Charter of Paris for a New Europe (1990) As the collapse of the Soviet system and Warsaw Pact became apparent, a summit was organized to seek to reorganize relationships between western and eastern powers. The resulting Charter of Paris laid the groundwork for post-Cold War cooperation and crisis resolution among formerly hostile powers.
Cold War This term describes the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union from after the Second World War (1939–45) to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–91. The term ‘Cold War’ highlighted that the conflict was more about ideas and political allegiance among allies than about warfare. The Cold War was nonetheless very hot in places such as Korea, Angola and Afghanistan.
The Final Solution Formally established in 1942, the Nazi strategy to ‘solve the Jewish question’ was a euphemistic description of the shift in Nazi policy from the effort to subjugate and drive out Jewish populations to a determination to exterminate them.
Iron Curtain Though a popular metaphor before the Cold War, the term ‘Iron Curtain’ came to describe the physical division between communist eastern Europe and capitalist western Europe after British prime minister Winston Churchill used it in a 1945 telegram to US President Harry Truman. These fences and walls were generally established to prevent eastern Europeans from fleeing into western Europe.
Maoism This term refers to the political, economic and social theory developed and espoused by Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. The Chinese Communist Party defines Maoism as ‘Marxism-Leninism applied in a Chinese context’. Other core components included a strong degree of anti-Confucianism – opposition to the philosophical and ethical system based on the teachings of Chinese philosopher Confucius – and emphasis on peasant-based revolution.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Established in 1949, this mutual defence pact provided a framework for defensive military coordination between most western European and North American states. Though initially designed to guard against potential Soviet expansion into western Europe, the organization expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Warren Commission Formally known as the Presidents Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. Under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the commission determined that gunmen Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby had acted independently.
Warsaw Pact Formed in 1955, this mutual defence pact among eastern European communist states and the Soviet Union was a response to western Germany’s entry into NATO. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, several former Warsaw Pact states applied for NATO membership.
Zyklon-B gas Originally developed as a pesticide in the 1920s, this cyanide-based poison gas was used by Nazi Germany to murder an estimated 1.2 million people during the Holocaust. Most of the victims were Jewish. Some 200,000 of the killed were Polish and Soviet prisoners of war and Roma.
In 1885 through diplomatic dealings Belgian king Leopold II had established the Congo Free State, a vast territory in central Africa, as his private property. The king granted concessions in his colony to unscrupulous companies. Booming demand for rubber from the nascent automobile industry at the turn of the 20th century led companies to plunder the Free State’s natural resources and use intimidation tactics and violence against the Congolese to punish those who did not harvest enough of the prized latex. Leopold’s government endorsed the razing of villages and mutilations. The atrocities were exposed by a group of western activists including American author Mark Twain, British diplomat Roger Casement and journalist E.D. Morel, who displayed photographs of Congolese people with severed hands to mock Leopold’s claims that his colony promoted Christian civilization. The death toll from illness and violence may have been as high as several hundred thousand. The Congo reform movement helped to force Leopold to sell his colony to the Belgian government in 1908. The government proved to be more efficient than Leopold’s regime, but often just as rapacious. One employee of Leopold’s, Joseph Conrad, wrote the haunting novella Heart of Darkness based on his Congolese experiences. European conquest came at a brutal price.
The Congo Free State’s reliance on violence led to great loss of life and inspired an international human rights alliance to battle the regime’s severe colonial injustices.
Africans as well as westerners exposed the cruelty of the Congo Free State. In 1903 Herzekiah Shanu, a Nigerian photographer who worked for Leopold II’s regime, sent damning evidence of the ruthlessness of colonial officials to Casement and Morel. A police officer discovered Shanu’s secret role as an informant, and the colonial government refused to hire him again. Bankrupt and depressed, Shanu committed suicide in 1905.
MARK TWAIN (SAMUEL L. CLEMENS)
1835–1910
American author and fierce critic of the US occupation of the Philippines and European imperialism in Africa
JOSEPH CONRAD
1857–1924
British writer who briefly worked for the Independent State of the Congo before penning Heart of Darkness, published in 1902
Jeremy Rich
The inhabitants of what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo were brutally exploited by Europeans seeking to get rich on the supply of rubber.
In 1919, wealthy hotel-owner Raymond Orteig offered a prize of $25,000 to anyone who could fly from New York to Paris, an offer he renewed in 1926. Charles Lindbergh, a 25-year-old US Air Mail pilot, approached several aircraft manufacturers before B.F. ‘Frank’ Mahoney, of Ryan Airlines, offered to build a plane for Lindbergh ‘at cost’ ($10,580) capable of flying nonstop for 40 hours. The Spirit of St. Louis, named in honour of Lindbergh’s financial backers from St. Louis, was a redesign of the Ryan M-2 mail plane, with longer wings to accommodate more fuel weight. Lindbergh made many of the specifications, including a single engine and main fuel tank placed in front of the pilot; Lindbergh feared being crushed between engine and fuel tank in the event of a crash. This meant that there was no forward visibility, save for an installed periscope. The pilot’s seat was wicker, to reduce weight, and no parachute, radio or navigation lights were on board. Lindbergh even cut the excess paper off his maps to reduce weight. On 20 May 1927, Lindbergh set off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, NY, to land the next day in Paris. The feat set the stage for rapid trans-oceanic flights.
Charles Lindbergh’s solo transatlantic flight in the Spirit of St. Louis helped the public accept air travel as an exciting and viable means of transportation.
The Spirit of St. Louis made history before the transatlantic expedition when Lindbergh flew it from the factory in San Diego to New York City in 20 hours 21 minutes, a transcontinental record. After his New York–Paris flight, Lindbergh flew the Spirit across the US and to several Latin American countries, in a promotion of goodwill. Lindbergh donated the plane to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C., in 1928, where it is displayed today.
CHARLES AUGUSTUS LINDBERGH
1902–74
American pilot who made the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic
RAYMOND ORTEIG
1870–1939
French-American hotelier whose prize sparked an era of aviation explosion in the years following Lindbergh’s flight
Laura J. Lee
Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis won a place in history and on a US Air Mail stamp with the 5,800km (3,600-mile) New York–Paris flight.
Before the First World War the term genocide didn’t exist and holocaust generally referred to a large massacre. Both terms would become synonymous with Hitler and Nazi Germany’s annihilation of European Jewry. The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and murder of those considered a threat to the social, moral, economic and political stability of Nazi Germany. Persecution began with anti-Semitic laws based on notions of scientific racism. In addition to Jews, Nazis targeted political opponents: the mentally and physically disabled; homosexuals; Jehovah’s Witnesses; Catholics; and non-Aryans including Slavs, Roma and Africans. Initially, mobile killing squads shot and buried victims en masse. Such methods proved inefficient and were replaced by concentration camps. Labour camps were established to work and starve prisoners to death. Death camps, however, were designed as efficient killing centres that deceived victims that they were being de-loused by showers, only to be killed by Zyklon-B gas. The world was stunned by the base inhumanity of the camps. An estimated 11 million people died under the Nazis, of whom 6 million were Jews – almost 80 per cent of the total European Jewish population.
The Holocaust shocked the world and discredited notions of racism and Social Darwinism that had justified segregation and colonialism for many democracies.
Nations and citizens demanded moral, social and political changes to ensure atrocities like the Holocaust would never be repeated. Deeper religious rapport between Jews and Christians developed as the need became evident to establish a Jewish homeland for survivors who could not return to their European communities. International tribunals were set up to ensure justice upon those who perpetrated crimes against humanity. The heightened awareness of the crime of genocide and international efforts to protect human rights reveal the lasting legacy of the Holocaust.
HERMAN GOERING
1893–1946
German military leader who gave the direct order to Heydrich to formulate a plan for the ‘Final Solution’
HEINRICH HIMMLER
1900–45
German Nazi official who served as commander in chief of the concentration and death camps, and chief of the mobile death squads
REINHARD HEYDRICH
1904–42
German Nazi official who formulated and delivered the plan for the ‘Final Solution’
Rita R. Thomas
The slogan Arbeit macht frei (‘Work Makes You Free’) taunted concentration camp inmates.
Between 1966 and 1976 a radical Maoist movement convulsed and reshaped China. Dissatisfied with China’s development, in the mid-1960s communist leader Mao Zedong regained his dominant status, resurrected Maoism and promoted a Mao cult. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution represented Mao’s attempt to implant his vision, destroy his enemies, crush stifling bureaucracy and renew revolutionary vigour. Groups of militant workers and students known as Red Guards attacked and arrested anti-Mao leaders and smashed temples, churches and party and government headquarters. Revolutionary committees led by students, workers and soldiers ran cities, factories and schools. The turmoil disrupted industrial and agricultural production, closed most schools for two years and resulted in thousands being killed, jailed or removed from office. Estimates of deaths range widely, from 500,000 to 3 million. Millions of others were sent to remote areas to experience peasant life. Anti- Mao officials, intellectuals and people with upper-class backgrounds faced public criticism and often punishment. Soon even Mao was dampening down the chaos. After his death in 1976 his successors shifted to less radical political and economic policies. Nonetheless, the Cultural Revolution legacy still influences Chinese life.
This radical, decade-long, movement in China represented Mao Zedong’s attempt to transform Chinese, politics, culture and economics while revitalizing the revolution.
By disrupting daily life and reshaping political, social, economic and cultural institutions and ideology, the Cultural Revolution transformed China. Individuals inspired by the slogan ‘Serve the People’ subordinated their own needs to the broader social order. People – especially villagers – shared resources: food, draught animals, farm equipment. Politicization of the arts peaked. Red Guards sang new songs praising Mao. Militant operas and ballets promoted revolutionary values. Chinese still debate the value of these innovations.
MAO ZEDONG
1893–1976
Leader of Chinese Communist Party and the first chairman of the Peoples’ Republic of China between 1949–76
JIANG QING
1914–91
Mao’s wife and a former film starlet who played a prominent role in promoting and shaping the Cultural Revolution
Craig Lockard
Red Guards carried a little red book containing short, inspirational quotations from Mao’s writings.
After narrowly winning the 1960 election, President John F. Kennedy knew he would need more than his television-debating persona to help him win again in 1964. On 22 November 1963 President and Mrs Kennedy began a political fence-mending campaign in Dallas, Texas. At 12.30pm, three shots rang out. As Kennedy slumped into his wife’s lap, the final shot exploded his head. The rapidity of the event was recorded in 26.6 seconds of 8mm film taken by Abraham Zapruder. Witnesses, however, provided confusing and conflicting stories of the tragic event. Fifty minutes after the confirmed newsflash of the president’s death, Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee of the Texas School Book Depository, was arrested for shooting a Dallas policeman and as the prime suspect in the death of JFK. Unsure of the threat to national security, Vice-President Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office on board Air Force One, with Mrs Kennedy by his side, still wearing her blood-stained clothes. For four days, the nation collectively mourned as all television networks provided constant coverage of funeral ceremonies. On the same day Kennedy’s funeral was held in Washington, D.C., Oswald was shot in the basement of the Dallas police station by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
The 1963 shooting of President John F. Kennedy shocked the world and helped set the stage for a decade of high-profile assassinations.
Kennedy’s assassination was a shocking event that launched the concept of uninterrupted breaking news coverage to the American people; it also led to the people’s distrust of their government. Before the publication of the Warren Commission, Americans believed Kennedy’s death was a result of a conspiracy. Multiple conspiracy theories endure that propose as suspects Cuban President Fidel Castro, the Mafia, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, the KGB, the CIA, Hoover and the FBI, and even Lyndon Johnson.
ABRAHAM ZAPRUDER
1905–70
Dallas businessman who captured the clearest footage of the Kennedy assassination and was later called to testify before the Warren Commission
JACK RUBY
(JACOB LEON RUBENSTEIN)
1911–67
Dallas nightclub owner who killed suspect Lee Harvey Oswald as Kennedy’s funeral was being broadcast to live national audience
LEE HARVEY OSWALD
1939–63
Former US Marine, who, according to the Warren Commission, was the lone assassin of President John F. Kennedy
Rita R. Thomas
Oswald fired his carbine from the sixth floor of the Book Depository building.
Arguably the most important political assassination of the 20th century, the death of Patrice Lumumba, in 1961, played out most devastatingly for his native Congo, where a repeated series of disturbing, violent events have already lasted decades longer than Lumumba’s brief political life.
Born Élias Okit’Asombo (meaning ‘heir of the cursed, who will die quickly’), Lumumba was the son of Tetela farmers in the mining province of Katanga (Kasai). He received a colonial education and training at the government post office training school. Lumumba became a postal worker and, later, an accountant, before marrying and turning to political life in the 1950s. An early African member of the Liberal Party, Lumumba travelled to Belgium and returned convinced that Africans could aspire to independence. He was arrested and imprisoned shortly upon his return.
In the late 1950s, Lumumba intensified his political engagement and repeatedly found himself in leadership roles. Helping to launch the anti-colonial Mouvement national congolais (MNC) in 1958, he became the group’s president. At the All-African Peoples Conference in Accra, Ghana, Lumumba represented the Congo. Ghana had just achieved independence in 1957, and Lumumba’s contact with the new nation’s president, Kwame Nkrumah, solidified his pan-Africanist beliefs and commitment to the struggle for independence at home.
Meanwhile, the United States and other nations in the West had begun to worry about the threat from outspoken African leaders, whose neutrality towards communism was held in suspicion during the height of the Cold War. The Belgians and Americans began to plot the eventual overthrow of Nkrumah (1966) and Lumumba’s assassination (1961).
Decolonization only reinforced foreign domination and control over key mining and urban regions. At the Independence Day ceremony in 1960, the King Baudouin of Belgium’s speech blithely celebrated the ‘genius’ of the colonial past. Lumumba, the nation’s first elected prime minister, did not shrink from pointing out the evils of colonialism and imperialism arguing that ‘it is too early to forget’ the oppression, humiliation, torture, insults, maiming and killings suffered by the colonized.
Briefly imprisoned, Lumumba feared for his life and the viability of autonomy in the face of excessive mining profits. He was captured by Belgian forces and executed in 1961. Between 1961 and the present, the Congo territory changed its official name a number of times, while still extracting the copper, gold, diamonds, gold and cobalt (the so-called ‘conflict minerals’) that power up the world’s mobile phones. Rather than silencing the past, Lumumba’s martyrdom directed attention to the forces of capitalism, violence and greed that continue to wreak havoc in the Congo.
Candice Goucher
Belgian king, Leopold II, claims Congo Free State as his personal property
1899
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness published in serial form
1908
Colonial rule formally begins
2 July 1925
Patrice Émery Lumumba born in the Kasai province of the central region of the Belgian Congo
1951
Weds Pauline Opangu in an arranged marriage
1955
Travels to Belgium for the first time
1958
Founds the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC)
1958
Meets Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana
1960
Elected prime minister, while in jail
1960
Congo gains indepence
17 January 1961
Executed by firing squad
When President Kennedy gave his famous ‘Moon Speech’ John Glenn had just become the first American to enter orbit, part of Project Mercury, NASA’s endeavour to orbit Earth, determine whether man could function in space and practise successfully recovering both man and spacecraft. Gemini’s mission was to observe man in space and prepare astronauts for long-duration flight and weightlessness, practising re-entry and landing and testing docking methods and docked vehicles. NASA’s most famous project, Apollo, was about getting to and exploring the Moon. On 27 January 1967 the first manned mission ended in tragedy during preflight testing: astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee were killed when fire erupted in the command module. Apollo flights 7–10 all launched successfully, running tests, orbiting Earth and the Moon and testing equipment. It was time. Three men were aboard Apollo 11: Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. (Buzz) Aldrin, Jr. On 20 July 1969, seven years after the ‘Moon Speech’, they announced, ‘Houston, Tranquility base here. The eagle has landed.’ Aldrin and Armstrong spent two and a half hours on the moon’s surface. A further six Apollo missions followed, five of which successfully landed on the Moon.
‘One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.’
Neil Armstrong
In 1957, the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into Earth’s orbit, instigating the Space Race. Americans responded by launching their own satellite, Explorer I (1958), and created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The Soviets launched Luna 2, a space probe that landed on the Moon (1959), and sent cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin to orbit Earth (1961). The US responded with Project Mercury. When Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, the US ‘won’ the Space Race.
JOHN GLENN
1921–
First American to orbit Earth (1962); former US senator
ALAN B. SHEPARD, JR.
1923–98
First American to enter space (1959); former United Nations delegate
NEIL A. ARMSTRONG
1930–2012
American astronaut and the first person to set foot on the moon (1969)
Kristin Hornsby
Buzz Aldrin takes small steps down from the lunar module Eagle then stands beside the US flag the crew planted on the Moon’s surface.
The Cold War was the conflict after the Second World War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The two superpowers engaged in an intense power struggle, reshaping the world into two hostile spheres of influence, divided by competing political and economic ideologies. Together with their military alliances – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact – they launched a massive arms race that was fought bitterly around the globe, but refrained from direct armed conflict within Europe. The Berlin Wall, constructed in 1961, was a powerful symbol of this war, an ‘iron curtain’ of concrete encircling a democratic West Berlin within communist East Germany. On 9 November 1989, ordinary men and women of Berlin breached the wall and began to tear it down brick by brick, in the wake of anti-communist revolutions sweeping across eastern Europe. This milestone initiated the process towards German reunification of 1990, uniting two countries split since 1949, the German Democratic Republic (GDR – East), and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG – West). The United States and the Soviet Union officially ended the Cold War with the Charter of Paris for New Europe (1990). The following year, the Soviet Union collapsed into fifteen separate countries.
The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the end of the Cold War, which cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars.
The Cold War shaped world politics for most of the second half of the 20th century. While technically ‘cold’ (there was rarely ‘hot’ confrontation), power politics and fears drove surrogate wars, invasions, coups d’état and arms races. By supplying arms the superpowers perverted nationalist movements, including the Korean War (1950–53), the Cuban missile crisis (1961–62), the Vietnam Conflict (1955–75) and Afghanistan (1979–89). Korea remains divided from the 1945 partition of communist North and capitalist South.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
1874–1965
British prime minister (1940–45, 1951–55) who coined the term ‘iron curtain’ in March 1946
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV
1931–
Soviet Union’s last president (1989–94), who introduced reforms such as perestroika and glasnost, which led to the eventual end of the Cold War
Grace Chee
Berliners from east and west clambered up onto the wall to celebrate its demise.
