<>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
\\
[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”
\\
*--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" [TXT] which laid out the urgent need to "contain" Soviet ambitions with firmness and clear adherence to the powerful principles of US life, all in anticipation of a time when the doomed Soviet experiment would surely collapse
*--Kennan's telegram was intended to promote a "civilian" strategic vision for the post-WW2 world [EG#1 with "UNO" LOOP] [EG#2] [EG#3] [EG#4] [EG#5]
*--However, in USA & elsewhere, it  brought to attention more militaristic visions of "The West" vs. "the Soviet Bloc" [EG#1] [EG#2] [EG#3] [EG#4] [EG#5]
*--Almost as if in response to Kennan, a Soviet diplomatic "big picture" quickly emerged
*--A year and a half after his "Long Telegram", Kennan's refined his message and broadcast it widely in his famous "Mr. X" article. But are there subtle shifts of position from the one to the other?

<>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
*1946:1949;  Perón speeches [SWH:392-7] 
*--Autarchic [stand-alone or independent] and protectionist economic policies as well as the pro-labor stance alienated USA

<>1946mr:Moscow | English charge d'affaires Frank Roberts telegraphed British Foreign Office, and later dispatched a copy of Kennan's "Long Telegram" and a statement [TXT] that he had collaborated in the composition of it [Kennan,Origins]

<>1946mr05:USA MO, Fulton | Winston Churchill delivered "Iron Curtain" speech [TXT], which was taken my many as a sufficient strategic vision for international relations in the post-WW2 world
*--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]
*--UO website MAP moves dynamically through the main eras of Cold War in Western Europe [MAP]
\\
*--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)

<>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]
\\
*--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]
*--Compare the Novikov telegram with Kennan analysis (1) seven months earlier, and (2) nine months later

<>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]. Here we read about the culture industry that "its appeal to its own properly commercial nature [...] has long been a subterfuge that it uses to evade responsibility for lies." 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]
\\
*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 [Martin Walker paragraph on this issue]
*--Over $13B distributed in four years. European manufacturing rose 35% and agricultural output 10% above pre-WW2 levels
*--The Marshall Plan was a major component of post-WW2 European recovery
*--Within three years, a similar but less publicized and far more unilateral US program was introduced in Japan [ID]

<>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 social democratic or liberal policies of FDR on the domestic front, most particularly with respect to wage-labor
\\
*--Website review of USA labor law

<>1947jy:FoA. George Frost Kennan, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" (so-called "Mr. X" article) [TXT], a refinement of Kennan's "Long Telegram" with an eye to providing a strategic vision for the Marshall Plan
*--Compare Kennan's views with the views of Kennan's Soviet counterpart
\\
*--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 gravaman of Varga's strategic vision was 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
\\
*--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 (ITO), but that world institution was never created [ID]
*--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:+; France was rocked by a two-month general strike, provoked by post-war shortages
*1948jy:Italy in grip of general strike
*--The most ambitious and famous post-WW2 policy, the Marshall Plan [ID], was aimed to satisfy the needs of war-torn western European economies in such a way as to bolster standard free-market arrangements, in order to avoid any further wage-labor drift into radical social-democratic policy, certainly in order to block any drift toward Soviet-style policy. The growing military confrontation characteristic of the Cold War helped put a great social-economic crisis in the shade of a great military crisis. Fear of the "Soviet threat" masked an even deeper fear in European and North American financial circles that post-WW2 Europe might of its own political volition move toward radical policies, with or without subversive action on the part of the USSR. Repeated outbursts of popular discontent over the next few years required serious efforts to meet the needs of  wage-labor, and not just in "The West"

<>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]
\\
*--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 standards earlier common in "The West" [BMC4:658-9]
*1948: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 [ID] and Lao-Tse [ID] as well as Socrates [ID], Plato [ID], and Plotinus [ID]; heirs of Zarathustra [ID] and Muhammed [ID] as well as Elijah [ID] and Elishah and Peter [ID] and Paul [ID]; heirs of Shankara [ID] and Ramanujah [ID] as well as Clement [ID] and Origines [ID]; heirs of the Cappadocian Fathers of Orthodox Church [ID] as well as our African Augustine [ID] and our Umbrian Benedict [ID]; heirs of Ibn Khaldun [ID] as well as Bossuet [ID]; and heirs, if still wallowing in the Serbonian Bog of politics [EG], of Lenin [ID] and Gandhi [ID] and Sun Yat-Sen [ID] as well as Cromwell [ID] and George Washington and Mazzini [ID]" [Civilization on Trial:90]
*--What a playful but obviously serious ecumenical vision of a highly educated and multi-cultural future generation, feeding on world-wide traditions of inherited wisdom. Toynbee identified this future generation as a global, rather than Western, civilization. Apparently these future folks, once enrolled in a good university, will take and do very well in some version of lower-division "group-satisfying" world history
*--In a contrary direction, Toynbee here 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 Toynbee thought this post-WW2 era was a better time than after WW1 because the USA would now protect "The West", rather than scoot back home and turn its back on Europe [ID].
*--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 focused 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]
*--You might try F/The West/ on this SAC page to get some sense of the hypnotic ubiquity of the phrase
\\
*--Thomas C. Patterson's vigorously argued Inventing Western Civilization 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 one of the most enduring of the many strategic visions offered over the previous four years in the unfolding of the 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"
*--Nitze was a central figure in the creation at this time of "The Committee on the Present Danger" [Official W | W#1 | Unofficial W]
*--Dean Acheson [ID] admitted later that the administration felt justified in issuing such a report and mobilize public opinion to their cause 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
*--But, then, so did the Soviet defense budget grow, financed out of the hides of the Soviet nation and economy severely mauled by WW2 and much needing to devote resources to the task of post-war rebuilding

<>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]
*--Not one of the 200 CIA officers stationed in Korean during the 1950-1953 war spoke Korean [Weiner,Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA]
*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 "banality of evil" which can pop up under the "wrong circumstances" in human societies
*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 [ID]. In the 1960s it was developed in the theoretical works of Jűrgen Habermas [JANUS]. In the 1980s, political openness in its Russian form glasnost'  was tried by Soviet leader Gorbachev in his futile efforts at perestroika [ID]
*--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 and learned “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. Public activism, rather than long historical traditions ("Anglo-Saxon", "Aryan", etc.) was the only guarantee of liberty. Active exercise of political freedom, even where it has never existed before, was the crucial and pan-cultural prescription. Tyranny and plurality were in direct, eternal conflict with one another. 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 regions peripheral to "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]
*--Anti-Soviet dissent mounted after Stalin's death

<>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]

<>1953au09:Iran | Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh [ID] was arrested as a result of US and English intervention in Iranian domestic politics. Mossadegh had been duly appointed two years earlier as Prime Minister in the Iranian constitutional, parliamentary government. Shah Reza Pahlevi was the monarchical figurehead. Mossadegh was a forceful supporter of Iranian liberation from imperialist control, and his position found a lot of "democratic" support in the Iranian parliament. He worked to craft new and more equitable contract agreements with British Petroleum [BP] which enjoyed managerial control over the extensive and productive Iranian oil fields. BP refused. Mossadegh moved to seize all foreign-owned petroleum facilities in Iran and nationalize Iranian petroleum industries
*--The tenure of Prime Minister Mossadegh was one of great political agitation that reached far beyond the issue of fair agreements with big oil companies.. In the struggle, Mossadegh was briefly ousted by domestic political rivals. Popular pressure -- including that exerted by the large Iranian communist party Tudeh, as well as many other factions -- forced the Shah to bring Mossadegh back to power. In the aftermath, pressure built to strip power from the Shah and to enhance secular and representative governmental power. Many began to feel that a new and authentically independent and modern Iran was being built
*--CIA Operation Ajax, approved by US President Eisenhower and in collaboration with transnational petroleum corporations and the embattled Shah, conspired to overthrow the Mossadegh government, ostensibly to forestall further "communist takeover". This was an important moment in the early years of the Cold War, carried out by "The West" right under the nose of the USSR
*--An important moment, but was it a victory for "The West"? The modernizing government of Mossadegh was forcefully replaced by police-state policies, carried out by the notorious Iranian intelligence agency SAVAK. Under these new circumstances, influential Islamic clerics, including Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, turned against the Shah and were forced into exile. The ostensible victor, the Shah, was profoundly compromised in the minds of many Iranians
*--Modernization of Iran was not halted altogether, but the groundwork was laid for the rise in the 1970s of an anti-US [anti-"West"] Islamic (Shie) political opposition and the eventual creation of an  Iranian Islamic Republic, sharply hostile to "The West" and to the "satanic" forms of modernization for which it stood

<>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, but hailed as a hymn to freedom by all political factions, left to right, in "The West"

<>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, as seen over the previous 130 years of cadre party existence), 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#1] [W#2] (1913-1960) won the Nobel Prize for Literature
*--He wrote about the meaning of revolutionary dissent 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 [TXT] included a passage that must have been provoked in part by the alarming military-industrial inclinations of the newly elected USA President Kennedy. Eisenhower warned, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
*--The failure of the USSR to demobilize after 1945 and the US re-mobilization after 1947, and the joint evolution of unprecedented military-industrial complexes must be given full attention as a central element in the history of the Cold War. The Cold War served the interests of those who benefited from the military budgets of the two “superpowers”, those who held powerful positions of managerial authority within these systems of national defense and their various associated clients, dependent nation-states and corporate enterprises (some were “free-market” corporations, some were state companies run by managerial apparatchiki). It is best to define “military budget” more broadly than either USA or USSR wished. We cannot exclude espionage, secret police, pseudo-diplomatic representation, foreign aid, massive cooperative construction projects, GULag factory prisons, "space programs", and semi-entrepreneurial enterprise abroad. It is useful to include all agencies funded or contracted in state budgets, producing commodities and services associated with the nation-state in the wider world and involved in projection of nation-state power or reaping benefit abroad
*--Those in charge were a “neo-imperialistic” or "neo-mercantilistic" executive and managerial elite. [As a reminder of what these big trends, now labeled "neo", were originally, take a hop or two on the mercantilism LOOP in early modern European history] This new "neo" elite was directly or indirectly dependent on the budgets, authorities and opportunities generated by the contingencies of Cold War and the several "Third World" [ID] military adventures that picked up in intensity in the 1960s
*--The priorities of military-industrial complexes since the end of WW2 shaped the fate of all contending parties, their allies and subordinated peoples, and all those who were the targets or arena of their competition. [Continue the LOOP on "national security threat"]
*--Much as Khrushchev did five years earlier [ID],so also did Eisenhower now unintentionally embolden a growing culture of dissent =
*--In the very year of Eisenhower's speech, wartime military-industrial administrative culture was lampooned in USA author Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 [W]. Heller saw that the actions of those in charge were motivated not by the widely evoked ideals of “freedom” or “democracy” or “equality” or “liberation”, but by the sordid and laughably petty interests embedded in his characters’ military-industrial institutions and authority. However outrageous the lampoon, Heller was pointing his finger at one anatomical feature of the very same elephant that his contemporaries, Serbian statesman and theorist Milovan Djilas [ID] and English pundit George Orwell [ID] described. Neither Orwell nor Djilas had an ounce of Heller's hearty levity
*--In this year also, USA economic historian David Granick published The Red Executive: A Study of the Organization Man in Soviet Industry [TXT], where he found surprising similarities in the managerial styles of the two cold-war industrial economies
*--Europeans caught between the two superpowers now began to chafe. See all introductory material and text to p. 36 in Alva Myrdal, The Game of Disarmament: How the United States and Russia Run the Arms Race (1976). Myrdal served as Swedish Ambassador to several countries and was a leading figure in the global movement for disarmament during the Cold War. In 1982, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for her disarmament work. Website biography
*--English historian and social critic, E. P. Thompson, Beyond the cold war: A new approach to the arms race and nuclear annihilation (1982)
*----------. The heavy dancers
*--The apprehension that Europe was destined to fall under the power of the two peripheral giants, Russia and USA, had been a theme of European diplomatic and theoretical discussion since the 19th century. The way an arms race ("balance of power") ought to work was also explored prior to WW1
*--Military-industrialism was becoming a global phenomenon
*--The famous "Sixties" [1960s] were a feature of world history = Growing unease with overweening managerial military and bureaucratic control over national life fed a growing mood of dissent in "The West" as well as in "The East"
\\
*--A. W. De Porte, Europe between the Superpowers: The Enduring Balance (1979, 1986)
*--See the chapters by M. Reich on USA and V. Aspaturian on USSR in Steven Rosen, ed., Testing the Theory of the Military-industrial Complex (1973)

<>1961mr:Geneva talks renewed but broke down quickly

<>1961ap:Cuba repulsed USA CIA sponsored invasion at Bay of Pigs

<>1961ap:Moscow, Mayakovskii square | First arrest in connection with the illegal reading of poetry. The Soviet dissent movement broke into the open

<>1961my04:Soviet law vs. "parasites" [SGv:301-3]. The struggle against dissent also broke into the open

<>1961je:Vienna Summit Meeting | President JFK clashed with First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR ("the Soviet ruler") Nikita Khrushchev

<>1961jy:Berlin | JFK delivered speech announcing US military buildups, adding "Ich bin ein Berliner" ["I am a jelly roll" was the waggish translation popular at the time]

<>1961au:USSR announced plan for atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons

<>1961au13:Berlin wall under construction

<>1961se:USA announced underground nuclear testing

<>1961oc:Communist Party congress22; remarkable new political party program announced by Khrushchev [SGv:188-206]
*--The Party ideologists were exploring the question of dictatorship and the state in the time of transition from Socialism to Communism [Jaworskyj:580-5] Compare with a discussion of this topic nearly forty years earlier

<>1962:USSR | Novocherkassk wage-laborers staged a successful general strike against managerial authorities [Derluguian,"Contradictions":14]

<>1962:USA environmental consciousness raised by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring

<>1962je20:USA-USSR presidents Kennedy and Khrushchev agreed to create "hotline" telephone connection

<>1962se08:Cuba, Havana harbor | USSR unloaded medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBM). Beginning of "Cuban Missile Crisis" [W]
*--Tensions between USA and Cuba had intensified in the three-plus years since Fidel Castro's successful revolution in Cuba
*--But first a curious cultural interlude =

<>1962se12:1962oc09; Moscow & Leningrad | After 48 years in west European and USA emigration (since 1914), Igor Stravinsky made a triumphal return to his homeland, Russia, with his wife, Vera, and chronicler Robert Craft [Craft, Stravinsky, Chronicle...:313-42]
*--Stravinsky lived the last decades of his life in Los Angeles = KNIGHT LIBRARY HOLDINGS
*--In some ways the Russian visit was the crowing moment in an international career that had opened with a bang a half-century earlier
*--Now back to the "Cuban Missile Crisis" =

<>1962oc22:USA imposed blockade on Cuba. If one rocket released in W. Hemisphere, USA would attack USSR. Squadrons of B-52s, w/ hydrogen weapons flew to tactical positions; nuclear submarines trained Polaris missiles on USSR; USA army prepared Cuban invasion. Twenty-five USSR ships approached Cuba. Suddenly all stopped but one, an oiler. JFK let it pass

<>1962oc28:Khrushchev announced dismantling of missiles in Cuba. USA reciprocated by removing some missiles from Turkey
*--USA settled into tense but largely peaceful relationship to the Cuban revolution, now secure after three years in power

<>1962no:1975;COLD WAR era of dissent. USSR and USA "Sixties", a dozen years of domestic social, political and cultural dissent; era of "civil rights" and "human rights" movements
\\
*1950s:1960s; USA Afro-American civil rights movement, Zinn, ch17 ("Or Does It Explode"):435-59

<>1962no:USSR dissenter Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich [TXT] with official approval. On the basis of personal experience in post-WW2 Soviet prison camps, Solzhenitsyn described life in the infamous GULag [ID] 

<>1962no23:Nikita Khrushchev split Communist Party apparat [bureaucracy] [SGv:214]

<>1963:Nikita Khrushchev on literature and the arts [RRC1,3:704-8]

<>1963ja:French President Charles de Gaulle vetoed English application for EEC membership. Nationalism blocked evolution of the European Union [EU]

<>1963au06:USA, USSR, and England signed treaty banning nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater

<>1963au28:USA dissent figure and civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech [TXT]

<>1963no22:Dallas TX | US President JFK assassinated

<>1964:USA NYC | Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington, Political Power: USA/USSR
*--On task of comparing the two superpowers [excerpted TXT]
*--Of especial interest is the definition of what proponents called "The Theory of Convergence" [TXT], followed in the final section of the book by the authors' refutation of that idea [TXT]
*--Devised in the 1950s, the theory held the optimistic view that modernization would force the USSR to become like "The West". The transformative power of industrialization was at the center of this idea [TXT], and these authors harbor a hedged affection for technocratic managerialism [TXT]
*--Soviet ideologists rejected the theory of convergence [TXT] [More detail in Jaworskyj:529-38]
*--Over the years the idea that "convergence" might tend toward making USA like the USSR inspired outrage among some USA citizens [EG]
*--With no questions asked, Brzezinski and Huntington presumed that the comparative welfare of the US and Soviet populations was a vital measure of comparative quality of the two systems.  It had taken a century, but welfare was now a nearly universally accepted legitimate function of government. However, the legacy of "Social Darwinism" [ID] lived on....
*--Here are several other especially interesting points of comparison in Political Power =

  • Agriculture (ch. 7:301-330)
  • Military/civilian conflict = Marshal Zhukov vs. Politbiuro & General MacArthur vs. President Truman (ch. 8:331-65)
  • Table 153: Primary occupations of top political leadership
  • Table 183: Turnover at the top
  • Table 231: Major policy innovations, 1945-1963
  • Table 302: Grain production
  • Table 303: Man hours and productivity
  • Pages 439-40: Soviet and American Societies in general statistical terms
\\
*--GO 1927de02 for comparisons of USSR and USA economic systems
*--Economic Comparisons, USA-USSR: Population and Area, Basic Production, Exports, Levels of Living, Military (1958)
*--Gail W. Lapidus and Guy Swanson, eds., State and Welfare, USA/USSR: Contemporary Policy and Practice | See especially Joseph Berliner, "Comparison of Social Welfare Systems":1-13 and Alex Inkeles, "Rethinking Social Welfare: The United States and the USSR in Comparative Perspective":383-457
*--Urie Bronfenbrenner with the assistance of John C. Condry, Jr., Two Worlds of Childhood: U.S. and U.S.S.R. (1970). On comparative family and education, pp. xi-xxviii, 1-5; especially from the final section of ch5 ("Soviet Upbringing Revisited") to the end]
*--Paul Hollander, Soviet and American Society: A Comparison (2nd ed. 1978). Intro (ix-xxxi) addresses problem of Cold War outlook, problems of anti-Soviet bias, and antagonistic attitude toward the 1960s era of dissent (USA student movement). This widely-read book was a "Time/Newsweek" level of commentary on certain quotidian themes of USA political-economic comparison (cf. p. xxv). Weak comparison or exploration of shared experiences, more a skein of personal opinions on supposed key features of contemporary USA and USSR, seen solely within the Cold War framework [cf. p. 82, and Perceptions:3-36 and Conclusions:374-405]. This book is a classic example of US "cold-war" narrative. Should be compared with Soviet "cold-war" narrative, such as =
*--Vladimir Nikolaev, The Americans, as seen by a Soviet writer (1984). One implication of these pared narratives was that things are so bad over there, no sane person could complain about things over here
*--European Communities, Statistical Office, Basic Statistics of the Community: Comparison with Some European Countries, Canada, the United States of America and with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 31 volumes (1961-1994)
*--W. H. Parker, The Superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union Compared (LND:1972)
*--American Bar Association, A Contrast Between the Legal Systems in the United States and in the Soviet Union (1968)
*--For a later legal comparison in the same celebratory vein, see Arpad Kadarkay, Human Rights in American and Russian Political Thought (1982)
*--Remember Custine, Tocqueville, Haxthausen, List, Marx, Weber, Keynes, and Toynbee earlier

<>1964jy03:USA President Lyndon Johnson signed civil rights legislation
*--Civil rights dissent intensified, and Alabama Governor George Wallace reacted [W]

<>1964jy15:Nikita Khrushchev’s agriculture reform [SGv:370-5]

<>1964jy23:French President Charles de Gaulle delivered his tenth press conference:  "In discussing Europe and in trying to distinguish what it should be, it is always necessary to ascertain what the world is. | At the end of the last World War, the distribution of forces in the world was as simple, as brutal, as possible. It appeared suddenly at Yalta [ID]. Only America and Russia had remained powers, and all the more considerable powers in that all the rest found themselves dislocated, the vanquished engulfed in their unconditional defeat and the European victors destroyed to their foundations. | For the countries of the free world, threatened by the Soviets' ambition, American leadership could then seem inevitable. Of all the countries of the free world, the New World was the great victor of the war. [... However, the world has changed since 1945. The result is this: ] the division of the world into two camps led by Washington and Moscow respectively corresponds less and less to the real situation. With respect to the gradually splitting totalitarian world, or the problems posed by China, or the conduct to be adopted toward many countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, or the remodeling of the United Nations Organization [UNO] that necessarily ensues, or the adjustment of world exchanges of all kinds, etc., it appears that Europe, provided that it wishes it, is henceforth called upon to play a role which is its own" [based on translation in BNE:329-34]

<>1964au05:Tonkin Gulf resolution [TXT] followed from false claims by US military and President Johnson that US warships were under attack from North Vietnam. After a decade of heavy involvement in the politics and economy of the South, including sending large contingencies of "advisers" to the South and engineering a recent bloody coup d'etat, US involvement in the civil war between the North and the South escalated into a full-blown "Vietnam War"
*--The war was often justified by what was called the "domino theory", i.e., if Vietnam fell to Communism (that is, to competitors with American imperial power), then other US possessions might soon fall. Compare this theory with 19th century theories
*-- 1965:1968; Eyewitness accounts of war [Eye:668-76]

<>1964oc:China detonated its first nuclear device

<>1964oc15:Moscow | With the dismissal of Khrushchev [1964oc17:Pravda announcement in ORW:280-3], Leonid Brezhnev became First Secretary [General Secretary] and held that post until 1982, bringing an end to the era of Khrushchev "thaw" and opening the eighteen-year period called the "Brezhnev Era", or "Generation of Victors" (remembering World War Two), or "Era of Stagnation [zastoi]".
\\
*--Kerblay,Mikhail Gorbachev:12

<>1964no16:Communist Party apparat restored [SGv:214-23]

<>1965:Dominican Republic briefly occupied by USA military

<>1965wi:Russian dissident poet Joseph Brodsky on trial [Eisen:60-77]
*--Brodsky later emigrated to the USA and served for a while as US poet laureate
*--Compare with Mstislav Rostropovich who became conductor of US National Orchestra in WDC
*--Consider also Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author and ethicist, who lived for years in USA exile

<>1965fe27:USA State Department bulletin "AGGRESSION FROM THE NORTH" [TXT] [TXT] (mr22:published), about Vietnam War
*--In this year, Malcom McLean’s NC-based container shipping company contracted with the US government to transform the method by which multiple tons of war materiel were delivered to a new Vietnam container port built on Cam Ranh Bay
*--For a decade, McLean had been revolutionizing industrial shipping. Before his container ships, it cost almost $6/ton to load a cargo ship. After, it cost less that sixteen cents/ton. Old industrial docks withered away, along with the huge army of longshoremen required by pre-container technology. The largest land-based transportation device was a coal train capable of shipping 23,000 tons. McLean’s container ships were capable of transporting three or four times that weight. Later developments allowed up to 4200 semi-truck-trailer sized containers to be loaded on one vessel. Fuel consumption of sea-going ships is not affected by cargo tonnage, so the more on board, the cheaper per-unit shipping costs
*--Global trade was utterly transformed [ID]. The US military-industrial complex contributed to the evolution of world trade. The containers emptied at Cam Ranh Bay were brought back via new container ports in Japan, where they were filled with the first splashes of what soon became a tsunami of Japanese goods hitting the US shore
\\
*--Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

<>1965mr24:Leonid Brezhnev criticized Nikita Khrushchev's agriculture reform [SGv:376-9]
*--The twelve-year Khrushchev era was quickly put aside

<>1965ap27:French President Charles de Gaulle criticized USA dominance over European policies. "In the end, our reappearance as a nation with free hands obviously alters the global context which, since Yalta [ID], seemed henceforth limited to two partners. But since the liberty, equality, and fraternity of peoples decidedly do not profit from this partition of the universe into two hegemonies, and, thus, two camps, a different order and a different equilibrium are necessary for peace."
*--In these days, he criticized USA policy in Vietnam and announced withdrawal from the NATO military alliance [CWC:550-3]

<>1965se:USSR Central Committee accepted economic reform package created by Evsei Liberman and sponsored by Andrei Kosygin. Liberman was the author of Economic methods and the effectiveness of production [Ekonomicheskie metody povysheniia effektivnosti obshchestvennogo proizvodstva] (1972). These reforms were linked to continued agriculture reform but failed to get to the root of the problems = incentives
*1966:Planning, Profit and Incentives in USSR 2v
\\
*1987no02:KIARS, Archie Brown drew parallel between Gorbachev [ID] and Kosygin economic policies

<>1965se:1966fe:USSR | Arrest and then trial of Andrei Siniavskii and Yulii Daniel for slandering the USSR in their writings; Soviet dissent deepened
\\
Wagar:173

<>1966:USSR Decree on the Structure and Staffing of the Central Apparatus of the Council for Religious Affairs of the Council of Ministers [PS&C:305]

<>1967:1972; USSR dissent movement into high gear, with accent on overweening statist policies and "Human Rights" violations in the Soviet Union
*--Soviet leaders were inclined to blame these growing protest movements throughout eastern Europe on an insidious influence of "the decadent West"
*--The “Western” establishment frequently blamed its own dissent movements -- e.g., civil rights movements, anti-Vietnam war protest and even organizations of wage-laborers and their activities -- on the insidious influence of "international communism". This was the tactic of J. Edgar Hoover, for more than three decades Head of the USA Federal Bureau of Investigation. This was the tactic of political figures like US Senator Jessie Helms who, much like Hoover, described the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King as communist inspired
*--Whereas Cold-War pundits preferred to see dissent in the USSR and its satellites as a moral condemnation of Soviet socialism, they never gave serious consideration to the possibility that dissent in their own midst might represent a moral condemnation of "The West". They had to deny, as did Soviet propagandists, that dissent and opposition in their nation could possibly be of domestic origin. For these US pundits, resistance to the status quo had to be alien, had to be “un-American”
*--Another tactic was employed in the USA by those who felt most righteous about Soviet dissent. They switched off moral compasses and averted their eyes from similar forms of dissent in their own midst. They turned their gaze from the protest literature, the bloody streets and the burning buildings in their own US cities. They were able to make judgments about Soviet abuses in a tightly contained ethical vacuum
*--Possibly the most interesting tactic was the Soviet effort to make cynics of all Soviet citizens about issues of governmental abuse. This they did by emphasizing the falseness of liberalism, especially its claim in The West to have created democratic societies. In essence, by the 1970s, Soviet presentation of public suffering in "the capitalist world" was designed to say this = "Even in the world of liberal civil rights and the long traditions of democratic rule, life can be unbearably cruel and exploitative. What makes you think it should be better here?" Political cynicism is a great boon to undemocratic powers that be, even greater than outright support. Resignation is much desired. Support is of no significance, it is in fact an annoyance in an undemocratic environment
*--Soviet and Western propagandists most often worked without any serious or even honest bench-marks to guide them in their judgments about increasing levels of irresponsible and abusive power and increasing instances of popular resistance in the modern world. It suited their polemical ends to insist on their own unblemished superiority and the malevolent decrepitude of others. Much of the great moral stature of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn derived from his extreme and “old-fashioned” but evenhanded condemnation of Soviet and Western culture. Solzhenitsyn had his particular take on the global discontent that erupted in the late 1960s. US authorities loved him best when he lambasted the USSR. Russians found some pleasure in those moments when he condemned The West.
*--See Ali Tariq, ed., 1968: Marching in the Streets, especially pp.20-23 (USSR dissent) and the pages that put the spring and summer of 1968 in full global context, especially the months of April (pp. 65-87) and August (pp. 121-163)
*--Rodger Streitmatter, Voices of Revolution: Dissident Press in America (2001)
*--The optimistic 1950s idea of "convergence" of the two Cold-War super powers had begun to realize itself in some decidedly dark ways, as in the case of dissent which mounted in reaction to deplorable state policies pursued by both of the super powers, USSR and USA

<>1967:France | Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber warned of the US threat to Europe in Défi américain [translated in 1969 as The American Challenge]. "Fifteen years from now it is quite possible that the world's third greatest industrial power, just after the United States and Russia, will not be Europe, but American industry in Europe"
*--Dissent from American hegemony gained a new international dimension, and it was being felt at home as well

<>1967:USA | Canadian literary scholar and wildly insightful and shameless pop-arts media critic, Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) [ID] published The Medium is the Massage. He reached the peak of his fame and influence in this year, a fame characteristic of the era known as "The Sixties". Major works =
*1951:The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of industrial Man
*1962:The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man [W]
*1964:Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
*1967:A balanced critical study reflected a wide range of contemporary opinion, positive and negative, with McLuhan responses: McLuhan: Hot and Cool (with a bibliography of his many and diverse writings up to 1967)
*1968:Harold Rosenthal, McLuhan: Pro and Con
*1969:London | Rebecca West delivered a cranky address on the implications of McLuhan [TXT] and other "cool", "hip" ("hippy") or "counter-culture" figures, for example, Oregon's Ken Kesey [TXT]
*--Here are some McLuhan aphorisms =

  • "We are increasingly living in a global village."
  • "People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath."
  • "With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is being sent."
  • "One of the nicest things about being big is the luxury of thinking little."
  • "When a thing is current, it creates a currency."
  • "If it works, it's obsolete."
  • "Tomorrow is our permanent address."
  • "The peculiar and abstract manipulation of information is a means of creating wealth."
  • "The medium is the message."
  • "The medium is the massage."
  • "The user is the content."
  • "Television is teaching all the time. It does more educating than all the schools and all the institutions of higher learning."
  • "We look at the present through a rearview mirror; we walk backwards into the future."
  • "The future of the book is the blurb."
  • "The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially."
  • "Technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented."
  • "Once we surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly."
\\
*--[W#1] [W#2] [W#3] [W#4]

<>1967ap04:USA | Preacher and civil rights leader Martin Luther King delivered speech, "Beyond Vietnam". The speech not only specifically addressed the relevance of his Christian religion to US politics, it also linked international military aggression with domestic injustice [TXT]
*--Thus opened the final year of Martin Luther King's life

<>1967my:Yuri Andropov replaced Semichastnyi as head of KGB [Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti or Committee of State Security]. Andropov brought a new toughness to the job, but also a new understanding and political practicality
*--In dealing with dissent, the fist was still in evidence, but it was now lightly gloved. Andropov had the reputation of being an intellectual [intelligent]

<>1967au16:USA GA Atlanta | Martin Luther King delivered the Annual Report at the 11th Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, "Where Do We Go From Here?" [W]
*--Dissent was becoming more than a domestic problem for the USA and the Soviet Union. Dissent took on international dimensions

<>1968ja:Czechoslovak Communist Party elevated Alexander Dubcek to the post of First Secretary [General Secretary] and introduced changes that came to be called "Socialism with a human face"
*--Twenty years after falling within the Soviet sphere of influence, Czech and Slovak independence began to assert itself
*--The fragrance of internal reform rising out of Soviet-dominated border states refreshed all varieties of dissent
*1968ap:Czechoslovak Communist Party "Action Program" [P20:362]
*--The Prague spring 1968 : A national security archive documents reader
*--PRAGUE SPRING [videorecording (29 min.)]. Dubcek's attempt to liberalize Communist rule in Czechoslovakia resulted in Soviet tanks in the streets of Prague. This program presents both the political "detente" behind Brezhnev's position and the dissent that was silenced within the Warsaw Pact alliance. In addition to extensive archival footage, contemporary interviews with leading Dubcek supporters and opponents provide insights into the dissent that arose in the USSR's Eastern Bloc in the 1960s

<>1968mr31:USA WDC National Cathedral | Martin Luther King delivered a sermon, "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution", which gave unmistakable sign that he was beginning to see the domestic civil rights movement in a much broader context of economic justice. The middle sections of the sermon focused on the plight of the poor, whatever their race or color. F/poor/ [W]

<>1968ap03:USA TN Memphis | Civil rights leader, now increasingly a leading social-political critic and voice of national dissent, Martin Luther King, delivered his last sermon, "I've Been to the Mountain" [W]
*1968ap04:Martin Luther King assassinated in the prime of his life, just when his politics began to expand on the remarkable achievements as a leader of US civil rights movements over the previous 13 years
*1983:US Senator (NC) Jesse Helms led the unsuccessful fight to prevent creation of a national holiday in honor of civil rights dissident Martin Luther King. An aide in this fight later wrote a memoir of the event to justify Helms' antagonism to King [TXT]. Does this effort at justification suggest that Helms' antagonism to King was motivated only by "racism"? Specifically what was the political essence of Helms' antagonism, as recorded by his erstwhile aide? Anti-communism for years provided Helms a cover for his strong southern-style "anti-progressivism"
*2006ja16:Almost forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and a decade and a half after the collapse of the USSR, the US political "right" still pursued the question of King and the Communist menace = [TXT]
*--Debate on the meaning of MLK continued to rage into the 21st century [2001:TXT (before "9/11")] [2006:TXT]
\\
*2000ja18:PBS "Newshour" interviewed MLK biographer Michael Eric Dyson [W], author of I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.

<>1968ap:USSR | Chronicle of Current Events no1 appeared; Samizdat [underground, uncensored dissident publishing] under way

<>1968ap20:English conservative Enoch Powell addressed the problem of Bringing the Immigration Issue to the Center of Politics [P20:414]

<>1968my20:French youth leader and dissident Daniel Cohn-Bendit was interviewed for Le Nouvel Observateur by Jean-Paul Sartre about The French Student Revolt [P20:378]

<>1968jy15:Warsaw Meeting of Five Communist and Worker Parties urged Czechoslovak Central Committee to bring an end to liberal reforms, "To the Czechoslovak Communist Party Central Committee" [P20:364]

<>1968au:USSR invaded Czechoslovakia to put down Dubcek liberalization, which was called the "Prague Spring" or "Socialism with a Human Face"
*--Warsaw Pact still restless

<>1968au:USA, Chicago National Nominating Convention of the Democratic Party | Days of rioting in the streets gave concentrated expression to broadening atmosphere of dissent and provided opportunity for significant deployment of paramilitary police units against protesters. In addition to everything else, this was a major media event. USA could not ignore mounting disorder in this social/political life
\\
[W]

<>1969:Soviet dissident intellectual Len Karpinskii wrote Words are Also Deeds [CVG:297]

<>1969fe07:Decree on Tightening Control over the Implementation of Legislation on Religious Cults (esp. Islamic organizations in Uzbekistan) [PS&C:306-11]
*--Certain Islamic practices were offences against Soviet legality (blood feuds and various courtship and marriage customs) [PS&C:312-14]

<>1969no27:USSR kolkhoz (collective farm) law [SGv:383-404]

<>1970fe23:Leonid Brezhnev law vs. "parasites" [SGv:312-6]
*--In these days, reform-minded and mildly dissident intellectual Aleksandr Tvardovskii was dismissed as editor of Novyi mir [New World]
*--Novelist Yurii Trifonov (1925-1981) was an active contributor to Novyi mir. He won the Stalin Prize for his 1950 novel Studenty. Yet his writings increasingly expressed a subtle dissident attitude. He was at this time completing a historical novel about Andrei Zheliabov, a terrorist member of the populist party Narodnaia volia [ID]. In 1973 Trifonov's novel appeared under the title Neterpenie [Impatience]. Populist terrorists had been from the very beginning the object of high scorn on the part of Russian Marxists. In the 1930s, Stalin had furthermore declared that the study of revolutionary populism should cease. Teaching that history taught the virtues of underground and sometimes violent opposition to oppressive central governmental authority. For reasons not fully explained, Stalin found that dangerous
*--Now Trifonov joined the many scholars and cultural figures in this era of dissent who were re-thinking the populist legacy, as well as the Stalinist legacy and the qualities of their own time
*--Soviet media given list of censored topics in the open press and radio or TV broadcasts [PS&C:140-2]
 \\
*--Carolina DeMaegd-Soëp, Trifonov and the Drama of the Russian Intelligentsia (1990)
*--David Gillespie, Iurii Trifonov: Unity through Time (1992)
*--Nina Kolesnikoff, Yury Trifonov: a Critical Study (1991)

<>1970mr05:USSR/USA Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons went into effect [TXT]

<>1970oc08:Canada, Quebec | Front de Libération du Quebec (Quebec Liberation Front; FLQ) broadcast over CBC/Radio-Canada a manifesto declaring federal independence of their province from Canada
*--This can be thought of as a North America variety of national minority independence movement and dissent
*--Primary and secondary sources on FLQ [W]

<>1970de:Polish industrial wage-labor disturbances brought workers into the ferment of intellectual dissent
*--Gierek replaced Gomulka as First Secretary
*--In the following decade of Soviet "stagnancy" [zastoi], the nations of the Warsaw Pact grew relatively quiet, regrouping, making adjustment toward a time of national assertiveness

<>1971:USA political philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002) published A Theory of Justice. Some think Rawls was the most important liberal political theorist of the 20th century
\\
Here is a SAC page summary of the main ideas of John Rawls

<>1971ap23:USA dissent against Vietnam War intense. John Kerry testified before the US Senate. Army veterans took stand against war [Eye:677-9]

<>1972:USSR prelude to Gorbachev’s perestroika visible in growth of voluntary societies and other social organizations
\\
*--Dobrovol’nye obshchestva and Obshchestvennye organizatsii. See also Kudriavtsev and Yampol’skaia

<>1972mr:China | US President Richard Nixon visited

<>1972my26:Moscow summit meeting, after two and a half years of negotiation, the first round of SALT was brought to a conclusion when President Nixon and General Secretary Brezhnev signed the ABM Treaty and the Interim Agreement on strategic offensive arms
*--More on nuclear arms control treaties = U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency [TXT]
*--A new era of COLD WAR Détente suggested possibility of closer and more peaceful relations between USA and USSR
*--However, forces on both sides, whose interests had become so dependent on Cold War procurement and administration, resisted. On the US side, Paul Nitze and Albert Wohlsetter (a University of Chicago professor) formed “Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy” which recruited Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle into an active role. Their objective was to resist arms reduction
\\
*--A specialist on international arms control, Richard Rhodes [ID], says Paul Nitze “unleashed a team of sorcerer’s apprentices whose trail of wreckage extends well into the present [21st] century”
*--Henry Trofimenko and Pavel Podlesny, USSR-USA: Lessons of Peaceful Coexistence, Fifty-five years of Soviet-American Relations

<>1972su:USA-USSR agreed to a massive export of wheat to the USSR. Grain merchants made millions, farmers continued to suffer. Cooperation on the world grain market enhanced by new dominant role of corporate "agribusinesses" in USA
*--USSR worked through Eksportkhleb [Export-grain], and dealt with USA departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Transportation, as well as the State Department. The six great transnational or global grain companies were involved = Cargill (Minneapolis), Cook (Memphis), Continental, Dreyfus, Garnac and Bunge [Bunge hired US Agriculture Department official Clifford Pulvermacher to represent it (Solkoff:50)]
*1975: The six big grain corporations controlled 95% of the world $11b/year grain export business
*1978:Global Grain-trade routes [Compare grain-trade routes from one century earlier]
*--Overseas grain trade arose over a century earlier as a startling consequence of the industrial revolution, when industrializing and urbanizing nations (for example, England) ceased to be able to feed themselves without import of essential foodstuffs
*--USA rural farm population burgeoned after the 1862 Homestead Act, now the number of "farmers" was in steep decline. As everywhere else, economic modernization resulted in the complete transformation of USA rural life
\\
*--Dan Morgan, Merchants of Grain (1979) puts these events in world historical perspective
*--Joel Solkoff's The Politics of Food: The Decline of Agriculture and the Rise of Agribusiness in America (1985) puts a political edge on this story
*--Robert B. Porter, The US-USSR Grain Agreement (1984)
*--John De Pauw, Soviet-American Trade Negotiations (1979)
*--Philip J. Funigiello, American-Soviet Trade in the Cold War (1988)
*--Nish Jamgotch, ed., Sectors of Mutual Benefit in U.S.-Soviet Relations (1985)

<>1972se:Georgia [Gruziia] | Eduard Shevardnadze became First Secretary [General Secretary] of the Georgia [Gruziia] Central Committee

<>1973:Germany brought end to decade-old policy of allowing "temporary" immigration of foreign "Gastarbeiters" ("guest workers", largely Turk, but also Spanish, Italian, Greek and Yugoslav)
*--By the 21st century, 10% of the united German population were such guest workers
*--Zehra Onder described Muslim-Turkish Children in Germany: Sociocultural Problems [P20:418]
*1993oc:German journalist Joachim Krautz tried to explain The Grapes of Neglect--Violence and Xenophobia in Germany [P20:422]

<>1973se11:CHILE | General Augusto Pinochet with support of USA executive branch, via its CIA, seized power, killing elected President Salvador Allende. An economic boom followed this coup d'etat [Documents]
*--THE PINOCHET CASE | Videotape with Chilean judge Patricio Guzmán who, against all odds, fought to bring Pinochet to justice

 <>1974fe:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn deported from USSR, became émigré and soon settled in USA
*--Solzhenitsyn published abroad the first of three volumes of his Gulag Archipelago. This massive and overpowering literary exposé informed the world of some awful truths about Soviet labor camps. These truths were known before in broad outline and by a relatively small number of specialists. Now, largely from memory of what he saw and what fellow prisoners told him, Solzhenitsyn brought this incredible 20th-century experience to millions of readers, and in numbing, relentless detail
*--Solzhenitsyn had a word or two of warning for his hosts in exile, Warning to the West (1976). Solzhenitsyn's 22-year career was not over. He eventually returned to his native land after the collapse of the USSR and died there in the era of Vladimir Putin
*--Soviet dissent was becoming an international scandal
*--Lev Razgon remembered his days in the Stalinist Gulag, True Stories [P20:135]
*--Two decades after the death of Joseph Stalin, Soviet political culture still struggled to expose and cast off all vestiges of "Stalinism" with its roots in the earliest institutional history of Bolshevik/Communist Party rule

<>1974au28:USSR passed new passport rules [PS&C:167-75]

<>1974au:WDC, White House | US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned appointed President Gerald Ford that he and his influential White House advisers -- including Donald Rumsfeld -- were making a grave mistake to put pressure on the unstable Iranian Shah to lower oil prices. Kissinger feared the collapse of the Shah and the rise of yet another "radical regime" in Iran. "We can't tackle him without breaking him", said Kissinger. The warning was not heeded. The Ford administration greased the skids for the fall of the  Iranian Shah
\\
*2008oc16:Middle East Journal interviewed scholar Andrew Scott Cooper [W]

<>1975:French philosopher and social historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
*1982:Progress report on study of "power" [CWC:583-92]
*--Noam Chomsky and others in debate with Foucault
*--A "home-page" website with links to etexts
\\
*--[W]

<>1975:Saigon fell to North Vietnamese military forces, marking end of Vietnam War. Vietnam came under unified governance with its capital in the North, in Hanoi. Saigon was renamed "Ho Chi Minh City"
*--Vietnam now on the road to recovery, having finally slipped the yoke of imperialist dominion over the previous 85 years
*--Thus developments in Vietnam can be understood as an episode in the rise and fall of European mercantilist imperialism over the previous 300+ years, though it could be said that European imperialist traditions lived on

<>1975oc:Soviet nuclear physicist and prominent dissent activist Andrei Sakharov awarded Nobel Peace Prize one year after Sakharov Speaks was published [DSC:17-25]
*--The Soviet KGB kept a detailed dossier on Sakharov, The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov [2005oc20:NYR:18-20 review article]
*--As the Vietnam war came to a close for the USA, and as the USSR sank further into the Brezhnev era of "stagnancy", the dozen years of most intense dissent waned [You could consult the Kimball essay on dissent [TXT] or return to it if you hopped onto the dissent LOOP from there]
*--Into the 1980s, dissent continued to play a role in global events

<>1975no:France, the United States, Britain, Germany, Japan and Italy met to discuss economic policies of the "economically most advanced countries". They were joined by Canada at the San Juan, Puerto Rico Summit of 1976, and by the European Community at the London Summit of 1977. Soon they called themselves G7 [W]
*--GO 1998my15:my17

<>1976:USA | "Two hundred years after declaring its independence from the Old World in order to ‘be a standing monument and example for the aim and [194/196] imitation of like peoples of other countries’, the United States had left the protective shell of its exceptionality, adapting itself to the anarchic and competitive global community of which it now was an integral part". USA now a leader in the "world revolution of Westernization", "at a price to itself" [195]. "It had also become more like its archrival, the Soviet Union...." [196]. Soviet contributions to 20th c. world revolution:232-5 [Theodore Von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization: The Twentieth Century in Global Perspective (Oxford: 1987)]

<>1976:USA CIA Director, George H. Bush created what came to be known as “Team B”, staffed by private “experts” picked by the Nitze group and vetted by US President Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff, Dick Cheney, and the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld
*--Nitze's quarter-century influence on US military policy continued. CIA influence had much the same duration
*1976de:"Team B", headed by Harvard Professor Richard Pipes, reported a month after Republican Party defeat in US national elections. Team B asserted that the USSR was hell-bent on world conquest. Aggressive preemptive action on the part of the USA, not excluding use of nuclear weapons, was necessary. Newly elected President Jimmy Carter rejected this report and disbanded Team B, winning an enduring hatred from the "military-industrialist" camp
*--Team B was disbanded, but its core membership regrouped as a revived “Committee on the Present Danger” [W] and attracted as members Norman Podhoretz, Edward Teller, William Casey, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick. They fabricated the notion that the USSR was now able to make a first strike and wipe out the USA, unless a huge military build-up were initiated by the USA
\\
*--Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA [Summit] believes she has shown, point by point, that Team B was wrong in all its main findings
*--See also Richard Rhodes [ID]

<>1977:USA signed treaty vowing eventually to relinquish Panama Canal. Won praise for President Jimmy Carter in Latin America, but yet further serious enmity at home in the military-industrial community

<>1978:French sociologist and pundit Jacques Ellul published a defense of  "Western" moral values, The Betrayal of the West. Ellul did not reject other civilizations or extol Western Civilization. "In fact, I think it absurd to lay claim to superiority of any kind in these matters. What criterion would you apply? What scale of values would you use? I would add that the greatest fault of the West since the seventeenth century has been precisely its belief in its own unqualified superiority in all areas. || The thing, then, that I am protesting against is the silly attitude of western [NB! reluctance to capitalize in this case] intellectuals in hating their own world and then illogically exalting all other civilizations" [excerpts = PWT2:387-91]
*--UO holdings of Ellul publications

<>1979ap01:Iran declared itself an Islamic Republic after the Shah Reza Pahlavi was overthrown and went into exile. Ayatollah Khomeini returned after years in west European exile to lead the Islamic revolution
*1979no04:Iran, Tehran | Students seized US Embassy and took US diplomatic personnel hostage. More than fifty of them were held for 444 days, released, by secret agreement with representatives of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, only minutes after Reagan was inaugurated as US President

<>1978ap:Afghanistan coup d'état led by two pro-Soviet factions of People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan: Khalq ["the masses", rural based] and Parcham ["banner", urban based]. Afghanistan had for fifteen years moved closer to the USSR. The USSR was its biggest trading partner by a wide margin. Now political disorder and rivalry threatened that favorable position
*--"For many educated people in pre-modern societies, communism offered a way of both catching up with and resisting The West; and the ideology had a powerful, and often generous, sponsor in the Soviet Union. But the hasty, ill-adapted borrowings from Soviet communism -- the simplistic notion, for instance, of Afghans as feudal people who had to be turned into  proletarians -- more often than not imposed new kinds of pain and trauma...." [2001no15:NYR:19, Pankaj Mishra, "The Making of Afghanistan"]

<>1978ap12:USSR Extraordinary All-Union meeting approved new constitution

<>1979jy:USA President Carter and his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, took covert steps to involve America in Afghanistan disorder. They decided to stir the pot of troubles into which the USSR had fallen. They began to supply sophisticated military hardware to warlord factions ready to resist pro-Soviet authorities in Kabul. A Presidential Directive called for financial backing out of the US budget, administered by the CIA via the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. Supplemental budget was eventually found in the newly flourishing opium trade out of Afghanistan. All this was five months before the USSR invaded Afghanistan [1979de]
*1998ja15-21:Le Nouvel Observateur:76 interviewed Brzezinski = "We didn't push the Russians [i.e., USSR] to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would." As for the effect of all this on the Afghan people, Brzezinski said he regretted "having supported Islamic fundamentalism" and given "arms and advice to future terrorists", but "what is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?" [quoted in English translation in 2001no15:NYR:20]
*1980s:USA CIA Director William Casey committed huge sums to the support of a world-wide Islamic fundamentalist jihad against communism [Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987]
*--What are best termed Soviet-American "proxy wars" were already being fought in Angola, Somalia, and Ethiopia. Brzezinski's implied prescience of Soviet collapse was a post-facto rationalization of imperialist adventurism, such as came to dominate USA tactical behavior in the 1980s. Unfortunately, the sorrowful question -- Brzezinski's "what is most important to the history of the world?" -- was soon being asked all over the globe and by increasing numbers widely various peoples. Their widely various answers to the Brzezinski question shared at least one trait = they justified almost any extreme action

<>1979de:USSR intervened in Afghanistan, hoping to sustain its influence there and stifle expanding chaos. Airlift troops engineered a coup that brought the Parcham faction of the local Communist Party, led by Babrak Karmal, to power. Soviet soldiers killed Columbia University trained Hafizullah Amin (leader of the the other Communist faction, Khalq), and saw to his replacement by Mohammad Taraki
*--Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev committed to serious war. It lasted over nine years, until 1989fe, and over one million people were killed. Internationally negotiated USSR withdrawal was one of the important signs that the Cold War was winding down
*--On the day of the Soviet invasion, Brzezinski wrote to President Carter, "Now we can give the USSR its Vietnam War". Many compared Afghanistan War with the USA Vietnam War (which had its own deep historical roots). These two wars were "hot" moments in the "Cold" War, and both took place in what was called "The Third World" [ID] and were reminiscent of longer traditions of European imperialism
*--Just as in the case of USA in Vietnam, so also USSR in Afghanistan , Cold War hot-war militarism ended badly for all involved
\\
*--For comparison with the US Vietnam War, see Douglas A. Borer, Superpowers Defeated: Vietnam and Afghanistan Compared (1999)
*--William Zimmerman and Robert Axelrod, "The 'Lessons' of Vietnam and Soviet Foreign Policy" in World Politics 34, 1 (October 1981)
*--Also see Robert E. Harkavy, Lessons of Recent Wars in the Third World 2 vols. (skim intro, then let the index entries on "Afghan", "Soviet/Afghan", and "Vietnam" guide your reading)
*1989je11:NYT Magazine 138:60 [90 column inches] Peter P. Mahoney, "The Wounds of Two Wars: American Veterans of Vietnam, Russian Veterans of Afghanistan"

<>1979de03:Iran, under the leadership of Ayatollah...., put new constitution into effect, and that constitution served as the basis of the Islamic Republic politics and law into the 21st century
*--On the next day, Ayatollah affirmed and regularized the central role of a quasi-military/quasi-managerial organization, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, or Sepah. Hooman Majd (below) argued that Sepah has functioned as an Iranian version of the French E'cole Nationale d'Administration [ID]
\\
*--Ali Alfoneh, "The Revolutionary Guard's Role...." [W]
*--Hooman Majd, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ

<>1980au31:Poland | Gdansk industrial labor disturbance; an authentic labor union and movement called Solidarność [Solidarity], under leadership of shipbuilder Lech Walesa [Wałęsa, pronounced "vawENsa"] [W], forced government to sign agreement = (1) wage increases, (2) price rollbacks, (3) right to strike, (4) right to form labor unions, independent of the Polish Communist Party, (5) radio broadcasts of Catholic Mass
*--Inter-Factory Strike Committee of Gdansk Shipyard, The Twenty-One Demands [P20:369 | PWT2:410-13]
*--As in the longer history of European "civil society", labor organization played a leading role in the Warsaw Pact countries in the 1970s-80s
*--"Western" leaders who worked to undermine labor unions in their own countries applauded labor leaders in the Soviet sphere

<>1981de:Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law, briefly suppressing Polish wage-labor social mobilization, and the Solidarity movement
*--"Western" political leaders, many strongly opposed to wage-labor movements in their own countries, adopted Solidarity and applauded its organized resistance as the sign of the people's righteous resistance to Communist exploitation
*--Through the 1980s in USA, wage laborers witnessed a "sharp rise in the firing of pro-union activists during union organizing campaigns" [2007ja14:Report released by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, based on data from the National Labor Relations Board]
*1980s:English Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher [ID] remembered her victory over the great steel industry strikes [ID]  [P20:393]
*--Wage-labor interests experienced serious ups and downs in the decades after WW2
*--These trends continued into the following decades

<>1982:+; UNO took up question of "fourth world", the situation of indigenous minorities within nation-states dominated by majoritarian ethnic groups [W]

<>1982no:USSR | Yuri Andropov became First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party upon the death of Leonid Brezhnev.  “Stagnancy” [zastoi] obvious to all; need for reform pressing [Example of stagnancy in Eisen:54-9]
*--Nikolai Ryzhkov became a Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
*--Summary of whole period, 1982-1991 in Miller:38-52; use of KGB (which Andropov had recently headed) for reformist purposes against organized crime [mafiia], in Walker:139-53]

 

Return to top
Next SAC

|

|

|

|

|

|

|

|