THIS TURBULANT WORLD: People's Endless Struggles to Change Their Lives

People's endless struggles to change their lives

Change, when it was constant and fairly manageable, used to be called progress. At the deepest point in the Depression, Chicago held a 1933 World's Fair gamely celebrating "The Century of Progress." The slogan was forgivably boosterish then, but now change is regarded far more neutrally. The word describes not merely the advances but all the tumults, the violence, the wrenching readjustments of our era. Even necessary change has its costs, for as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it, "It is the first step in wisdom to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the society in which they occur." For good or ill, the processes of change have swept the whole world. World War II did more than end Hitler's nightmarish rule and Japan's conquests. It impelled the European great powers, exhausted as they were by victory or by enemy occupation, to let their colonial empires go. At the end of the war, only 18 fully independent nations existed in Asia and Africa; before long there were more than 80. Winston Churchill, who vowed he would not preside over the dissolution of the British Empire, was supplanted by a Labor Party that would.

The way to independence for much of what is now known as the Third World was charted by the courage and will of one frail man, Mahatma Gandhi, with his doctrine of nonviolent resistance. He was sadly disillusioned, however, by the savage separation of India and Pakistan, which he proved powerless to prevent. Only five months after India won its independence in 1947, he was killed by a fanatic.

Most of these new nations became one-party states, sometimes benignly, sometimes tyrannically led. In many of them, the educated elite was pitifully small and somewhat alienated from the people. Democracy often seemed a luxury. The new rulers, usually from a dominant tribe, generally retained the national borders that had been drawn by the colonial powers. They stood off from, but took support from, both the Western and Eastern worlds.

In China, the Communists took advantage of the process of change. Chiang Kaishek, his armies exhausted by the fight against the Japanese invader and his regime weakened by raging internal corruption, fled to offshore exile in Taiwan. The disciplined Communists brought literacy and better health to the masses, but ruthlessly exterminated much of the middle class and fastened a tight dictatorship on China. The Soviet Union and China, those historic enemies, proclaimed their "fraternal" unity, and though it did not last, the perception of a monolithic Communism had much to do with the later U.S. involvement in Korea and Viet Nam.