The World Since 1914
Part 6—1946-1959 Deceptive Prosperity Amid a Peace That Was Not
“TODAY’S world, whether we like it or not, is a product of Hitler,” claims literary prizewinner and journalist Sebastian Haffner. He explains: “Without Hitler no division of Germany and Europe; without Hitler no Americans and Russians in Berlin; without Hitler no Israel; without Hitler no decolonization, at least not at such a swift pace, no Asiatic, Arabic and Black African emancipation and no European decline.”
Of course, other world leaders of the day also did things of great consequence. For example, “most modern historians trace the current East-West division of Europe to decisions reached among the Big Three at [the] Tehran [Conference at the end of 1943],” says the Canadian magazine Maclean’s. It goes on to point out, however, that the “Yalta [Conference held in February 1945] became best-known among many historians . . . as the meeting at which Stalin outwitted his Western counterparts and stole an empire. . . . Within weeks Stalin’s troops had consolidated and extended their grip on Eastern Europe. . . . The hot war was ending, but the Cold War had just begun.”
Cold War? Yes. This is the term Bernard Baruch, U.S. presidential adviser, used in 1947 to describe the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was a Cold War being fought on political, economic, and propaganda fronts.
At war’s end the Allies divided Germany into four occupational zones. The French, the British, and the Americans took over the southern and western parts of the country, the Soviets the eastern part. Thus two national blocs came into being, the one democratic, the other communistic. Ever since, they have been trading icy stares across an invisible iron curtain.
Berlin was also divided into four sectors. Since the former German capital was embedded within the Soviet occupation zone, supplies destined for its British, French, and American sectors had to pass through the Soviet zone. This caused problems, and in mid-1948 the Soviets blockaded all ground accesses from Berlin to the West. The Western powers responded by flying in all their needed food and fuel supplies. Until ended some 11 months later, the Berlin blockade and the airlift kept Cold War tensions high.
“Almost overnight,” writes Professor Alfred Grosser of the University of Paris, “Berlin transformed its image from a symbol of Prussian militarism and Hitler dictatorship into a symbol of freedom.” Today, Berlin is still a popular symbol, and politicians of both East and West periodically use it as a pretext for fanning Cold War flames.
Five days before the end of World War II, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Japanese-occupied Korea at its northern tip. When Japan capitulated, the Allies agreed that Japanese troops north of the 38th parallel should surrender to the Soviets and those south of this line to the Americans. In 1950 this unnatural division of the country led to war. Before it was over, almost 20 nations were militarily involved, and over 40 more provided military equipment or supplies. On July 27, 1953, a cease-fire was finally put into effect after hundreds of thousands of people had died. For what? Today, over 30 years later, no final solution to the Korean problem has been found. They call this separation the Bamboo Curtain.
The prophet Daniel foresaw that such a confrontation would take place between two symbolic kings. The Cold War has given the two superpower-kings of our day ample opportunity to confer with each other, in continuing their longtime policy of speaking “at one table a lie.” Thus they have pursued national interests, while at the same time actively engaging “in a pushing” against each other for personal advantage.—Daniel 11:27-45.
Unruly “Babies Satisfactorily Born”
When the atom bomb was first successfully exploded in New Mexico, U.S. president Truman was sent a secret message reading: “Babies satisfactorily born.” But how unruly and demanding these “babies” have turned out to be! They have thrust nations, large and small, into an unprecedented worldwide military buildup, forcing them to spend money that they might better have used to feed and educate their needy. They have fostered the dangerous policy of preserving peace by a balance of terror. They have given the United Nations organization due cause to consider every national or international skirmish, however minor, a potential nuclear holocaust. They have necessitated the setting up of new peace-keeping organizations like NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) in 1949 and the Warsaw Pact in 1955.
As the number of atomic “babies” and their parent nations has grown, so also has the danger of a global nuclear war, caused either by accident or by design. They have kept the world trembling in “fear and expectation of the things coming upon the inhabited earth.”—Luke 21:26.
So if the shot that began the U.S. War of Independence in 1775 was “the shot heard round the world,” as poet Ralph Waldo Emerson called it, then the atom-bomb blast that ended World War II in 1945 was most surely ‘the blast heard round the world.’
The World Book Encyclopedia tells us about some other unruly “babies” that were “satisfactorily born” during the postwar era. Referring to “The Rise of New Nations,” it explains: “One by one, the vast European empires collapsed after World War II. Great Britain, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, and the other large colonial powers had been weakened by their losses during the war. They no longer could hold their colonies by force.” Among the first colonies to gain independence were Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Israel, Libya, Tunisia, and Ghana.
The trend toward political independence has continued to this very day and has resulted in the birth of at least a hundred new nations since 1945.
Colonialism had its drawbacks, but what has replaced it is not necessarily better. Syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer notes: “As the colonial empires dissolved, many of the new nations began what was to be one long period of slow-motion collapse, often marked by internal warfare.” Thus has the evidence grown that man cannot rule himself successfully.—Ecclesiastes 8:9; Jeremiah 10:23.
Prosperity—But Costly and Deceptive
In 1945 the inhabitants of war-ravaged Europe and Asia were in difficulties. For humanitarian reasons, but also driven by self-interest, the Allies devised the European Recovery Program. It was an agency that offered financial help in rebuilding Europe’s bombed-out industries. Popularly known as the Marshall Plan, named after the U.S. secretary of state who originated the idea, this do-it-yourself program, while costly, was effective.
Economic and industrial recovery was remarkable. Modern plants full of up-to-date machinery enabled the defeated nations to catch up to, and in some cases to overtake, their victorious neighbors, who were often forced to make do with antiquated plants and equipment. During the 1950’s the so-called German economic miracle was in full swing, and by the end of the decade, Japan had embarked upon a building program that would enable it to conquer much of the world commercially.
The victors, meanwhile, were also trying to get their domestic and economic policies back to normal. Construction of homes and production of domestic goods were severely curtailed during the war, when everything was geared to war production. There was now a tremendous market for items people had long done without. This meant work for all; at least for the moment, unemployment was no problem. The world was now headed toward a period of prosperity not seen since before the Great Depression.
But prosperity had its price. More and more mothers took up secular work outside the home, sometimes neglecting children in doing so. Rising living standards allowed for more recreation, but it was not always wholesome. TV watching began replacing family conversation. A breakdown in family life led to an increase in divorce. This trend was later partially offset by the growing tendency of single people to live together without being married. Both trends implied a growing tendency to stress personal interests at the expense of others. Spiritual and moral values, already sorely disrupted by the war, were now being further eroded.
Genuine Peace and Prosperity
As a whole, the world’s religious organizations had seen nothing wrong in sending their members out to slaughter fellow humans during World War II. So now they saw nothing wrong in lending moral and physical support to the Cold War and to political uprisings and so-called wars of liberation. But there was one notable exception.
Jehovah’s Witnesses preserved Christian neutrality during World War II and thereafter. Rebounding from Hitler’s attempts to destroy them, the number of active Witnesses in Germany increased from fewer than 9,000 in 1946 to over 52,000 within five years. Between 1945 and 1959, they increased throughout the world from 141,606 Witnesses in 68 countries to 871,737 in 175 countries. While members of many other religions were increasingly at war with one another over political and social issues, as well as unsettled by a drop in church membership, Jehovah’s Witnesses, in a spiritual way, were enjoying real peace and prosperity.
This was apparent at their 1958 Divine Will International Assembly in New York City, where the peak attendance at one session was over 250,000. A featured speaker said: “It is the flourishing of the spiritual paradise that explains the overflowing happiness of Jehovah’s witnesses . . . This spiritual paradise reflects the glory of God and testifies to the establishment of his kingdom.”
The peace that followed World War II, actually a peace that was not, as well as the purely materialistic prosperity it promoted, pointed up this indisputable fact: Genuine peace and prosperity can come only through God’s established Kingdom. During “The 1960’s—A Period of Turbulent Protest,” this would become even more obvious. Read about it in our next issue.
[Box on page 14]
Other Items That Made the News
1946—Ho Chi Minh declares war of liberation in Vietnam
1947—Dead Sea Scrolls, including oldest extant Bible
manuscripts, discovered
1948—Mohandas Gandhi assassinated
1949—Peoples Liberation Army completes conquest of mainland
China; non-Communist Nationalist government withdraws to
island of Taiwan
1950—Riots against apartheid in South Africa
1952—United States explodes first hydrogen bomb
1954—U.S. Supreme Court declares racial segregation in schools
unconstitutional
1957—Soviets send first earth satellite, Sputnik I, into
orbit
1958—European Economic Community (Common Market) begins
operations
1959—Soviet rocket transmits pictures of the moon back to
earth
[Picture on page 15]
Postwar prosperity brought fine homes and new cars to many families
[Credit Line]
H. Armstrong Roberts