Connections

image If anyone still doubted the interconnectedness of all the world’s inhabitants following the Great War, those doubts faded as events on a truly global scale touched everyone as never before in the 1930s and 1940s. First a Great Depression shook the financial foundations of the wealthiest capitalist economies and the poorest producers of raw materials and minerals. Another world war followed, bringing global death and destruction at a magnitude beyond the imaginations of even Great War survivors. At war’s end, as we shall see in Chapter 31, the world’s leaders revived Woodrow Wilson’s idea of a League of Nations and formed the United Nations in 1946 to prevent such tragedies from ever reoccurring.

Although the United Nations was an attempt to bring nations together, the post war world became more divided than ever. Chapter 31 will describe how two new superpowers — the United States and the Soviet Union — emerged from World War II to engage one another in the Cold War for nearly the rest of the century. Then in Chapters 32 and 33 we will see how less developed nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America emerged after the war. Many of them did so by turning the nineteenth-century European ideology of nationalism against its creators, breaking the bonds of colonialism.

Today we want to believe that the era of totalitarian dictatorship was a terrible accident — that Stalin’s slave labor camps, Hitler’s gas chambers, and Japan’s Rape of Nanjing “can’t happen again.” But the cruel truth is that horrible atrocities continue to plague the world in our time. The Khmer Rouge inflicted genocide on its people in Cambodia, and civil war has led to ethnically motivated atrocities in Bosnia, Rwanda, Burundi, and Sudan, recalling the horrors of the Second World War. Today’s dictators, however, are losing control over access to information — historically a cornerstone of dictatorial rule — and are being challenged and even overthrown by citizens with cell phones, cameras, and Internet connections.