A Short History of the World

by Christopher Lascelles

  A less isolationist America funded much of the rebuilding of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan, under which US$12.5 billion of aid (equivalent to over $100 billion today) was distributed over the following six years, leading to an economic boom. Unhappy with this, the Soviet Union attempted to blockade Berlin in 1948, destroying any trust that had been built up between the two blocs during the war in one fell swoop. Western powers reacted to this new situation by creating a defensive military alliance, NATO, in 1949, which the Eastern bloc met in turn with the creation of the Warsaw Pact, their NATO equivalent, in 1955. The arms race that followed was seen by both blocs as a way of protecting their interests.

  Unable or unwilling to attack each other directly, the two new global powers of the USA and the USSR supported friendly regimes as a way of increasing their global influence. Military conflicts in China, Korea and Vietnam, among others, were all born as a direct result of this support.

  Paradoxically, it was Japan and Germany – the aggressor countries that had previously both faced total destruction – which became the ultimate winners in the post-war period. Forbidden from spending money on arms, they both invested money in industry and in rebuilding their infrastructure, and this led to economic booms. Germany’s growth in the 1950s was so strong that it was termed a ‘wirtshaftswunder’, or ‘economic miracle’, and the country became the strongest economy in Europe.

  In the mean time Japan benefited from American investment following the war, in an attempt by the USA to create an ally in the Far East to counter the growth of communism in neighbouring China. Japan grew to be the second largest economy in the world until it was overtaken by China in the 21st century.

  Revolution in China (1949)

  Soon after the defeat of Japan, civil war resumed in China between the communists, supported by the Soviet Union, and the nationalists, supported by the USA. Despite initial nationalist successes, the communists rapidly gained the upper hand, forcing Chiang Kai-Shek to resign in January 1949 and retreat with his government and two million people to the island of Taiwan, which was proclaimed the temporary capital of China. His nationalist government was recognised by most Western nations as the legitimate government of China for many decades.

  In October 1949 Chairman Mao declared that ‘the Chinese people have stood up!’ and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China, as opposed to the Republic of China (run out of Taiwan). A few months later, China and the Soviet Union signed a Sino-Soviet treaty of alliance. Almost half of the world’s landmass was now under communist rule, with China becoming the largest communist state in the world.

  No sooner had the communists taken power in China than they supported an attempt by communist North Korea to occupy the democratic South Korea in a war that lasted until 1953 and caused four million deaths. South Korea only managed to defend itself through Western support. A decade or so later, China would also give significant support to a communist North Vietnam in its battle to unite with the south.

  De-Stalinisation and the Space Race

  In Russia, Stalin’s long rule of terror finally came to an end with his death in 1953. He had suffered a stroke and was not attended to for several hours, due either to fear of disturbing him or through wilful neglect.

  Three years later his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, privately and then publicly denounced Stalin’s tyrannical rule, condemning the crimes which had been committed under Stalin’s leadership, and released a number of political prisoners. He also instigated a policy of ‘peaceful co-existence’ with the West to allow the Soviet Union to develop its economy without having to dedicate so much of its budget to defence. While this policy was welcomed warmly by Eastern European satellite countries, the thaw only went so far: when Hungary called for a multiparty political system and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact in 1956, Soviet troops invaded.

  In Germany, the flight of East German citizens to Western Germany was met by the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. In the following decades, while some 5,000 East Germans successfully managed to escape to the West, at least 170 were shot in the attempt. In 1968 when Czechoslovakia dared to let some of its people travel abroad, the country was occupied by Soviet troops as a result.

  The launch of Sputnik 1, the world’s first satellite by the Soviet Union in 1957, came as a shock to the United States, as it implied that the same technology could be used to hit targets in America. This saw the start of a space race which led to the Soviet Union sending the first man into space (Yuri Gagarin) in 1961110 and to the USA landing the first men on the moon (Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin) eight years later in 1969, incredibly only 66 years after the Wright brothers had managed to get the first plane into the air.

  In the increasingly tense atmosphere that followed Gagarin’s mission, the world came to the brink of nuclear war in 1962 when Khrushchev attempted to install nuclear missiles in Cuba in what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The situation was defused only when President John F. Kennedy agreed to remove (obsolete) US missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviets removing their missiles from Cuba.

  After the launch of Sputnik, Khrushchev boasted that the Soviet Union would surpass the USA in economic production within 15 years. One of the world’s great tragedies was that Mao Zedong of China, ever competitive with Soviet Russia and constantly worrying about ‘keeping face’, decided that it would be a good idea for China to do the same.

  The Great Leap Forward in China (1958–1962)

  Returning from Moscow immediately following the launch of Sputnik 1, and not wishing to be outdone by the Soviet Union, Mao declared that China would catch up with – and ultimately overtake – the economic production of Britain within fifteen years. He called it the ‘Great Leap Forward’. His attempt to do so ended with arguably the greatest catastrophe the country has ever known and caused the death – predominantly from hunger – of tens of millions of people.111

  Ignoring the terrible hardships of Stalin’s five-year plans of the early 1930s, which had themselves resulted in the death of several million Russians and Ukrainians, Mao instigated a programme of planned and rapid industrialisation and collectivisation. In an attempt to meet unachievable targets, the entire population was mobilised to set up backyard furnaces; pots, pans and farming implements were just some of the metal objects sacrificed in the drive for steel, which was always of questionable quality. To run the furnaces, forests were cut down and houses destroyed. Millions were pushed into communes of collectivised farm holdings and millions of others were mobilised to take part in massive, and generally unsuccessful, countrywide irrigation projects.

  The end result was a shortage of agricultural workers to tend the crops and a lack of implements with which to gather them. With targets continuously revised upwards, they became less and less possible to attain. This led to rice husks being filled with water to increase their weight and left to rot due to an infrastructure woefully inadequate to collect the crops. Worse still, in order to buy foreign machinery and in order to prove that China was close to achieving communist paradise, the little grain that was collected was often exported in large quantities in an attempt to hide the massive shortfall. Significant quantities of grain were also donated free of charge to communist regimes globally.

  Mismanagement on a titanic scale led to a severe shortage of grain, which resulted in mass starvation throughout the country. The livestock that was not exported often starved to death with the people. Cotton did not escape the export quotas and much of the population lived in rags as a result. Despite the obvious problems, the Chinese Communists adopted the Stalinist tactic of imprisoning and/or killing anyone who dared to criticise ‘The Great Leap Forward’, blaming all problems on counter-revolutionaries. In a disregard for human life on a par with Stalin or Hitler, Mao responded to the problems by stating, ‘When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.’

  As if the population had not suffered
enough, in an attempt to reassert his authority, in 1966 Mao launched The Cultural Revolution. Bands of young revolutionaries were encouraged to roam through the country and destroy the ‘Four Olds’: old customs, old habits, old culture and old thinking. Older authority figures were verbally and physically attacked and the Communist Party was purged. Millions of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ were subsequently sent to labour camps in the countryside.

  Political and ideological relations between China and the Soviet Union had been worsening before the Cultural Revolution, as Beijing began to supplant Moscow as the ideological leader of the world communist movement and continued to worsen. Mao, who had supported Stalin ideologically and politically despite Stalin’s treatment of him as the inferior younger brother, became concerned both with Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation and with his advocacy of peaceful co-existence between communist and capitalist nations. This was seen by Mao as a betrayal of Marxism and a clear retreat from the struggle to achieve global communism. In 1960 the Soviet side withdrew its aid to China in what came to be known as the Sino-Soviet split, and in 1969 the two countries even saw military conflict on their borders. Sino-Soviet relations only warmed again in the 1980’s, after the death of Mao.

  Vietnam and Cambodia

  In the mean time, China was lending significant support to a communist North Vietnam, which was attempting to unify North and South Vietnam by force and largely against the will of the South Vietnamese, which had large pockets of Catholics and non-Vietnamese minorities. Concerned that communism in Vietnam would spread to other parts of the world, the United States and other anti-communist nations supported the democratic South both financially and militarily. US support escalated over the next eight years leading to a full-blown undeclared war by 1965 when US president, Lyndon B. Johnson, committed over half a million troops to aid South Vietnam. The war lasted until the US negotiated a cease-fire and withdrew its military forces in 1973. While America lost some 60,000 troops – including 2,000 ‘Missing in Action’ – the Vietnamese, both in the South and in the North, lost at least twenty times that.

  Neighbouring Cambodia also suffered terribly as a result of the war. By 1969 the USA had started to bomb Vietcong supply routes there, killing 500,000 Cambodian civilians and driving thousands to join the Khmer Rouge – a weak communist guerrilla force at the time – and to flee to the cities. The Khmer Rouge eventually seized power in 1975, invading Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. They proceeded to force the populations of entire cities into the countryside where they began a policy of exterminating them in execution grounds that came to be known as Killing Fields.

  Over the following four years, approximately two million people – or roughly one-third of the country – died from starvation, overwork, and execution during an attempt by the Khmer Rouge to turn Cambodia into a pure agrarian society. The widespread and systematic brutality adopted by the Khmer Rouge under their leader Pol Pot and his henchmen easily matched, if not overtook, the worst brutality of the Nazi SS, the Soviets and the Japanese during the Second World War. Pol Pot survived and lived on until 1998, and some of his henchmen were finally brought to justice only in 2011.

  The Communist Holocaust (1917–1991)

  Communist regimes were responsible for a greater number of deaths than any other movement in history with torture, mass execution, starvation, terror, forced labour camps and murder all justified in the cause of a communist utopia. In their efforts to bring about the greatest human happiness, communists have brought about great human suffering. The numbers of deaths are staggering; if we include the estimated 50 million deaths that occurred through famine as a result of misguided agricultural or deliberate government policies, it has been estimated that communism was the direct cause of over 100 million deaths in the 20th century or, to put it into perspective, more than those killed in all the wars, revolutions and conflicts in the entire century combined.

  The Chinese and Soviet communists executed the largest numbers of their citizens, while the Cambodian communists murdered the largest percentage of their own population. Three of the four worst dictators the world has known in terms of the number of deaths caused have been communist – Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot. Despite this, communist regimes still exist today, including the morally bankrupt North Korea, which continues to run a network of forced labour camps. China, Cuba, Vietnam and Laos continue to have nominally communist regimes in 2015.

  The Microchip and the Digital Revolution

  If the steam engine and electricity are credited with revolutionising the way in which we live and work, the invention of the microchip in the middle of the 20th century must also gain its place as one of the most important innovations of all time. Calculators, computers, the Internet and mobile phones all exist thanks to the microchip and the world would live at a considerably slower pace without them. What used to take weeks to communicate now takes seconds, and technology has changed the way in which we live and do business. Whether we control technology or technology controls us is another question.

  Decolonisation: The End of Overseas Empires

  The other major global movement since the end of the Second World War has been the decolonisation of much of the world. British India – which had been under British control for 90 years by the end of the war – was one of the first to go. Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi, a British-educated lawyer, became the figurehead of a peaceful resistance movement which encouraged Hindus and Muslims to unify in their fight for independence and self-government. Britain, which had invested significantly in large-scale infrastructure projects and for whom India was a large market for British goods and supplier of a large low-cost standing army, initially responded negatively by imprisoning Gandhi and his colleagues. It had no way of understanding that this would only contribute to the success of the independence movement in the long term.

  Gandhi was less successful in closing the divide between the Hindu and Muslim populations of India, which clashed with increasing frequency. It soon became clear to everyone that successful independence would occur only if Indian Muslims were given their own territory. In August 1947, following almost 350 years of colonial presence in India, the new nations of a predominantly Hindu and Sikh India and a predominantly Muslim Pakistan came into existence. What should have been a joyful occasion was marred by the death through sectarian violence of hundreds of thousands from both sides as people settled into their new countries.

  In Asia, many colonies were initially returned to their former rulers following the war and only obtained independence much later. France, which had fought to build a colonial empire since Napoleon’s defeat, granted independence to Cambodia and Laos after the Second World War, but it tried particularly hard to hold on to other colonial territories. It sent an army into Vietnam only to be decisively defeated there in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu and, having failed to learn its lesson, went on to fight a bloody and unsuccessful decade-long war against insurgents in Algeria, ultimately forcing Charles de Gaulle to withdraw the French army in disgrace in 1962.

  Algeria was just one of the countries in Africa that was encouraged by a growing and global independence movement to demand self-rule. Many countries were offered support in their struggle for independence from Western powers by the communist bloc, which hoped to gain influence in the region. In South Africa, a predominantly white government refused to give the majority black population any say in the running of the country under a regime of apartheid, which despite international opprobrium continued until 1991. International pressure resulted in an economic boycott and isolation that played a large part in forcing change in South Africa combined with the patient, non-violent resistance led by an imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Mandela’s inspired leadership created a government that allowed for peaceful transition from apartheid to peaceful co-existence instead of a bloody civil war, years of instability and worsening poverty that is the more common result of such transitions.

  When required, Western nations would come together to defend their st
rategic interests, as happened in Egypt when French, British and Israeli troops invaded the country in a failed attempt to protect the Suez Canal from nationalisation under Egypt’s president, Colonel Nasser. They also colluded in the Middle East where, in 1953, the British and the Americans arranged for the hugely popular and democratically elected Iranian Premier, Mohammad Mossadegh, to be replaced by the previously deposed Shah after Mossadegh nationalised the Anglo-Iranian oil company. The Shah was eventually overthrown in 1979, creating a fundamentalist Muslim government which continues to be a major supporter of Middle Eastern terrorist groups.

  By 1980, few Western colonies remained. Much of Eastern Europe, on the other hand, in which German subjugation at the end of the war had been replaced by communist subjugation after it, had to wait until the dissolution of the Soviet Empire before it could taste true freedom.

  The Collapse of the Soviet Union (1991)

  The collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable, as it had become morally and financially bankrupt; morally bankrupt through the continued repression of its people, and financially bankrupt through its inability to match the USA in military spending. Its shortcomings were represented by a stagnating economy, a shortage of goods, and general disquiet with the regime.

  To revive the economy, the Russian premier and committed communist, Mikhail Gorbachev, called for a programme of market-oriented economic reforms (‘Perestroika’) and openness (‘Glasnost’) in the mid-1980s, not realising for a minute that this would lead to the dissolution of the USSR within six years. Despite growing problems in the economy to which there was no quick fix, Gorbachev’s popularity soared, thanks largely to the fact that people became less fearful of speaking openly. He had let the genie out of the bottle.