Today, I’m going to make a terrible mistake for your educational benefit.
See, usually on this channel we take one individual topic and dissect it in a comfortably localized
way, to avoid getting bogged down in tangential plotlines and extraneous players.
But as we march closer to the modern day, it becomes vastly more difficult to take any
topic in isolation, because Spheres of Participation have grown from “some rivers and this nearby
sea” to literally the entire planet.
So, with that said, the subject of this video is the aftermath of the Second World War and
how it prompted both the Cold War and Decolonization… which is a lot, and I’ll need a MUCH bigger
worldmap.
But it’s also way too misunderstood for how important it is to our modern lives.
My goal in this objectively awful decision that I’ve forced upon myself is to show
how the big plotlines of the mid-to-late 1900s are intricately linked by a direct chain of
causes and effects.
So, to trace the winding road from 1945 to the new millennium, Let’s do some Modern
History.
Now, this being a video that falls under most people’s living memory, we’re automatically
in spicy territory, and I’m going to fly over a mountain of details in pursuit of The
Big Picture.
So even more than usual: Disclaimer that this is a summary, and I am sorry that I didn’t
mention your favorite part of modern history.
You know, the thing at the place, Yeah, that one.
Sorry.
SO, a few months after the surrender of Germany in May 1945, the United States bombed the
Empire of Japan into submission and ended the Second World War.
This left two massive theaters of war reeling from their initial conquest by the axis and
the grueling allied advances toward Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo.
Europe and East Asia were devastated beyond belief, where even the victorious France,
Britain, and Russia could be forgiven for looking out their shattered windows and thinking
they fared just as badly as Japan and Germany.
The difference of course was that even the broken and bankrupt allies could party it
up at the winners table with all the occupation privileges that entailed.
In Asia, the United States reallocated pacific colonies to their previous owners and then
promptly sat on top of Japan for 7 years.
In doing so, they reorganized the government into a democracy, confiscated the military,
and rebuilt Japan from literally the ground up into a powerful economic ally, (which started
by importing enough food to stop the Japanese from starving to death on account of all of
their infrastructure being destroyed).
In effect, America’s postwar occupation traded deep structural reforms and 7 years
of sovereignty for Japan’s head-start in becoming one of the world’s biggest economies.
This relationship was ultimately pretty straightforward, but the situation was vastly more complicated
back over in Europe, where multiple parties had a hand in bapping the Fascism out of Deutschland.
The US, Britain, and France had cooperated with Soviet Russia, under duress, to sandwich
the Nazis, and after the war, Europe was firmly bisected between these camps.
German-occupied territories in Western Europe returned to their prewar status, while Germany
itself was partitioned into four zones of occupation between the US Britain France and
Russia, with the capital of Berlin similarly sliced up.
But Russia was a touch more grab-happy with Eastern Europe, annexing up to the Baltic
coast and gently scooting Poland to the left.
Speaking of going left, Russia’s international goodwill and lingering military presence helped
create Russian-modeled Communist governments in here here here here here here here and
here.
Essentially, the liberations and occupations of post-war Europe split the continent between
Soviet Russian influence and American influence, and these camps did not like each other.
Beyond the obvious problem of There’s A Powerful State Over There Who Isn’t Me,
the Russo-American rivalry had a distinctly ideological tint.
Since the 1920s, The Soviet Union operated under Communism, a collectivist philosophy
that aims for equality and civic cooperation through a centrally-planned economy.
And this hyper-teamwork attitude made for a single-party political system which, thanks
to ultra-dictator Joseph Stalin, had a distinctly authoritarian vibe from the get-go.
So the theoretical aim of “everything belong to everyone” looked a little more like “Everything
belong to state”.
Meanwhile, America and friends still followed Capitalism, where market-competition and individual
choices about how to spend and invest money drive the economy.
And capitalist democracies carried that competitive spirit into multi-party politics, which has
the benefit of encouraging participation in government, but gets a little finnicky when
people are more interested in attacking each other than actually solving problems.
On paper, this distinction might seem stuffy and better suited to halls of Econ and Poly-Sci
101 than grounds for international conflict, but in practice, picking a philosophy meant
picking which global superpower to buddy up with, and the world swiftly found itself bisected
between Team Stars And Stripes and Team Hammer and Sickle.
These teams took very different approaches to rebuilding a war-torn Europe, as in, America
actually tried.
Well, that’s not quite fair, because Russia was focused on rebuilding itself after enduring
Operation Barbarossa and seeing every farm west of Moscow go fwoof.
But, the Soviets did make a point to ban their satellite states from bowing to capitalist
aid, so eeeh?
Meanwhile, the West had no problem with receiving vast amounts of American cash.
The Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe was a rather friendlier operation than what went
down in Japan, but had similar goals of securing trade partnerships and solidifying alliances,
with the added bonus of gently dissuading them from looking too closely at that copy
of Marx on the shelf, and embarrassing the Soviet Union for its comparative stinginess.
The Marshall Plan worked like a charm, and there was hardly anything Russia could do
about it, except in Berlin.
In Germany, the western 3 zones were becoming distinct from the Russian eastern zone, but
the partitioned capital was well into Communist territory, and as a show of force, Stalin
blockaded Berlin’s supply routes to try and force a surrender of the city’s western
zones.
As a show of bigger force, America France and Britain organized a yearlong airlift to
drop supplies right in West Berlin and keep the city running.
The airlift worked, Jojo Stalin backed down, and West Berlin survived, but relations between
Eastern and Western Europe remained tense and fragmented from each other.
This metaphorical “Iron Curtain” between Communism and Capitalism got literal when
the Soviets and friends built walls along their borders and around West Berlin — both
to keep capitalists out, but also to stop their own people from leaving.
With all this talk of America and Russia, it’s easy to overlook the two other Allied
parties of France and Britain.
As winners of the war they were rolling in diplomatic street-cred along with big boys
ussr and usa and they, like Russia, had a lot of rebuilding to do, but they were raking
in cash from the Marshall Plan, and most importantly, these two were the last big colonial empires
on earth.
France had all of this, Britain had all of THIS, while Belgium Portugal and the Netherlands
were bopping around with these.
Even the colonies which didn’t see direct conflict like North Africa or suffer Japanese
occupation like Hong Kong and Vietnam still paid dearly for the kerfuffles of their parent
states by providing soldiers and supplies throughout the war.
And by the time peace was declared in 1945 it was obvious that these empires lacked the
moral and practical means to persist.
The first chain to break was British India, which was granted independence in 1947 and
(rather hastily) partitioned into India and Pakistan.
This was accomplished without a war, but the ensuing years were far from peaceful, as over
12 million Hindus and Muslims were displaced from their homes and over a million died.
But even this was less overtly violent than the liberation of other colonies.
Vietnam proclaimed its independence after the defeat of Japan only for France to show
back up and say Nope, don’t be silly, you’re ours again, and fight a 7-year war to attempt
and subsequently fail to keep their colony.
A similar story played out in the Dutch East Indies, where Indonesia finally won its independence
in 1949.
Many newly independent nations viewed western capitalism as a little too closely entwined
with imperialism, for reasons including and not limited to deep personal experience, so
some looked to Communism as a model for progress and a way to decouple from their colonizers.
This also happened in places where European imperialism was more informal, like China,
where Mao’s Communist faction won a civil war against the Nationalists.
The defeated “Republic of China” jumped from the mainland in 1949 to settle in Taiwan,
and mainland People’s Republic of China (very different) cozied up with the Soviets.
Meanwhile, France’s Vietnamese thrashing affected their African colonies as well, where
Algeria began a war for independence and France was essentially forced to let the rest of
Africa go in an attempt to hold Algeria for dear life.
Needless to say, they could not, and by 1962 L’Empire Français est mort.
Britain’s process of decolonization was slightly longer and slightly less violent
but ultimately had the same outcome.
India’s hasty partition showed how weak the war had left this once-glorious empire,
and in most cases, the British unceremoniously bounced before a colony became a liability.
With the pointed exception of Kenya (where the Mau Mau uprising saw a brutal 8-year fight
for independence), British Africa decolonized through the ‘50s & ‘60s as Britain set
up governments they were super duper sure wouldn’t go Communist, like what almost
happened in Malaysia whoopsies.
Most of these independent countries joined the new Commonwealth in the hope that good
relations and lasting economic ties would benefit everybody.
The trouble is that colonial rule was enforced through violence and acted primarily to extract
value, so these new nations didn’t have any experience with healthy government and
were largely left with weak institutions and inexperienced leaders to just figure it out.
So most of Africa’s start in independent life was marked by poverty and violence and
oppression, and that legacy has been tough to shake.
But even in the rare case when a post-colonial nation did get some pep in their step, it
didn’t go over well in Europe — Such as when Egypt gained de facto independence from
Britain when it became a republic in 1953.
Even after this, Britain and France maintained partial ownership of the strategically vital
Suez Canal until Egypt’s president nationalized it in ’56.
And so, France and Britain teamed up to invade Egypt about it.
On paper, the invasion worked, but sending an army into a sovereign state to avoid paying
tolls on a canal was a bad look, to say the least, and this was one of a handful of moments
where Russia and America agreed that the barbarity of imperialism had no place in the world.
Because nobody should be so crass as to outright conquer another territory.
Please, no, the polite way to go about was through exerting diplomatic and economic pressure
to enforce to a sphere of influence; like when the United States played anti-communist
whack-a-mole in Central America, OR when the USSR violently suppressed popular demonstrations
in Eastern Europe.
Empire was old hat, Influence was the new hotness!
Now, on paper I’m nowhere near finishing this whole story, but from a structural point
of view, the narrative can essentially play itself out from here — The Cold War started
as a bid for diplomatic and economic influence in Europe and in the power-vacuum of newly
decolonized territories, and it later developed into a space-faring science exhibit and occasional
sports competition with the casual background threat of total nuclear annihilation.
So despite some pretty beefy multinational alliances in the form of NATO and the Warsaw
Pact, those pesky nukes stopped the parties from directly throwing hands at each other.
Instead these conflicts played out via proxy wars, like you know, Korea and Vietnam and
China and Thailand and Cambodia and Afghanistan and Iran and Israel and Yemen and Turkey and
Greece and Ethiopia and Angola and South Africa and Chile and Bolivia and Peru and Nicaragua
and Cuba and a bunch of other places.
Honestly, throw a dart at a map, and you won’t be that far off.
But ultimately, this world of making armed-conflict a them problem was not to last, because the
fundamental issue at the heart of the cold war was starting to wear.
Western Europe had been creating a shared economic community, starting in the ‘50s
with a common Coal and Steel market to aid in the postwar rebuilding effort, and expanding
that network to include goods, services, and the movement of people.
This arrangement took its modern form in ’93 when the European Economic Community became
the European Union and began creating much more robust systems of international cooperation.
But this was only half of the European story.
On the other side of the Iron Curtain, an easing of censorship was showing everyone
just how bad life had gotten under Soviet-style Communism.
Food was scarce, governments were cruel, and protests for change were becoming harder to
ignore.
So in the late 80s, Eastern European governments elected their first non-communist leaders,
and the once-iron grip of communism suddenly released.
The Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, Germany reunified the next year, and in 1991 the USSR
collapsed, ending the Cold War.
Some people who really should have known better called this “The End of History” but as
we know all too well, that little scamp hasn’t let up.
The immediate aftermath of Communism’s fall saw massive changes in the east, as countries
struggled to adapt to this rapid shift, and Yugoslavia disintegrated in a violent ethnic
war.
So as we reach the new millennium we have to recognize just how much had changed (and
continues to change) since the end of the world war.
Empires are gone, and Europe is inconceivably at peace.
Plus, if you went around in 1942 telling France Britain Japan Russia and Germany where they’d
be in the year 2000, they could be forgiven for thinking that WWII was about to go in
a very different direction.
All of the plotlines of the modern world deserve a good understanding, but I hope that this
video has helped show that nothing in history operates in a vacuum, and even the end of
something as monumental as WWII is never the end of the story.
And that’s about as much modernity as my brain can take.
If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to bother my pet kitten with fun facts about Florence.
But before we go, one last bit of painfully modern history for you.
So as we all know, plagues be wack, and wearing a facemask is an unbelievably easy way to
keep yourself and your community safe.
But what if you don’t have the coolest mask on planet earth?
WELL, we’re working with our friends at Volante Design to bring you these amazing
OSP-styled Red & Blue facemasks.
They’re super high-quality, washable and reusable, water-resistant, uh, rad as hell,
plus, they’re handmade in the good old US of A. Oh but that’s not all, we’re also
working together to raise money for Volante to make and donate extra masks to local public
schools, which, uh, will be a very important thing to keep safe in the coming months.
So if you want to snag one of these BiChrome beauties, or help out a student who otherwise
wouldn’t be able to acquire a high-quality mask, please hop on over to VolanteDesign
using the link in the description.
Thank you so much for watching.
This video was, uh, a mess, but I did it, so I really hope that you enjoyed it.
I’d like to give a very special thanks to my dad, who helped me organize my plotlines
and keep all my ideas on track over the course of several phone calls.
I really appreciated your help and I love you a lot.
Thanks dad.