World War I, World War II, Cold War: Causes and Effects
World War I (1914-1918)
Cause: Assassination of the heir of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo.
Before:
- Triple Alliance: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy
- Triple Entente: Russia, France, Great Britain
After:
- Triple Alliance: Bulgaria, Ottoman Empire, Germany, Austria-Hungary
- Triple Entente: Italy, Portugal, Greece, Romania, Japan, USA, Britain, France, Russia
World War II (1939-1945)
Causes: Expansion of Italy, Japan, and Germany; disobedience of the Versailles Treaty (which forbade German rearmament); the Crash of ’29 and the Great Depression; economic crisis; division of population into supporters of leftist and fascist war policy and arms in countries like Japan, Germany, and Italy.
Phases:
- German Advance: Invasion of Poland (1939), Denmark, Norway, Holland, and Belgium (1940).
- Prevalence of Axis: Invasion of USSR, German attack in Africa, Japan attacked the U.S. (1941).
- Decline of Axis: Japanese retreat in the Pacific, hunger and cold for the Germans in Russia, an alliance between the U.S., Britain, and the USSR (1943), Normandy invasion (1944).
- Ending the War (1945): Hitler commits suicide, nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Cold War (1945-1990)
Between the USSR and the USA.
Conflicts: Greek Civil War (1946-49), Prague Coup (1948), Berlin Blockade (1948-49), Korean War (1950-53), Hungarian Crisis (1956), Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), Vietnam War (1960-1975), Prague Spring (1968), Afghanistan War (1979-88), Arab-Israeli Wars (1948-82).
Effects of Modern Warfare
Demographic:
WWI: 20 million dead. WWII: 55 million deaths.
Economic:
Depletes all financial resources of a state and has consequences years later.
Political and Social:
Strengthens the authority of the state, diffuses fear and terror.
Hunger and Poverty
Hunger: The absence of one of the forty essential nutrients for health.
Poverty: Deficiency of food, shelter, education, culture…
Hunger Pathology:
- 1st Phase: 1800 calories, weakness and fatigue, depression, aggressiveness, accelerated weight loss.
- 2nd Phase: 1200 calories, decrease in temperature to 35 degrees, reducing pulse to 50-60 beats, organ failure, and death.
Grain Trade:
Major grain producers are the USA, Canada, Argentina, France, and Australia. These countries sell their grain to rich countries who pay with money, then sell to others who pay with oil. Countries without money and oil are not sold cereals.
Reasons for Hunger:
Corruption in governments of poor countries, unfair market competition, war and insecurity, disinterest, accommodation to survival (waiting for food delivery), geographically determined diseases (lack of food preservation culture), politics (bad decisions of the ruling classes).
Genocide
The Armenian Massacre of 1916, Nazi Holocaust (1939-1945), The terror of Pol Pot in Cambodia (1975).
Holocaust:
Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish race.
Economic Models
Capitalism:
Private ownership of means of production, market demand and supply, market guarantee, consumer economy, limited progress, society must be capillary (wealth = effort and ability).
Communism:
Work exploited by others, the means of production should be conducted by the state, politics is above the economy, forcing planned economy.
Political Models
Fascism:
Born in the interwar period.
- Features: Led by a dictator, strict police control and repression of all opposition, creation of concentration camps, concentration of all military means, control and direction of the economy, official ideology, racism and xenophobia. Examples: Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet in Chile.
Communism:
Capitalist and liberal model, the hope of workers and peasants.
- Features: Suppression of democratic elections, control of power, the party general secretary is the highest representative, persecutions of all dissenting with police methods and creation of concentration camps, politics controls the economy, egalitarianism is proposed that all people have needs covered, the USSR and Communist China.
Democracy:
The evolution of liberalism.
- Features: There is a constitution, division of powers: a legislature, executive, and judicial. The political representatives are elected by universal suffrage, human rights, the economy sometimes influences politics, crisis in the traditional parties, but differences between countries exist, some having less freedom of expression.