The Linguistic Culture-2 (british media) (1157941), страница 12
Текст из файла (страница 12)
The final details of the war and plans for the postwar world were hammered out at the Yalta Conference in the Crimea in 1945. Russia was to become the guardian of the nations of Eastern Europe. Defeated Germany was to be divided into four zones of military occupation, and a conference was to be convened in San Francisco on April 25 to create the United Nations Organization and formulate its Charter.
Roosevelt left Yalta physically weak but pleased that he had brought Allied unity. Nine weeks after Yalta conference he had a stroke and died. His Vice President Harry Truman came into office. Truman participated with Stalin and Churchill in the final meeting at Potsdam, from which two declarations were issued. One of them confirmed the occupation zones in Germany and settled the reparation issue.
The second was an unconditional surrender ultimatum to Japan. In 1945 American bombers made devastating raids on Japanese cities. In June the island of Okinawa fell to the Americans. On August 6 an American bomber dropped an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. A few days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. Both cities were devastated and nearly 2000000 civilians were killed. Even the scientists who had been working on the bomb were shocked by the result. On August 14 the Japanese government surrendered. The Second World War was over.
The Cold War and the McCarthy Witch Hunts
The Cold War was an ideological struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States over control of the world. Americans was the only nation in the world that the Second World War had made better off. Their homes had not been bombed or their land fought over like the homes and land of the Russian people. Busy wartime factories had given them good wages. Americans became the most prosperous people in the world. But despite economic prosperity during the years under president Truman (1945-53) and then president Eisenhower (1953-61) there was a constant anxiety in America and fear of the Russian influence on the afterward world. After two unpleasant surprises – the Soviet Union’s atomic bomb and the creation of communist China – a wave of panic swept across the USA. Due to the terrible propaganda some Americans started to see communist plots everywhere. When in 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea their fears became even stronger. An ambitious and unscrupulous politician McCarthy tried to use these fears to win fame and power for himself. He started the campaign that came into American history with the name a “Witch Hunt” – a search for people he could blame for supposed threats to the United States. For over five years, from early 1950s till the mid 50s McCarthy launched the serial of “hearings”, accusing a lot of people – government officials, scientists, and famous entertainers – of secretly working for the Soviet Union. He never gave proofs, but Americans were so much frightened by the threat of communism that many believed his accusations. They were afraid to give jobs or even to show friendship to anyone “suspected” in “Soviet sympathy”. In 1957 McCarthy died, but so-called McCarthyism did serious damage to the relations between the countries.
In 1961 a new President John F. Kennedy (1961-3) was elected, the most progressive president since A. Lincoln and F. Roosevelt. He was young, had a good education, energy and keen, quick wit. The unfulfilled promise of Kennedy’s thousand days in office is nearly impossible to measure. He told American people that they were facing a “new frontier” with both opportunities and problems. He announced policy of fighting poverty and giving civil rights to black people. He streamlined and pushed through the space program and new laws for pollution treatment, but his main merit was his foreign policy.
When J. Kennedy came to the office, foreign problems were numerous. Soviet Union power was growing and relations between two superpowers were as cold as ever. The incipient nations of Africa were rebellious. Fidel Castro had taken control of Cuba. Unrest was evident in all Latin America. Kennedy’s first two innovations – the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress – captured the imagination of much of the world. The Peace Corps sent thousands of young Americans abroad to assist underdeveloped countries. The Alliance for Progress was designed as a broad assault upon the economic and social problems of Latin America.
In June 1961 a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles supported by the CIA attempted an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Although the attempt was a dismal failure, the Soviet Union tried to install Soviet mediation-range ballistic missiles and bombers in Cuba. Kennedy met the Soviet Union challenge and displayed great mind in dealing with what was probably the most serious confrontation of the Cold War era. He gave the promise not to invade Cuba. The leader of the Soviet Union Nikita.Khrushchev also promised to recall the weapons from Cuba. The two leaders succeeded in setting up a “Hot Line” to facilitate a quick exchange of views in case of major crises, and in signing a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that halted surface atmospheric and outer space testing. While Kennedy was president he frequently said: “All I want them to say about me is what they said about John Adams, “He kept the peace”. In the speech he had intended to give in Dallas on November 22,1963, the day of his assassination, Kennedy declared: “We ask…that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of ”peace on earth, goodwill toward men”. Kennedy’s sensible policy not only reduced the tension between the two but also started the policy of so-called “détente”.
Even the long and bloody war in Vietnam (1965-73), finished by the victory of the latter, was not allowed to interfere into it. In May 1972 President Nixon flew to Moscow to sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) with the Soviet Union. The idea of SALT was to slow down the arms race as well as to make war between them less likely. When the Soviet troops marched into Afghanistan in 1979 American Congress refused to renew the SALT agreement.Both the United States and the Soviet Union continued to develop new, more deadly nuclear missiles and in the early 1980s détente looked dead. In the middle of the 1980s American military strength was increased so much that president Reagan realized the necessity to slow down the race M. Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985 in the USSR, also believed that the huge cost of the arms race was crippling the Soviet Union economy. In 1987 Gorbachev and Reagan signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Force (INF) treaty. According to the treaty both countries agreed to destroy all their land-based medium and shorter-range nuclear missiles within 3 years. A hope was born that a new time of peaceful cooperation between the SU and the USA might be possible now. “I believe that future generations will look back to this time and see it as a turning point in world history. We are not in a cod war now” the British prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said in 1988 .
Afro-Americans after the World War II
World War II paved the way for change in the he area of civil rights. In 1946 president Truman created a President’s Committee to investigate the status of civil rights in America and recommend their improvements. In 1947 the committee called for changes in lynch laws, voting laws, for elimination of discrimination in the armed forces and in the federal civil service through the creation of the Fair Employment board. A lot of cases were passed to the Supreme Court. In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of children in public schools on the basis of race as unconstitutional. After the decision had been given, the question appeared how the nation, and particularly the Southern population, would respond to it
Under President D. Eisenhower desegregation made progress. But in the Deep South resistance to it began even to harden. White Citizen’s groups were created, and the Ku Klux Klan was revived. In 1956 nineteen Southern senators issued a “Manifesto” against “forced integration”. Economic reprisals were taken against blacks and the progressive organizations were under constant fire. The first open official resistance occurred in Little Rock (Arkansas), when the school board approved of a plan to admit a few black students to central High all-white school. The night before the opening of the school the governor of Arkansas appeared on television to announce that he was strongly against the plan. In 1963 President Kennedy had to dispatch regular army troops to Oxford, Mississippi, to put down a riot when black James Meredith tried to be enrolled as a university student. “ It ought to be possible for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed by troops”,- the president commented.. By 1964 only 1.17% of all black students were attending schools with white pupils. Schools for black students were usually much inferior to schools in middle-class neighborhoods
On December 1, 1955 black woman Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Alabama and sat down in the free whites-only section, as she was very much tired. Whites and the bus driver began to threaten her, but she did not move. Her arrest proved to be the catalyst for a new black protest movement. Under the leadership of Baptist clergyman Martin Luther King, Montgomery blacks formed the Improvement Association, boycotted the bus lines, and referred their case to the state court and then to the Supreme Court. Seventy-five percent of the black population walked to work. Both the District court and Supreme Court ruled that segregated busing was unconstitutional. The movement propelled King into a position of national prominence and led to the organization of a regional group called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or SCLC, a group of one hundred southern clergymen of the beliefs that churches and church leaders must assume civil rights. From the beginning its emphasis was on nonviolence, and its guiding light was Dr. Martin Luther King. The organization was active in the areas of voter registration, protests, and citizenship. Although SCLC preached nonviolence, blacks were beaten, set upon by police dogs, and hit with water from high-pressure water hoses. Still the brutal treatment of black demonstrators shown by national television little by little stirred the nation’s conscience. More and more whites became convinced that it was time for the blacks to achieve equality.
Martin Luther King was primarily responsible for the March on Washington in 1963 for Jobs and Freedom – the largest civil rights rally in American history. Over 250000 blacks and whites gathered to ask the president for a federal fair employment practice. They also demanded new civil rights legislation. The protests of the 1950s, the March on Washington, Birmingham, and the consciences of white Americans climaxed in a monumental Civil Rights Act in 1964, claiming the discrimination based on race or sex in all public facilities and in all areas of interstate commerce as illegal. The Voting Rights Act abolished the number of discriminating devices and provided protection for persons seeking the right to vote.
From 1965 to 1968 King’s direction was a much more northerly one. He became involved in peace movements against the Vietnamese War and in better housing conditions for blacks in northern ghettos. King’s leadership cannot be overestimated. He was the driving force of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and the apostle of nonviolent protest. He viewed the world in terms of a brotherhood of people and accomplished so much more than black leaders before him. King never lived to see whether his “dream” would be realized. . His life was cut short by his assassination on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee
Black Americans began to play a much greater role in American society. The black middle class has appeared. The struggle was long and hard, but blacks have gained more positions of power and prestige than ever before in politics, in the media, in police, in justice, in education, in sports and offer a lot of promise. The slogan “black is beautiful” today has taken on a new meaning In Virginia, Douglas Wilder became the nation’s first elected black governor. When the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, there were only 300 black elected officials, now there are more than 7000.Emanuel Cleaver was elected mayor of Kansas City – a city where only one of four votes is black. General Colin Powell rose to prominence during the Gulf War and was invited to Bush administration later to the position of State Secretary. He was changed by black woman Conzolesa Right. The climax – the election of the first black President Barack Obama at the end of 1908.Barack Obama’s trip to Moscow in June, 2009 was an impressive diplomatic performance to shift the orientation of U.S.-Russia relations fro the past to the future.
![](https://s.studizba.com/z.php?f=/templates/si/i/noavatar.png&w=100&h=100&t=1"){kind=avatar}
