The Cold War

II. Hegemonic War Strategy


A. Uneasy Allies--while the war was ostensibly fought to keep the “free world” from the iron fist of Nazi domination, it was also fought--perhaps largely fought--to ensure that the “great powers” maintained control of strategic locations. The “Three Great Powers” were very suspicious of one another, and each hoped to enhance their position in the postwar world.

1. Soviet Union--made several treaties with Nazi Germany before 1941 to gain territory on its western border (particularly the Ribbentrop-Molotov Treaty, where the two countries divided Poland between them). These deals left the Soviet Union vulnerable to attack, however, because Stalin misjudged Hitler’s ultimate intent--and ill-prepared for the Nazi attack when it came in 1941. The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the war from 1941 to 1944, when Allied forces launched the D-Day attack.



a) German SS forces were particularly savage, murdering Polish and Soviet political leaders in German-controlled territories; the Red Army paid back this debt in full in its 1944-1945 counterattack.




2. Great Britain --from the debacle at Dunkirk, Churchill concentrated most British efforts on maintaining control of the Mediterranean--and the Suez Canal, its link to the crown jewel of Britain’s colonial possessions.

a) Battle for North Africa (with US assistance)

b) “The Soft Underbelly of Europe”--Churchill insisted that before a second front was opened in western Europe that what he called the “soft underbelly”of the continent--though mountinous Italy, then attempt to attack Germany through the Alps--be exploited. This strategy had the effect of prolonging the conflict in Europe, I would argue. This campaign was undertaken despite pleas from the allied Soviet Union, which had been promised that the western front campaign would begin in early 1943.

3. United States--drawn into the conflict by the “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the US left much of the campaign planning in Europe to Great Britain, while it carried on against the Japanese in the Pacific.

a) US partially controlled Great Britain through supplying the country through the Lend-Lease Act, providing Great Britain with war material, food, and other provisions in exchange for naval bases and easy terms for other considerations

b) US also supplied Soviet Union with material through the Lend-Lease program, but not in the quantities or the favorable terms granted Great Britain.



B. Hegemonic Peace: Dividing the World--first at Tehran, and confirmed at Yalta and Potsdam, much of the world was divided into “spheres of influence,” where either the Soviet Union, Great Britain, or the United States would dominate. The “hot war” devolved in the postwar era into a “cold war” that each side tried to undermine through economic power and proxy wars.

1. Soviet Union--Stalin’s main objective was to create a “sphere of influence”--buffer states that would bear the brunt of any conventional attack on the Soviet Union from the West.

2. Great Britain--worked to maintain the antebellum status quo--but the two World Wars in the 20th century changed the financial landscape, shifting the balance of power from London to the United States. Great Britain never recovered from the destruction of the war--despite the Marshall Plan--and has largely served since the end of the war as a junior partner to the ambitions of the United States.

3. United States--the US emerged from the war as the dominant financial and industrial power in the world, with the ability to use this prowess (as well as its military might) to bend other to its will.


a) Marshall Plan--offered to countries of Europe to help them rebuild and recover from the war, introduced in1948; by 1952, every country that was a member of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation except had a GDP higher than its pre-war level except for Germany.

4. Big Three Conferences

a) Tehran (November 1943)--Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill met to discuss war strategy and postwar Europe. Stalin pressed his demand for a western front; Churchill and Roosevelt claimed casualties would be prohibitive, but promised an offensive by spring 1944.


b) Yalta (February 1945)--clear that Germany would shortly be defeated, as the Red Army was rolling westward. It was agreed that Germany would be divided among the Allies; but the Big Three leaders were also aware that the country that took control of Germany would be in the strongest position.


c) Potsdam (July 1945)--Roosevelt died in April 1945, and Churchill was turned out as prime minister after Germany’s defeat in May. Truman distrusted--and disliked--Stalin; when Truman received word of the successful Trinity test, he became more determined to keep the Soviet Union out of Asia.



C. Dropping the Bomb--numerous factors went into Truman’s decision to attack Japan with nuclear bombs

1. Revenge

a) Pearl Harbor “sneak attack”

b) Bataan and other wartime atrocities committed against prisoners of war.

2. Spare American lives that would be lost in attacking Japan

3. Racist feelings against Japan, exacerbated by the revenge factor

4. Keep Soviet Union out of Asia--and demonstrate the fate of the Soviet Union should it come into conflict with the US.

III. The Super Power Struggle

A. The Lone Super Power--as long as the US maintained sole possession of nuclear weapon technology, the US saw world relations in balance, because the “Soviet threat” could remain “contained.”


B. Soviet Union as a Nuclear Power--the US only remained the sole nuclear power until 1949, when the combination of independent work by Soviet scientists and espionage, the Soviets developed an atomic bomb of their own--resulting in near-panic in the US, and touching off a second Red Scare and marginalization of the left (again)



C. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)--the ability of the Soviet Union to create a nuclear weapon--and the reaction of the United States to that event--touched off the arms race, where each country attempted to manufacture enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the other if every attacked. This eventually led to a sort of stabilization of the situation, called Mutually Assured Destruction.


D. The Proxy Wars--while reaching this stabilized point, both the Soviet Union and the United States attempted to undermine the other by encouraging proxy battles involving client states.

1. China (1949)

2. Korea (1950)

3. Vietnam (1947-1975)

4. Poland (1953/1983)

a) Radio Free Europe


b) Solidarity

5. Hungary (1956)

6. Cuba (1960-1989)

7. Czechoslavakia (1968)

8. Afghanistan (1979-1983)

E. Cold War Blinders--because the two antagonists saw other conflicts as proxy wars, they tended to overlook the internal or anti-colonial caused that really lay behind these disputes

The Hot War

I. Stalinism v. Nazism

A. Atrocities--murder is murder, and to the dead it makes little difference to discern the reasons behind their death. It is also true that Stalinism and Nazism were not the same thing, and one of the distinguishing characteristics has to do with the reasons they killed people.

B. Genocide--has a very specific meaning, although that meaning is often in contention. As coined by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, genocide was “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”


C. Internment Camps--both the Soviet Union under Stalin and Germany under Hitler forcibly transported large numbers of people to internment camps because, they argued, these groups posed a threat to the well-being of the nation.

1. Concentration camps--location where a significant population of undesirable or “enemy” populations are forced to live, under guard and confinement, because of the perceived danger these people were believed to pose to the well-being of the state.


a) United States--while both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany ran concentration camps, it is often overlooked that the United States ran concentration camps, as well, where Japanese on the West Coast were sent after the bombing of Peal Harbor. This included both Issei (immigrant Japanese) and Nissei (second generation Japanese-Americans who were citizens of the United States--something the Chinese could not aspire to until 1943, when the United States rescinded the article in the Chinese Exclusion Act that prohibited Chinese from becoming citizens.

2. Labor camps--most concentration camps were run as labor camps. Workers were forced to labor for no compensation--they served, in fact, as slave labor


a) Soviet Union--”enemies of the state” were sent out to these labor camps--later known by their Russian acronym Gulag--for a variety of crimes against the state: being late for work too many times, too many unexcused absences, complaining about the government (and real crimes, as well). Many of these camps were located in inhospitable climates (Siberia), and many inmates died (perhaps millions, certainly hundreds of thousands) because of harsh working conditions and/or inadequate diets.


b) Nazi--Nazi labor camps were first inhabited by communists and socialists, along with Jehovah Witnesses, Roma people, the mentally ill, and other “social deviants.” Some of these people may have been Jew (except the Jehovah Witnesses and Roma, of course), but they were not rounded up because they were Jewish.


This changed after Anschluss in Austria, and Kristalnacht in December 1938, when Jewish adult males were arrested and sent to these “concentration camps.” After 1938, Jews were identified (fairly easy to do, since in many places in Europe Jews had to live within restricted neighborhoods known as ghettos), and many of them began to be transported to labor camps--where many died because of the working conditions they had to endure and inadequate diets. Oskar Schindler, of Shindler’s List fame, was a member of the Nazi Party, and the Jews who worked for him were assigned to a work camp and treated as slaves--although Schindler treated his group better than most employers.


3. Death Camps--also known as extermination camps. Several labor camps were converted to death camps, and other death camps were established, where inmates were systematically murdered.

a) Soviet Union--Stalin, despite his numerous faults did not establish any death camps--although many thousands died in their labor camps.

b) Nazi Germany--in 1943, several work camps were converted to death camps, and several other death camps were established in Nazi-held Poland and Czechoslovakia. Jew and Roma (Gypsies) were transported to these new death camps, where showers had been converted into gas chambers, and ovens built to cremate the remains--after dental gold and other valuables were recovered. Industrial efficiency was applied to the systematic murder of human beings.


4. Genocidal intent


a) Soviet Union--evidence is lacking for reaching a conclusion about whether Stalin intended to commit acts of genocide; Stalin simply had a callous disregard for human life in general. There was no systematic attempt to exterminate a particular ethnic group.

b) Nazi Germany--the intent of the Final Solution was to exterminate Jews and Roma and other “enemy” populations. In fact, assets were devoted to this task even while causing defeats on the fronts the war was fought on.


II. War and Xenophobia


A. Definition of Xenophobia--An unreasonable fear, distrust, or contempt of strangers, foreigners, or anything perceived as foreign or strange.


1. Racism--a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races [itself a fallacy, since there is only one race of humans in existence today--gm]. Racism often grows from xenophobia.

B. Racializing “the Other”--as Harman argues in his book, Hitler capitalized on xenophobia and racism to get Germans to go along with (or actively support) his Final Solution.


1. Aryans as the “superior” race--Hitler’s government actively sought to promote his ideas about the racial superiority of “aryans”--by which he meant blue eyed blond white people, and the government provided monetary awards for these kinds of people to have greater numbers of children.

2. Untermenschen--German for “sub-humans,” used to characterize Poles, Russians, and other Slavic peoples--the reason given for German domination (and extermination) of these peoples; Jews were considered even lower than the untermenschen.

3. Japanese--considered other Asian peoples being inferior to themselves, and therefore people who should be dominated by them. Japanese also considered Americans racially inferior to themselves, part of the decadent and soft peoples of the world.

4. United States--The United States had a whole host of racist ideologies, present from its inception--even though the reasons given for going to war against Germany was that country’s racist ideology, the United States quickly racialized its conflict with Japan--as a viewing of cartoons from the time quickly inform us. Japanese were depicted as devious--if not terribly intelligent--with wide toothy grins and round glasses. Germans, on the other had, were largely depicted as sadistic Nazis.


5. War as a Racist Enterprise--any (every?) war that lasts any appreciable length of time incorporates racist/xenophobic rhetoric, which in lend itself to justifying wartime atrocities. This is particularly true for guerilla wars, where the “enemy” is difficult to distinguish from non-combatants.

a) Gook--perhaps the longest-lasting wartime epiteth, first coined by US Marines during the Moro Rebellion in the Philippines following the War with Spain; remained in use for the next 70+ years to describe any combatant in eastern Asia (as well as in Haiti)


b) Dehumanization--by using ugly epitaths to describe people soldiers are sent to kill--Krauts, Wops, Japs, gooks, even hajis--these soldiers grant themselves the license to treat them as sub-humans, to destroy their lives and/or property even if they have not offered any resistance.


III. From Depression to War


A. State Planning of Economics--Again, American conservatives like to argue that the Great Depression would have ended much earlier if only government had stayed out of the economy--but around the world, no government, no matter what political ideology, did so. Even the Conservative (Tory) Party in Great Britain nationalized public utilities, the airlines, and coal mining rights.


1. Economics as warfare--during the Great Depression, nations used trade as a sort of proxy for warfare. Tariffs were used to make imports from other countries more expensive to purchase, while the devaluation of currency make exports from a country cheaper than many of its competitors


a) Look, for example, at the foreign trade practices in China; tariffs on imported goods make them more expensive, while economic incentives are provided to manufacturers to locate factories in the country--and keeping the Chinese yen artificially low makes Chinese exports readily available.


2. Colonies as captive markets--maintaining colonies provided developed countries with captive markets for their goods, easing the economic pain for home manufacturers. European countries without colonies (Germany and Italy) used military force to gain colonies or their equivalent

a) Germany’s push toward the Middle East (through the Balkans) threatened British control of the Suez Canal, as well as the oil fields of its creation called Iraq, This threat propelled Great Britain to back its ally France, which began preparations for war with Germany as the latter swallowed up a number of France’s erstwhile allies in Eastern Europe.


3. Government spending--to gear up for war, governments around the world borrowed money from their banking systems, and then spent it on the manufacture of war goods--trucks, planes, ships.

a) By the end of the war, at the huge airplane factory built by the US government and the Ford Motor Company at Willow Run near Ypsilanti, assembly line production eventually produced an airplane an hour.

b) In the United States, wartime spending was spread around the country to ensure continued Congressional support for the spending--resulting in the manufacturing base of the country also being spread around the country. This meant that this base was no longer centered around the Great Lakes; this has had a significant effect on the region in the postwar era.


B. Hegemonic Strategy--while the war was ostensibly fought to keep the “free world” from the iron fist of Nazi domination, it was also fought--perhaps largely fought--to ensure that the “great powers” maintained control of strategic locations.

1. “The Soft Underbelly of Europe”--Churchill insisted that before a second front was opened in western Europe that what he called the “soft underbelly”of the continent--though mountinous Italy, then attempt to attack Germany through the Alps--be exploited. This strategy had the effect of prolonging the conflict in Europe, I would argue.


C. Hegemonic Peace--first at Yalta, and confirmed at Potsdam, much of the world was divided into “spheres of influence,” where either the Soviet Union, Great Britain, or the United States would dominate. The “hot war” devolved in the postwar era into a “cold war” that each side tried to undermine through economic power and proxy wars.


1. Great Britain--never recovered from the destruction of the war--despite the Marshall Plan--and has largely served since the end of the war as a junior partner to the ambitions of the United States

The Great Slump

I. World-Wide Depression


A. Black Thursday--October 24, 1929 the New York Stock Exchange crashed, losing fully one-third of its value. Many rich investors who had put most of their wealth in the stock market lost it; newspapers in New York reported 11 suicides related to the Wall Street crash the next day.

B. Causes of the Great Depression--despite the popular perception that the Great Depression started on Black Thursday, there was not one single cause for the Great Depression--but it was not caused by a “perfect storm” of unconnected factors, either. The reactions by governments around the world, coupled with malfeasance and criminal behavior on the part of the business class, helped increase the severity of the slump, and prevented a quick recovery.


1. Conservative explanation--it has become popular for ideologues on the right to claim that the Great Depression was, in fact, merely another manifestation of the business cycle, and if governments would not have interfered with the market, everything would have righted itself more quickly. This argument hinges upon the 1937 “Roosevelt Recession,” when FDR slashed slashed the federal budget in an attempt to balance the budget.


2. Winston Churchill and the Gold Standard--Churchill served as Chancellor of the Exchequer (equivalent to the Secretary of the Treasury in the US), and was determined to return Great Britain to its pre-war greatness--by returning the country to the gold standard and pegging the value of the British pound to the US dollar.

a) Effects--to raise the cost of British exports, making them more costly for other countries to purchase--which depressed employment. Britain suffered a bit less during the Great Depression because it had colonies to sell to as protected markets, but the missteps of Churchill made the situation much worse than it would have been otherwise.



3. Germany--after the social turmoil of the war and its aftermath, Germany after 1923 was fairly stable--thanks to an infusion of cash from the United States via the Dawes Plan. This spurred investors from the US to also invest in the country, which was responsible for its prosperity. That investment stopped in November 1929 with the stock market crash, and the US insisted that the loans provided under the Dawes Plan be paid back on schedule.

a) National Socialist Party--after the abortive Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923, Adolph Hitler (after serving his eight-month sentence for treason), acted more cautiously, maintaining a more disciplined party of thugs (the Stormtroopers, or SA), but not attempting another coup d’etat until the proper time. The Nazis remained a minor party throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. At the height of their electoral powers, they only received 37% of the vote--and that percentage declined after they came to power.

b) German politics unravels--the renewed economic crisis brought on a new political crisis in Germany, as well. The president of the Weimar Republic, military hero Paul von Hindenburg, was approaching senility. After several unsuccessful appointments of prime ministers, Hindenburg reluctantly turned to “the corporal” to head up the new government in January 1933.


c) Reichstag Fire (February 1933)--just a month after Hitler came to power, the Reichstag was set on fire. The Nazis blamed the fire on a Communist plot, and rounded up several suspects. Ultimately, a single Communist was convicted for the crime--but four alleged co-conspirators were found not guilty.


4. France--France had a relatively high degree of self-sufficiency, and suffered less than most of the industrialized European countries--although the hardship was severe enough, and unemployment high enough, that workers rioted in June 1934--leading to the rise in power of the socialist Popular Front that year.


a) Much of French industry did not have the level of capitalist investment that was present in other industrialized countries; ownership was mostly individuals or small partnerships, and little investment was placed in stock ownership.

b) Farms in France were also smaller than in many industrialized countries, although a push to “modernize” agriculture in the country during the 1920s had begun to change that.

c) Unemployment stayed fairly low because the population remained depressed as a result of the carnage France had suffered during the First World War.


5. United States--ground zero for the Great Depression. The economic malaise lasted the longest and cut the deepest.

a) Malfescence--while prices remained low (this was, in fact, an extended period of deflation), the crisis in the banking industry made economic conditions much worse--and much of this problem was a result of criminal, or near criminal, behavior on the part of “banksters.” Interlocking directorships (men sitting on the board of directors of banks also served on the boards of other institutions--and many of these institutions obtained loans from these banks with little collateral). Banksters also used their connections to obtain loans for a variety of purposes--and bank mergers also helped to hide the losses banks suffered as loans went bad, hiding the losses until the whole house of cards collapsed.


b) Solutions--Herbert Hoover attempted to stabilize the banking industry by creating the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to take over troubled banks, but the US government under Hoover never was vigorous enough to regulate the banking industry and staunch the bleeding. It was not until FDR took office and declared a “bank holiday,” closing all banks in the country until they could prove they were solvent, that the banking industry could begin to recover. Congress then passed legislation to prevent most banks from engaging in speculative ventures like the stock market and created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (the Glass-Steagall of 1933; the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 repealed the provisions preventing banks from engaging in speculative ventures, and is in part responsible for the difficulties the banking industry is in today).


6. Japan--was still in the early stages of industrial capitalization, but was the first industrial nation to embrace what became known as the Keynseian remedy--deficit spending by the national government to encourage production and job growth, and the devaluation of the national currency to make exports cheaper. Japan focused its spending program on the production of armanents; since this coincided with increased militarization of Japanese society, it also encouraged colonial expansion. The military was so enthusiastic about the program in fact that when the finance minister attempted to decrease the deficit spending, the army had him assassinated.


7. Italy--the European country that suffered least from the effects of the Great Depression. Mussolini had already implemented “state capitalism,” control of the economic system by the state, but with profits still going to the private sector.

II. The Revolution Betrayed

A. Struggle for Power After Lenin


1. The NEP (New Economic Policy)--re-introduced the market (in a limited way) to the Russian economy. Begun by Lenin and Trotsky in 1921, it allowed farmers to sell their produce (particularly grain) as long as they paid a tax in kind (that is, in the produce they grew) to the state. Banking and heavy industry remained under the control of the state. The agricultural sector grew much faster than the industrial sector as a result of this. Industry then began to charge higher prices for the goods it produced, forcing farmers to grow more to buy these consumer goods--or to withhold goods from the market to await higher prices. There also emerged speculators, known as “NEP-men” who bought the grain from farmers and held it to await the rise in price.


2. Lenin dies 1924--setting off a power struggle between Stalin and Trotsky

3. Stalin the Bureaucratic Infighter--Stalin proves more adept at the bureaucratic infighting, increasingly marginalizing Trotsky, eventually forcing him into exile.

4. “Socialism in One Country”--Stalin argues, contrary to his previous position (and in contrast to Trotsky’s argument of the Permanent Revolution) that in order to keep socialism alive, the revolution must be protected in the Soviet Union at all costs. This entails enforced orthodoxy from Moscow, and the ending of the NEP.


5. State Socialism--in ending the NEP, Stalin ended the market experiment in the Soviet Union. All peasant farms were collectivized--i.e., the state took control of them. Farmers were forced to live on communes, and the state seized all that was produced. Those who resisted were either executed or exiled to the gulag work camps. In order to compete with the west, the state also exercised more stringent control of the factories in the countries, banning independent labor unions (which had operated in the country previously), while also implementing the most oppressive aspects of capitalist control of workers, and Soviet industry strove to catch up to western capitalist industry.

III. Conclusion--The reaction of counties to the stress induced by the Great Depression led to greater political conflicts by government in Europe, and also to greater conflict between the United States and Japan around the Pacific Rim. By the end of the 1930s, this led to a Second World War, with even greater devastation and carnage than witnessed during the First World War.

Rise of Fascism

I. Failure of Socialist Revolutions

A. Reliance upon Gradualist Tactics

1. Parliamentary Solutions--because the socialist political parties became vested in the bourgeois political process, they saw this “gradualist” means of rectifying and reforming capitalism as preferable to the dangers of Marxist revolution.

a) Not everyone who viewed themselves as socialists also viewed themselves as adherents to Marxism, believing in the inevitability of the proletarian revolution.

b) This reliance upon the political solution left these social democrats susceptible to attacks not only from the left, however, but also from the right--and those on the right would prove just as impatient with the pace of change as those on the left.

c) The gradualists used revolutionary rhetoric, because they felt it was what the people wanted to hear; but in political action they attempted to stay “in the middle of the road,” veering neither to far left nor right; they attempted what political scientists would term today “triangulation.” tacking to what they believed were the popular positions on a variety of tactics.


2. Problems of the postwar period--these problems were most severe in Germany, which in the early 1920s had runaway inflation reaching Zimbabwean proportions; storied were told of people bringing money in wheelbarrows to pay for the day’s loaf of bread. But even the victors experienced social dislocation.

)a) Worker militancy before the war--workers and their unions in the period just before the outbreak of hostilities were beginning to flex their muscles and contest the status quo; workers went on strike in a variety of countries and a variety of industries during this time period.

b) Sacrifices during the war--for most of the countries in Europe, the war was a time of sacrifice and privation--but these sacrifices were not shared equally by the entire population. This situation added to the class resentment that added to the feelings that European societies, as they were then constituted, were unjust and need to be changed.


3. The Failure of Gradualism--while people might have been satisfied with a gradual change in the way European societies were structured before the war, the crisis in confidence of governments throughout the region because of the horrendous cost of the war contributed to feelings that government could no longer be trusted to make the necessary changes.

B. The Socialist Split--Harman claims that there were three factors that weakened socialism as a result of the war.

1. Social Democrats--put nationalism before class solidarity. Some of these people would eventually drift into fascism; the most prominent name to do so was Benito Mussolini, who left the Italian Socialist party--where he served as editor of the party newspaper--to found fascism in Italy.

2. Revolutionary Socialists--willing to stand and fight in the streets for the socialist revolution. Many revolutionary socialist were Marxists--they believed that the proletarian revolution was the next logical step in the evolution of society. Many of these people (or, at least, the ones that survived) moved into the various communist parties. As the Russian Revolution continued to be threatened, these people continued to support it. After Lenin died, and Stalin won the power struggle with Trotsky over who would succeed Lenin, the communists supported the idea of protecting “socialism in one country,” and many willing followed the dictates of Stalin to protect the Soviet Union.

3. Independent Socialists--vacillated between the Social Democrat position and the Revolutionary Socialist position.

II. Fascism

A. Definition: 1: a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition; 2: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary).

1. Historical use--this term has become a contested political epitaph, and has lost some of its original meaning. Historically speaking, however, it has stood in counterpoise to its opposing political system, socialism/communism. Historically, the term has been used to describe some political philosophies on the right.

a) During the 1960s, it was used by members of the left as a term of disdain for many of the ideas they disagreed with on the right; it was politically potent because the best known fascist politician was Adolph Hitler. It was often coupled with the word “pig” to goad police into doing something unprofessional, as in “fascist pig!”


b) The political right in this country has spent part of this decade pushing back against this trend, accusing liberals of being fascist; this has further muddied the concept.

2. The Connection between Fascism and Socialism--despite the seeming connection--Mussolini was a socialist, Hitler called his political party the National Socialists--the two political systems are diametrically opposed to one another, and should not be confused; one cannot be a socialist and a fascist.

a) Socialism is internationalist in its outlook--it views the divisions among humans to be along class lines, rather than along ethnic or national background. Socialism also has a strong economic component--that the workers should control the means of production. It is primarily an economic/political movement.

b) Fascism emphasizes nationalism to the point of being jingoistic (extreme chauvinism or nationalism marked especially by a belligerent foreign policy). Economics is an afterthought for most fascists; the economics component mostly has to do with ensuring that order is maintained, so unions are usually made illegal. Fascism is largely a social/political movement

B. The Rise of Mussolini and Fascism

1. Root of the term--from the Latin word Fasces, which means the binding together. It was used in iconography to symbolize the binding together of a nation (see the 1916 US dime). For Italian fascists, using the iconography of ancient Rome was a way to harken back to this supposed glorious period of Italian history, and to tie their efforts in modern Italy to that period.


2. Mussolini left Socialist Party--Mussolini left the Socialist Party over his avid support for Italy’s entry into World War I. He was well known politically, but had little political popularity, except for other disillusioned socialists and some militarists who were disappointed over Italy’s being denied land from Austria and along the Dalmatian (Yugoslav) coast.


3. Occupation of factories in Rome and Turin--by 1920, economic conditions in Italy were worsening; harvest levels for both wheat and corn fell to approximately half of their war time highs. Approximately 500,000 workers occupied factories around the country, most prominently in the industrial center of Turin. The leaders of the unions, however, felt that the time was not right for a socialist revolution--or even hard bargaining with capitalists--and essentially bargained workers back into the factories with little change.



4. Mussolini mobilizes former soldiers--Mussolini mobilized many former soldiers concerned about the apparent power of “reds” in the factories into a paramilitary organization known as the “Blackshirts” for the color shirt they wore at rallies and mobilizations. With the collaboration of local police and the army, groups of Blackshirts began assaulting socialists, destroying their meeting places, forcing them to drink castor oil.

a) Because their assaults were against socialists, they had the tacit support of industrialists and the bourgeois, interested in keeping the workers under control.

b) Mussolini even gets the government to pay members to assault socialists, thereby making his organization even more attractive to unemployed or underemployed soldiers.

c) Blackshirts usually behaved like bullies, only fighting when they badly outnumbered opponents


5. The March on Rome (1922)--the Italian prime minister, trying to control this growing political movement, offered Mussolini a place in his government; Mussolini instead that he be made prime minister. The king acquiesced to this request.

C. Il Duce--despite his distaste of parliamentary democracy, Mussolini spent the next two years running the government as prime minister--although his Blackshirts came in handy to keep order.

1. Imprisonment of opposition--during the early years of the regime


2. Assassination of Matteoti--Mussolini’s henchmen kidnapped and murdered a socialist member of parliament, Matteoti, who had the audacity to stand up in front of the body and denounce the actions of the government. Mussolini declared the end of democracy in Italy, and himself at “the Leader”--and the king and army let him do so.

World Wars and Peace

Global War and Peace

Global conflicts proved to need global resolutions

I. Imperial Japan

A. Adoption of Western practices

1. Industrialism

2. Modernization of the Military

B. Scientific Racism

1. Japan and "White Privilege"

2. Japan and Its Asian Neighbors

3. A Leader in Pan-Asianism--or an Exploiter?

C. Militarism

1. No civilian control of military

2. Argued that militarism necessary to gain Japan greatness as a nation

3. Resistance to militarism

D. Defeat of Japan

II. Anti-Colonialism and the Cold War

A. Congo

1. Dispute with Belgium

2. Lack of speedy response from UN, turn to USSR

3. US turns to Mbuto

III. Movement for Peace

A. Citizens movements

B. League of Nations

C. United Nations

1. Successes

2. Failures

Europe in Turmoil

I. The German November Revolution



A. The March 1918 Offensive

1. Brest-Litovsk Treaty--the concessions wrung out from the Soviet Union at Brest-Litovsk allowed Germany to move troops and war material from the Eastern Front to the Western Front (which was also why the Allies were putting so much pressure on Russia to stay in the war); Germany then quickly developed a plan to execute an offensive to win the war before the United States could land troops in Europe and push the advantage toward the Anglo-French side.


2. New Strategy--planned as a four-stage offensive, to break out of the trench warfare stalemate that had lasted nearly three years by this time, each stage of the offensive was to consist of three parts:

a) Artillery bombardment--the new strategy called for relatively short, intense bombardment with artillery; in the firs of the four offensive, the German army shot more than 1 million artillery shells along a 160 mile front in under 5 hours.

b) Stormtroopers--the initial attack was instigated by a select group of soldiers, called stormtroopers, chosen because of their military skill. The were to attack the weakest part of the enemy’s defense, disrupt command and communications, and then hold their position until the regular troops arrived.

c) Consolidation--while the stormtroopers made the initial attack, the rest of the army was to advance shortly afterward to consolidate the new position.

3. Initial success--despite intelligence reports that tipped off the Allies of the impending attack, Allied forces were initially overrun, and the German army made the greatest advances since before the war bogged down in trench warfare in late 1914.


4. Ultimate failure--the Germans were unable to follow-up on this initial success. The Allies quickly shifted their own strategic defensive tactics, and moved most of their troops and command structure further behind the forward trenches, beyond the reach of German artillery, which meant that the initial bombardment was less effective. The front lines were largely guarded by snipers and machine gun nests, and the areas the stormtroopers attacked were quickly reinforced. The casualty rate for the stormtroopers quickly became atronomical, meaning that the German army was depleting itself of its best soldiers. Even the early success was illusionary, because the greatest success of the new strategy took place in those area of the least strategic importance.



B. Entry of United State Armed Forces--was essentially the turning point of the war, because the troops and war material the Allies could now bring to the point of attack along the Western Front simply overwhelmed the German forces there. The arrival of US forces occurred several months before the Germans anticipated it happening; even if the offensive had been successful, it is doubtful whether the Germans would have been able to hold their advanced positions.

1. 100 Day Offensive--began August 18, 1918 and lasted until the formal German surrender in November.

2. Breakdown of German Army--despite continued communication problems between the Allied forces--and the fact that American commanders refused to place US troops under the command of any “foreign” officer (except for the all African American battalion from Harlem), the US entry into the war force the German army to begin to retreat along the western front.

a) German General Ludendorff,, the commander of the German army, in the midst of what was apparently a nervous breakdown, asked the Kaiser to form a new government. The Kaiser brought in several pro-war Social-Democratic Party (SPD) to be ministers in the new government.


b) The eventual surrender by the civilian government, rather than by the German, permitted the creation of the “stabbed in the back” myth, which helped create the atmosphere for the re-establishment of militarism in Germany in the 1930s; defeat was blamed on the weakness of the civilian government--the socialist in particular.


C. Naval mutiny--the German Naval high command, hoping to stave off defeat and rehabilitate the reputation of the navy, order the High Seas Fleet to leave their blockades ports and enter the North Sea to engage the British Royal Navy.


1. Kiel Mutiny--rank and file sailors, realizing that this was a death warrant for themselves, mutinied instead. The sailors armed themselves, and joined with dockworkers in the city to disarm opponents, and the group also established a sailor’s and workers council to run the city.




D. Revolution in Germany--the Kiel Mutiny touched off protests against the war and the government in a number of cities: Bremen, Hamburg, Hanover, Cologne, Leipzig, Dresden, and a number of smaller cities, as well.

1. Munich--socialists took control of the royal palace and declared the ‘Bavarian Free State.”

2. Berlin


a) Karl Liebknecht--recently freed from prison, Liebknecht led a procession of workers and soldiers with guns and red flags through the streets of Berlin to the imperial palace--recently abandoned by the Kaiser, who fled to Holland--and declared a socialist republic from the balcony.

b) Phillipe Scheidermann--a pro-war Social Democratic Party(SPD) leader in the Kaiser’s last government, proclaimed a republic from the balcony of the imperial parliament.

c) Factions reunite--the two SPD factions (temporarily) reunited to present a “revolutionary” government of people’s commissars for endorsement by an assembly of 1,500 workers’ and soldiers’ delegates--in effect, a German soviet.

3. “Moderate” socialists--pro-war socialists outnumbered radicals in the new socialist government, and they used their greater numbers--and collaboration with the military and others on the right--to suppress the opposition on the left.

a) Friedrich Ebert--President of the short-lived Socialist Republic, and first president of the Weimar Republic. Worked with the military and the Freikorps (right-wing former soldiers, many of whom eventually found their way to the National Socialist Party--the Nazis) to put down the Spartikus Revolution, led by Liebknecht and Luxemberg. Members of the Freikorps murdered both Liebnecht and Luxemberg.

b) The failure of the war led to a greater sympathy for left-wing solutions, and many people who previously had supported liberal political solutions moved left and looked to the SPD as a proponent of those left-wing solutions--only the moderate politicians who controlled the party, while advocating radical solutions for public consumption, acted in a “gradualist” fashion, making only piecemeal reforms.

c) Public impatience with the slow pace of reform led many to back the Independent Socialist Party, whose members had broken with the SPD over the war. The government could no longer rely on the army, either, since rank-and-file soldiers, also dissatisified with the slow pace of reform, joined workers in the streets in larger cities.


d) Emergence of the Freikorps--the government turned to the Freikorps to put down the Spartikus Revolution, and to intimidate their opponents on the left. The members of the Freikorps were drawn largely from the ranks of the stormtroopers, many of whom felt alienated from the rest of German society because of their experiences during the war, and also feeling that they had been betrayed by that society--that they had not suffered a military defeat, but abandoned by other members of German society. This alliance nearly backfired in 1920, when members of the Freikorps staged the Kapp Putsch in 1920, and attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic. While Adolph Hitler was not himself a member of the Freikorps, many members migrated to the Nazi Party and the SA

II. The Spirit of Revolution--Germany was not the only country where revolutionary firmanent took place.

A. Austria--had a socialist party similar in structure to Germany, and worked to tone down worker protest to remain “respectable.”

B. Turkey--no socialist revolution, but Greece declared its independence; the conflict here quickly devolved into atrocities on both side. The Turks, however, in reaction to the defeats their army experienced to Russian forces on the battlefield, blamed another Christian minority in the country--the Armenians, and began a program of genocide that eventually murdered somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million men, women, and children.

C. France--French troops in Archangel, like their British and American counterparts, refused to take any a part in battles in Russia, and French sailors had to be evacuated from the Black Sea after several mutinies.


D. Great Britain--strikes by workers in Glasgow (“Red Clydeside”), London, Liverpool, and Belfast, which nearly turned into a general strike that united Catholics and Protestants.


E. United States--witnessed the greatest strike wave in history--steel, meat packing, metal workers. A general strike in Seattle.


F. Spain--inspired by events in the Soviet Union, farm workers in the south of the country had a number of strikes and meetings to attempt to organize. In Barcelona, workers went on strike for next several years; when local business leaders hired gunmen to murder labor leaders, anarchist leaders took matters into their own hands to strike back.