In more recent times there has been both collectivist and individualist thinking. The Soviet states such as Hungary, Lithuania, and Checklosovakia were just a few of the states that stood up to the communist system while trying to break away. In the late 1980s, Hungary was breaking away from the Soviet block of states. This caused many people from other Soviet states, such as East Germany or Checklosovakia to, “Take Vacations”, in Hungary. People in communist countries were allowed to take vacations in other communist countries, but really what these people were doing was fleeing to a state with more freedom. Yugoslavia, Albania, and Romania were communist countries, although they were not allied with the Soviet Union. These Communist countries also had a revolution and their communist leaders were overthrown. In East Berlin, a seemingly off-hand remark about people being able to go to West Germany sent hundreds of people to the Berlin wall, where joyous celebrations took place.

In China, there was a protest against communism in Tienamin square. The protesters were mostly made up of students and some workers. The Chinese government’s response to this was to fire on the crowd, and those who survived, especially the workers, could be imprisoned or killed. Communism also fell in the heart of where it had once existed, and the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, was elected to office. So in many ways, things have improved for the individual since communism. But at the same time, some countries still have dictators, and communism remains in places like North Korea and Venezuela. So the Western Civilization course ends and both individual and collectivist thought remain.

In the 1960s, not only was a great cultural shift taking place, but the world in which it took place was also a dangerous one. The cold war was at its height during the Cuban missile crisis, and the thing preventing the United States and the Soviet Union from actually starting a war was the idea of a nuclear holocaust. During the 1980s many now Soviet leaders came to power in quick succession, because of the politburos propensity for electing sickly elderly men as leaders of the Soviet Union. Leaders Andropov and Gorbachev wanted to better the economy and living situation for the Russian people without getting rid of communism. Andropov was also someone who was a complete Soviet insider who had once been the leader of the KGB. He wanted the world to know that the Soviet Union was not to be reckoned with, which lead to Soviet Fighters shooting down flight KAL-007.

The Vietnam war officially started in 1955 when the French withdrew from their former colony and communists took over the Northern part of Vietnam. The United States began with a low level of intervention in the Vietnam war, such as sending supplies and ammunition. The Ruler of South Vietnam Ngô Đình Diệm was a Catholic and made himself very unpopular with failed land reforms and acts against Buddhism in a largely Buddist country. In 1963 the CIA told generals planning to remove Diệm, that they would not punish them by cutting off aid. Therefore on November 2, 1963, Diệm and his brother were killed in a coup and twenty days later President Kennedy was assassinated. During his presidency, Kennedy had escalated US involvement in Vietnam but was against the deployment of troops. During the Johnson administration, many troops were deployed and involvement in Vietnam became a full-on war until the last troops were pulled out in 1975.

*By Enterprises, I meant the ones mean the ones Captained by James T. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard.

In Germany, the year 1945 was referred to as year zero. Many towns were in ruins and people resorted to stealing food to survive. In a plan that the allies had made before the war ended, they had planned to let Germans have one-thousand two-hundred calories a day, an astonishingly low amount. The plan was leaked to the press however and people were outraged at the severity of the plan so it did not really go through. The allied forces were occupying Germany and controlling the German economy. The German Mark had been so inflated that it was essentially worthless and attempts to employ an allied scrip also failed. Instead, a cigarette economy took hold where people used tobacco as currency. This state of year zero continued into 1947.

Ludwig Erhard had managed in 1946 to get the general in control of Bavaria to remove some of the economic control and this resulted in great results. After this Erhard went to Lucius Clay, the military governor of Germany, and asked him to remove all economic restrictions. Lucius Clay had already been thinking about how to improve the situation for the German people so he agreed to this plan. They also decided to instate a new currency, the Deutschemark, in 1948. The day after the new currency had been instated the stores had goods in them. This was because if the storekeepers had saved anything or had received a shipment of goods, they were not willing to sell their goods for a worthless currency. After these reforms had been made, which became known as the “Economic Miracle,” the situation in Germany was vastly improved. The rubble was cleaned up and industrial output rose as well as the standard of living. While the Marshal plan helped Germany somewhat, the main contributor to the economic miracle was the removal of restrictions on the economy and the installment of viable currency.

As the war progressed, the Allies employed tactics that were more revenge-based than tactical strategy. The city of Dresden in Germany was bombed because of its history as a center for art and culture. This was in reparation for the German decision to bomb the English city of Coventry. The Soviets advanced into Germany for a few weeks in 1944 before being driven out, but in that time the brutality of the Red Army on the villages and civilians made itself well known. Most Civilians were Women children and elderly people at this time as almost all able-bodied men were in the army. It was for that reason that many Germans fled Eastern Prussia when the Red Army officially invaded. The fleeing Germans sometimes had to cross frozen lakes, that the Soviets would then bomb while they were crossing so as to drown them. When the Soviets defeated the Germans at the Battle of Berlin, the Soviets proceeded to wreak havoc in the city with their brutal acts. If the Red Army found Soviet Nationalists in German Concentration camps, the Soviets then sent them on to one of their gulags, because the defenders of the motherland had been contaminated by the outside world.

After the German occupation of France, people were encouraged to rat out anyone who had conspired with the Nazis. There were people who had collaborated with the Nazis, but many people rated out against people they just didn’t like or owed money to. The people accused of conspiring against the Nazis could either have been shot or paraded through the streets naked for people to spit on and throw stuff at.

As World War II progressed, some of the brutal designs and tactics that were planned at the beginning of the war, progressed and became even more brutal. The final solution plan begun by Germany had originally been comprised of Germans shooting large amounts of Jewish people. When this took too much work and took too much of a toll on the soldiers, Nazi leaders decided to go with a work camp plan. Gas chambers would be set up in order to be able to kill more people who could not work, and those who could work would be sent on to the concentration camps, the center of the camps being Auschwitz. Other than Jewish people, the Nazis went after other people they considered lesser humans. Many Slavic people and Polish civilians were killed, as well as Soviet POWs. Thousands of Yugoslavians were killed in reprisal shootings, and a large percentage of Jehovah’s Witnesses were killed.

Something that many military leaders thought was that the airforce would be the end all be all of warfare. Indeed many new tactics were employed in the airforce in World War II. One of the main tactics of both the Allied and Axis powers was bombing civilians and factories. Especially the Allies thought that if you bombed enough civilians, they would get tired of being bombed all the time and urge the government to surrender. When the Allies after the war took surveys of places that had been continually bombed, however, they found that the effect was to make the people angry and strengthened their resolve not to surrender. When factories were bombed they could usually be rebuilt quickly. One of the more effective strategies was to bomb railroads, so that even if the supplies were made the military could not get them. As the war progressed brutal tactics were employed on both sides to result in general mass destruction.