Transcript for:
Analyzing 20th Century European Conflicts (Euro100 w:11)

Euro100 week 11 transcript Today we're going to look at some really general things about Europe in the 20th century. So we're going to look at a very general way at the progression from just after World War One through World War, World War two, and we won't spend time talking about World War Two, about the actual battles of World War Two. But just what what that, um, what that war and the settlements afterwards mean for Europe today. So we'll look at that bit and then we'll look at the Cold War, which I think we can kind of look at as a continuation of World War One and World War Two. And in fact, I'm going to start like that. I'm going to propose to everyone that we think of the wars of the 20th century and then into now, the 21st century, and we're actually quite a ways into the 21st century. And a quarter of the way through the 21st century proposed that we look at those wars as sort of a long war, one really long war. And I'm not I'm not expecting all of you to agree with this, and I would actually be interested to hear what you have to say. But I'm just proposing that in the same way that we have, say, the War of the Roses and England in the 15th century, the Hundred Years War between England and France, that you would have talked about with Lindsay in the 14th century into the 15th century, really long wars made up of battles that can be sort of divided into different sections. And you would go like decades without a new battle. Then it would come back and you would think of yourself as kind of, or at least historians looking back, think of these as like one long war. I'm going to suggest that maybe we could think of the wars of the 20th century, in the 21st century, as one long war, and now the war in Ukraine as just kind of the latest, um, addition to that long war. So, um, yeah, let's let's try that. Let's see what happens. What I'm going to suggest is that, um, maybe we could say that we could frame this proposition in four different parts. So we'll have World War One, First World War two, the Cold War, and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine, part of a century long struggle for control over a particular territory in Europe, which is Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, which has always been there, like right in the centre of these wars and continues to be there, right in the centre of the newest war, the, um, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Why Ukraine? That's, um, that's what we're going to think about today. And let's think about other things, smaller topics too, but let's kind of keep that in mind. And I'm just going to give you a couple of ideas. So let's say the first phase is World War one, which is an imperial competition. So you've got a bunch of land empires. They all vanished. Right? World War One takes care of the land empires, right? Takes care of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, takes care of the German Empire, takes care of the Russian Empire. Takes care of the Ottoman Empire. So World War One does away with those big empires. And we end up with a bunch of small nation states that this seems like pretty positive way to end the war. But they don't last long, right? Because World War Two comes along and kind of gobbles them up. What's Ukraine's role in World War One? So Ukraine, at the time of World War one and just after World War One was essentially split in two, I mean, as it kind of still is. Right? So you've got the western part, which is Galicia, which is closely aligned with with Poland, and then you've got the eastern part, which is has always been more closely aligned with Russia after World War One, instead of becoming one of the nation states that form out of the old land empires. So to become one of those nation states, Ukraine gets sucked up by the new Soviet Union. Okay. And so we'll think about that. We're going to come back to these things. I just want to kind of lay out in a general, in a general way, this kind of framework. So Ukraine then gets stuck in Soviet Union, although it had players who wanted very much to become a nation state, but it didn't at that point. Then we have World War two and the land empires have disappeared, but they kind of re-emerge, right? Germany appears to Germany is certainly a land empire, like moving ever eastward. Um, the Soviet Union is an empire, right? It's seeking contiguous land, the maritime empires. So that is I mean essentially Great Britain and France, so maritime in the sense that their colonies are overseas as opposed to like contiguous, um, with the, with, with them on, on, um, European soil. Those empires made it through World War One. They make it through World War two, but they're going to lose their empires very quickly after World War Two. So that's our situation, World War two. And what about Ukraine in this case in World War two? Well, Ukraine once again is right there in the centre of the action. Right? Germany wants to Ukraine and Russia wants Ukraine. And Ukraine is like completely annihilated because it gets it from both sides. So so Germany invades Ukraine after it has already been completely demolished by Stalin. Um, of the famines of 1932, 1933, the Holodomor. So Ukraine is just completely annihilated by World War two and rebuilds slowly as a member of the this um, the USSR at that point, the Soviet Union, um part of what Timothy Snyder calls the bloodlands and we're going to get back to this World War two was essentially fought in what Snyder calls the bloodlands, that is to say, the area between what we would think it was Western Europe today and then the Soviet Union. So that area that got, um, demolished on both sides from then the Germans from the Nazis, and then from the other side, from Stalin and the Russian troops. Okay. So we'll keep that idea in mind. We'll come back to that. That gives us World War Two, and then we have the Cold War, which is, you know, it's obviously not a conventional war. Nothing ever came of it. In fact, um, although during the 1950s, I wasn't around in the 1950s. So I don't know this personally, but I, I hear that people lived in in real terror that there was actually going to be a nuclear war that was gone by the time I was growing up. And we were no longer afraid of the Soviet Union, but that, um, that, that war, if you want to call it that, that sort of, uh, um, the, the sort of surveillance of each side by the other, each side saying, yeah, we've got nuclear weapons. So let's sort of keep each other in line. That whole kind of stalemate, um, existed up until the 1990s. Up until 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart. And during that time, Ukraine was always integral to the Soviet Union. Um, it had the Black Sea Fleet so that the Soviet Union's fleet was actually attached to Ukraine. It held most of the Soviet missile silos. So we're going to come back to that idea because that's important, I think, for thinking about Ukraine today. It housed the nuclear arms of the Soviet Union to a large extent. Those were in Ukrainian territory. And much of the heavy industry of the Soviet Union was based in Ukraine. So it's like a really important part of the Soviet Union. And nonetheless, throughout that period, that is to say, throughout the Cold War, um, Ukrainian nationalism was still very strong. There was always a real strong strain of nationalism, especially in the West and the country, not so much in the East, which is always more closely aligned with Russia. Um, but, uh, that Ukrainian nationalism never went away. And as soon as a Soviet Union started to fall, Ukraine declared its independence and became the most powerful of those that, um, nation states that would come out of out of that, uh, that, that demise. And then we can look, I think the fourth phase, um, 1991 so that's the fall of the Soviet Union, um, from that point to today to to the um, invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Um, that period saw the collapse of the USSR and Ukraine declaring independence. Um, it saw a number of events in Ukraine that, um, I think thinking most of you were probably too young to have any memory of these, but things like, um, the, the, the 2004, um, Orange Revolution in Ukraine. We'll talk a bit about that. And we can't talk about anything and entail. But it's just a revolution starting in Ukraine 2004 and then 2014, the revolution, um, dignity or the Euromaidan revolution, um, then then Crimea being snatched up by the Russians and then finally the invasion in 2022 by by Putin. Um, so, so Ukraine, once again, it's like right in the centre of of what for Europe are the most important conflicts in the world. I mean, obviously there are other conflicts going on in the world that that should concern us. But for people who are in a course called Euro 100, Ukraine is just always kind of there in the middle. And yet and yet it's probably not a place that we associate all that strongly with European history. So on the very first day that that we met, I wanted to sort of make clear that that's not really quite true that year or that that Ukraine is not part of European history. It is. Always been there and it remains there. Okay, that was just my introduction. Just kind of wanted to throw all of that out. And I will be curious to hear what you think, um, if that makes sense, to look at what's been happening over this century and into this new century as all part of the same sort of fundamental conflict over this geography, this this land that exists between Western Europe and what is the Soviet Union or what was the Soviet Union? What is what is Russia today with that way of looking at things makes sense. And as as we speak today, we have no idea what's going to happen in Ukraine if this war is finally going to come to an end. Um, I have no idea. You guys know as much as I do. Um, and I can't even really hold out a whole lot of hope. I mean, just if you listen to the news the last couple of days, things don't sound all that good. On the other hand, the thing that keeps me going is that colonial power is always lose. They always lose their colonies. Um, so we'll we'll look at, uh, look at how Great Britain and France lost their colonies and the kind of the usual suspects. But Russia, too, loses wars all the time. So they. Russia, a colonial power, loses a lot of wars. And here I just created a little list of the wars that Russia had, the big ones that Russia has lost, not necessarily recently, but they lost the the Crimean War to England and France back in 1853. Um, uh War, the continuing to 1856. They lost the Rus that the Russo Japanese war in 1904 and 1905. They lost World War one 1914 to 1918. I mean, it's not quite fair to say it like that. I mean, the Bolshevik Revolution did come along and changed everything, but the Russian Empire lost World War one. Um, they lost the Latvian and Estonian Wars of independence 1918 1920. So just after World War one, they lost the Polish Soviet War of 1919 1921. They lost the Cold War 1947 to 1991, essentially because the Soviet Union collapsed. They lost the Afghan War 1979 to 1989, and they lost the First Chechen War in 1994 to 1996. So Russia doesn't always win, even though it's very big. So anyway, we are watching history right now as as we're talking. We'll see in another year what's what's going on in Ukraine. Okay. Um, anyway, there's a sort of introduction, uh, and just one thing I would add to what I just said is that we are living in really interesting times for all of those reasons, but also because we're now experiencing a new wave of authoritarianism, something that we haven't really seen since 1933 or thereabouts in Europe, when a number of fascists came on the scene and sort of quickly took power. Our modern authoritarians aren't really acting in the same way as those fascist leaders. Um, they're taking power slowly and legally so that they are legally in quotation marks. Maybe, but they tend to do it, um, by sort of messing around with institutions that are already in place. So there aren't any coups going on. But authoritarian leaders are becoming more and more common, um, in, in Europe today. So anyway, there's our long view. Let's put this all together. Looking at World War II, just from right after World War One into World War Two. And here are the topics that we'll cover today. So a search for a lasting peace, which includes such institutions as the League of Nations, the outbreak of World War two, we'll look at we'll look at the Holocaust. Not much to tell. We don't have much time, but we will have a look at the Holocaust. We'll look at the aftermath of World War two because we are still so affected by that. And then we'll look at the Cold War, which is the aftermath of World War two, one of one of the things that came out of World War Two. We'll look at the fall of the USSR, and then we'll think about the status of of that part of Europe today. So what's happening in Ukraine today? So, um. There were a number of changes after World War One. And I know that you look at this map with Lindsay last week just to make a couple of points. Um, there were massive transformations in the territory, massive transformations in political, um, the political structure after World War One, as we said, for big empires, all the land empires all fall, um, and that territory is translated or morphed into nation states. And there they are. Um, actually, you can't see all the nation states that were created. Latvia and Estonia were also created. But what you will see is that there's no Ukraine there. So. So Ukraine does not get its own, uh, its own state after World War One. Um, for a number of different historical reasons. Um, none of these things ever have, like, one simple reason. But, um, we can say it's because they were signatories to the Treaty of. The task, for example, which the with which the new Soviet Union signed with the um, with the German and the axis forces, the Germans and and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in other words. So Ukraine was not well viewed by the allies because they signed on to that, uh, to that particular, uh, treaty before the war ended. So they were already kind of on the outs. And then within Ukraine, there was always so much fighting because you had a strong contingent of communism, of communists, and you also had nationalists in Ukraine trying to create a nation state. Those two were in conflict, and the allies didn't really see any possibility of settling those conflicts. And so, uh, so Ukraine kind of got absorbed into the Soviet Union just after World War one. Um, other things that we might say about about the situation just after World War one is that, um, the victors so the Germans and the French and the English were all really hoping for things just to return to normal. Um, the communists, on the other hand, and there were lots of communists, especially in Germany, and very strong Communist Party in Germany wanted to take over the continent because the principle behind communism was, of course, the sort of domino effects that that, um, once communism was present in a place it would naturally spread. You wouldn't have to have a coup. You wouldn't have any wars, but it would just naturally spread. That was the idea in Germany in particular. Um, it didn't happen though, right? And the communists were pretty much wiped out. Um, thanks to a number of factors, including Hitler. Um, so those the communists failed in Germany, but fascism flourished. So another sort of authoritarian regime flourished. And that's going to be the outcome of what looks so hopeful, right? You create nation states that are supposed to be self-determining. They are for a little while, but you never really have the infrastructure you need to start, uh, just to start an economy you don't have, like like the sort of banking you need. You don't have the laws, you need to enforce contracts and so on. So you have a bunch of nation states that just aren't really in a position to be nation states. And I just wanted to emphasise this now, because we're going to have a similar situation with the fall of the Soviet Union, right? You're going to have um, uh, you're going to have, um, what are they called, actually a bunch of Soviets. So you have a bunch of states. You're going to have places that want to be independent, that want to be democracies, but they just don't have what it takes. They don't have the infrastructure that places like France and England and Germany had been building up over centuries. So that's our situation right after World War One. Let's be hopeful for a few minutes. Um, and the League of Nations then, is established to maintain the peace that had, um, that had resulted from World War One. So have World War One, the armistice and the League of Nations is created to make sure that World War Two doesn't happen. It didn't do a very good job of preventing that. Um, the League of Nations was established in 1920, and you'll notice that it existed until 1946. So until just after World War two, when it sort of was replaced by the United Nations, um, which had essentially the same, the same kind of goal of keeping, uh, keeping world wars from happening. Um, uh, yeah. So it's it's not a, it's not, um, an institution on the level of the United Nations that never had as many members. There were 42 members to start, and of those, only 24 made it through the war. And you can compare that to the United Nations, which today has 193 members. So it was never as big, never as, as um, as influential. But it was, um, it was spearheaded by Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States. At that point, although he never managed to get the thing passed through his own Congress. And so the US never approved the League of Nations. Um, and they were much more interested in isolationism than actually getting involved in a war in Europe, which would theoretically happen if you're part of the League of Nations and one of the nations is attacked, you would have to actually defend it. So, um, without the U.S., it didn't have as much heft as it might have had. Still, it was responsible for settling a number of squabbles. I mean, it wasn't completely useless. Um, for example, it served does this kind of thing. It served as a trustee for the Tsar lunch, which is right in between France and Germany. The island after the war didn't know if it wanted to be French or German, and so went to the to the League of Nations. And they settled that decided to become part of Germany. It mediated a dispute over the city of a villainous or Vilna um between Poland, Russia and Lithuania. Then that was settled. It um also mediated a mediated um uh, dispute between Poland and Germany about Upper Silesia. So it was perfectly capable of meeting, mediating this kind of minor disputes. Um, Greece invaded. Darya, Bulgaria asked for help. They both listen to the United Nation or sorry, I keep calling the United Nations to the League of Nations. Um, and so they accepted the settlement. So it actually did do things on a minor scale. Um, it also created the Geneva Protocol to limit chemical and biological weapons, which is which is still operative today. I mean, to the extent that people listen to it. So anyway, that was an important thing. It did, but obviously it failed to keep the peace. Right. Um, as soon as you get the Empire building fascist dictators taking power in Germany, Italy and Spain, well, they they leave the League of Nations, so they've no influence over those people. It was unable to stop or intervene in any way in the civil war in Russia, which you heard about last week, that after the Bolshevik Revolution, there was a civil war in Russia, um, until 1922, and millions of people were killed. The League of Nations couldn't do anything about that. Couldn't stop Japan from invading Manchuria in 1931 for raw materials, couldn't stop Japan from attacking China. Full scale war breaking out in 1937 couldn't stop any of that. Um, 1932 Germany. Um, not quite under Hitler yet, although Hitler has a lot of influence that point. 1932 Germany decides to leave the League of Nations. Uh, the League of Nations couldn't do anything about the famine that the the mass death caused by the Holodomor. Um, that the mass that which was the Holodomor caused by Stalin's collective, um, farming in Ukraine in 1932 33, couldn't stop the war between the Japanese and the Soviet Union, and it couldn't stop the Anschluss of Austria from happening or from so that and land being a nest. So what was the point of the League of Nations? Well, it did not succeed. And yet it's a good idea. And, um, we're still trying with, with the United Nations today. So that was the main institution that was created after the war to, um, keep the peace. There were other initiatives, and there's this one I wanted to mention. This is not a big one, that some of you are language students. Possibly you studied different languages, and I just like to mention Esperanto as an initiative for peace. Is anyone ever heard of Esperanto? Of the language Esperanto? One, two, three. So yeah, there's a few. A few of you have heard of it. Yeah. Um, and so the idea, um, was to create a language that was nobody's language and was therefore everybody's language. So instead of imposing one diplomatic language that belonged already to someone like our languages and those of us who are native English speakers, our language is kind of the the default lingua franca today, um, which is both good and bad. I think it's bad because we don't really have to learn other languages. Right? I think that's been a real a real detriment, I think, to nations that are natively English speaking. Anyway, that's not life. It's not like business to complain about people not learning languages. But anyway, just to this, to just to say that Esperanto was meant to be a language that everybody was unattached to, but then everybody could use to mediate. And it was created by a guy called Zamenhof who lived in Bialystok in what was, um, what was, uh, Poland. And it was Russia at that point. Today it's in Poland. And where he grew up, there were four languages that everybody could speak. So everyone was kind of like like quadra lingual. But he noticed that the languages all had different social statuses. So depending on which which one you spoke natively, you were more or less elevated in society. And so what he was hoping for was to get away from that experience of his youth, where his language of Yiddish was not a language that was that was particularly valued in that in that situation. So what he wanted was a language that was equally valued by everybody. And so he created this thing called, um, called Esperanto. And it actually, I mean, now it's just kind of an oddity, right? I mean, I'm sure that none of you has ever had a lesson in Esperanto, although if you want to learn it, you can do it on Duolingo. I mean, it is actually there, believe it or not. But, um, it was like taken seriously for a little while. Um, so after the revolution in 1917, um, the Communist Union supported it, like using this as the language of diplomacy. And Stalin later banned it. But, you know, for a little while there it was, um, and after just after World War One, I should have said that that Zamenhof invented this language in 1887. So it had been around for a while by the time of World War A, World War one. Um, and after World War one, the Iranian delegation to the League of Nations proposed that it actually be adopted in diplomatic discourse, that everyone in using diplomacy, all ambassadors should learn this language. Then use it with each other and the League of Nations, the nations that belong to the League of Nations. At that point. What? Um. That's a really good idea. Except for France. France said no to that because they were still convinced that French was the language of diplomacy. So already all the way up into the 20th century, French was a language that, like every cultured person, could speak the language spoken among diplomats. That changes after World War two. And we get English. But the French said no to that one. Um, the league recommended that its member states all include Esperanto in their educational curricula, like so everybody would have learned it in schools. Once again, France vetoed that idea. And then when, um, Hitler took power, there was no possibility of it going any further. Um, other than the Nazis banned it because Zamenhof was Jewish. They were also worried about the sort of universalist nature of the language. They preferred their own, their own German language. So it never got much traction. But today there are 2 million speakers, people who claim to speak, um, this language, 2 million of them. Um, and just compare that to 350,000 speakers of Icelandic. So, you know, it's quite a lot more than some languages that we genuinely consider two languages. So anyway, there it is. It was a sort of hopeful idea. It never really took root. But I can't resist. I'm just going to bring this up for you and let's listen to what this thing sounds like. And if you have studied a romance language, you will probably be able to understand quite a lot of it here. This is what Esperanto sounds like. Solution that. Budapest, Hungary. Mr. Stella, la lengua kuni Perales, estas Esperanto kiosks, Esperanto, Zamenhof and other tanto craze 21 Q as does Maya, the Nazca lingual. The Nazca signifiers scare me. I get that try. I'm out like that. But at least I'm learning one egg. The Mayans Quito know me very positive. Kathy Ortiz lingual as that's part. Then you have evil genius. Okay, I probably indulged myself enough there just with that. But anyway, there it is. That's what it sounds like. And does any. Could you pick out any words there that it sounds sort of familiar. Yes it is all go first two. Yeah. I couldn't follow the conversation but you could hear like like paralysed for example. You you hear words in there that sound really. Um, and it was meant to be based on like, all languages. And of course it's not. I mean, it sounds pretty romance to me, but anyway, there it is. Anybody want to make any comments about it? Yes, I live with those speakers of today. Are they based in any particular parts of Europe? Have you noticed or it? My knowledge of it is really, um, it's limited to online presence and so I can see all kinds of people who speak, but I don't know what country they come from. So they, they there are different groups that promote it online. So it's got a real strong presence there if, if you're interested. Yeah. I mean it's an oddity, but it, it's, it's kind of interesting and yes an interesting. It is like. Yeah, it's quite interesting, um, to hear how was reported on between languages. I know that, um. The um, for example, French um, how they say sorry supported over into languages like, uh, well. Oh, I actually share the same story word, which is, um, which I find is quite an interesting parallel. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The one word I know, I do know French, I don't know Turkish, but I know the word for toothpick in Turkish because it's the same word in French. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how I know that, but yeah. Yeah. So language is constantly importing, so I don't know, maybe, maybe Esperanto wouldn't have been a bad idea, I don't know. Um, anyway, it didn't work right. It never actually got accepted and like, circulated enough to actually cause any, any difference. But anyway, there it is. I just wanted to show, um. Let's see. Can you back here? There we go. Oops. Sorry. I didn't mean to do that. Here we go. There we go. Okay. And now we are on the. We are on the eve of World War two. And I just took this, um, this picture from, uh, the World war. It's a rather new World War two, um, museum in Munich. Not that new, maybe ten years old or something like that. And I just like this, um, this, uh, description of Hitler by Thomas Mann, the writer who by that time was an exile in the U.S, which he absolutely hated. But, um, he, he left chased out by Hitler. As was the case with many writers and actors and artists of all kinds. Um, and the point I want to make is just the people were perfectly aware of what a joker Hitler was, but it didn't stop, didn't stop his progress. So we can be aware, we can laugh at leaders. And it doesn't really doesn't really make any difference if they've got a military behind him. So Thomas Mann, the the compulsion of this regime to glorify itself with pompous and grand architecture that isn't as megalomaniac as it is artistically impoverished as a trying to shame and it doesn't work, is a passion with a strongly pathological streak. There is something maniacal about it that reminds us that a building craze is a clinically recognised phenomenon. So he's out of his mind. Thomas Mann can yell that all he wants, um, doesn't make much difference in any case. The point is just that people were perfectly aware, um, people were making fun of Hitler for years and years, and it never really made any difference. So let's get Hitler into power. This megalomaniac, um, in 1932, he places second in the present in the presidential race. Paul von Hindenburg of the World War One. Hero actually won that that, um, that that, uh, camp he won that that that election. But he then appoints Hitler chancellor in German in January of 1933. So that gives him a lot of power being chancellor of Germany. And he immediately starts causing trouble. And it's really quite striking here. I'm thinking about a World War Two museum in Berlin, and when you walk into the front room, there is a line of there's sort of like pennants or banners that are hanging from the ceiling, just like the length of a imagine a big museum. Um, so at least this long and each one of the banners, one after another, is a law. It represents a law that was passed to persecute or harass the Jews. It's just incredible. I mean, they're laws that you'd never heard of. I mean, things that you just couldn't even imagine, just like one after another. And that's what he starts doing pretty much as soon as he gets into office, starts this kind of, um, I was going to say low level harassment, but it's not really low level harassment. It's already pretty, pretty high level. And then becomes worse and worse as we get closer to, uh, closer to to the war. Um, yeah. So he he does that. He, he harasses he harasses people in the country, and then he starts gobbling up territory. I mean, so so the nation states that we saw coming out of the demise of the big empires, the big land empires of World War One are not going to remain safe for very long. Um, so you are as familiar with all of this as I am? I have no doubt. But, um, he starts picking up things, um, and yeah, just sort of one after another. The Anschluss of Austria. Well, no, actually, let's say we'll start here with the demilitarisation of the Rhineland. So France, as you can imagine, wanted a nice sort of buffer zone between Germany and itself. So this was meant to be demilitarised. Well, 1936 Hitler said not I don't think I'm going to stick with that. And he starts to militarise and the next thing you know, you've got troops in here. And this just sounds so much like our authoritarian, authoritarian dictators today who are just kind of not following the rules that have been followed since World War two. Um, if people don't follow the rules, like, what are you going to do about it? Not a whole lot you can do about it. So he demilitarised or he militarised this demilitarised zone, and then we get the, um, the Austrian Anschluss, which is like. Arguably, I don't know that maybe people weren't all that unhappy about it. The people of Austria, when you see pictures of them today, they're out in the streets, like welcoming Hitler, seeming, seeming to be really happy about it. I mean, I have no doubt that there were lots of people who weren't happy about it, but that one doesn't seem quite so horrible. And that really didn't upset, um, any of the the Western Europeans. They just kind of took that one in stride, and then they move over here into Slovakia and get rid of it and sort of gobble that one up at the same time, moving into Bohemia and Moravia and then taking the Sudeten land, which was populated by or it's actually I'm getting out of order here. But taking the sedate land which was populated by German speakers. And so Hitler thought, well, we've got to bring all the German people back together. Um, they did not actually want to be part of Germany. They were perfectly happy where they were, but they were sort of gobbled up. Um, and at a certain point, I think the Brits and the French start to get a little worried, but it takes them a really long time. And in fact, it takes until, um, Hitler decides that he's going to absorb Poland and at that point that maybe we declare war. But there's just one other little thing, um, because we're going to be talking about this land lying in between the German Reich and Russia. Um, that was want to mention the, um, uh, the ribbon chop, Molotov, uh, accord, which was meant to, um, meant to sort of create a unity out of those two, out of the Germans and out of the Soviets. And of course, Hitler immediately reneged on it. But the idea was that they were going to gang up together and divide up Poland. Um, the Germans have been asking Poland for a long time if they didn't want to gang up together and then invade Russia. Um, and they said no to that. Um, the poles had no interest in that. And so then they, the Germans got together with the Russians, and they're going to sort of divide Poland up. And all of this is going to eventually result in World War Two, but it still takes a little while. Um, the, the, the, um, the Brits and the French declare war on Germany when the invasion of Poland takes place, but, um, but no war happens for quite a while. We enter into what's called the the phoney war or the. Get in there, um, just waiting for the blitzkrieg, which then takes place in April of 1940. And now I'm bringing us into the war in too much detail. Um, we got the war started, and now we're just going to kind of skim over the rest of it and get to the other side of that war. Okay, let's move on to this side. Um, 1945. We will, um, focus our attention on Yalta in 1945, because that's where we get the information that is probably not very familiar to all of you, but to people my age, um, growing up in, um, in, in the world of the 1980s and so on, we were very much aware of Eastern Europe and Western Europe and then how that all came to an end. Okay. Anyway, those are the basic things of the war. If you want to take a look at any of those. Um, yeah. So we will sort of move over all of that. There's just so much to say about World War Two. But yeah, we can't really linger. Okay. Um, so we, we want to talk about the war itself, but I do want to make some points about Nazi ideology because of Ukraine. Okay. Because this will ultimately tie back into our story about Ukraine. Okay. So, um, what's going on? Why is Hitler, first of all, why is he so anti-Semitic? And why is he so interested in getting Ukraine from for for Germany? Like what? What is the big deal? And it's probably obvious enough. Why from the Russian side, Ukraine is so important. Is this massive, um. Oh, like sort of, um, what am I going to call it exactly, since it's this massive flat territory, um, with planes that have black earth that just grow things really well. So it's like the breadbasket for the Soviet Union. Absolutely crucial there. And what Stalin really wants to do with it, besides collectivise the farming which which he does with with disastrous results, he also wants to, um, use it for building up his industrial base. So that's kind of his idea. He wants to industrialise Ukraine because there's lots of space there, and he wants to feed Russia with it, and also export grain to other parts of the world to, um, to, to make money. How about Hitler? What is his idea? Um, you're probably familiar with the expression the Laban's, um, um, and what that has to do with Ukraine. Anybody know that expression? What is he up to? Sort of sort of, like familiar a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. What do you, what do you what have you heard about that. What do you understand with that expression I don't know. Accurate translation from behind my. This translates to English as living space. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. German expansion. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. More Germans. Um, so because we're absorbing various territories that are German speaking, not even necessarily German speaking, but sort of absorbing all of the wider territory that was once the German Empire. And those people need to be fed now. Right. And so we have to find a place that will be capable of supporting all of them. And that's Ukraine, right? Um, Laban's Rome, then, is just like the principle kind of like manifest destiny, like like the idea that whatever nation you are, whichever nation holding this principle has, whichever nation is holding this principle has the right to expand off into any territory it needs, because it's so obvious that that territory needs to needs to, um, have room. So let's think about why Hitler thought that the Germans had the right to do that, because, I mean, I think most of us would agree today that we nobody really has the right to just, like, expand into a sovereign nation and take over it. And here we can get into his, his, his ideologies, which are, um, pretty disturbing. I mean, pretty weird. Um, yeah. Anybody want to say anything about that? What what does what does why does Hitler think that it's okay for the Germans just to move into into Ukraine or into Poland first and then into Ukraine? What's his principle there? How does he justify that? Yeah. Their superior race. Right. And how do you get to be a superior race? How does that even occur to somebody? I mean, if you ever like, if you go to just pick your German city, like got to go to getting and or whatever, and you just look at the people sitting around in any cafeteria eating, and you look at them and you go like, superior race. Like, on what basis? Sorry. You don't like sausages? I do, I'm vegetarian. That. My God, I love sausages. I it's so hard to be vegetarian. It is so hard. I love sausages. Yeah, yeah. Oh, God. German bratwurst. Oh, yeah. Um, and and I'm kind of kind of joking, but I'm actually really serious. Why is it that the Germans got to be superior? Like, what was it about the Germans? Yes. Yeah. I mean, but, um, I remember hearing that some guy thought of this whole theory that Germans least, like the average German, um, could justify it based on fear of the unknown. So there was a lot of that blood. You okay? Yeah. Yeah. And the fear of the unknown is that they would imagine. Becoming enemies. Mhm. Okay. That was about it. They were stoically going to battle each other to, you know um they could um vilify them. Effective. Yeah. Um, I can't really just live with that. No, we can't justify it. You're right. We can't do that. Yeah. And then what you've described is, is I think othering I mean, which is what people do to people they want to take over. Right? You make them into enemies, like you said, like internal enemies, like Slavs are always the enemies of the Germans. Right. And so you turn them into these sort of monstrous people. And, and I'm probably making it sound more complicated than it really is, but just the basic idea behind Hitler's notion that the Germans were superior comes to us like via Darwin, a perversion of Darwin. And you talked about Darwin and social and social Darwinism, I think, last week. And the idea there is that human beings are like animals, and among animals there are some animal species that are stronger than others. So like if you're lions, you just plain eat gazelles, because that's nature. That's the way things happen. And so as far as Hitler was concerned, races in quotation marks because like, there is really no such thing as a race. Right? And what does that even mean? Um, people are kind of the same size. I mean, roughly the same. We kind of all look pretty much the same. But he imagined people divided into races and that those were like lions or tigers, and then some were like rats and, you know, the different kinds of animals. And that actually gave him his, his, um, all the justification he needed. Um, there were some other little bits thrown in there that kind of helped him develop this idea. One was actually the study of virology. So mid 19th century we started to realise that diseases were caused by viruses, not by like sort of random, um, uh, movements in the aether, but you actually got diseases because there are these tiny things called viruses that will invade you. And so that that image of invasion was actually very helpful in promoting, um, for persecution of the Jews because they were imagined as viruses coming into the healthy German body. So, I mean, these things aren't justification, but they explain how it was that Hitler was able to convince people that they were tigers or whatever, and also that that, um, the Jews were a sort of noxious species invading and invading, um, the German landscape. Um, so anyway, Jews why Jews? Well, Hitler has another great little element that he explains in Mein Kampf, um, which is that Jews are bad because they're idea people instead of like, natural people, like like tigers. They're ideas people, and they're responsible for both communism and capitalism. He has to try to figure that one out. So they're the people who are disrupting the kind of natural fighting among the species, which should result in German superiority, because they have their ideas like they're their intellectuals. And so that's always something very negative. And then you can just take your sort of typical anti-Semitism. Um, the idea of Jews as, as wanderers who have no loyalty to any particular country, they sort of come into countries, they invade, and then they just sort of stay there. And, um, and I'm not sure what why I'm not sure exactly what they are meant to do, because there just were never really all that many of them. And it's just sort of a bizarre thing to imagine. So Poland and what I've done here is this sort of pulled out the numbers of, of people who were Jewish in these different countries. Poland has the highest number, so 3 million, and that represents 10% of the population. The Baltic states have a much lower number. Um, but that's about 5% of the population. Romania once again a lowish number, 42.2% of the population, Soviet Union. Once again, we have a lot, but that still represents a rather minor portion of the population, Great Britain. So I'm going to get to Germany here in just a second. Um, there are your numbers in Germany there are, sorry. In Great Britain, here's Germany. So out of they've got 500,000 Jews out of 67 million people, it's 0.75% of the population. Why are they so obsessed with getting them out? It's just it's so strange. And I say this as a my family is I'm not I wasn't raised as a Jewish person, but, uh, my family is I mean, coming from from Ukraine in the early 20th century, then to Slovakian Poland in 1920. And then my father in law, um, made it to the U.S. they bought their way out with gold they stashed away from Duisburg, Germany. They left for Rotterdam and the Netherlands made it to the United States. And then he came back and fought and died and was a German interpreter and so on. So my whole family is is really obsessed with this kind of thing. What is the problem with Jewish people? How on earth were they? So says France has fewer even. And yet we're also aware of. A Vichy regime and so on. The Netherlands still fewer. We all know the Anne Frank story. Greece. Even fewer. Italy. My gods, it was so few people were talking about. And yet the sort of murderous, um, outrage is really hard to understand. Okay, um, where were those people killed? Where? Where the Jews actually killed. And the concept of the Bloodlands, I think, is really important for understanding what happened in Europe and then following this into the Cold War. So the Bloodlands is an expression that Timothy Snyder, the historian, um, who has recently, um, escaped from Yale to the University of Toronto. So some moved from the US to Toronto in Canada. Um, this is an expression he uses to describe this part of the world. So you can see that these sort of crosshatching is right here. That's the worst part for people living through World War Two. This is where you were likeliest to be killed. Not that to survive over in this side. You can see right here this crosshatch part. And you can see it moves from the Baltics all the way down into what is Ukraine today and down into the Balkans. So that territory was so dangerous because it was, um, it was annihilated from both sides. So the Soviets went in and just sort of dismantled everything that was there. The Nazis went in and dismantled everything that was there. And when you got like, no civil society whatsoever, it's really easy to kill a lot of people. You can just like shoot people when you feel like it. You can put them in concentration camps or in death camps, pretty much do whatever you want with them so you don't have a lot of killing going in, going on in the rest of Europe. Um, the Soviet Union is a different story because of the war going on there. But people weren't just, like sort of systematically killed as they were in the area called the Bloodlands. And then the 17 million people murdered between 1933 and 1945. So that includes not only Jewish populations, but Ukrainian populations, um, and uh, other groups that were, that were, um, targeted by the Nazis, like, like the Romani people, um, homosexuals, people who were mentally disabled and so on. The 17 million, 14 million of them were killed in that area between the Soviet Union and Germany, called the Bloodlands. The Timothy Snyder calls the Bloodlands. Sorry, I couldn't resist that. The the purpose of this graph is just to show you if you lived in a place that was between Germany and the Soviet Union, you were in bad shape. If you were Jewish, slightly like with how many Polish Jews made it through the war, as opposed to Germany, where your chances were really good of making it through the war, which is kind of interesting because we focus so much on Germany when we look at World War two. But relatively speaking, you were pretty safe in Germany, and my family was lucky enough to be among those people who who survived. I'm hungry. That's bad. Right. That once again, that's sort of stuck between, um, between Russia and Germany in that that corridor that was just so dangerous, um, Soviet Union, a somewhat different story because they have their own history with, with, with pogroms and so on. So we won't won't linger on that. But the point is just that if you were in Western Europe, where civil society continued even during the war, you still had like police stations, you still had institutions, even though they were, um, all monopolised by the Nazis, you still had institutions. And that made it harder to just, like, go out and kill people. Sorry. Why is that happening? I did not mean to do that. What have I done? They're okay and okay. And just once again, to just sort of divide the numbers up. So killing centres, which is the I don't know what the euphemism for death camps. You know, 6 million Jews were murdered. Um, 2.7 were murdered in, in killing centres or death camps. 2 million were just like shot mass shooting. And then they were killed in other ways and in ghettos. And then just like random acts of violence. And here is a map showing you where the death camps were. And as you can see, lots of concentration camps in Western Europe, which aren't good. You know, obviously they're not good. Um, Bergen-Belsen, for example, where Anne Frank died was not a nice place, but you at least had a fighting chance of getting out of it, as opposed to the death camps where they just gassed you and they just got rid of you. And so, once again, just to focus on that territory in between Germany and Russia and this especially dangerous place. Okay. And I'll just, uh, we'll, we'll wrap up this conversation with this. Just a couple of couple of figures. Um, not that these mean anything. What does 40 million deaths even mean? Um, half of them civilians, um, people killed in the Holocaust. That includes. That was one consequence, like a diminishing of the population. Um, another consequence is that the U.S. emerges as the strongest nation in the world, economically speaking, but also a possessor of the atomic bomb. And this is going to have repercussions that we are still feeling today. Okay. So go ahead and take your break and I'll see you back in ten minutes. Well. It's not particularly important to understand any of the details about World War Two. What really matters is understanding how everything shook out after World War Two. But I did want to linger for just a few minutes, as I had just done on the Holocaust and the reason there. The reason that I wanted to bring that up and talk about the Bloodlands is to make a point about the authoritarian sort of turn that leaders, a number of leaders in Europe are taking today. Not that these people who are authoritarian today, Giorgia meloni, for example, if we call her an authoritarian, not that she is anything like the genocidal maniacs that we saw during World War two. Not that at all. But I just want to make a comparison between wiping out of institutions, which was characteristic of Hitler and co. I mean, you can't really do what he did unless you wipe out institutions and other. I mean, relative relative to the bar is set so high by people like Hitler. I mean, it's you can't really draw comparisons between him and anyone else, but the way authoritarian dictators always act is to get rid of institutions. I mean, so they will try to get control of the judiciary, they will try to get control of whatever their Congress happens to be. And once you do that and then throw in the media, get control of the media, then you can pretty much do anything you want. So I don't mean to compare any authoritarian leader to Hitler. I mean, that's ridiculous. But they operate in similar ways. And I'm just saying to all of you, all of you young people who are going to have to deal with the world that my generation has created, that what you want to do above all other things is hold on to process, make sure that you've got processes as annoying as they are. Bureaucracies are like our only defence against genocidal maniacs. So anyway, that's what I wanted to talk about, about that point that that the reason this could happen is only because you wipe out institutions. So we saw even in Germany, even in France, I mean, things were not good in Germany, things are not good in France, but they weren't bad in the same way that they were in the Bloodlands. Okay. So I'll stop there and I will move to the post-war period, and we will have a look at our big guys there. We got Churchill and Roosevelt and Stalin and Stalin looking really big and bulky. But did you know he was a really little guy? He was actually a very small man. He just he just this looks a lot bigger than he really was, I guess a very loud sort of personality. But there are big three, and they met together even before the war was over. So the first conference that they got together for a Yalta conference at Yalta, um, in February 1945. So Hitler is still alive at that point. And this is the war has even ended. It's clear that the allies are going to win. So these guys get together and they divide up Europe. And this is something that is significant to this very day. We all kind of know how they how they divided the continent up. Um, they agreed to a number of things that so all three of them agreed to a number of things like that. The Nazis had to surrender unconditionally. They were all okay on that. They decided at Yalta that Germany would be divided into four different sectors. Stalin didn't want France to have one of the sectors, but the UK wanted France to have one of the sectors because they thought the U.S. would very quickly get out, and they didn't. The U.S. the US is still in Germany. I mean, not anywhere in the same numbers that they used to be. But but I taught for many years for the military in Germany. So I taught soldiers who took night courses through the University of Maryland. And it's a big presence. Um, and having done that, got to go to all of the different bases in the different four sectors of Germany. It was really kind of interesting. So if you go to the bases in the French sectors, you get really, really cheap, calm money. And so you get really cheap things in the US from all over. But of all the different countries, which is really kind of a it was an interesting thing to see. I mean, how these different, um, the different cultures were represented in the different in the different courses, which is the state, the stores, the stores on the base. So Germany was divided into four different sectors. One of them was controlled by Russia, and that became East Germany, which means nothing to a lot of you anymore. But when I was growing up, Germany was divided into two different sections. There was the West and there was the east, and the east was was communist. So that was decided that they were going to divide Germany into four sections. Berlin. The city was also divided into four different sections itself. Um, they decided that there would be trials for the war crimes committed by, by, um, Hitler. And so they decided that Germany would pay reparations and would go undergo a process called de-nazification. Nazi theory. We'll talk a little bit more about that, how that actually took place. The U.N. was established, um, in place of the League of Nations, and Stalin promised free elections were going to be held in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Free elections. But it turned out that the people voting in those elections were not voting for communists. And so he reneged on that. And we all know what happened. Communist governments were were established. Um, and there have been a lot of complaints that Stalin was given free rein, that he was given way too much leeway. Um, we needed Stalin to win the war. But once it was over, um. And I don't even quite know what to say to that. I mean, I'm not sure what exactly they could have done. I don't know, it's hard to. I mean, there are all kinds of suggestions about how the whole business could have been handled differently, but it's hard to understand. It's hard to imagine what one could have done at that point in February of 1945. So that initial conference then was followed by the Potsdam Conference, um, in July August 1945, when they literally divided up Germany. And we'll just look at a couple of, of, um, examples here. Um, so, so the, the, the, the leaders there said that, so the leaders at ports at Potsdam and, and um, and Yalta have been criticised for giving way too much leeway to, uh, to, to Stalin. But the handling of Poland especially has been criticised. I'll just mention that one. This is what I've cited here is just, uh, it's just a war document. It's in the, ah, the National Archives in the United States. Um, it's this is, uh, represents the allies recognising the situation in Poland. So, so a new situation has been created in Poland as a result of a complete liberation by the Red Army. So, so, so the Russians or the Soviets liberated Poland. This means that we need to establish a Polish provisional government. The Provisional Government, which is now functioning in Poland, should therefore be reorganised on a broader democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic leaders from Poland itself and from poles abroad. So what had happened during World War two is that the Polish government that the democratic Polish government had fled overseas, like Charles de Gaulle, and so they so that government was maintained overseas. Um, and so this is the allies recognising that fact and that now it's time to bring these people back and to start up a new government that will be pledged to the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot, which we're all familiar with as how you hold a democratic election. So the allies were perfectly well aware of this sort of problem in the background, which is that the Soviets had freed Poland. And so there are a lot of them there. And what immediately happened is that Stalin goes, okay, yeah, I'll let the Polish government in exile come back to Poland. They did. And they were like immediately arrested and sent off to the Soviet Union and tortured. And then we all kind of know the rest of the story. I mean, there never was from that moment on, the democratic government in Poland until until much, much later. Um, and anyway, that's the kind of thing that is so criticised. And once again, I'll just say I'm not exactly sure, and surely there would have been a better way of handling the situation of keeping Stalin from doing this kind of thing. But this is the kind of problem that arose after the war, that I just have no idea how you could have prevented. Okay, um, Germany then gets divided. And here in beautiful colours are the different sections. And as you can see, the sections that the sections represent the countries that they're closest to. So France, the section of Germany that was under French supervision is actually right next to France and, and so on. Um, West Germany, um, whereas this is a West Germany refers to the entire, um, colourful little, little group of three there. Um, and then East Germany is much smaller. And East Germany, as you probably are aware, um, uh, are aware of is today the place where almost all of the political party called the, uh, of de the, um, the, the very right wing, um, sort of neo um, which I'm not going to say neo Nazi party, but the party that, that is feared as a very, um, a very authoritarian party, they're almost all concentrated in what is the former East Germany today. So anyway, this is kind of an interesting historical point that is becomes clear when we you understand why they're in East Germany. Well, it's because that's the old Soviet Union section. Um, what else could we say about that? Um, the capital of Berlin was the capital that had been in Berlin was transferred the two to Bonn, which is. Is a really pretty little city on where Beethoven grew up. But the idea was to, um, the idea was that Berlin is filled with those great big, massive buildings that Hitler had built and was too reminiscent of the Third Reich. So they thought that they needed to move to move the capital. Um, and then the Soviet Union occupied the area that became known as the day the Earth or or East Germany. Okay. Um, I think that's all we will say about that. For the moment that Germany was divided and it remained divided for a very long time, and there were still actually troops in Germany, um, although not anywhere close to as many as used to be there. Berlin itself is divided by the Berlin Wall. As you're probably all aware, um, so we're divided into the east sector and then the west sector. And I was actually in Berlin when, when the wall fell. And you could have bought an apartment in the east sector for 17,000 Deutschmarks. And if I only had any money back in those days. Um, and what a what a what a boon it would have been to actually have an apartment in Berlin today, because that's, like the most expensive place in the world to live. But anyway, um, so, so East Berlin, it was a crazy place. I mean, there's just a really, really wild place, um, to get to Berlin in the first place. If you can see from this map, um, where Berlin is, you can see it's like right in the middle of the eastern sector. Um, so to get there, you had to get on one highway. I lived in Munich at that point, and you had to get on one highway. You could not get off the highway once you got into East Germany. Um, there were road stops, like you could stop to fill up your car with gas or whatever, but you could not get off the highway. Had to go straight to Berlin. And it was really weird because the minute you crossed the border into East Berlin is so cold. I mean, it is so strange. I mean, it was a very different kind of atmosphere, and there were no lights, like no city lights whatsoever. So Berlin then itself was divided by a physical wall, a great big, um, concrete wall. And when the wall came down, everybody started chipping away at it, and everybody came home with little pieces of, of the old wall that finally, um, that finally happened in, in the 1990s and everybody kind of came streaming out of, out of East Berlin. Um, it was really strange living there just before the wall fell, because when you go to the, um, the subway stations at night, you would see people like saying goodbye tearfully, like, like hugging each other, their families and so on. In the East, the people from East Berlin have to go back home, and the people from West Berlin would have to go to to their own homes. I mean, so this is a strange, strange situation where you got families divided up like that. Okay. Um, let's see here. What do we want to like? I think I'll just leave it at them there. Just so much you can say about that weird division of the countries of the country, but, um, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll move on to other things. So, um, what we have after the war is a new attempt to try and, and, um, make sure that that doesn't happen again. Who's going to grab my notes? There's a page in my on your page five. Page six. There we go. Okay. All back in order. Yeah. So, um, so the world had to be rebuilt, essentially, or Europe. Europe had to be rebuilt after the war. And the first thing that was understood to be necessary was some kind of accountability. So it was decided that there had to be an international tribunal where the the genocidal leaders would be tried, some of them would be executed, others would be sent to prison for life, and others would be acquitted. But it needed to be done in an actual, like, seriously impartial kind of setting. And thus was born the Nuremberg trials, which then went on for months, where all of the German leaders who were suspected of committing war crimes were tried. And um, in fact, like almost all of Hitler's guys got out. Hitler committed suicide. Goering committed suicide. Goebbels committed suicide. Um, Himmler committed suicide. I mean, you can see here just a couple actually going was tried. Here he is, um, right there in this corner. And you can see him over here, this guy right here in the corner. So that's Hermann Göring. Um, he managed to save a cyanide capsule in the night before he was supposed to be hanged. He. He managed to commit suicide. Um, here is another one of Hitler's big guys. The one who planned all of his buildings. There he is, Albert Speer right there. And he was sentenced to 20 years in prison because he was a really handsome man, really well spoken, um, family guy, and managed to convince the allies that he really hadn't done anything wrong. Although, of course, he had been responsible for slave labour and that kind of thing. But anyway, so so, um, very few people were actually executed. Um, 12 were sentenced to hang. Um, and so the just the worst of the worst. And lots of other people were, were sent to prison. There were similar trials in Japan. Um, but the emperor thought about it, that the emperor was not invited because there was a fear that that would actually lead to, like, an uprising. That would be counterproductive. So this trial then, was an occasional trial. It was set up for a particular purpose, and it was recognised that it would be a good idea to have an international court after this trial ended, after these trials ended, and then an international court. And so the International Court of Justice was created right after the war. And that's. Where you tried like disputes over territory, that kind of thing. So sort of civil disputes. An international Criminal Court, which now exists in The Hague, couldn't exist until after after the Soviet Union fell. Um, so it was. But that does exist now, as you probably are all aware, um, Didi, Netanyahu and Putin are both wanted by this International Criminal Court, although I can't imagine that anyone's ever really going to arrest them. So those those courts were established. Um, um, the UN wanted a permanent international court to deal with this kind of things and give it some heft. Um, and, um, and now they are settling disputes more or less successfully. And in fact, the International Criminal Court has actually tried people, um, and, um, to what extent did actually prevent anything from happening? That's another question. So along with that, we have the process that was called de-nazification. And the idea here was to sort of, um, debrief people who had been through the the Nazi propaganda have lived with that for all of those years and were kind of living in an alternate reality. So the idea was to make people recognise that, that the Nazi ideology was, um, was a perverted and sick ideology and sort of bring them back into the world because Germany is an important and important member of, uh, of Europe. And they did things like rename streets because he's taking down Adolf Hitler Street. I was just looking to see if anyone is named Hitler anymore. And there are actually some people, not very many, but there are actually some people. It tends to be spelled differently, though, apparently like Hitler or Hitler. But it's essentially the same name. Same the same, uh, uh, etymological derivation. But yeah. So there's still a few people name named Hitler left in the world. Um, virtually no one named Adolf anymore. That name is pretty much disappeared. But anyway, so we rename the streets, um, make Germans go in to visit the camps. Like, force them, force normal people, ordinary people off the streets to go into the camps and look at what was done, because there was a real strong tendency, if you see this, even today, not among Germans, but there's still Holocaust deniers, right? People who think that it didn't really happen, but they forced people to go in and look, say, look, this is what your, your ideology brought about. So they were forced to acknowledge, um, that the atrocities were their fault for not ever, not ever resisting, for not ever saying anything about them. So De-nazification included that sort of deprogramming the people who had lived through, through Nazi Germany and then these sort of rallies without without cleaning. We cannot rebuild. We can't build again. So, so rallies where you would sort of pump people up to, to, um, look forward to a new future. And then they also had to, um, had to get statements from people who were going to occupy positions in the government or positions in like public institutions or at universities to try and keep people who had been like the worst of the worst Nazis from those positions. And so everybody had to fill out, uh, a little, um, form like this. And you can see they were asked where you parts of the, where you did. You belong to the Nazi Party. Did you belong to the general SS? Did you belong to the Waffen SS or any part of the Gestapo and so on. And if you answered nine to those questions, then you could be considered for for a job. But you had to, I suppose a lot of people lied on them too, but you actually had to, like, verify what you had, what you had done in the war. In addition to that, um, picking up from the League of Nations, we have the UN starting in 1946 and, um, the UN, the UN, um, creating this declaration of human rights, which is, uh, a beautiful document. But once again, it's hard to see exactly what kind of, you know, what kind of influence it has. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was based to a large extent on something, on a document you probably saw with Lindsay when you were talking about the French Revolution. The declaration did water damage situation, which, um, claims that all people were created equal. Um, so this was a milestone document in the history of human rights. Um, and it was composed by people from all over the world so that it wouldn't be biased in, in, um, favour of any particular region, set out fundamental rights believed to be universally protected. In addition to that, another organisation that was created right after World War Two to try and keep that from ever happening again is NATO created and created right after the war, and this 1949 was the day that was created. This is NATO as of 2024. And as you are all aware, there are 32 NATO members now. And when I first started teaching this class, there were 30. But now we have the addition of two Scandinavian countries that were not there previously. And you can see that Ukraine um, label there is a light blue, um, the light blue um, colour is a candidate for membership, but uh, not sure what's going to happen with that. That does not seem to be to be on the horizon any time soon. Um, and there you see the other the other nations, the other NATO nations. And we have talked about these a bit, but anyway, there they all are. Um, the idea here is that if any of these NATO nations is, is is invaded, the other NATO nations will come to its defence. Not sure that that's going to happen anymore. Um, yeah. Things are kind of in a period of flux at this point. Another thing that happened right after the war. And I want to especially mention this, the Marshall Plan, I want to mention this because this a program like this could have helped so much after the fall of the Soviet Union, if there had been a marshall plan to help Russia. Um, I think things would have gone so much better. And there was a chance, I mean, George Bush not not not w not the the Iraq guy, but his father, who was the the president, um, 1988 to 1992 was asked, can't we have a marshall plan for Russia like help it sort of over the bumps, like turned it into a democratic nation. We need to support their economy and so on. And George Bush senior went now I don't think so. We don't really have the money for that. And that is, uh, sort of it was a catastrophic mistake that I think everybody would admit today because the Marshall Plan really worked to rebuild, to rebuild, um, Western Europe in any case. Um, the idea, of course, was self-serving. The U.S. wanted a market for American goods, but it did help the, um, European economies recover from the war, something that they would not have done at nearly the same rate as effectively had they not had this, this financial aid. So the Marshall Plan, if only after the fall of the Soviet Union. Okay. And along with that, we have the creation of the European Union. And we've talked about that in quite a lot of detail. So I won't say anything else about that, just that these are the the sort of, um, important years leading up to the creation of the European Union, which has been happening gradually now since, um, since 1957, since the Treaty of Rome, and that it has expanded to the state the status that we know today. Okay. Now we finally have arrived in the Cold War. Um, and the Cold War. Um, is that a concept that is familiar to you guys? So when you say Cold War, does that mean anything to people? And it's. So I see some of you nodding. What what do you think of when you think of Cold War? What is a cold or what is the Cold War? Anybody else? Please? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That was very, very well articulate. I'm going to say it. I'll say it so that everybody can hear. But the idea is that you've got these two superpowers, right? One communist, one capitalist, and they're fighting each other not directly, which is a good thing, because they have nuclear weapons, so they don't fight each other directly, but they fight each other in a series of proxy wars. Right. And you mentioned Korea, Vietnam, um, AlphaGo, that Afghanistan. Um, that's um, I'm sure that there are others. But you're absolutely right that they fight each other, not face to face, but they involve themselves in other wars and sort of try to wars that, that have to do with, with, um, uh, with communism and capitalism. Okay. So, so that's essentially the Cold War, the situation that arises because we've got the Soviet Union and the U.S., um. At the sort of ideologically at odds with each other. Um, if. Right after World War Two, only the U.S. had the A-bomb. But quite quickly, I think by 1949, um, Russia already or the Soviet Union also got nuclear weapons. And now there are a number of different countries that have nuclear weapons, and one of them is not Ukraine. And we'll talk about that in just a moment. And Churchill's famous statement from Stettin in the Baltic to trust in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended upon the continent. And the Iron Curtain is just a metaphor. It doesn't actually mean that there's a literal iron wall. It just refers to the separation between the East and the west, between eastern and Western Europe. So in response to NATO, of course, um, the Soviet Union created its own, um, its own um, bloc, which is called the Warsaw. The name of the agreement was the Warsaw Pact, that it existed from 1955 to 1991, and the countries included all of the countries that were either satellites of the Soviet Union or members of the Soviet Union. And then a couple of others like Albania. You can see down there in the yellow, which was not actually a satellite. It has special status, but it was a communist country. So anyway, the, the, the pink countries, those represent the um, the satellites of the Soviet Union. So they were governed by their own, by their own government. They were sovereign nations, but they were all communist and they all had very close ties to the Soviet Union. They could not not be communist. They were not allowed to actually they they tried at different times. Um, uh, maybe the most famous is, is Hungary in 1956. They tried to elect, um, democratic governments, and they were not militarily, um, uh, prevented from doing that, that the Eastern Bloc then. So the Eastern Europe Soviet bloc is called sometimes a socialist bloc. And, uh, members of the Warsaw Pact united to respond to NATO. Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia tried not to be part of the Soviet satellite states. Um, so 1947 parliamentary elections so early on? Right. Right after. Right after though right after the war, the Hungarian Communist Party tried to, um, try to get rid of the other the Communist leaders. And what happened is that they elected, um, a Democratic prime minister. Um, his name is Frank nage. They, um, but he was removed. Um, the Hungarian Revolution of 1986 was also repressed with tanks. Um, and all of the treaties between the Allies and Poland that we were just looking at were disregarded. And Poland was left within the Soviet steer of influence. And there's a lot of talk of betrayal by the by the West. Um, you may have heard of the Prague Spring of 1968, essentially the same story, um, an attempt to elect a democratic government and brutally repressed again with the tanks. So they were were, um, forced to remain satellites of the Soviet Union. I've got to take a little detour here now and talk about decolonisation for a second. Just. We don't want the. We don't want Western Europe to sound too nice. Um. Western Europe, they elected their they they elected their governments democratically. You had freedom of speech. You had all kinds of rights in Western Europe, unless you happen to live in a colony of one of the Western European nations. Um, and it's always kind of shocking for me to realise that, that France, when it was under German occupation, under the Vichy regime, when they were, um, being forced to send workers to, to Germany to do forced labour when they were sending Jews off to die in concentration camps, you know, against their will when this kind of thing was happening, when you have resistance fighters and so on, at the same time, those same French people were and were colonisers of, say, Indochina, uh, of Vietnam. And treating those people just horrendously, I mean, sort of France tried to execute Ho Chi Minh, for example, didn't manage to do it, but that all the time that they are themselves occupied, they still have these colonies in other parts of the world. And that's always kind of shocking to realise how you can have those two things going on in your head at the same time. But but they did, um, those maritime empires and that I've been talking about. So maritime empires as like Great Britain, which has colonies overseas, um, France, which has colonies overseas, they finally kind of fell of their own weight during the 1960s. So from the late 1940s to the 1960s, so that, um, the I guess the world had changed to the extent that they could not reasonably hold on to these colonies as hard as they tried. So decolonisation typically happens after a lot of protests, a lot of failure of negotiations to keep the colonies in line. Um, can't find permanent solutions. Sometimes you actually have wars. I mean, so there was an Algerian war, um, uh, with France. Um, sometimes you have wars, sometimes just the countries peacefully, as the case was in India. Eventually. Um, but it was no longer possible as of about the 1960s, to have colonies on this scale. And here is a map just to represent this map represents what the world looked like, um, just before 1945. And so the yellow those are the countries that are not colonised, but you can see that all of Africa and most of, um, Southeast Asia and India, those are all colonised, those those colours represent different countries. But the point is simply that that's what the world still looked like right after World War Two. All of those colonies. And then they gradually started, um, started decolonising. Um, and I've just given you some years here and just these have a, have a vague idea. India gained independence in 1947. By 1966, all of the British African uh colonies are independent in France. It's really, um, about 1962 that when Algeria goes that, that there are no more colonies of France unless you count, um, these, uh, these entities called don't own. So don't they? Ultraman, which I talked about the term, these are still, I guess you could call them colonies, but they choose to remain. I mean, they're given referendums. Um, and you're probably most aware of New Caledonia. Um, New Caledonia. Referendums have been been, um, have been with this one due to a referendum. They've been held, um, and several of them. And New Caledonia has voted to remain part of France. It has a special status. It's not really a don't it's it's own like unique kind of status. But there there will certainly be a time when New Caledonia decides to to leave France is I think it's purely a question of money. France pours money into into New Caledonia. But like why? It's why this situation still pertains. I don't actually know. Um, I'll we can say about the don't is at least they're represented in parliament and in France. So they, they actually have they have their autonomy to a certain degree in their represented at least. But anyway, I just wanted to say that so that no one can say France hasn't completely divested of its colonies. I mean, they have a different status today. Okay. Just a couple of words about nuclear arms before we move into Ukraine. I gotta get back to Ukraine. Um, so the Cold War then essentially ran like this, that the Soviet Union and the U.S knew that they would destroy each other if one of them used nuclear weapons. And that worked for all of those years. Um. There was a there was a crisis where for about 13 days, apparently. I mean, I wasn't around for this either, but the fact 13 days there was a standoff between Khrushchev and John F Kennedy while they decided what they're going to do because the U.S. saw that there were missiles in Cuba. What's going to happen? So the world held its breath, and then finally, nuclear war was averted. They sort of both backed down. But that was the situation for for many years that the two sides, terrified of each other, kept each other in line. We're living in a different world now where we don't have a sort of bipolar system. We're kind of waiting for everything to shake out because there are various nations now that have nuclear weapons. And so I guess the fear is just always that one of them will sort of become a rogue act on its own, and then we don't know what's going to happen. Because, as you so eloquently said, we're always fighting proxy wars. Um, so the different countries with nuclear weapons can come to the aid of each other. And God knows, we could end up in World War three. And that's the fear of Ukraine and Cold War hotspots. Um, just the different places that these proxy wars were fought. Um, all because capitalists were convinced of the domino theory of communism, that if you took one nation, you would take the nation next to it and so on. And the next thing you know, all of the world would be communist. Okay. Um, we're going to gradually now get that actually really quickly get back to, to Ukraine. Um, but we need to have the Soviet Union fall first. Um, this man was a hero when I was young, Mikhail Gorbachev. And it's just, like, crushing to me to realise that, in fact, like most of the world and certainly Russia does not consider him a hero. Um, a good man and a person who had all of the best intentions, but a person who was not actually able to bring about a change in the Soviet Union that led to a sort of lasting, um, a lasting, booming economy and lasting peace. Um, so a person that was so exciting back in like 1985, when he was first elected, um, secretary general of the Communist Party. This is this young man. He's he's only 53. Um, this is a relative, though, to the other the other general secretary secretaries general. He was really a, you know, a very, uh, a very useful man. So all of these geriatric leaders, hard line communists, and then suddenly comes this breath of fresh air. Um, and the collapse of communism came along with him. That was not his intended result. He meant to reform communism. He meant to revive an absolutely moribund, uh, economy so that the Soviet economy in the 1980s was was, like, just completely dead. And his idea was that he was going to reform it by bringing in some characteristics of a market economy. That's what he tried to do. But he was, um, a I'm not sure if it was him in particular. Maybe there was no person in the world who could have brought this about, but he was not able to bring about a transformation that would lead to an economy that would grow and, um, and a democratic nation. That just did not happen. Here are some dates that we can, um, just sort of look at what happened there. Um, so in 1985, he becomes the general secretary of the Communist Party, and he immediately starts to launch these structural changes. Um, one that we all heard of was perestroika, which means that like a total restructuring of the economy. So you have to do things like, like, like open up the economy to let people create what they want to produce what they want and, and sell it where they want. Um, so that was one of the things that happened. He also promoted an ideology or a principle called glasnost, which means that things are going to be transparent. And I don't know if you've heard of Chernobyl, the, um, uh, a place of nuclear where nuclear reactors melted down in 1986. That sort of brought about his interest in glasnost because the nuclear reactor melted down and nobody said anything. Gorbachev, both in Moscow, had no idea that this is happening. And then suddenly the Swedes start going, you know, we're getting some really weird figures here, like we're measuring the the contents of the air. And they could see that somewhere that there had been a nuclear meltdown. And so they were sort of watching the cloud crossing Europe. And Gorbachev found out from other places that this had happened. And he was so appalled that he said that the country can't function like this. We have to make these things known to people. We have to protect people by giving them knowledge. And so he opened up, um, information as well as trying to sort of open up the economy. Um, the problem, though, is that, um. In the process of doing this, in the process of loosening Soviet ties on its satellites and on the parts of the other parts of the Soviet Union, um, nationalism kind of reared its head. That is to say that people living in formers that are living in Soviet satellites decided that they want to leave their own countries, and they started leaving the Soviet Union because suddenly that became possible. So we start to see the fall of communist regimes across Eastern Europe. Um, in 1990, Lithuania, in the Baltics becomes the first of the Soviet satellites to declare its independence. The other Baltic follows the Latvia and Estonia, and then Ukraine follows very quickly afterwards. And at that point there really is no Soviet Union anymore. There's no effective Soviet Union. Um, so 1990 Gorbachev becomes the first and last president of the USSR. So the USSR now becomes like a democracy. He becomes the president. Um, and then he, um, he sort of cedes the office to Boris Yeltsin in 1991. Things could still have gone really well, um, in despite a, there's a coup that actually brought Gorbachev. It's actually it's gets confusing because Gorbachev is president of the USSR and, um, and, uh, Yeltsin is president of the Russian Federation. Does that make any sense, though? There are different, different political entities that the heads of. And then in 1991, Gorbachev falls from power. Um, definitively. I mean, he sort of sort of limps along for a while. Then by Christmas, he he resigns and the USSR completely ceases to exist, and only the Russian Federation exists. So the old Soviet Union, without all of the satellites, and Yeltsin becomes the president of the new federation. That is to say, the 15 states that now make up the make up Russia. Okay. Any comments or questions about that? Moving through this at a very accelerated speed. Um, as all of this is happening in the West, we're all proclaiming, proclaiming the end of history. And this isn't really quite fair to Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist who made this proclamation in 1989. He's reacting against the Marxist claim that communism is going to spread everywhere. Um, he says that's over. That whole battle is over. All of the ideological battles between the East and West are now over. And and capitalism, democracy, liberalism has won. That's not quite true, since we are kind of going back in a different direction right now, but for a few years, um, but everyone call them the liberals, the democratic nations of the West. We're celebrating, but there is no happily ever after. Things did not did not actually turn out the way that Francis Fukuyama would have hoped. And he's he's written a number of books since that point and ran a rally. He's running around giving lectures on why it is that we misunderstood him in the first place. Now he claims that he never really said that, um, that we were just reacting to something he never said. But anyways, it's sort of interesting that for a few brief years there, it looked as if everything was going to be really great. If you lived through this period, you would just you were you were happy for a little while. Okay in this, um, we're going to move now into Ukraine and take this full circle in the last few minutes. So I'm just going to point to the very last, uh, set of bullet points there, the cold or, sorry, the post-Cold War illusion. The European Union and NATO are expanding eastward. Um, but Ukraine is remaining sort of by itself. The Soviet Union really does not want Ukraine to join NATO, certainly not the European Union. Um, Ukraine wants to do that. And Ukraine is is looking to the West and, um, thinking that things look better in the West. But, um, that is something that's not going to happen. Um, in 2004, the Orange revolution in Ukraine kind of signals the first, um, sort of serious, um, feelers towards the West. Um, and let's see what happens with that. But first I going to take one quick detour. I've been telling you that Ukraine used to have nuclear weapons. They no longer have nuclear weapons. Today, Ukraine has no nuclear weapons because of this agreement. 1994 In Budapest, there was this memorandum on security assurances wherein Ukraine, which had all of these nuclear weapons because it used to be part of the Soviet Union, um, it destroyed those nuclear weapons because they were guaranteed that the US, the UK and Russia would respect their independence and sovereignty. And of course, that has not been the case because Russia invaded Ukraine. Um, and this could not have happened, presumably, if Ukraine continued to possess nuclear weapons. So, I don't know, that was just kind of leave it there. But that was, uh, um, um, another part of this tragic story. Okay. So the, the, um, the Orange Revolution in 2004 came about because because how am I going to say this exactly? Because the, the sort of, um, the the Russian leading candidate for president, Viktor Yanukovych, not to be confused with Viktor Yushchenko, who is the person who was actually elected by the Ukrainians, tried to become president. Um, through what, uh, what the Ukrainians said was like an unfair election, cheating and so on. So Putin's friend Yanukovich did not take office at that time. After the revolution of 2004, U Chango was elected. And Yushchenko might be known to you because he was poisoned back in 2004. And his face today is is like sort of bizarrely cratered and gravelly and so on. So, so so someone from the Soviet Union poisoned him and, um, like, disfigured him forever. He was nonetheless elected president. But things didn't go well because the economy did not come bounding back and so on. So we have another election where in Yanukovich is elected fairly only leading to another revolution in um, in, uh, in, in Kiev in Ukraine, which is called, uh, the Euromaidan or the Maidan revolution, the revolution of dignity. And I'm just, uh, citing can't there because, um, the, the dignity of word. Uh, um, from our reading, unconscious of the idea that all human beings are, are, um, worthy of dignity simply by virtue of being, being human beings. So this, this revolution called the revolution of dignity, 2013, 2014. And that then brings about, um, a closer ties with, with Europe. So Yanukovych, who was not at all in favour of closer ties with Europe, sort of, um, sort of, uh, doing the bidding of Putin. Um, he is ousted from office and Ukraine itself decides that it wants closer ties with Europe. And they sign this agreement and they elect Petro Poroshenko in 2014. Um, not a terribly I mean, there's just so much to talk about the the various corruption scandals and so on, but we don't have time to do that. I've got to finish up right now. Um, so the 2019 Volodymyr Zelensky, who you all know was elected president, um, and someone in whom I would say the West probably didn't have a whole lot of faith to start, um, a comedian, you know, an actor who is who played a politician in his TV series. And then he turned out to be a person who just, like, stepped up to the moment, right? A person who, um, who rose to the occasion in a way that you really don't see very often. Okay. Um, let's finish on this note to say a couple of things about Putin. Um, his rise to power in the face of the instability in Russia. And once again, if only there had been some kind of a marshall plan or kind of a worldwide plan to help Russia through that. Really difficult period. I mean, you don't just, like, turn on a dime and become a functioning democracy with it, with a market economy, it just doesn't happen. And then Vladimir Putin, by the end of the 90s, seemed like the person, a very strong personality, seemed like the person to lead Russia out of their of their, um, chaos. But, um. The next thing we knew, after he had made friends with all of the European leaders, the next thing we knew is he pulled out his grievance narrative, talking about how, um, how Russia had always been, um, had always been sort of put upon by the West and how the West was decadent and trying to influence Russia and that the Russians needed to be left alone and so on. And, um, then we had the Crimea invasion 2014, the full invasion 2022. And this is kind of where we are. Um, anybody have any comments or questions? And that was a very quick, um, ending to this discussion. But we're in the middle of it, so I just don't really even quite know what to say. I mean, like every day we're watching the news to see what's going to happen there. Um, today doesn't look terribly hopeful. Maybe tomorrow it will, I don't know. Any comments or questions? Okay. Well, then, um, good luck on the rest of your semester.