Civilization and Beyond: Learning from History Part 18

4. Countries and peoples still under the political, economic and cultural umbrella of the formerly dominant empires were at different stages in the completion of the bourgeois revolution. Their ruling oligarchies--fascist or neo-fascist--were stubborn defenders of remnants and fragments of the nineteenth century bourgeois culture. Their stronghold was the Atlantic Community.

During the cold war years following 1945 each of these groups was undergoing the drastic social changes incident to the worldwide revolution of the period. Meanwhile mini-wars, civil and international, were fought in the Americas, Africa and Asia. By common consent conventional weapons were used and atomic weapons were kept in mothb.a.l.l.s.

These experiences were highlighted in British Guyana and Cuba. British Guyana was a Crown Colony, with a London-appointed Governor and a small occupying force of British troops with an elected legislative a.s.sembly and a considerable measure of home rule.

Democratic socialists Cheddi and Janet Jagan helped to organize the Peoples Progressive Party of British Guyana. Twice Jagan won a popular electoral majority and was established as Prime Minister of the British Colony. His two periods of administrative responsibility were badgered and hectored by every reactionary force that could be mobilized inside and outside British Guyana, from the British appointed governor to the domestic and foreign business interests and the urban trade unions.

Before a third election British and American governments, business and labor interests got together. Money was funnelled into the country through trade union connections. Protests were staged. Riots were organized. The electoral system under which the Peoples Progressive Party had won its victories was altered in London and Jagan was replaced by a system of proportional representation under which the P.P.P. was defeated and a new regime inaugurated.

Throughout the struggle the Peoples Progressive Party had insisted upon winning popular majorities as a basis for establis.h.i.+ng socialism in the colony by democratic methods and legal means. Imperialist reactionaries from Britain's Prime Minister and the President of the United States to the A.F. of L.-C.I.O. retorted: "No you don't", and backed up their veto with money, riots and guns. As a consequence of this counter-revolutionary conspiracy, the Peoples Progressive Party was forced out of office and an administration favorable to British, United States and native Guyanese capital was subst.i.tuted.

A revolt was led by Fidel Castro and his a.s.sociates against the Was.h.i.+ngton-backed Batista regime in Havana, Cuba. When Cuba was seized by United States armed forces during the Spanish-American War of 1898 much of the island was in the hands of anti-Spanish rebels who were demanding independence of Spain's imperialist rule. Between 1898 and 1959 seven million Cubans enjoyed technical independence. Actually the island, located only 90 miles from Florida, was economically a United States colony and politically a Was.h.i.+ngton dependency, with United States armed forces stationed in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. After seizing power in 1959, Castro went to the United States seeking a market for Cuba's chief export, sugar; a source of food supplies not produced in Cuba, and the manufactures necessary for the economic and social life of an essentially agricultural island.

Batista had emptied the Cuban treasury before he fled the island in 1959. Castro therefore needed loans to meet the immediate needs of the Cuban economy. He also sought to continue arrangements under which the chief market of Cuban sugar was in the United States. Castro was turned down cold. All doors, political and economic, were closed to him. As a revolutionary with left leanings he got the cold shoulder in New York as well as in Was.h.i.+ngton.

Faced by economic bankruptcy and political hostility in the West, Castro turned to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. They bought his sugar on long term contracts; provided him with manufactures; extended loans. Under these economic and political conditions Castro's Cuba had no choice. Of necessity it became a part of the socialist bloc, took over the property of Americans and other foreign investors, planned its economy and announced socialist goals, thus making the island of Cuba the only outpost of socialist construction in the Americas.

Socialists exercised authority in one country from 1917 until 1943.

Thereafter the land area devoted to building socialism steadily increased. By the time China threw off imperialist leading strings and opted for socialist construction in 1949, a third of mankind was living on territory under nominally socialist control. Most of this territory was Asian. An important part lay in eastern Europe. Until 1917, effective control of the planet was held by a half-dozen empires headed by the British, who exercised authority over a quarter of the human race living on a quarter of the earth's land area. After 1917 socialism mushroomed as a potential competing social system, challenging monopoly capitalism in Europe, replacing it in large sections of Asia and even threatening to destroy the foundations of western civilization.

"Action and reaction are equal and opposite" is an axiom of physical science which is also applicable in the social field. The sweep of world revolution and the growth of socialism-communism after 1945 called into being an opposing force of counter-revolution. The greater the successes of socialism, the more ardent and a.s.siduous was the counter drive, aimed to modify, negate and, if possible, to destroy the revolution and restore the social system of imperialism-colonialism built by monopoly capitalism to its prerevolutionary status of planet-wide ascendancy.

Winston Churchill personified this counter revolutionary drive. It was he who proposed to "strangle the Bolshevik infant in its cradle". The Peace Conferees, meeting in Versailles, heeded Lloyd George's warning of March, 1919, and turned their attention to the urgent task of strangling socialism. Revolutionary beginnings in central Europe were stamped out. Funds were raised and arms were supplied to the anti-Bolshevik forces in European Russia and Siberia. At the height of the counter-Bolshevik crusade there were sixteen armies in Soviet Russia with the common aim of destroying Bolshevism and restoring the country to its previous status as one of the pillars of western civilization.

This military phase of the counter-revolution lasted for four years. It failed. By 1922 the Soviet leaders were able to turn their energies to the task of rebuilding a devastated country while they planned and organized a socialist society.

Counter revolutionary forces failed to overthrow the Bolsheviks during the civil war of 1918-1921. They failed again when the n.a.z.i armies swarmed into the Soviet Union in June, 1941. The years from 1941 to 1945 cost the Russians perhaps twenty million dead, six million dwelling units and immense damage to their economy and their social organization.

When the war ended, responsible observers in the West predicted that if the Soviet power survived, decades must elapse before the country was back on its feet.

War destruction had played havoc with much of Europe. The Soviet Union was especially hard hit. Under the Marshall Plan billions of dollars of United States aid were poured into Britain, France, Belgium and West Germany. At the same time, the Soviet request for United States loans was refused categorically by President Truman. Alone and unaided the Soviet People repaired the extensive damage inflicted by the 1914-18 war, the Russian Civil War and the 1941 military invasion from the West, and went on with the task of socialist construction which the war had interrupted. Within five years--by 1950--the Bolsheviks were again on their feet, going strong, extending substantial aid to China and other professedly socialist countries and playing a crucial part in the struggle for disarmament and peace.

At war's end in 1918 the Soviet Union was struggling to draw the first breath of socialist life. Three decades later, after expelling the n.a.z.is, the Soviet Union was a st.u.r.dy giant of a nation standing head and shoulders above its nearest European compet.i.tors. During the interval, Soviet Russia was attacked, denounced, boycotted, encircled, invaded, ostracized as the leading figure in "an international communist conspiracy". When the policy of intervention and invasion failed, the counter-revolutionaries turned to cold war.

Whether or not there was a "communist conspiracy" to overthrow capitalism, there was certainly an organized capitalist conspiracy to overthrow socialism-communism. Representatives of the chief capitalist empires made repeated attempts to subsidize anti-Bolshevik forces in the Soviet Union. From 1918 to 1921 and from 1941 to 1945 they used every available means, including military invasion, to overthrow the Soviet Union and stamp out the beginnings of socialist construction in Central and East Europe.

From the military invasions of the Soviet Union immediately following war's end in 1918, western spokesmen, led by President Wilson, did their utmost to subsidize counter-revolution inside the Soviet Union, to send American and other armed forces into the country, to villify, denounce, boycott and handicap the Soviet Government. Sixteen years pa.s.sed (1917-1933) before Was.h.i.+ngton extended diplomatic recognition to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. President Wilson did his best to keep the Soviet Union and Mexico, both under the control of revolutionary governments, out of the League of Nations.

After the 1936-1945 war Was.h.i.+ngton played the same role with regard to China, refusing for twenty-two years to recognize Socialist China diplomatically, leading the drive in the United Nations to exclude China from members.h.i.+p, although the United Nations Charter specified that China should be one of the permanent members of the Security Council.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles justified the policy of blacklisting and boycotting China by declaring that there was no such nation as China on the Asian mainland, only 650 million slaves, and that Chiang Kai Shek's rump government on the island of Formosa was the "China" specified in the U.N. Charter.

Under the Truman Doctrine announced immediately after war's end in 1945, the United States refused to tolerate any extension of socialism, whether by revolution from within or by invasion from without any country. This doctrine was applied to Greece, to Iran, to Guatemala, to Santo Domingo, to Chile. During the Korean War, which began in June, 1950, one of President Truman's first directives ordered the United States Seventh (Pacific) Fleet to occupy the waters about Taiwan (Formosa), which was historically part of China.

In order to implement this anti-communist policy, Was.h.i.+ngton used a newly created international secret service, the Central Intelligence Agency or C.I.A., gave it an initial appropriation of $100,000,000 and turned it loose to spy, corrupt, undermine and overthrow governments that refused to accept or follow Was.h.i.+ngton's leaders.h.i.+p.

Between 1815 and 1914 the planet enjoyed a measure of peace and order.

In the three decades between 1914 and 1945, two general wars, a plague of lesser wars, a general economic depression and a hurricane of revolutions scourged the planet. Meanwhile, the revolution in science and technology and its products penetrated almost every crack and cranny of human society.

Had the changes incidental to these rapid transformations been carefully planned and supervised, the disturbances in the ecology and the shocks to human society would have been less disturbing and upsetting. In the absence of any planet-wide authority, there could be neither general planning nor general supervision. There were warnings aplenty from liberals and radicals who were attempting to keep the situation in perspective, but such utterances failed to reach the great bulk of mankind.

Disturbing and upsetting products of the revolution in science and technology--the harnessing of steam, the internal combustion engine, the air plane, electronics, plastics, and the release of atomic energy--were used to mutilate, destroy and kill. During the half century that began in 1910, tens of millions were mobilized, fed, taught, armed, and led to the slaughter fields by the masters of western civilization in two long orgies of wholesale destruction and ma.s.s murder--1914-18 and 1936-1945.

Energies and techniques that might have brought peace and plenty to the human family were used to set fire storms that incinerated property while it degraded humanity to the horrors of ma.s.s suicide.

In a very real sense these ghoulish results were the logical outcome of compet.i.tive nationalism armed and equipped with the technology produced during the two centuries of the great revolution. War is the most carefully planned, most elaborate and most intensive form of compet.i.tion--the decisive climax of a life and death struggle for survival.

The great revolution had put into human hands almost infinite possibilities for utilizing nature and improving the social environment.

With foresight, careful planning and skillful manipulation of forces and trends the cultivatable portions of the planetary land ma.s.s might have been turned into a garden of unending plenty dotted with marvelous city centers of light and learning.

In order to achieve such results it would have been necessary for the human family to coordinate its efforts around an agreed division of labor, share the goods and services produced and move from one level of affluence to a level of abundance.

Instead of joint efforts to achieve abundance and security, the most prosperous and most highly developed centers of western civilization consolidated their authority in sovereign states, surrounded by forbidding frontiers, armed them with the most destructive agencies that human imagination and ingenuity could devise, schooled the citizens of each nation in the suicidal formula: "might makes right; every nation for itself and woe betide the laggard and the loser."

The logical ideology of such a formula was egomania, suspicion, fear and hatred. Its outcome was a compet.i.tive life and death struggle for wealth and power, with the nation or a bloc of nations as the units of compet.i.tion. The struggle at its highest level involved occasional local wars and periodical general wars like those of 1914-18 and 1936-45.

Before the great revolution such struggles were waged chiefly with weapons wielded by human muscle power, supplemented with whatever animal power was available. Equipped with the products of the technological revolution, the struggle became a war of machines, powered by the energies of nature. Retail killing and destruction was replaced by ma.s.s murder and wholesale annihilation.

Given the a.s.sumptions, the practices and the inst.i.tutions of civilization, the catastrophic losses of the present century could have been foretold and, with competent leaders.h.i.+p and disciplined followers.h.i.+p, could have been averted. But leaders.h.i.+p was self-serving, shortsighted and for the most part untrained, while followers.h.i.+p was split up into national and local segments, each following the suicidal doctrine of every nation for itself and the devil take the laggards.

Socialists-communists around the earth have spent a wealth of time and energy during several generations predicting the present revolutionary upset and preparing for it. They have been derided, denounced and persecuted for their efforts. Despite bitter opposition they have prepared for change, they accept change, they welcome it, because in change they see the only path to improvement and betterment.

They are learning to live with change and even to welcome it because the time of troubles through which their society is pa.s.sing is warning them of the dangers they face. At the same time they are learning, bit by bit, of the spectacular achievements of the billion human beings in socialist-communist countries.

The majority of mankind has been unprepared for revolutionary change.

When change came they resented it, maybe resisted it at the outset.

Those who have a vested interest in capitalist imperialism--the real backbone of the counter-revolution--join and support counter-revolutionary organizations and take part in counter-revolutionary activities.

Planners and organizers of the counter-revolution have the bourgeois state generally on their side and enjoy the backing of the bourgeois establishment, its organizations and its facilities. Since their object is defense, they have no constructive program. Instead they stumble, fumble and bungle as their system flounders into one disastrous crisis after another.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

WESTERN CIVILIZATION ATTEMPTS SUICIDE (1914-1945)

Each bit of handiwork, each artifact, tool and machine is an expression of man's wish and will. Each transcends nature and is an affirmation that takes its place in the vast storehouse of human culture.

Cities, the building blocks of civilization, not only transcend nature; they replace her. Up to a certain point man lived more or less consciously as a part of nature. Bit by bit and step by step man s.h.i.+fted from the stream, the glade, the tree and the cave to the hut, the village, the city, the nation, the empire, the civilization.

Early in this study I wrote of civilization as an experiment: an aspiration, a creative urge, a concept, a purpose, a unity of thought and act, a conscious sequence of related actions, a construct of multiplying complexity.

These terms, by and large, are constructive and, to a degree, creative.

I might have written a parallel series of words a.s.sociated with destructiviness. In every social situation construction and destruction are Siamese twins. One does not appear without the other. The same forces, the same implements, the same inst.i.tutions and practices that construct can be used to destroy.

Through ages, men learned how to establish, maintain and perpetuate community and organize society. At every stage of the building process it was necessary to check, to question, to evaluate, unlearn, tear down, make a new start. Pus.h.i.+ng up and tearing or wearing down is implicit in nature. It is an essential aspect of human society.

Each human being is a living example of production and destruction. Each generation repeats the affirmation, modifying it little or much in accord with circ.u.mstances.

Modification means purposeful change--partially or wholly abandoning the old and replacing it with something new. In the course of these changes the conservative elements in man and in society, voluntarily or under coercion, give up the old and learn how to use the new. The learning process is always more or less painful, especially to people past middle age.