10. AMERICA SHIFTS TO THE HUMANIST LEFT

LIFE GOES ON ELSEWHERE

What was unusual at the time was how "superpower" America – the leading figure in the NATO European-American military alliance and in fact defender of the "Free World" in general – was so completely wrapped up in the Vietnam issue that America seemed to have no time or interest, and thus played no particular role, in other major international events going on at the time.

De Gaulle attempts to undercut American leadership in Europe.  De Gaulle's dislike of the Anglo-Saxon world (British and American) reached all the way back to World War Two, when De Gaulle did not receive the attention he felt he deserved as self-appointed leader of the Free French.  Also he suffered from a sense of rejection when after the war the French were not interested in designing a new French republic that would give him the powers and thus prestige he felt he deserved.  Thus he went into political retirement – that was up until 1958 when a military coup he directed brought him to power, thanks to the terrible confusion France was experiencing due to the independence movement of Muslim Algerians desirous of taking Algeria out of the French Union.  In setting up the new French Fifth Republic De Gaulle finally had the political formula that he wanted by which to govern France.

But De Gaulle had one more political item to attend to:  the humiliation of the British and the Americans.  First he vetoed the application of the British in 1963 when they finally decided to join the European Economic Community ... a deep humiliation indeed.  Also he turned on NATO, headquartered in his country, but clearly led by America.  In 1959, the year after coming to power in France, De Gaulle pulled his French Mediterranean naval fleet out of NATO and then demanded that the British and Americans remove all their nuclear weapons from the country, a move designed supposedly to bring as much of Europe as possible under the French nuclear umbrella instead of that of his Anglo-Saxon opponents.  But the other NATO members were not interested.  In 1963 De Gaulle went further and pulled his more strategically important French Atlantic fleet out of NATO, hoping that others would do the same (none did).  He then also moved to strengthen diplomatic relations with Mao's China and Soviet Russia, demonstrating France's new "neutrality" in the Cold War.  In 1965 he demanded that all French dollar holdings be converted into American gold, and sent the French navy to America to collect that gold.  But once again, no other nation joined him in this gold-run designed to collapse the dollar's international status.  In 1966 he ordered all foreign troops (mostly American) out of France^[1], with NATO responding by moving all its operations (including even its civilian headquarters) out of France and north to Belgium, helping Brussels, already the administrative seat of the European Community, become even more the administrative center of West European society!

In all this, Johnson did nothing, perhaps because there was nothing he could have done about such behavior.  De Gaulle was a very determined American opponent.  Finally the French themselves had enough of De Gaulle's imperiousness and in 1968, when the French refused to ratify a new constitutional amendment that De Gaulle wanted in order to give himself even more power, he quit, expecting France to fall apart and the French to come on bended knees pleading for his return.  They did not, and France moved on quite well without him.

With the collapse of the Chiang government in China (and its transfer to the huge island of Taiwan) America had focused its "China policy" entirely on Taiwan – and had simply ignored developments going on after that in China, which actually helped Mao greatly in securing his Communist hold over mainland China.

But his fellow Communists in China tended to ignore Mao now that Communism was securely in place in their country.  After all, Communism was about the modern industrial world, not the world of the traditional peasant countryside – which stood behind Mao and his accomplishments.  But Mao was not one to be put aside – and thrust himself forward again as China's savior when he regained political control by offering to show how, under proper direction, Chinese rural society could do industrialism more quickly than its urban society.  With his "Great Leap Forward" program, put into effect in 1958, he planned to have China's thousands of tiny villages undertake iron production in their new small smelters.  Supposedly the combined effort of all these villages going at this project would make China now a major producer of iron – in Mao's eyes a key indicator of China's move into industrial leadership. 

Backyard iron smelters created during the Great Leap Forward

Chinese hard at work on their "back yard" smelters

Chinese hard at work on their "back yard" smelters
Chinadaily.com

Actually all this did was to produce inferior-grade iron – which had no real industrial use, and take millions of farmers away from their fields where China's food should have been produced.  As a consequence, millions of Chinese (anywhere from 20 to 40 million?) began to die – of hunger, of exhaustion, or simply of human discouragement.  Finally, Mao had to scrap the Five-Year Plan, even before its full run.  It had obviously been an enormous failure.

But again, Mao was not one to be put aside.  Thus in 1966 he came forward with another of his moments of grand insight:  he would push the Communist Revolution forward in the form of a grand Cultural Revolution, revolutionary ideology planted in the hearts and minds of the more trainable Chinese youth (Mao was finding the adult world less amenable to his "revolutionary" thinking).  Indeed not only would he instruct (brainwash basically) China's youth with the thoughts of the Great Leader himself through the reading, reciting and even singing of his words found in Mao's Little Red Book, he would activate that youthful spirit by having it become the vigilant eyes and ears of the Revolution, ferreting out any "anti-Revolutionary" activity – even thought – found in the older Chinese generation.  Not only the West's Christianity but also China's traditional Confucianism came under fierce attack, as the youth "liberated" the country from "unprogressive" social norms.

Chinese Red Guard – 1966

Youthful Chinese Red Guards – devoted followers of Chairman Mao

Mao's Little Red Book – 1966

Thousands of the Chinese Red Guard gather to study 
Mao's Little Red Book

Studying Maoist doctrine

Maoist indoctrination

"The Chinese People's Liberation Army 
is a University of Mao Zedong Thought

"We'll destroy old world and build new"
A young worker crushes the crucifix, Buddha and 
classical Chinese texts with his hammer – 1966

Thus young vigilante "Red Guard" youth took over the schools, the town halls, the local communities themselves, setting up their own judicial councils to try and punish anti-revolutionary activity found still existing in the country. 

Two Chinese citizens branded as "Capitalist Roaders" and
hence subjected to physical abuse in the public ... as part of 
the Maoist strategy of "Struggle Sessions" to get Chinese
who were less than revolutionary to struggle with their 
"errors."  Hundreds of thousands were required to do this in
"reeducation" (prison) camps.

Chinese youth conducting a “Struggle Session,” forced on
an adult (probably teacher or local official)

In some of the worst cases they would even be beaten to death
by the overwrought youth

Young Maoists attacking an older Chinaman who did not meet 
their measure of proper Maoist demeanor – 1967

Chinese "Capitalist-Roaders" punished by Red Guards 
during the Cultural Revolution

The nuns were expelled from China with great fanfare a 
few days later.  These nuns had remained in China after
the Communist victory in 1949.  They ran an English 
school, which many children from Western embassies 
attended.  During the Cultural Revolution their presence 
in China became evidence to the Red Guards that the 
revolution was not thorough enough.

But the real goal of the Cultural Revolution was to swing 
such strong public support behind Mao that he could 
get rid of all his political adversaries within the 
Communist Party (anyone with a personal base of 
support of his own within the party) and thus rule China 
as he personally chose to do so.

Liu Shaoqi – Chairman (President) of 
the People's Republic of China (1959-1968)

Persecution of Liu Shaoqi's wife, Wang Guangmei – 1967

Consequently, once again Mao simply shut down Chinese society, as schools, businesses and local community operations came to a halt under this new Red Guard regime.  Finally, by 1968, even Mao realized that he had gone overboard with his Cultural Revolution, and in 1969 was even forced to call in the Chinese Army to get things back under control!

Another event that took place in these years, one that America actually might have been able to direct to fairer results – but basically looked the other way as events unfolded – was a disastrous war conducted between the new state of Israel and its Arab neighbors.  Israel had been created in 1948 by masses of Jews, the ones fortunate enough to have escaped death in Hitler's concentration camps, flooding to Palestine, in order to set up a state where they would no longer be bothered by a hostile non-Jewish world.  Unfortunately, Palestine was not uninhabited, but instead was fully inhabited – the portion that was not desert anyway – by Arabs, both Christian and Muslim in religion, as well as Jews who also had been part of Palestinian society since time immemorial.  And other than the desert, there was nowhere else for these Palestinians to go if the Jews were absolutely determined to take over fully the part of Palestine that could support human life.

A party of rather young and very determined Jews sailing to
British-held Palestine to start a new life there – 1946

A ragtag Szold being blocked by British troops from
disembarking its passengers into Palestine

A Haganah soldier with Auschwitz tattoo
doing sentry duty in Jaffa

A wing of the King David Hotel being blown up by the Irgun
terrorist organization (founded and headed by Israel's future
Prime Minister, Menachem Begin!) – July 22, 1946.  
91 Britons, Arabs and Jews died in the explosion

A Jewish-owned taxi burns outside the Damascus Gate in
Jerusalem in retaliation for a drive-by shooting conducted
by Jewish terrorists which killed 15 people in the Arab market.
During the month after the announcement of the pending
partition, 489 people died in the violence.

Jews surveying some of the damage caused by the Ben Yehuda
bombing.  The bombing was undertaken by Arab terrorists
dressed up in British uniforms.  57 people died.  Angry
Jews, taken in by the deception, killed 9 Britons in retaliation.

On May 14th, 1948 Britain's mandate over Palestine ended.
That afternoon the Jews announced the creation of Israel.  
On the following day the Arab-Israeli war began.

Palestinian refugees "Making their way from Galilee
in October-November 1948".
Front cover of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem by Benny Morris

Jaramana Refugee Camp for Palestinian refugees, Damascus, Syria – 1948

Palestinian refugees in Zerka refugee camp – 1949

Refugee routes of Palestinians
Wikipedia – "Palestinian refugees"

Consequently a very ugly battle for the land resulted, one that would be ongoing, not only as long as there were still Palestinians left to contest the Jewish invasion of their homeland but even as long as there were other Arabs in that part of the world outraged in seeing their fellow Arabs in Palestine driven from their homes, farms and businesses.

And that fellow-Arab world included Egypt, right next door to the new Israel, where Egyptian President Nasser was posing himself as the leader not only of Egypt but of all the Arab world, through his newly-created United Arab Republic.  And he had as his rallying cry to promote his Arab candidacy the call to do something about the "Jewish problem" in Palestine.  Thus not only was he developing a military well beyond any immediate need for Egyptian national defense, he was talking loudly (part of his political campaign) about his intentions to lead the Arab world in delivering Palestine from its occupiers.

United Nations Secretary General U Thant meeting with
Egyptian President Gamel Abdul Nasser in late May 1967
to try to back the Egyptians down from a growing
confrontation with the Israelis

But Israel was in not in the mood to wait around to see exactly how he was planning to advance his candidacy, and, without any warning, struck hard at Egypt, fully destroying the Egyptian air force with its planes still on the ground, and thus making it impossible for the Egyptians to offer air cover to their ground troops now facing an advancing Israeli army and its covering air force.  It was a slaughter for the Egyptians ... as the Israelis rolled quickly all the way up to the Suez Canal – which now found itself shut down as a result of the war.

Part of the Egyptian air force caught unprepared 
for an Israeli surprise attack – June 1967

Israeli armored vehicles advancing through the Sinai desert

Israeli soldiers advancing on Egyptian lines in the Sinai

The burned-out remains of Egyptian armored vehicles
and tanks at the Mitla Pass

Israeli soldier guarding Egyptian captives taken in the Gaza strip

Israeli soldiers advancing toward the front;
Egyptian prisoners being brought to the rear

Then foolishly Jordan and Syria decided to come to the aid of Egypt, and Israel crushed their forces as well, all of this in a mere six days (thus the term "Six-Days War"). 

The Israelis sweep quickly through the West Bank region
against the Jordanians – June 1967

Palestinian refugees (some of nearly 200,000) fleeing across
a demolished Allenby bridge into Jordan to escape the Israeli
occupation of the West Bank region

Israeli soldiers planning their moves into East Jerusalem
June 1967

This was the event – not that America had any part in it – that brought Americans finally to want to offer full support to Israel in its contest with its Arab neighbors (America had been fairly neutral about this complex matter prior to this).  The very one-sidedness of the news coverage of the 1967 Jew-versus-Arab conflict made this rather inevitable (there were not many Arabs running America's news organizations!). 

The American monitoring ship USS Liberty holed off the
Egyptian coast by an Israeli torpedo – an unexplained Israeli
action that caused 100 US casualties (the Israelis never
offered a convincing explanation for this attack on a
well-marked American naval vessel)

But what was not inevitable – actually quite strange – was the way that Evangelical Christians came out so strongly in favor of Israel against Palestine's Arab population, not realizing what a high percentage of the Palestinian population was Christian.  Evangelicals seemed not to understand that chasing Palestinian Christians from the land would not advance the gospel in that part of the world (Israel was not a big supporter of the Christian gospel!).  But unlimited Evangelical support for Israel was indeed the case.  And indeed it would come to be that way for all the nation, America now dedicated to supporting Israel at all costs (it would have the opportunity to be more proactive in this regard within another five years, with the outbreak of the Yom Kippur or October War of 1973).

Pro-Israeli protesters gather in front of the White House – June 1967
Behind them is a much smaller group of pro-Arab protesters

The American media followed the war almost exclusively from
the Israeli perspective ... drawing America broadly into an
on-going pro-Israeli position in the Arab-Israeli dispute.

The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank region
will now be viewed in Israel as the completion of Israel’s full
unification.  The world (including the U.S. government)
however will not recognize these new boundaries … and the
Palestinians will continue to struggle against this expanded
Israel in an rather futile effort to secure their own
national homeland

Captured Russian-built Egyptian tanks being paraded through
a "unified" Jerusalem  on Israel's 20th Anniversary – May 2, 1968

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman Yasir 
Arafat – 1968.  He and his organization will be portrayed in 
the American media and popular culture as a war criminal 
for his actions in promoting and defending militarily the 
Palestinian cause

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THE "PRAGUE SPRING" AND CZECHOSLOVAKIAN CRISIS OF 1968

Another major international event that Superpower America did not participate in – or even influence in the smallest way – was a spontaneous uprising of the Czechs in 1968 against the Soviet domination of their country.  The Czechs had formerly been very productive members of Europe's industrial world, that was until the country fell into the hands of Soviet-backed Communists in 1948.  The Czech economy had done very poorly since then, even in comparison to other subject nations within the Soviet bloc or Empire.

Surprisingly, it was the Czech Communist leader himself, Alexander Dubček, that decided that the country must open itself up to greater personal initiative, that is capitalism itself, in order to get the Czech economy up and running again.  But such independent-mindedness, especially from a Communist who was supposed to be getting governing instructions from the Kremlin (Communist headquarters in Moscow) – and from there alone – could be a real danger to the Soviet Empire.

Thus after some efforts to talk the Czechs back from this program – with no results (the Czechs themselves were very enthusiastic about this new "Prague Spring") – in mid-August (1968) Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev ordered hundreds of thousands (some say as many as half a million) troops and 1200 tanks to roll into Czechoslovakia and put an end to the program.

The end of the "Prague Spring" – August 20-21, 1968

A Czech youth challenging an invading Soviet tank crew

The forceful end of the "Prague Spring" – August 21, 1968

Soviet tanks parked in the streets of Prague – 1968

The world was loud in its denunciations.  But ultimately it (along with America) did nothing, and moved on to other matters.

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Go on to the next section:

The Boomer Comes of Age

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  Miles H. Hodges