The Mental Floss History Of The World Part 32

In 1964, Premier Nikita Khrushchev was forced from office after his efforts to reform the nation's moribund economic system failed. Leonid Brezhnev, an old-school, hard-line Communist, replaced Khrushchev. Brezhnev wasted no time slapping down attempts to liberalize Communist regimes in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1981.

The country continued its full-court press in the contest with the United States for supremacy in s.p.a.ce; in 1971 the Soviets launched Solyut I, the first in a series of permanently manned s.p.a.ce stations. The USSR also continued to encourage the spread of communism in other countries and continued to economically prop up those countries that already had it.

All that, plus trying to keep up in the arms race and fight a war in Afghanistan, put a heavy strain on the Soviet economy. In addition, Soviet leaders just wouldn't stop dying. In 1982, Brezhnev expired and was replaced by sixty-eight-year-old Yuri Andropov, who died in 1984. He was replaced by seventy-two-year-old Konstantin Chernenko, who died in 1985. Chernenko's replacement was fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, who pledged to revitalize the economy, modernize Soviet communism, and improve relations with the West.

In 1988, Gorbachev introduced major economic and political reforms, dubbed "perestroika" (restructuring) and "glasnost" (openness). He also urged other Warsaw Pact nations to follow the USSR's lead. They did so with enthusiasm. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, as did Communist governments in country after country. This included the Soviet Union itself in 1991, but only after Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Republic, thwarted a Communist coup attempt in that state.

The USSR was dissolved into a collection of autonomous states that enjoyed varying degrees of success on their own. The Russian Republic remained a considerable world presence; due in large part to its wealth of natural resources, including oil. In 1999, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB official, succeeded Yeltsin as Russian leader, and Russian relations with the West took a decidedly frostier turn.

Putin agreed to step down as president in 2008-after hand-picking his successor, Dmitry Medvedev-but made it clear he intended to continue to be the dominant figure in Russian government, even without the t.i.tle.

China:

Off to a Slow Start, but Picking Up Steam

The world's largest nation had ended the 1950s with one of the world's most ironically named failures, the Great Leap Forward. So, in 1966, Mao Zedong tried launching another big-name program, the Cultural Revolution.

Enforced by a newly formed paramilitary organization called the Red Guard, Mao wanted to root out all deviation from Communist ideals. Led by Mao's wife, Chiang Chi'ing, the Red Guard hunted down "counterrevolutionaries," who were punished with penalties that ranged from being forced to wear a dunce cap in public to being executed. By the time of Mao's death in 1976, the fanatical movement, in which as many as five hundred thousand people were killed, threatened to crumble Chinese society.

Chiang tried to rule in her husband's place with a quartet of henchmen known as the Gang of Four, but most Chinese officials had had enough of her and the Cultural Revolution, and she and the gang were thrown out.

Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, began a serious reform of China's economy, mostly by loosening up overbearing governmental controls and taking advantage of the country's huge size. It worked. Between 1978 and 1998, the gross national product grew at an average annual rate of 10 percent. Exports soared a staggering 2,000 percent during the same period. It didn't hurt things that China regained control of the economic dynamo of Hong Kong from the British in 1997.

Political reform, however, lagged. Efforts to democratize were vigorously thwarted and dissent stifled, most notably demonstrated by the crus.h.i.+ng of a student demonstration in 1989 at Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

Still, as the twenty-first century began, China was poised to become more of a world force than it had been in centuries, and had emerged as America's chief rival for the preeminent position in the world economy.

Elsewhere in Asia:

Changing Times

Other Asian countries steered similar courses to China's, without the Cultural Revolution part. In the Philippines, a lawyer named Ferdinand Marcos was elected president in 1965, was reelected in 1969, declared martial law in 1972, and stayed in office until he was ousted in 1986.

One of the reasons Marcos gave for seizing power was the fear of a Communist takeover. It wasn't a wholly unwarranted fear. After North Vietnamese Communists took South Vietnam in 1975, Laos and Cambodia followed.

In Cambodia, the ruling Khmer Rouge party, under Communist dictator Pol Pot, undertook one of the century's most horrific regimes. More than 1.5 million people-as much as 20 percent of the country's entire population-were worked to death, starved to death, or executed for offenses as mystifyingly petty as wearing eyegla.s.ses.

The Khmer Rouge was toppled in 1979 by invading Vietnamese troops, who withdrew in 1989. Although Vietnam remained as one of the world's few Communist nations in 2007, democratic governments were restored in Laos in 1989 and in Cambodia in 1991.

While much of the rest of Asia was quarreling with neighbors or fighting internally, j.a.pan was continuing its amazing postwar economic recovery. Through the 1960s, its economy grew at an average annual clip of 11 percent. In the 1970s, j.a.pan responded to the global oil crisis by s.h.i.+fting its focus from heavy industry to high-tech electronics. This consolidated its position as an economic heavyweight.

But it also became a victim of its own successes. Rapid growth and continual innovation raised expectations of financial markets to unreasonable levels. Other Asian states-most notably Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan-emulated j.a.pan's methods and provided stiff compet.i.tion. By the end of the twentieth century, j.a.pan's remarkable economic run had ended.

LORDS OF THE RINGS.

In 1964, j.a.pan hosted the Summer Olympics, marking its full reemergence onto the world scene after World War II. The hosts didn't do badly in the games, either: j.a.pan won sixteen gold medals, behind only the USSR and the United States.

In South Asia, the world's largest democracy, India, struggled through the 1960s like a gawky adolescent trying to figure out how to harness his developing strength. It found itself frequently at odds with its neighbors-China in the early 1960s, Pakistan almost continually-and dealing internally with sectarian and religious strife among the Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh elements of its population.

As a leader of the world's nonaligned nations, India became a nuclear power in the 1970s and played both sides of the cold war against each other, siding often with the Soviet Union and occasionally with the West. Beginning in the 1980s, India also undertook a series of ambitious economic reforms. By the first decade of the new century, its economy was one of the fastest growing in the world.

The Middle East:

s.h.i.+fting Sands

If you had to pick just one word to describe the Middle East from the 1960s on, unstable unstable would be a good one. At least four complex and deep-rooted conflicts intertwined into a Gordian knot of, well, instability: would be a good one. At least four complex and deep-rooted conflicts intertwined into a Gordian knot of, well, instability: -fundamentalist Islamic antipathy toward the West;-sectarian feuds between s.h.i.+te and Sunni Muslims;-differences between Islamic countries with more secular governments and those with religious bases; and-the Arab world's ever so mild (he said, sarcastically) dislike of Israel.

The very existence of Israel, in fact, was enough to send many Arab leaders scurrying for their helmets in the 1960s. In 1967, fearing an attack was imminent, Israel launched a preemptive strike on Egypt and quickly routed Arab forces, which were indeed planning an attack. The so-called Six-Day War ended with Israel seizing Arab territories that included the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the city of Jerusalem. It also ended with a three-year-old group called the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) taking the lead in seeking the destruction of Israel.

In 1973, Egypt and Syria struck first and pushed into Israeli territory before an Israeli counterattack drove them back. Under pressure from both the United States and Soviet Union, the Arab nations gave up the fight. (But the Arab-dominated Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) retaliated by cutting oil supplies. Prices around the world tripled, effectively ending the globe's postWorld War II economic surge.) Weary of the violent approach, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat decided to seek peace with the Israelis. In 1978, at the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David, in Maryland, Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin signed a peace treaty brokered by President Jimmy Carter.

Peace didn't catch on. In 1981, Sadat was a.s.sa.s.sinated for his efforts, and Israel invaded Lebanon in an effort to root out PLO terrorists who were using the country as their base. Israeli troops stayed four years. In 1993, however, Israeli and PLO leaders met secretly in Oslo, Norway, and came up with a tentative plan for semi-autonomy for Palestinians in some of the territory Israel had seized in 1967. Like Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who oversaw the Oslo peace effort, was a.s.sa.s.sinated.

ONE WACKY IRAQI.

According to U.S. journalist Mark Bowden, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had the chefs at each of his twenty-plus palaces prepare three elaborate meals each day, whether he was there or not, to lessen the chances of his being poisoned.

Although some progress was made as a result of the Oslo Agreement, violence and unrest continued in the region and most major issues remained unresolved.

Not all of the Middle East's problems involved Israel. In 1980, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein launched an attack on neighboring Iran. Financially drained by the war, which basically ended in a tie, Saddam demanded tribute from the small oil-rich country of Kuwait in the fall of 1990, and then invaded. But a U.S.-led coalition responded with ma.s.sive force, crus.h.i.+ng the Iraqi army in less than six weeks and forcing Saddam to sign a humiliating peace treaty. He was allowed, however, to continue in power.

In Iran, meanwhile, the corrupt-but-pro-U.S. Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, had been overthrown in a 1979 coup led by a Muslim cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. After the United States gave refuge to the shah, Iranian students retaliated by seizing the U.S. emba.s.sy in Tehran and holding sixty-seven Americans hostage, fifty-two of them for more than a year.

In Afghanistan, a fundamentalist Islamic group called the Taliban had ruled the country since 1996. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on American targets by members of the al-Qaeda terrorist group, U.S. officials charged that the group's leaders were being harbored in Afghanistan. When the Taliban refused to hand over the terrorists, U.S. and British forces attacked Afghanistan, forced out the Taliban, and occupied the country as part of a multinational force.

In 2003, the United States followed up by accusing Iraq of developing "weapons of ma.s.s destruction." After Saddam refused to acknowledge the weapons' existence, the United States and some other countries invaded Iraq.

Saddam was overthrown, eventually captured, tried for crimes against humanity by an Iraqi court, and executed. No weapons of ma.s.s destruction were found, and the country continued to be occupied by Western, mainly U.S., troops and wracked by sectarian terrorism and civil war.

United States of America:

Lonely at the Top

The United States faced two main demons as the 1960s unfolded, one foreign and one domestic. In 1963, South Vietnam's dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, was a.s.sa.s.sinated. Although the United States had propped up Diem's dictators.h.i.+p, it wasn't really sorry to see him go. After his death, the United States stepped up its military support of the country in its fight with Communist North Vietnam.

By the time he was a.s.sa.s.sinated himself that November, President John F. Kennedy had sent sixteen thousand U.S. military "advisors" to Vietnam. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, accelerated the pace. By March 1965, more than one hundred thousand U.S. troops were in the country and U.S. aircraft were heavily bombing targets in North Vietnam. By the beginning of 1968, the U.S. troop count had reached five hundred thousand.

But it was a confusing war for the American people. Relatively few knew exactly what the war's objectives were, beyond defeating Communists. Watching the horrors of the war on television every night didn't help, and opposition to American involvement grew so intense that Johnson chose not to run for reelection in 1968.

All Vietnam is not worth the life of a single American boy.-U.S. senator Ernest Greuning (D-Alaska), during debate on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave President Lyndon Johnson congressional authority to commit U.S. forces to "defend" Southeast Asian countries threatened by communism, August 6, 1964

The country elected Richard Nixon, a veteran Communist fighter. Nixon tried several methods to force the North Vietnamese to negotiate a settlement, ranging from heavy bombing to invading Cambodia. But nothing worked. In January 1973, after years of fighting and the deaths of fifty-eight thousand American soldiers, the United States signed a "peace treaty" with North Vietnam and pulled out. In April 1975, North Vietnam overran its southern counterpart and took control.

The demon on the home front was racial discrimination. Although the American civil rights movement had its roots in the 1950s, it picked up speed in the 1960s. Tactics borrowed from India's Gandhi supplied part of the momentum: sit-ins, marches, and strikes. Political leaders.h.i.+p-first by Kennedy and his attorney general brother, Robert, and then by Johnson, as well as by civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr.-also played a significant role.

If physical death is the price I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on June 5, 1964, a few months before the year he was awarded the n.o.bel Peace Prize for his work toward racial equality. He was a.s.sa.s.sinated four years later.

In 1964, Johnson pushed a bill through Congress that banned racial discrimination in public places such as hotels and restaurants and broadened federal authority to enforce civil rights laws. The following year, Congress approved another bill that safeguarded the voting rights of African Americans.

But white resistance and black impatience combined in an explosive mix. Race riots broke out across the country in 1965, 1967, and 1968. Black leaders Malcolm X and the Rev. King were murdered. The streets eventually cooled, but race relations remained one of America's most vexing problems.

If the 1960s were turbulent, the 1970s were sort of depressing in America, despite its two hundredth birthday in July 1976. Nixon was driven from office by a political scandal; the Arab-pushed oil embargo inflicted major damage on the economy, and U.S. prestige suffered a humiliating blow when the president was unable to rescue the hostages held in Tehran by Iranian students.

"WHAT I MEANT TO SAY WAS..."

I don't give a s.h.i.+t what happens, I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment or anything else.-President Richard M. Nixon, discussing the Watergate cover-up with aides, March 22, 1973 There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.-President Gerald R. Ford, during a 1976 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter I've looked on a lot of women with l.u.s.t. I've committed adultery in my heart many times.-Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, in a 1976 Playboy Playboy magazine interview published just before the election magazine interview published just before the election Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.-President Ronald Reagan in 1981 I'm going to say this again. I did not have s.e.xual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.-U.S. President Bill Clinton, issuing a forceful denial at a White House press conference, January 26, 1998 We found the weapons of ma.s.s destruction. We found biological laboratories...and we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.-President George W. Bush to a Polish television interviewer, May 29, 2003, in justifying the U.S. invasion of Iraq

But in 1980, an improbable hero showed up in the form of a former Hollywood actor. Ronald Reagan, a charismatic B-movie star and two-term California governor, was elected president. While personally affable and self-deprecating, Reagan was steadfast and stubborn when it came to pus.h.i.+ng his political ideas. Domestically, he believed that if business thrived, the benefits would "trickle down" to everyone. Internationally, Reagan was a "big stick" man. He heated up the cold war by calling the Soviet Union amoral and evil, and by building up U.S. missile defenses.

But his tough talk also helped the USSR realize that America was not going to slow down in the arms race, and helped bring about the end of the cold war and the United States' emergence as the only true superpower.

As the world's cop, the United States led international coalitions into wars in Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The actions, particularly the highly controversial decision by President George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003, led to a tidal wave of international criticism.

The attacks on September 11, 2001, also rammed home a chilling reminder that even the biggest dog on the block is vulnerable. Economic globalization and technological innovation challenged America's place in the world marketplace. As the twenty-first century dawned, the United States was finding that a smaller world didn't necessarily mean a better one.

Name That War!

Keeping all those wars straight can be a tough job, especially when there are so many repeat offenders. Lucky for you, here's a quick cheat sheet to the major wars since 1962.

Sudan: North Sudanese vs. South Sudanese, 19561972, 19832006. As many as 2 million dead, mainly civilians. Ended in uneasy peace between North and South, but did nothing to end violence in Western province of Darfur. North Sudanese vs. South Sudanese, 19561972, 19832006. As many as 2 million dead, mainly civilians. Ended in uneasy peace between North and South, but did nothing to end violence in Western province of Darfur.

Rwanda: Hutu vs. Tutsi, 19591994, off and on. More than 1 million killed, overwhelmingly civilian. Ended in uneasy peace between two feuding tribal groups. Hutu vs. Tutsi, 19591994, off and on. More than 1 million killed, overwhelmingly civilian. Ended in uneasy peace between two feuding tribal groups.

Vietnam: United States and South Vietnam vs. North Vietnam, 19621973. As many as 1.1 million North Vietnamese soldiers, 58,000 U.S. soldiers, and 1 million to 4 million civilians dead or missing. The United States stopped fighting in 1973; North Vietnamese took over South Vietnam in 1975. United States and South Vietnam vs. North Vietnam, 19621973. As many as 1.1 million North Vietnamese soldiers, 58,000 U.S. soldiers, and 1 million to 4 million civilians dead or missing. The United States stopped fighting in 1973; North Vietnamese took over South Vietnam in 1975.

India-Pakistan: India vs. Pakistan, 1965 and 1971. The 1965 war killed a total of about 6,500 on both sides; ended in a draw. The 1971 war's military casualties were more than 8,000; civilian deaths at more than 400,000. Resulted in East Pakistan becoming nation of Bangladesh. India vs. Pakistan, 1965 and 1971. The 1965 war killed a total of about 6,500 on both sides; ended in a draw. The 1971 war's military casualties were more than 8,000; civilian deaths at more than 400,000. Resulted in East Pakistan becoming nation of Bangladesh.

Israel I: Israel vs. Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, 1967. About 19,000 deaths on all sides. Israel ended up with triple the territory it had when the Six-Day War started. Israel vs. Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, 1967. About 19,000 deaths on all sides. Israel ended up with triple the territory it had when the Six-Day War started.

Israel II: Israel vs. Egypt, Syria, and others, 1973. About 20,000 total military deaths. Israel gained some territory, but generally it was a draw. Israel vs. Egypt, Syria, and others, 1973. About 20,000 total military deaths. Israel gained some territory, but generally it was a draw.

Afghanistan I: Afghans vs. Soviet Union, 19791989. Soviets lost about 14,500; Afghans more than 1 million soldiers and civilians. Afghan rebels won; last Soviet troops pulled out in February 1989. Afghans vs. Soviet Union, 19791989. Soviets lost about 14,500; Afghans more than 1 million soldiers and civilians. Afghan rebels won; last Soviet troops pulled out in February 1989.