CH20 &CH21

(CH20)

• WWI, essentially a European civil war with a global reach, provoked the Russian Revolution and the beginnings of world communism. it was followed by the economic meltdown of the Great Depression, by the rise of Nazi Germany and the horror of the Holocaust, and by an even bloodier and more destructive WWII .
• Schools, mass media, and military service had convinced millions of ordinary Europeans that their national identities were profoundly and personally meaningful.
• Trench warfare resulted in enormous casualties while gaining or losing only a few yards of muddy, blood-soaked ground.
• Germany-"war socialism"
• The war seemed to mock the Enlightenment values of progress, tolerance and rationality.
• Enormous causalities promoted social mobility, allowing the less exalted to move into positions previously dominated by the upper class.
• As the war ended, suffrage movements revived and women received the right to vote in Britain, US, Germany, the Soviet Union, Hungary and Poland.
• New states - "national self-determination"
• The Treaty of Versailles, which formally concluded the war in 1919, proved in retrospect to have established conditions that contributed to a second world war only twenty years later.
• Conflicting British promises to both Arabs and Jews regarding Palestine set the stage for an enduring struggle over the holy land.
• During the Great Depression, the unemployment rate was as high as 30% in Germany and US (in 1932).
• "import substitution industrialization"
• In Britain and France and Scandinavia, the Depression energized a "democratic socialism" that sought greater regulation of the economy and a more equal distribution of wealth through peaceful means and electoral politics.
• New Deal - government actions and spending programs could moderate the recessions and depressions to which capitalist economies were prone. social security system, minimum wage and various welfare programs. also supported unions, subsidies for farmers.
• Fascists condemned individualism, liberalism, feminism, parliamentary democracy, and communism.
• Fascism - one-man rule, state-controlled parties, youth organizations or militia, a rhetoric of national renewal, anti-Semitic measures and revolutionary features.
• Holocaust - a genocide, the attempted elimination of entire peoples.

(CH21)

• The growing disbelief in the ability or willingness of the communist regime to provide a decent life for its people was a important factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of communist in the land of its birth.
• The communist revolutions of the 20th century took place in largely agrarian societies, despite the prerequisite of an advanced industrial capitalism that Karl Marx had envisioned.
• The Warsaw Pact
• Communist's Marxist ideology - committed to an industrialized future, pursued economic, political and gender equality, and sought the abolition of private property.
• The CCP frontally addressed both of China's major problems - foreign imperialism and peasant exploitation. It expressed Chinese nationalism as well as a demand for radical social change.
• Communist countries pioneered forms of women's liberation that only later were adopted in the West.