consequences of world war 2

Another two million military deaths were caused by accidents, disease and the effect of POW camp incarceration. At home, women stepped in and took over millions of their jobs to help with the war effort. The United States was blessed with a precious geographical advantage: a continent that was protected from foreign meddling by two oceans. One need only recall the tense situation which arose in the summer of 2008 as a result of the conflict between Georgia and Russia. The letterpress correspondents, radio broadcasters, and film people who perceived these horrors kept quiet about them on behalf of the War Effort.”, Decades of such public-relations treatment have had their effect on the American people. Botany, chemistry, physics, and medicine. Moreover, much of the “emergency” authority granted by Congress to the President is still on the books. For Germany it was a question of “organizing Europe.” The United States must “organize” the world. The war’s direct cost in money terms was $4 trillion (in then-current dollars). In short, here are the seven major consequences of World War II: 1: The End of the European Age. We are republishing the lecture today ahead of the 80 th anniversary of the outbreak of the war on September 1. After World War 2 ended, Britain was nearly bankrupted and did not have the financial means to govern its colonies. During, and especially after, World War I, there was a great deal of discussion about “who started the war,” “who fired the first shot” and, “who was to blame.” These questions play a major role in the propaganda of the states involved in war, as their ruling cliques are anxious to absolve themselves of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of their pyromania. Britain, it should be remembered, had waged a brutal counter-insurgency war against the Boers in South Africa only a decade earlier. The very survival of human civilization is at stake. 20 million refugees. Let us examine the death tolls suffered by a number of countries most directly involved in the maelstrom. But truth be told, there were some positive outcomes to the Second World War which started when Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939. In this way, the United States—for anyone concerned with moral distinctions in the conduct of different types of government—blurred the difference between fascism and democracy. More than 20 percent of French, Bulgarian and Italian Jews were murdered. More than 40 percent of Norwegian Jews were exterminated. Virtually all taxes were raised. This was an important step in women moving away from traditional domestic roles that we see today, 10 Fascinating Facts About The Human Body, Positive and negative impact of watching TV, Positive and negative impact of medical technology, The Surprisingly Fascinating History of Plumbing, 11 Of The Shortest-Reigning Leaders In History, A Photographer Captured An Amazing Friendship Between A Wolf and Bear, 6 Amazing Benefits of Living in Vancouver, BC, 13 Amazing Birthday Traditions From Around The World. It is true that France and Britain did not necessarily want war in August 1914. Four days later, on December 11, 1941, Germany declared war on the United States, which immediately replied with a declaration of war on Germany. Another major factor in the re-emergence of international tensions that was to lead to a renewal of global war in 1939 was the new role of the United States in world affairs. For all the changes that have occurred since the beginning of World War I ninety-five years ago and World War II seventy years ago, we still live in the imperialist epoch. The contradictions—political and economic—out of which these wars emerged have not been resolved. Another way of looking at it is that within the space of just thirty-one years, two catastrophic global wars were fought. “One reason is the normal human talent for looking on the bright side, for not receiving information likely to cause distress or occasion a major overhaul of normal ethical, political, or psychological assumptions. I would like to focus briefly on the analysis made by Trotsky of the causes of the war. Despite the defeat of Germany, the war did not produce the results that Britain and France had originally envisioned. [11] Frank McDonough, Hitler, Chamberlain and Appeasement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 33. Unfortunately, history is not so simple, and the consequences of World War II are much more complex. 16 million Germans expelled. But in World War II, good triumphed over evil. When it comes to the topic of war, whether it is the second world war or any war for that matter, it can be hard to think of the same as having a positive effect. Should anyone have been terribly surprised by that perverse outcome? Trotsky wrote: The democratic governments, who in their day hailed Hitler as a crusader against Bolshevism, now make him out to be some kind of Satan unexpectedly loosed from the depths of hell, who violates the sanctity of treaties, boundary lines, rules, and regulations. The breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resulted in the creation of a new set of unstable national states, torn by sectional rivalries. Fussell presumably was not surprised. resulted in radar, space travel, and the device you’r reading this on today. The October Revolution led rapidly to Russia’s withdrawal from the war. And, flowing from that second question, the next and most decisive question is whether anything can be done to stop it from happening. The Second International, which had been founded in 1889, declared again and again its unrelenting opposition to capitalist militarism and pledged to mobilize the working class against war. In August 1945, the United States dropped two nuclear devices on the defenseless and militarily insignificant cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the time the weapon was developed, the allies had won and Germany had surrendered nearly a month earlier. Though the United States had replaced bankrupt Britain as the pre-eminent imperialist power, it could not re-create, in its own image, the old British Empire. But these military conflicts were relatively contained, and did not lead to a breakdown of the entire framework of European and global politics. Moreover, keeping in mind the 2002 Strategic Doctrine, the United States confronts an expanding array of powers whose economic and military development are viewed by State Department and Pentagon strategists as significant threats. “A modern war between the great powers,” he wrote, “does not signify a conflict between democracy and fascism but a struggle of two imperialisms for the redivision of the world.” [7]. The war took some 50 million lives. In 1950, Secretary of the Army Gordon Gray said that the ultimate monetary cost of a war is four times the direct cost. It’s thus necessary to observe that it was a war and nothing else, and thus stupid and sadistic….”. [1] Exact casualty figures are not available. This would require at least some explanation of the political dynamics of the so-called “Cold War,” which defined international politics between 1945 and 1991. …, Capitalism has created the material conditions of a new Socialist economic system. Military deaths totaled twenty-two to twenty-five million, including the deaths of five million prisoners of war. [4] Writings of Leon Trotsky 1933–34 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975), p. 300. Germany’s bid for its “place in the sun” had suffered a decisive defeat. But the defeats of the working class in Spain and France—the product of the combined treachery of the Stalinist, social democratic and reformist bureaucracies—made war inevitable. It has divided the whole earth among the oligarchies of the great powers, around which were grouped the satellites, the small nations, who lived off the rivalry between the great ones. Wilson’s speech marked the decisive emergence of the United States as the dominant imperialist force on the planet. He rejected with contempt the deceitful and hypocritical claims of pro-war socialist leaders that they had sided with their capitalist rulers to defend their countries against foreign aggression. [13]. Stalin had hoped that he could avoid war with Germany through his cowardly and treacherous non-aggression pact. And France and the rest of Western Europe were liberated from tyranny. [1]. The speed with which the crisis unfolded in the summer of 1914 took many by surprise. Trotsky insisted that only the revolutionary struggle of the working class, leading to the overthrow of capitalism, could prevent the eruption of a new world war, even bloodier than the first. It is immensely difficult to articulate, let alone comprehend, the horrifying scale of the tragedy that occurred in the thirty-one years between 1914 and 1945. That is, the global economic, social and political contradictions that gave rise to imperialist war also create the objective foundations for international socialist revolution. If it were not for Hitler the capitalist world would blossom like a garden. And the outcome of this struggle will be influenced, to a decisive degree, by the development of revolutionary, that is, socialist consciousness. Few suspected that the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 would lead, within only five weeks, to a full-scale European War. There were great changes that occurred after the war. The millions of deaths that were directly caused by the war were followed almost immediately, after the Armistice, by the deaths of another twenty million people as a result of the influenza epidemic that devastated the physically weakened populations. However, when confronted with actions by Germany and Austria-Hungary that threatened the existing set-up and their interests, they accepted war as a political necessity. Of course, the scale of one’s personal acquaintance with death during the two wars depended on where one happened to live. Included in this catalog of death is the genocidal annihilation of European Jewry. Holocaust: Hitler’s hatred for Jews was one of the main reasons for the outbreak of hostilities, but it is his gruesome final solution that exacted a more severe price than any war to date, by committing genocide that resulted in the death of 6,000,000 Jews. The age of colonial empires, at least in the form they had previously existed, had passed. The war in Asia continued for another three months, though there was never any doubt of its outcome. As Trotsky wrote on the eve of World War II, the capitalist regimes toboggan to disaster with their eyes closed. It warned the European ruling class that if war could not be stopped, the International would use the crisis created by war to hasten the overthrow of capitalism. As in 1914, German imperialism was the principal instigator of the conflict. But it soon became clear to the European bourgeoisie that the interests of the United States were in conflict with its own. It viewed the privileges enjoyed by Britain within the framework of its Empire as a barrier to the expansion of its own commercial interests. As was commonly said of the British Empire, the sun never set and the wages never rose! More than 70 percent of Dutch, Hungarian and Greek Jews were exterminated. Will the working class develop sufficient political consciousness in time, before capitalism and the imperialist nation-state system lead mankind into the abyss? In 1927, France and the United States negotiated the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which declared war illegal. As foreseen by Trotsky decades earlier, the struggle among the main imperialist powers for global dominance, the brutal redivision of the world that cost the lives of tens of millions of human beings, had ended with the victory of American imperialism. Alan Behrens is an experienced writer and our editor-in-chief.PNI's goal is to publish high-quality, educational content covering everything from history to current events.

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