members in the time of the great purges [ID] 20 years earlier [RFP3:522-8 | ORW:263-8]
*--News of Khrushchev's "secret" speech spread quickly throughout eastern Europe. It was taken as highest possible authorization to expose and perhaps correct all crimes of the Stalin era, not just crimes against the Party. A simmering dissent movement was coming to a boil
*--In the previous year, historian of philosophy Fedor Konstantinov (Communist Party member since 1918) explored anew the Marxist theory of Basis [Unterbau] and Superstructure [Überbau] [Jaworskyj:400-06] Compare with similar effort over thirty years earlier, in the time of Lenin
*--Ideological "thaw" seemed to encourage dissent within the USSR and instability within the Warsaw Pact

<>1956mr28:Iceland demanded revision of 1951 agreement with USA and withdrawal of USA troops. Cracks in "The West"

<>1956ap25:se08; Nikita Khrushchev labor reform [SGv:433-37]
*--In this year, Machine Tractor Stations abolished

<>1956ap28:Soviet law on state secrecy provided list of censored topics, state secrets [PS&C:136-7]

<>1956my:USA stepped up spy-plane over-flights within territory of USSR

<>1956je:Polish industrial wage-labor disturbances were an early harbinger of disorder and dissent in the Soviet dominated Warsaw Pact

<>1956jy26:Egyptian President Gamal Abdal Nasser seized Suez Canal from English dominated, imperialist corporation, the Suez Canal Company. "Western" client states were as restive as Soviet client states

<>1956se:Moscow editors of Novyi mir [New World] rejected MS of Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago [58de03:CDP#10,43:6-11,32] The novel was first published abroad by a "left-wing" Italian publishing house

<>1956oc:Poland | Gomulka became First Secretary [General Secretary] of Polish United Worker's Party

<>1956oc:Hungary | Budapest gripped by general industrial labor strike, the most serious crack in the Warsaw Pact in this season of unrest
*1956oc23:Hungarian uprising opened with student demonstrations in Budapest. Students' manifesto and other documents [RFP3:602-21]
*--Andor Heller gave an eyewitness account of The Hungarian Revolution [P20:358]
*1956oc29:Hungary invaded by USSR; Janos Kadar became First Secretary [General Secretary] of Hungarian Workers' Party
*--The Soviet Army issued appeals "against the unbridled forces of reaction" [P20:361]
*--Over the next twelve years eastern Europe fell quiet, went into a protective crouch. But a Cold-War epoch of global dissent was coming to a boil =

<>1956oc29:Israel invaded Egypt in the Sinai Peninsula. England and France jointly demanded that both combatants cease fire and withdraw ten miles from either side of the Suez Canal. Egypt did not comply; Israel did, but held onto the Gaza Strip
*1956oc31:England and France attacked Egypt with a vague goal of returning the Suez Canal to European control. They failed. Anachronistic imperialist intervention failed everywhere but in Gaza
*--USA and USSR responded diplomatically to the crisis by condemning English and French actions [BNE:320-4]

<>1956no19:New Leader published Yugoslav political figure, theorist Milovan Djilas, "The Storm in Eastern Europe" for which he was imprisoned [RFP3:630-7]
*1957:Yugoslav pundit Djilas published The New Class [CCS:990-1014]
*--Within a year, Yugoslavia-USSR relations again on the rocks [RFP3:548-73]
*--Djilas defined a new managerial elite in the middle of the 20th century. He found the near perfect expression of it in the Communist Party of the USSR. But he was an associate of that remarkable Yugoslavian intellectual movement called “Praxis” which only very rarely adhered to simplistic or black-and-white partisan interpretations of global trends. He saw that his concept of “The New Class” had world-wide significance. (In much the same way, Orwell knew 1984 [ID] was about a lot more than the Soviet Union). The core of Djilas’ argument was that 19th-century presumptions about social/economic classes no longer worked in the post WW2 world to define actual, functioning political/economic formations. The 20th-century world was not ruled by a social class called the “bourgeoisie”. And the USSR was not ruled by a social class called the “proletariat”. Djilas identified a "new class", a dominant managerial elite. “New Class” perspective unified thought about a single global phenomenon, whether in the form of Communist Party apparatchiki, “cadre-party” operatives (whether a one-party or two-party political environment), corporate executives, KGB and CIA “assets”, or commanders of vast strategic military forces. It made it possible to see them all as variations on the same central theme = managerial elitism [bibliography]
*1957:Russian-born Hollywood scriptwriter and ideologist of extreme libertarianism Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged. She became one of the most widely read popularizers of the anti-managerial theme. She was born Alisa Rosenbaum in St.Petersburg, Russia, in 1905. During WW1, she attended St.Petersburg University where she majored in history, with a special interest in USA politics. The Soviet revolution scattered her family and instilled in her an abiding hatred of Communism, of socialism in general, of all forms of statism or empowered managerial elitism. Her views fit most comfortably in the Russian tradition of highly intellectual and militant anarchism, with a special American affection for unfettered business economics and an inclination toward violence to forward that cause. In Hollywood she worked as an acolyte of Cecil B. De Mille. Atlas Shrugged and the earlier novel The Fountainhead (1943) extolled the virtues of radically unshackled entrepreneurial individualism, defiant in the face of governmental or corporate conformism. There is some irony in the fact that many USA corporate executives embraced her preachy harlequin-romance style dramas and identified with her heroes, despite the fact that her heroes suffered as often under the authority of "big business" as under "big government" [bibliography]
*--For now we can let Djilas and Rand conclude the chronological half-century LOOP on the "managerial revolution"
*--But a LOOP on the military-industrial complex  continues to explore one facet of this continuing phenomenon
*--Three seasons after Khrushchev's "Secret Speech", the world was in a state of unrest, within and well beyond the sphere of Soviet influence. The post-WW2 enthusiasm for significant change was marked by wide-spread and growing dissent against unjustifiable and oppressive power in the lives of various peoples. None of this was the intention of the Khrushchev speech

<>1957:1958; USSR proposals called for East-West [i.e., Warsaw Pact and NATO] non-aggression pacts and nuclear-free zone in all of middle Europe. NATO powers rejected

<>1957:French (Algerian-born) existentialist author Albert Camus [W] (1913-1960) won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He wrote about rebellion in The Rebel (1951) and again in a 1957 lecture [BMC4:768-71]

<>1957:USSR and The People's Republic of China experienced sharp deterioration in their international relations. The two states were ruled by Communist parties that usually celebrated a certain familial closeness. But the Sino-Soviet conflict grew, even to the point of military clashes along often ambiguous borders (especially in winter). China accused the USSR of being a "state capitalist" rather than "communist" society. This conflict, with all its global implications, highlighted the fact that economic modernization ("capitalism") did not always produce liberal societies. By the mid-20th century the relationship between capitalism and coercion varied over a fairly broad spectrum [ID].

<>1957mr25:European Economic Community [EEC or "Common Market"] founded, Treaty of Rome, a direct outgrowth of the vision of Jean Monnet [ID] and the early accomplishments of the ECSC and a reinforcement of the idea of the European Union [EU]

<>1957my10:Nikita Khrushchev economic reform [SGv:93-101]

<>1957je29:Moscow | Central Committee backed Nikita Khrushchev vs. "Anti-Party Group" [SGv:182-7]

<>1957fa:USSR | For the first time in human history, two artificial satellites were launched into orbit. This Soviet achievement prompted a vigorous reaction on the part of the USA military-industrial complex
*1957oc04:Gigantic Soviet rockets lifted Sputnik I, which was a beeping 184-lb. ball with whiskery antennas
*1957no03:Sputnik II carried a dog into space where it died
*1957no07:Gaither Report, written by Paul Nitze for a National Security Agency Panel after a half year of deliberations, was submitted under top secrecy to President Eisenhower. It recommended sharp increases in military expenditures. ["Gaither Report" text, with some explication]
*1957no21:WDC | Committee for Economic Development (Fifteenth Anniversary Meeting) resulted in “confidential” publication which reflected deep concerns about competitive industrial and military relationship between USA and USSR, and about the dangers of a "military-industrial complex" arising to address the problem of mounting Cold-War competition = Soviet Progress vs. American Enterprise [TXT]

<>1958:Brussels World’s Fair (1st since 1939:NYC). The Brussels World Fair marked the beginning of new era of open cultural exchange
*--On the question of cultural relations, GO 1862fe 1906:USA and 1964:USA
*--This was the year of the US/USSR Cultural and Academic Exchange agreement and the popular victory of the Texas pianist Van Cliburn at the Tchaikovsky festival in Moscow
*1958ja06:Time Magazine named Nikita Khrushchev "man of the year" for 1957. In part, the selection was based on the following = "In 1957 the Russians opened on the Volga the world's largest hydroelectric station, developed west of the Urals the world's biggest new oilfield, built at Dubna, outside Moscow, the world's largest synchrocyclotron (particles accelerator). In 1957 Russia graduated three times as many engineers as the U.S. and published five times as many book titles. In the judgment of their U.S. peers, Russian scientists in 1957 excelled in such fields as astrophysics, very high energy studies, cosmic-ray research and certain branches of higher mathematics, and ran close to U.S. performance in oceanography, cryogenics and geology. The Russians moved up in air defense, long-range bomber capacity, and in reorganizing their traditionally massive ground forces into small, fast-moving units capable of using tactical atomic weapons."
  \\
*--Note alarmed reaction of US Cold-War ideologue/scholar Frederick C. Barghoorn, The Soviet Cultural Offensive (Princeton:1960):87-91
*--A later account, see Yale Richmond, Cultural exchange & the Cold War : raising the Iron Curtain (2003)
*--For Richmond's earlier views, US-Soviet Cultural Exchanges, 1958-1986: Who Wins? (Boulder:1987)
*--For a broader view of the background to 1958, see J. D. Parks, Culture, Conflict and Coexistence: American-Soviet Cultural Relations, 1917-1958 (1983)
*--USA has sometimes been slow to acknowledge the profound influence on "high culture" exerted by Russian tradition. Consider dance, for example.
*--For other instances of cultural relations, see Gordon Dee Smith with S. A. Carmeau, Jr., and Marla Price, Ten Plus Ten [10 + 10 here]: Contemporary Soviet and American Painters
*--On Russian and American literature, see Andrei Voznesenskii with John Updike and Bel Kaufman, The Human Experience: Contemporary American and Soviet Fiction and Poetry
*--On one aspect of this theme, see Lauridson, Inger Thorup Lauridson and Per Dalgaard, eds., The Beat Generation and the Russian New Wave (1990) ORBIS
*--A significant example of Russian cultural influence on USA is explored by Ewa Majewska Thompson, Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism:  A Comparative Study (1971)

<>1958:English pundit and author Aldous Huxley returned to earlier themes in Brave New World Revisited
*--A quarter century of political totalitarianism and total war, followed by disturbing nuclear remilitarization, suggested several new perspectives

<>1958:Gustav Wetter published his complex analysis Dialectical Materialism: A Historical and Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union (1963)

<>1958:USA | John Kenneth Galbraith published his influential critique of American society, The Affluent Society

<>1958fe01:Egypt played leading role in formation with Sudan of the United Arab Republic
*--fe21:Nasser elected head of state by plebiscite
*--In the fourth century Egypt played a role in the original "Easternizaton" (i.e., Christianization) of "The West". It now joined the ranks of modern nation-states

<>1958mr27:1964oc15; Nikita Khrushchev replaced Bulganin as president of the Council of Ministers, thus held highest state and Party posts for over 5 1/2 years, a time of sometimes bold but nearly always ineffective reform

<>1958mr:USSR completed heavy-yield, heavy-fallout tests of nuclear weapons and announced unilateral suspension of such tests, pending reciprocal suspension among other nuclear powers

<>1958my:Algerian disorders signaled intensification of five-year anti-imperialist struggle against France which quickly shook down the French government and which occasioned the rise of General Charles de Gaulle and the formation of the French Fifth Republic, even as Algerian disorders continued [my19:Paris press conference--CWC:544-50]
\\
*--THE BATTLE of ALGIERS [videorecording of 1965 movie]

<>1958:African (Nigerian) writer Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart which explored the shock of modernization on village folk. Two years later he published No Longer at Ease [Excerpts from both, SWH:414-23] 

<>1958oc:Geneva | USSR, USA, England opened talks on practical sides of enforcing cessation of nuclear testing

<>1958oc:Russian poet and gentle dissident Boris Pasternak, author of the novel Dr. Zhivago, awarded Nobel Prize

<>1959:USA author William Burroughs published Naked Lunch and shocked reading public [Wagar:179]

<>1959:USA sociologist William Kornhauser published The Politics of Mass Society [CCS:532-51]

<>1959ja:Cuban revolution, led by Fidel Castro, successfully entered and took control over the capital city Havana

<>1959ja08:French Fifth Republic proclaimed Charles de Gaulle President, an office he held for ten years [for a collection of characteristic political pronouncements, see CWC:540-53]
*--Executive-branch centralism of the "Gaullist" type dominated French politics until early 1980s

<>1959se:Camp David Summit; summitry initiated by Eisenhower and Khrushchev

<>1959no:German Social Democratic Party, which had been making a comeback over the previous ten years in several European polities, adopted its "Bad Godesberg Program", replacing its doctrinaire 1925 program in favor of a more moderate but still socialist platform [CWC:527-39]

<>1960:USA. Herman Kahn published his "thoughts on the unthinkable", On Thermonuclear War [summarized in CCS:1183-98; more on public debate in USA:1199-1226]
*--Communist Party issued its thoughts on the economic crisis of modern capitalism [Jaworskyj:477-85] Soviet aversion to capitalist cultural crisis (squalid commercial media, permissiveness, ethical relativism, etc.) was also a theme of that era [ibid:526-8, 564-9], not just for Soviet pundits and ideologues, but also for a growing "cultural-values" movement in the USA
*--W. W. Rostow published his influential The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto with its theory of economic development and underdevelopment. Here is his list of  "Some tentative, approximate take-off dates" into self-sustained, modern industrial development (p.38), followed by his "rough symbolic dates for technological maturity" (p.59) =

Great Britain 1783-1802 1850
France 1830-1860 1910
Belgium 1833-1860  ---
United States 1843-1860 1900
Germany 1850-1873 1910
Sweden 1868-1890 1930
Japan 1878-1900 1940
Russia 1890-1914 1950
Canada 1896-1914 1950
Argentina 1935- ---  ---
Turkey 1937- ---  ---
India 1952- ---  ---
China 1952- ---  ---

<>1960:USSR announced policy of "Peaceful Coexistence" [ORW:269-8]

<>1960je30:Belgian Congo was granted independence from colonial rule. President Joseph Kasavubu and Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba were the leading figures in the new national government. The army mutinied against Belgian officers still on the scene, but close aide to Lumumba and army chief of staff, General Mobutu Sese Seko, brought order to the army
*--The Belgian government was reluctant to let go of Congolese natural resources. It organized secessionist movements in mineral rich territories of its ex-colonial domain. The UNO intervened, but solely to “maintain order”. The UNO made no special effort to support the independent Kasavubu regime
*--Desperate for help, Lumumba appealed to the USSR and received an enthusiastic response. The USSR dispatched massive military and technical aid (about 1000 advisers arrived within six weeks)
*--USA saw this as the spread of communism and identified Lumumba as the on-site agent of this global conspiracy. In a sense, the USA stepped in where Belgian imperialists could no longer prevail. [Compare with Vietnam events.] The US encouraged Kasavubu and Mobutu in their enmity with Lumumba. Kasavubu ordered Mobutu to arrest Lumumba, and Lumumba ordered Mobutu to arrest Kasavubu. Mobutu was the man between
*1960se04:General Mobutu assumed power (with US backing) but retained Kasavubu as President. Lumumba was arrested and eventually assassinated
*1965no25:Mobutu assumed exclusive power with direct CIA support and, six years later, renamed the country Zaire. Ostensibly US support for Mobutu was rendered in order to prevent “communist takeover”. Ironically, new US ally Mobutu created a dictatorial single-party state and a government-dominated program of economic development which utterly ruined the nation. After three decades of pro-"Western" rule, the main result was the massive enrichment of Mobutu himself. His rule has been called the greatest kleptocracy [rule of crooks] in human history, and it lasted more than three decades
*1997my:Mobutu was forced to flee, ending his 37 years at the center of post-colonial politics in the old Belgian Congo
*2000:Congo River voyage by Tim Butcher was recorded in his Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart. He met Louise Wright, one of the last English missionaries still running a school on the banks of the great river. She told him about how, under the Belgians, native peoples were allowed to travel only if authorities issued them temporary internal passports. In fact, nothing of consequence could be done without the blessing of key imperialist administrative authorities posted throughout the land. She identified many survivals in recent times from the era of imperialism throughout the Congo basin. This doleful form of “Westernization” remained long after the Belgians were forced out. “By the time I got here in the 1980s the colonial era was long gone, but I found that under Mobutu everything was run along exactly the same lines. Nothing has really changed”. The traces of European imperialism could be felt into the 21st century
*--How would one list and evaluate the essential characteristics of the European/African confrontation in the Congo since 1885?
*--Through the last third of the 20th century, the US proxy-state Zaire may be compared with the USSR proxy-state Cuba [ID] to gain some sense of the meaning of the Cold War in the Third World [ID]

<>1960ap28:German Federal Republic Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard delivered speech to his Christian Democratic Union Party on West Germany's social market economy [P20:391]

<>1960my:Paris Summit ended when USA spy-plane, the U-2, was shot down, followed by strong Khrushchev denunciation [ORW:259-62]

<>1960oc28:USSR Russian Republic published comprehensive law "On the Conservation of Nature in the RSFSR" [Philip R. Pryde, Conservation in the Soviet Union (1972) translated extensive excerpts:184ff]
*--Environmental consciousness became a factor in Soviet and US civic activism as the era of dissent approached
\\
*--Douglas R. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev

<>1960oc31:Algerian Republic’s Provisional Government Prime Minister, Ferhat Abbas, commemorated the seventh anniversary of the Algerian struggle for independence from a more than century-long French imperialist dominion [P20:328]
*1961:Martinique-born psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who was trained in his profession in France and was a decorated war hero fighting for the French in WW2, but who joined the Algerian national liberation movement against French imperialist authority, published Les damnés de la terre [The Wretched of the Earth (1968)]. He urged African states to seek their own revolutionary future independent of the models imposed by European colonists. "The West" did not duplicate even its limited virtues in the non-European world it dominated. Here is one example of how he contrasted the "Western" with the colonial relationship between the powerful and the weak [SAC editor inserted boldface] =  "In capitalist societies, the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal service, and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and good behavior -- all these esthetic expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably. In the capitalist countries, a multitude of moral teachers, counselors and "bewilderers" separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action, maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle-butts and napalm not to budge" [BNE:324-8 | PWT2:385-7 | UO titles by Fanon]

<>1960de:Geneva talks on nuclear testing recessed with little accomplishment, especially in USA election year in which John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) attacked Dwight Eisenhower for "missile gap", claiming incorrectly that USA had fallen behind USSR in intercontinental military capability
*--Inflation of threats to national security continued to prove an effective political ploy

<>1961:Africa | Ghana President Kwame Nkrumah wrote several books in which he laid out his anti-imperialist ideology
*1948:English Commission of Enquiry reported on some of the roots of the anti-imperialist movement that created independent Ghana [BNE:312-14]
*--Kenyan leader of the unsuccessful Mau Mau uprising against English imperialism, Waruhiu Itote, described his own anti-colonial education [BNE:314-17]
*1961:USA sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein [ID] published Africa: The Politics of Independence which established him as a major theorist of modern imperialism [ID] [Selections from his work in CCS:1153-64]
*--In this year, Soviet theorists explored relationship between war and revolution [Jaworskyj:586-94]
*--The traces of European imperialism lasted longer and stronger in Africa than in any other region (with the possible exception of Central America)

<>1961:German school teacher Hannah Vogt published The Burden of Guilt in order to fill the gap in school histories which had hitherto ignored the Nazi period [P20:311]

<>1961:English radical dissident and dramatist Raymond Williams published The Long Revolution in which he expanded on the standard European concepts of democratic revolution and industrial revolution by adding "cultural revolution" [CWC:592-623]

<>1961ja16:USA President Eisenhower's farewell address