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10. AMERICA SHIFTS TO THE HUMANIST LEFT

LIFE GOES ON ELSEWHERE

CONTENTS

De Gaulle attempts to undercut American leadership in Europe

Mao's China

The Arab-Israeli "Six-Day War" of June 1967

The "Prague Spring" and Czechoslovakian Crisis of 1968

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America's Story – A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 320-325.
DE GAULLE ATTEMPTS TO UNDERCUT AMERICAN LEADERSHIP IN EUROPE

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.

[1]American Secretary of State Dean Rusk sarcastically asked de Gaulle: did this order to evacuate all U.S. troops from France include the 50,000 American war dead buried in French cemeteries?

MAO'S CHINA

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.

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.

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.

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!

THE ARAB-ISRAELI "SIX-DAY WAR" OF JUNE 1967

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.

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.

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.

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").

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!).

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).

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



Go on to the next section:  The Boomer Comes of Age

  Miles H. Hodges