The Anti-Colonial Century

I. India


A. Indian National Conference (INC)--the political organization in India that advocated for independence--and which is still in existence today. Its most famous member were Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

1. Mohandas Gandhi--Oxford-trained Indian lawyer. His own experience with racial discrimination in England, South Africa, and India led him to embrace Hindi religious and dietary practices--although he rejected the subjugation of women in society, and fought against the worst of caste practices, seeking equality for all Indians--and independence for the country. Gandhi was western educated, but learned in his time away from India that many British--or, most specifically, the British government--saw him as inferior because of his ethnic background; he spent much of his adult life fighting against that, and fighting for independence for his country.


a) Homespun--Gandhi was a proponent of domestic industry. He insisted on wearing traditional clothing--including a loincloth--from Indian grown cotton. This cotton he himself worked to turn into thread, which he then wove into cloth. This rejection of Western methods endeared him to a large part of India that could not afford western goods--he made their poverty a virtue. Gandhi consciously rejected westernization, and in this way made himself popular among the masses.


b) Salt March--in 1922, to protest the British imposition of a tax on salt, Gandhi and a growing number of followers march 239 miles to the sea to make their own salt, rather than pay the British for their imported salt.

c) “Non-cooperation” movement--after the success of the Salt March, Gandhi encouraged Indians to engage in a non-cooperation movement, where they would refuse to use the British governmental system--especially the courts--and to avoid the purchase of British goods

d) “Quit India” movement--signaled a renewed effort to persuade the British to grant India independence. Indian dissatisfaction with British rule grew throughout the 1930s, as more Indians became impoverished while the British government continued the practices that enriched the metropole in London.



B. Non-violent Civil Disobedience--Gandhi practiced pacifism; in fact, he was the lone figure in the INC to vote against conditional support for the fight against fascism. So this practice he undertook as a matter of principle, rather than for tactical reasons--and his followers often times were not as principled as he was. Non-violent civil disobedience is most effective when it provokes a disproportionately violent response.


1. Quit India--campaign sparked by the fact that the Viceroy of India (and Englishman appointed by the British government) declared war on Germany without consulting any Indians. In response, some breakaway factions of the INC sought out the Japanese. Most, however, followed Gandhi’s call to begin a massive program of civil disobedience. The British responded by sending a representative to negotiate a settlement with INC representatives; when those negotiations broke down, Gandhi renewed his call for civil disobedience to begin.

a) Arrest of INC leadership--the British responded to this movement by arresting the entire national leadership of the INC, which effectively killed the national movement--but spurred the development of secondary leaders in the provinces of the country. The leadership was arrested in 1942, and were to be held for the duration of the war. Gandhi was released in 1943, due to failing health. After his release, he went on a hunger strike in an attempt to win the release of the rest of the leadership.

C. Independence--it was apparent to many political leaders in Great Britain that the cost of maintaining India as a colony after the war would be more than the impoverished country could bear, and the decision was made to "grant" India independence.


1. Partition--the religious tensions between Muslims and Hindus, which the British had done much to foster (the ancient "divide and conquer" principle), impelled them to partition India at the time of independence, in order to attempt to diminish the likelihood of civil war--which happened anyway.


a. British arrogance--the British civil servant charged with drawing the boundaries for the two nations knew next to nothing about India, so the boundaries had nothing to with the majority population resident there. In addition, the two religions had co-existed in India so long that to make such a distinction was ludicrous, anyway.

b. Effect on India--since partition, politics in India has become more chauvinistic, with following the stricture of the Hindi religion becoming the defining characteristic of Indian nationalism--which leaves out all other religions.

c. Effect on Pakistan--with only Islam as a unifying principle (and even that being divisive, with the struggle between Sunni and Sha'ria for dominance), and with hundreds of miles dividing Pakistan from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), the military is the dominant institution--and democracy has suffered as a result.

II. Vietnam


A. French colonialism--began in 1858, when the French army and navy invaded to “protect” Roman Catholics in Vietnam who were being “persecuted.”

1. Collaborators--this labeled most Catholics in Vietnam as collaborators with the foreign enemy, which would have repercussions in the mid-20th century.

a) Dr. Tom Dooley, an American Catholic, and his accounts of communist treatment of Roman Catholics did much during the late 1950s (he was cited as an example of volunteerism by John F. Kennedy while the latter was establishing the Peace Corps). Dooley was cultivated by CIA agent Edward Lansdale, and probably gathered intelligence for the CIA while in southeast Asia.

2. French colonists--confined their activities largely to the lucrative rubber plantations, while allowing the elite in Vietnam (or, as the French preferred to say, Indochina or Cochin China; the French, in fact, forbade the use of the term Vietnam to refer to the country) to acquire most of the land and wealth they cared to not acquire for themselves, while peasants in the countryside were impoverished.


B. Ho Chi Minh--like Gandhi, Ho became the focal point for the independence movement in his country. Also like Gandhi, Ho was western educated--although his family was vehemently nationalist. His father was a minor mandarin, but refused to learn French because he claimed it would “spoil” his Vietnamese. Ho, like Gandhi, spent much of this public life dressed like a peasant, by choice, abandoning trappings of the office he attained.

1. Ho the Communist--Ho’s involvement with international communism dated from 1919 (even before Mao tse-Tung); he was one of the original members of the French Communist Party, and served for a number of years with the Comintern in Moscow as the expert on colonialism.

2. Ho the Nationalist--Ho petitioned the Versailles Conference to grant Vietnam independence, but was ignored. Ho collaborated with the United States Army Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA) to defeat the Japanese, and then petitioned US president Harry Truman to support independence for the country, and was ignored. Ho forced emperor Bao Dai to abdicate, but was forced to accept the French re-establishing control; he immediately set about creating a resistance movement, however.


3. Dien Bien Phu--a contingent of French paratroopers were defeated at this battle and force to surrender, the French then signed the Geneva Accords. The country was divided “temporarily” into two sections at the insistence of the United States; France and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam agreed that reunification elections would be held in 1956, but the United States and Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) did not sign the accord, and felt no compunction to follow its edicts--particularly because the government in the south never had much popular support.


4. The American War in Vietnam--the most obvious instance of the United States fighting a proxy war against the Soviet Union, when the war was essentially fought by the opposing side to throw off the cloak of colonialism and become an independent country

III. Palestine/Israel


A. Muslim resistance--as Jews began moving to Palestine in larger numbers, establishing kibbutzes and moving in numbers into cities, Palestinians began attempting to discourage Jewish settlement, including physical violence.

1. 1929 Riot--dispute over “permanent” structures built by Jews at the Wailing Wall, which Muslim clerics demanded by removed in keeping with an Ottoman edict restricting such structures from being built. Resulted in the deaths of 133 Jews, and 116 Palestinians.

2. 1939 White Paper--proposal by Great Britain to resolve growing dispute over Palestine; centered on restricting immigration of Jews until an election was held in 1949, when Arabs and Jews would be seated in a government in proportion to their populations that year--but guaranteeing that Arabs would remain in the majority. In the end, the White Paper pleased no one--the Jews saw it as a death warrant for thousands (the Nazi pogrom was just getting underway), as well as stiemying their nationalist aspirations, while the Arabs saw it as not restrictive enough, because it would allow the Jews to undermine the postwar government

B. Jewish response--the response of Zionists varied across a wide spectrum, from tit-for-tat retaliation to organized terror campaigns.


1. Irgun--a secret Jewish armed group, which carried out a campaign of terror (bombings and attempted assassinations) against British government and military officials, mainly


a) King David Hotel bombing--Irgun operatives carried out this terrorist attack that resulted in the deaths of 91 people, including 17 Jews. Irgun leaders said they regretted the Jewish deaths and would pray for their souls, but did not regret the British deaths, because Great Britain had never expressed regret over the Jewish deaths during the Holocaust. No mention was made of the deaths of the largest group of death--Arabs.


b) Menachem Begin--led Irgun during this time period, and was the man who gave the order for the hotel to be blown up. After Israeli statehood, Begin became leader of the Likud Party, and by the late 1970s prime minister of Israel. In a bit of karmic irony, his autobiography, The Revolt, is must reading for Hamas and Hezbollah.


c) Lohamei Herut Israel--LEHI or the Stern Gang, a splinter group that broke off from Irgun, targeted Arab populations in a terror car-bombing campaign. Best known outside of Israel as the first organization to be labeled a “terrorist group” by the United Nations. Inside Israel, they are recognized as devoted patriots to the Zionist cause.


IV. The Battle for Algiers



A. The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN)--the FLN was the Algerian national liberation group that fought an eight year guerilla war against France (1954-1962) to gain independence. The FLN, an Arab-socialist political party, is still in control of the government in Algiers, although lately their leadership is being challenged by an Islamist political party.

1. Social/Cultural/Political movement--the FLN was not a Marxist party, but construed socialism broadly--mainly as a way of identifying oppressors and the oppressed.

a) Attempted to ferret out what they defined as destructive behaviors (consumption of alcohol and prostitution in particular).

b) Reform of these behaviors was seen as key to developing sense of national pride, since native Algerians were lowest on the totem pole in colonial Algerian society, below French and the pied noirs (literally, “black feet”), Algerian-born of European descent.


2. The “dirty war” French occupying forces did not hesitate to use what the Bush Administration would term “enhanced interrogation techniques” (what sane people recognize as torture).

3. FLN response--to use plastique in bombing raids against both French establishments and the French military.


a) Cafe wars in France--the struggle for control by elements of the FLN for the government-in-exile led to a series of assassination attempts on Algerian ex-pats in France, called the cafe wars.

4. Evian Accords--granted independence to Algeria (in quick stages)--but led more than a million pied noir to emigrate to France. In the mother country, however, these pied noir felt that the native French population blamed them for the war--but also felt estranged from their native Algeria.



a) Algeria and the fall of the Fourth Republic--the cost of the war in Algeria--and the way the “dirty war” was carried out by French forces, led to the French parliament granting President Charles de Gaulle near-dictatorial powers--and also led to the fall of the Fourth Republic.

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.