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Stalin expelled east to Siberia and Central Asia a variety of small nations from western and south-western border regions, the Caucasus in particular: Chechens, Ingush, Karachays, Nalkars, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars and others,
The ‘Trotskyite-Titoite bourgeois-nationalist traitors and enemies of the Czechoslovak people’ were also, and above all, ‘Zionists’.
They were not much welcome in the countries to which they had returned, often after long exile: neither as Communists nor as Jews.
At the United Nations the Soviet Union was an enthusiastic supporter of the Zionist project,
They were guided in this criminal activity by Zionism, bourgeois Jewish nationalism, racial chauvinism.’
‘a Zionist terrorist gang’
From Brussels to Bucharest the polemical journalism and literature of the 1930s abounded in racism, anti-Semitism, ultra-nationalism, clericalism and political reaction.
public expressions of political allegiance were confined to the center and left of the spectrum. Right-wing thought and opinion in Europe had been eclipsed.
The intellectual Left after 1945 was also shaped by the experience of war, but this time as a clash of incompatible moral alternatives, excluding all possibility of compromise: Good versus Evil, Freedom against Enslavement, Resistance against Collaboration.
Post-war European intellectuals were in a hurry and impatient with compromise. They were young.
And the British mandarin Left, like their contemporaries in the Foreign Office, had little time for the travails of the small countries between Germany and Russia, whom they had always regarded as something of a nuisance.
‘Morally and economically Europe has lost the war. The great marquee of European civilization in whose yellow light we all grew up, and read, or wrote, or loved, or traveled has fallen down;
French culture became once again the center of international attention: French intellectuals acquired a special international significance as spokesmen for the age, and the tenor of French political arguments epitomized the ideological rent in the world at large.
French intellectuals re-interpreted the politics of the rest of the world in the light of their own obsessions,
In Sartre’s words, ‘To be free is not to do what one wants, but to want to do what one can’.
Moreover France, more than any other Western nation-state, was a country whose intelligentsia approved and even worshipped violence as a tool of public policy.
When Sartre and his contemporaries insisted that Communist violence was a form of ‘proletarian humanism’, the ‘midwife of History’, they were more conventional than they realized.
Western intellectual enthusiasm for Communism tended to peak not in times of ‘goulash Communism’ or ‘Socialism with a human face’, but rather at the moments of the regime’s worst cruelties: 1935–39 and 1944–56.
but because of them.
And many gifted non-Communists, as we have seen, were likewise reluctant to condemn the Soviet leader, seeking out ways to minimize his crimes or excuse them altogether.
‘the phallus is on its way to becoming a God’. Three years later the Christian editors of Esprit reminded their readers that ‘we have, from the outset, warned of the dangers posed to our national well-being by an American culture which attacks the very roots of the mental and moral cohesion of the peoples of Europe.’
During organized visits to the popular democracies, Peace Movement supporters (overwhelmingly from France, Italy and India) were fêted and honored for their support; behind their backs they were derided as ‘pigeons’, a new generation of Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’.
By 1953, at the height of the Cold War, US foreign cultural programs (excluding covert subsidies and private foundations) employed 13,000 people and cost $129 million, much of it spent on the battle for the hearts and minds of the intellectual elite of Western Europe.
But this wasn’t any undiscovered pocket of the Carpathians, it was postwar western Europe, where “postwar” was a season that stretched for nearly twenty years.’1
contemporary Manchester is depicted as nineteenth-century in all its essentials (hand carts, housing, social relations);
In Italy, as in much of rural Europe, children still entered the job market upon completing (or more likely not completing) their primary education; in 1951 only one Italian child in nine attended school past the age of thirteen.
The late forties and early fifties thus appear as a transitional age, in which conventions of social deference and claims of rank and authority still held sway, but where the modern state was beginning to displace church and even class as the arbiter of collective behavior.
In school, in church, on state-run radio, in the confident, patronizing style of the broadsheet and even the tabloid press, and in the speech and dress of public figures, Europeans were still very much subject to the habits and regulations of an earlier time.
American domination of post-war European cinema did not come about through the vagaries of popular taste alone, however. There was a political context: ‘positive’ American films flooded into Italy in time for the pivotal 1948 elections; Paramount was encouraged by the State Department to re-issue Ninotchka (1939) that year to help get out the anti-Communist vote.
At the beginning of the 1950s, one Italian family in four lived in poverty and most of the rest were little better off. Less than one house in two had an indoor toilet, only one in eight boasted a bathroom.
in West Germany in 1950 17 million of the country’s 47 million residents were still classed as ‘needy’,
Rationing continued longest in Britain, where bread rationing was introduced between July 1946 and July 1948, clothes coupons remained in force until 1949, the wartime utility clothing and furniture regime was not abandoned until 1952, and food rationing on meat and many other foods was not finally ended until the summer of 1954—though
Very few Europeans possessed a car or a fridge—working-class women in the UK, where the standard of living was higher than most countries on the continent, shopped twice a day for food, either on foot or by public transport, much as their mothers and grandmothers had done before them.
In many ways, Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s was less open, less mobile and more insular than it had been in 1913. It was certainly more dilapidated, and not just in Berlin, where only one quarter of the rubble of battle had been cleared by 1950. The English social historian Robert Hewison describes the British in these years as ‘a worn-out people working with worn-out machinery.’
the European publics of the gloomy post-World War Two years turned away from politics.
For the first time in many years, Europeans were starting to have babies again.
The re-emergence in post-war Europe of self-governing democratic states—with neither the means nor the desire to make war, and led by elderly men whose common if unstated political creed was ‘No experiments’—came as something of a surprise.
With the calamities of the recent past still fresh in public memory, most Europeans turned away with relief from the politics of mass mobilization. The provision of administration and services replaced revolutionary hopes
the complicated electoral system of proportional representation generated parliaments too divided to agree on substantial or controversial legislation:
Italy was in practice run by un-elected administrators working in central government or one of the many para-state agencies.
Yet Austria not only succeeded in avoiding a re-run of its history, but managed in a short space of time to repackage itself as a model Alpine democracy: neutral, prosperous and stable.
In politics, the two major parties agreed to collaborate in office: from 1947 to 1966 Austria was governed by a ‘Grand Coalition’ of Socialists and People’s Party.
A reform-minded Christian Democrat party, a parliamentary Left, a broad consensus not to press inherited ideological or cultural divisions to the point of political polarization and destabilization, and a de-politicized citizenry; these were the distinctive traits of the post-World War Two settlement in Western Europe.
The experience of war and occupation, and the memory of contentious civic divisions in earlier decades, encouraged a greater tendency towards cooperation across these communitarian divides.
Many conservatives, particularly in the Catholic South, attributed the rise of Hitler to the ‘secularizing’ influence of the West and argued that Germany should steer a ‘middle way’ between the triple evils of modernity: Nazism, Communism and ‘Americanism’.
In the German turn away from politics towards private accumulation, Grass and others saw a denial of civic responsibilities past and present. They ardently seconded the dissent from Bertold Brecht’s aphorism ‘Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral’ (‘Eating comes first, then morality’)
the end of the European colonial empires seemed very far off in 1939 even to students at a seminar for young Communists from Britain and her colonies. Six years later, the world was still divided between rulers and ruled, powerful and powerless, wealthy and poor, to an extent that seemed unlikely to be bridged in the near future.
Both sides regularly resorted to intimidation, torture, murder and outright terrorism.
كالعاده المساواه بين الجلاد و الضحيه عند الحديث عن العرب
The lasting consequences of the Suez crisis were felt in British society.
Like the rest of Western Europe, the British were increasingly interested in consuming and being entertained. Their interest in religion was waning, and with it their taste for collective mobilization of any kind.
