Strayer, last excerpt of last chapter 24

Despite the last chapter discussion’s emphasis on secularism, globalization, and religious backlash against science and related ideas such as evolution, the practices of abortion, this last segment in the chapter deals with Environmentalism and how that has impacted the world as it’s gone hand and hand with globalization bringing acknowledgement of environmental issues to the forefront of awareness by the public via media and so on. Memories of empires and revolutions, wars et cetera, have faded from memory of many to remember wars like Vietnam and others during the 20^th Century. There was perhaps a time when the resources of the world seemed endless. We had two world wars, genocides that killed millions, and yet still the population has recovered and continues to challenge our ability to transform the planet and deal with dwindling resources for a growing world population. Environmentalism brought this concern into the public sphere. Tapping new energy sources such as hydro-electric power, natural gas, and nuclear power allowed mankind to power larger cities, which meant more people expotentially; this allowed more economic growth. We use more energy in America than most places in the world, 50 to 100 times more power consumption than the average Bangladeshi for example. But, with the growth of these new economic, industrial and residential zones, came a host of other modern problems. Particularly the increase of domesticated animals for mass-consumption, and a lot of air pollution problems that some estimates killed 35,000 people a year by 2002! I knew that careless industrial accidents and lack of environmental oversight in the former Soviet Union had caused a lot of industrial waste. But, the authorities tended to censor environmental impact of their pollution there. I remember a friend told me you could only drink bottled water when you traveled to Romania. She said you couldn’t drink from wells or the tap because the water was so badly contaminated with pollution from the period when the Soviets occupied Eastern Europe, for example. 20 percent of Mexico’s population interestingly lives in areas described as “ecological disasters.” Sometimes industrial progress trumps the human rights of people unfortunately. Before the 1990s there wasn’t much concensus about the impact of global warming, it seems. The biggest concern was that of the burning of fossil fuels, and the deforestization of regions having an impact upon greenhouse gases being trapped in the atmosphere, polar ice caps melting, and extinction of whole species. Environmentalism began it seems via the discussion of Romanticism era poets like Blake and Wordsworth interestingly. You wouldn’t imagine poets as social activists in favor of environmentalism typically, but maybe that’s not a stretch since a lot of poets have written poets that eulogized the awe and beauty of nature itself. By the early 90’s only 14 million Americans were members of environmental organizations. That, I guess is a lot of people, but it’s still not the majority of the population fo the time. Still it’s an impressive start. In Germany, environmentalism was also prominent with parties like the Green Party, who were originally opposed to nuclear weapons on European soil, who took more of a general environmentalism stance later on with the rest of the movements.

Strayer ch 24 pp 740 - 747

Science and and socialist ideologies such as Marxism put a dent in the hold of religious belief in the minds of many early 20^th Century people. Science and socialism seemed to hold new answers that religion couldn’t answer old superstitions and beliefs were swept away. The new cause célèbre was Modernity with a capital m. However, religion did begin to change in terms of demographics. By the end of the 20^th Century Christianity had spread across wide swaths of Asia and Africa, but Islam also made inroads into China, where it represents 7% of the population and parts of north America, especially amongst African Americans. There was a sense of pluralism that pervaded the world, that confronted people to make choices to their beliefs and lives that once before they might have considered more fixed and inflexible.

In some ways however, religious groups, particularly Evangelic Christians thought that science and secular values had gone too far, so there was a backlash in which a certain amount of anti-modernity prevailed amongst these religious groups, most ardently opposed to Darwinism. They also reacted negatively to more liberal denominations of Christianity. They were also opposed to homosexuality, and abortion rights, believed that there would be a physical resurrection of Christ, and a heavy emphasis on miracles. They also tended to coincide with political parties that were opposed to “big government.” At first, more of a Libertarian stance, and solidly conservative. Some thought the U.S. was on the edge of a cliff and that these gains in science and culture had to be turned back somehow. Fundimentalists sought to create separate schools, churches and other institutions separate from the mainstream religious and secular institutions. And were called the religious right. People like Pat Robertson advocated that Evangelicals become more involved in the political process to impose their views on America at large. At the same time there was a rise in Hindu and Muslim nationalism in Asia.

Strayer, last chapter excerpt

This is such a short excerpt being the last part. Globalization has been the defining socio-economic philosophy since the 1960s. Has it really? I never heard the word “Globalization” during The Cold War. I never heard it being used in common usage within the vernacular and realpolitik until the first NAFTA legislation was passed around  1994, I thin. And then there was also European Union being enacted, formerly the Common Market.  I think Strayer is right that a lot of the wars and social conscious issues have faded into memory with the rise of globalism. I don’t think a lot of today’s generation really can identify with the issues of the 60’s, or the wars. And the people involved now are pretty much at retirement age. It’s kind of surreal like the scene in Airplane II where the elderly hippie couple are having a conversation like: “You remember the time, you and so and so were on that Acid trip at Woodstock?”

The 20^th Century fundamentally challenged our ability to tap new resources of fossil fuels and technologies like nuclear energy. I remember someone once said that “The 20^th Century was like a thousand 19^th Centuries and the 21^st Century will probably be like one hundred 20^th Centuries in terms of technological innovations.” Especially if we get things right with energy alternatives and no innovations. Yes, Americans have used unfortunately,  50 to 100 times more energy than someone in Bangladesh. That was a grievance in the film: “How Stuff Works.” Population has dramatically increased with our ability to increase production of crop yields and cattle via technological innovation, fertilizers, pesticides, dams, et cetera, the burning of fossil fuels increasing global warming, ad naseam. Environmentalism had its roots in 19^th Century Romanticism movements and were promoted by people like John Muir, The Sierra Club founder, and maybe I would say Theodore Roosevelt had some input in the early movement since he help establish the first national park system. But, it didn’t really take off until the 1970’s and 1980’s.

Strayer Ch 24 pp 734 - 739

The 20^th Century was a groundbreaking movement in terms of liberation movements. Especially by the 1960s. There were civil rights movements by Africans Americans and Hispanics, there was a youthful counter culture with a large emphasis on “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll;” prolonged by civil unrest and protests over the war in Vietnam. In France there was a large student protest against the Fifth Republic’s values because the government hadn’t provided adequate housing or facilities for students to be educated. The movement attracted the middle class and was brutally put down by the police, which spread to a movement of 9 million workers striking. There were also protests in Germany and Italy. In that same year there were protests in Czechloslovakia aiming to reform the communist regime from the inside out, but the Soviet Union sent in troops and tanks to crush what they considered a revolt to their absolute rule. These movements were largely led by scholars, students and activists. Che Guevara in Latin America was one of these revolutionaries, but he was not fighting through the use of Gandhian peaceful protest tactics. He and other revolutionaries were actually in military skirmishes with Latin American regimes. Feminism also really took off in the 1960s. It became more of a global effort because even communist regimes started to acknowledge feminist movements. Feminism had kind of stalled after the 1920s. It was like, where could it go after women gained the right to vote? The movement in the 60’s focused on things like having sexual liberation and having iconoclastic irreverence towards holidays such as Mother’s Day and institutions such as the Miss America contest. There were also calls for equal rights for gays and lesbians.  They looked back to 19^th Century womens movements  for ideas since there was nowhere left to go with the woman’s vote.

Strayer Chapter 23

I wasn’t expecting for chapter 23 to start off talking about South African Apartheid or the struggle of Nelson Mandela while he was in prison. I was alive when apartheid ended, but I was too young to really understand the complexities and political consequences of it. I do remember in the 1990s watching films such as “Madela & De Klerk,” which talked about how the last president of the regime helped free Mandela and negotiate an end to the system. And then I remember that also in the 90’s there was a musical produced about students in the 70’s protesting Apartheid in the township of Soweto called “Sarafina,” which starred Whoopi Goldberg and can be seen on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRaFRCAPWJk I remember that Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years, but I’m not sure if I knew the extent of how bad his imprisonment was. I don’t recall that sometimes he had no bed, and that he could have only one visitor for 30 minutes once a year, or that he was only allowed to write one letter every six months. And what’s amazing about the man was his ability to forgive his captors and the regime that imprisoned him. The textbook alluded to a speech Mandela did, but I was disappointed that Strayer chose not to unclude an excerpt of it within the textbook. Actually, Strayer has a tendency to on occasion quote ordinary people when relevant to the textbook, but he doesn’t really quote the famous people relevant to the times his trying to teach the student about. The chapter talks about the end of empires in Europe and the new notion of individual nations with their own right to self-determination, but it might have been discussed in better context had Wilson’s 14 Points Doctrine been mention, which had a lot to do with setting up these new nations in order to prevent wars between empires, the establishment of the League of Nations et cetera. I’d actually written some papers for an Asian studies course with Professor Chary at NDNU. But, it was interesting that Strayer noted that the British attacks upon the Ottoman Empire antagonized Muslims in India because this was not usually mentioned as one of the reasons for civil unrest when Gandhi became more prominent upon the political scene within India. I do recall that there were some British massequers of Indians protesting for civil rights, but I don’t recall the figure having been 400 victims before Strayer mentioned it. Strayer indicates that Indians amongst the educated elite planned to ask for autonomy at first rather than call for open rebellion towards independence. Of course, this is not really surprising since there have been other movements that demanded autonomy first before they realized they had to go for full independence. The Indian National Congress (INC) was mostly an urban phenomenon. I never knew this really. In films depicting Gandhi, a more rural setting is usually depicted. It’s important to note that Gandhi’s defining moment was when he was kicked off a train in South Africa for his race not the Satyagraya, when he disrupted Indian commerce by stopping salt production.

Cold War, Ch 22 pp. 675 - 689

Despite China and Russia having tendencies toward totalitarian interpretations of communist ideologies, they were wrought with internal conflicts that vexed them both. Both under Mao and Stalin, there seemed to be an internal search for enemies of the state that had consequences for both societies. Both China and Russia felt that their ideologies and state mechanisms hadn’t gone far enough to removes “bourgeois ideas” from their respective societies. These people who were accused of retaining these ideas were deemed “class enemies” who had betrayed the ideals of their communist revolutions. There was a paranoia that these class enemies wished to restore capitalist institutions. In the Soviet Union, for example there were a series of purges, also known as “The Great Terror” as late as the 1930s in which tens of thousands of communist, including the first generation of Lenin’s party leadership were purged from society, in addition to millions more ordinary people. These people were usually arrested, sometimes without warning or provocation after others had sometimes denounced them simply to save their own skins. Many were guilty by association. The state held “show trials” in which the accused were made examples of what class enemies were. Close to 1 million people between 1936 – 1941 were executed. Between 4 – 5 million people were sent into gulags. The state security apparatus was totally consumed by interrogations, arrests, and executions under the supposed laws. Interestingly by contrast, while the state in the Soviet Union executed the law with government officials handing out punishment, Mao instigated open rebellion against his own party by formenting civilian antagonistic tactics against the state, more like vigilante justice to some extent during their Cultural Revolution. These attacks from ordinary Chinese were agitated by huge rallies calling for young people to go out and rid the country of state enemies on “capitalist roads”.

While The Soviet Union agitated world revolution, this however, had to be put on hold because World War created some strange bedfellows in terms of unlikely alliances with the U.S. and Great Britain against Nazi Germany. The Cold War in the beginning remained mostly maligned as a European phenomenon until events such as the Korean War and the Vietnam War began to shift some of the focus of the ideological conflict to the sphere of Asia. Europe had NATO and the Warsaw Pact alliance along the Iron Curtain, Asia didn’t have these kind of military blocks with the exception of the shortly lived S.E.A.T.O. (South East Asian Treaty Organization). Vietnam began as an internal civil war with America supplying in the beginning, only 50,000 troops and advisers to the South Vietnamese government. The war itself lasted until 1975, but the saber-rattling would last at least until the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, which would turn into the Soviet Union’s own version of Vietnam due to high casualties. Perhaps the most dangerous moment of The Cold War was during the Cuban Missle Crisis, when Soviet brinkmanship placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, causing a blockade that nearly brought the world to nuclear war. This was averted by America agreeing to remove missiles it had in Turkey if the Russians would do the same in Cuba.

Massaro Catholic Social Teaching section 5

Chapter 5, section 5 within the handout by Massaro indicated that the material things can only be good if they are shared amongst a community for the common good with a wide availability. Massaro indicates that the Catholic Church isn’t necessarily opposed to private ownership. The church simply encourages that the private ownership of property be used efficiently in a way that the resources i.e., material goods associated with the property are equitably distributed amongst people, offering them incentives to be more productive and care for the goods as though they were somehow sacred to God. The Church tended to follow the teachings of Thomas Aquinas on property ownership, who admonished those for being greedy with material wealth and proposed that individuals ought to impose limits on themselves in terms of how much property they could hold. Alas, some of these admonishments by Aquinas and the church fell on deaf ears, largely being ignored by some. The Church believed according to Aquinas, that God didn’t favor individuals to have unlimited wealth and there seems to be an implication that it’s a kind of social sin to not share those excess material goods with ones less fortunate neighbors. In God’s eyes all people are equal as his children, therefore to redistribute material goods to the less fortunate is in God’s plan.

The Catholic church under Paul VI indicated that there was great concern amongst the clergy about excessive hoarding of wealth. Especially amongst the land owning classes in Latin America. Paul VI indicated that if lands weren’t being used efficiently and their resources weren’t being given to the common good that perhaps the church should encourage measures in which the people would forcibly take those resources for themselves if they couldn’t acquire it peacefully. But the pope at the time indicated that this would have to be reserved for circumstances defined as “extreme measures when he presented these arguments in 1967; as a consequence of the industrial revolution people were more dependent upon some implied means and modes of production. Many it seemed implied didn’t own their own modes of production, so therefore there ought to be measures in place for people to have upward mobility in which they could have their needs met. This would require a certain amount of social responsibility and socialization. John XXIII indicates that government could act as a catalyst to seize and redistribute material goods for the common good using church principles as guidelines for their distribution. The church began to recognize that the government and private sectors of life ought to have a vested interest in promoting redistribution of material goods for the common good of the people. But, make no mistake about it, the church doesn’t suggest all property ought to be collectivized, since early in the section the church endorsed limited individual property rights.

Rise and Fall of Communism

It’s always interesting for me to reflect on the rise and fall of Communism. I was 9 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. I remember it happening, but it didn’t really register with me at the time about how it divided people between east and west. Those of us who grew up during the Cold War had the perception of life behind the Iron Curtain being very dreary and monotonous, as this video attempts to convey western perceptions of communist life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-AjzrnEgew Communism wasn’t really in a position as an ideology to be considered a real competitor with Capitalism on a world stage until after World War II according to the textbook.  It can be understood that while the Soviet Union and China wielded most of their power in Europe and Asia, they didn’t have military services outside of their respective spheres of influence. In Latin America, for example, the most that Russia or China might have contributed was financial aid, weapons, and diplomatic attachés. The Warsaw Pact countries were for the most part, “buffer states” to stand between the Soviet Union and the west to prevent further invasions into the Soviet Union.  There was also quite a bit of mistrust towards the west not only because Germany had invaded the Soviet Union, but also because the U.S. and other European powers had actually sent special forces into Russia following the Bolshevik revolution to aid czarist armies, to help them overthrow the Bolsheviks. The Warsaw pact countries saw the Soviet Union as their protector, and modeled their economic systems and governments after the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union promoted the idea of a global communist revolution partly because they believed Marx thought the fall of communism was inevitable. But, not everyone was keen on the Soviet Union being the highest model of communism because China and Russia almost went to war over ideological differences stemming from China not being treated as an equal partner in the spread of Communism. While The Soviet Union and China may have promoted world communism, some of the countries they supported such as Vietnam and Korea were more concerned with unifying their countries under communism rather than being focused on spreading it beyond their borders. Some states had agendas that were “national communism” in nature while others were internationally oriented. In many ways, although ideologies changed, imperial ambitions remained very much intact in that like their czarist predecessors, the Soviets had little interest in giving autonomy to countries like Ukraine, who were their vassals. In some cases they even “Russified” the populations by trying to move Russian immigrants into these countries, but these countries always managed to retain their identity, language, and culture despite these attempts.

Strayer: Intro to chapter 21 and Chapter 21 reading

The introduction argues when the 20^th Century really ended, whether after the Cold War ended or after 9/11, but I personally believe that for most people the notion of the 20^th Century worldview ended after 9/11. I remember once actually watching the film, “Clear And Present Danger” based on the Tom Clancy novel, and a commentator on whatever channel it was described it as a “period piece” because it reflected a time between the Cold War and 9/11 when it was very feasible to see other things like the war on drugs being more of a threat to national security than conventional foes or terrorists, in the context of 20^th Century worldviews versus Post-9/11 world views.

Strayer on page 618 in so many words is saying that the Chinese and Russian communist revolutions were social experiments that sought to create an alternative world to the capitalist system.  But, they were the apotheosis of past revolutions that had attempted to garner gains for the working class. Another feature of the 20^th Century that Strayer notes is the end of empires, and the rise of Republican states. And he suggests that with more freedoms populations grew more dramatically than they had during the age of empires.

It was interesting that Strayer began chapter 21 talking about a WWI veteran being dismayed about how WWI wasn’t “the war to end all wars,” that he’d seen so much bloody conflict in his own lifetime, but he was also glad that a stronger, more integrated world came out of it in the long run. It certainly wasn’t when you consider that had the Treaty of Versailles been a lot less vindictive and more amicable to the Germans in terms of territories they lost and the reparations payment play they were forced to abide by, the possibility of another world war might have been a little more remote or at least put off a little longer, suggests Strayer on pages 631 – 632.

Strayer describes WWI as “an accident waiting to happen,” but one who knows the history of the conflict would actually surmize that there was a certain eagerness to prosecute the war  in the beginning on the part of the powers involved. I remember British euphemisms from the time that said, “This will be a jolly good war,” or “This war will be short and we’ll be home for Christmas (which Strayer also quotes on page 629, last paragraph).” But, that was not to be so. It was really a mess of entanglements via treaties in which one party would feel obligated to to attack in equal measure the other if their ally were attacked. It’s hard not to entertain counterfactuals like, if only one of the powers had refused to honor their treaties and refused to participate. That might have dissuaded other powers from taking part.  Strayer only indicates on page 627 that it was an accident of history because nobody anticipated the assassination of the Arch-Duke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire would happen, nor that it would be the spark for the conflict. But, he indicates on page 629 that there was a military-industrial complex on all sides that had lots of munitions and troops being unused, so perhaps there was a certain ambition to test out their readiness to fight rather than let the armed forces go to waste.