The Rise of Fascism and World War II: A Time of Destruction and Transformation, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica The Rise of Fascism and World War II: A Time of Destruction and Transformation e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! The world at war again. The rise of Italian Fascism under Mussolini and of German Nazism under Hitler were causes of great concern in Britain. The Prime Minister, Chamberlain, hesitated to involve the nation in another war, accepting the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (1935) and the German annexation of Austria (1938). Chamberlain flew to Germany for talks with Hitler in 1938. The German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 pushed the Prime Minister into action and Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939. The war saw the allied powers (France and Britain, and later Russia and the US) against the Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan). In April 1940, Germany invaded Norway and Denmark, and in May, the weak Prime Minister Chamberlain was replaced by Winston Churchill. France surrendered to Germany in June and Britain alone faced Germany and Italy. Dark days followed as the RAF (Royal Air Force) battled in the skies against the German Luftwaffe. British cities were subjected to regular night-time bombing in the 'Blitzkrieg' (lightning war). The war continued and spread into a global conflict, with Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 bringing the United States into the war, After another long and bloody war, the Allies achieved victory in 1945, followed by victory in Japan after the atomic bombs launched on Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced the Japanese into surrender. Wars of unparalleled destruction. Both the First and the Second World involved civilians. Movements of Resistance occurred in almost every occupied country and played an important part in defeating Nazi Germany. Those who fought in the Resistance risked a lot. If caught, they were tortured and killed. In 1942 the Nazis decided to rid Europe of all Jews. This gave rise to one of the greatest crimes in the history of mankind. The Shoah, also termed Holocaust, was the killing of six million Jewish men, women and children, and of millions of others, including Gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents. The Nazi killing program was carried out through the creation of death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the Nazis used gas chambers to exterminate large groups of victims at a time with poison gas. During the Nuremberg Trials, held between 1945 and 1949 to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, many Nazi leaders were convicted of crimes against humanity and some were sentenced to death. The post-war period and social welfare. Churchill with his Conservative party lost the first elections after the war and was replaced by Clement Attlee with a Labour Government which was determined to transform British society. During the Second World War plans had been prepared to revise state welfare in Britain. The economist, William Beveridge, produced a report in November 1942 which would be implemented after the end of the war. The slogan was welfare 'from the cradle to the grave'. In 1944 the reform of schooling and a commitment to full employment; in 1945 the Family Allowances Act; in 1946 the National Insurance Act, which provided further financial help for the sick and unemployed; in 1948 the National Health Service Act, creating a service with free medical treatment for everyone. THE UNITED STATES. The first half of the 20th century saw the United States transformed into one of the most powerful nations in the world. Industrial development and reform. As the new century began, the United States was developing into the world's leading industrial power. Millions of immigrant workers and farmers arrived. The rail network was completed, mining and factories developed. Aviation, modern industrial processes and the cinema industry were born and all developed rapidly. However, this progress saw corruption and exploitation of workers. President Theodore Roosevelt, elected in 1901, made many reforms. He limited the power of monopolies and trusts, protected natural wealth, established the first national income tax and gave women the right to vote. The black population. Not everybody shared in the civil rights and in the opportunities America offered. In theory African-American men had been given the right to vote by the 15th Amendment in 1870, but discrimination was still alive in the Southern states. This question was finally solved in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed this democratic right. The First World War. President Wilson, elected in 1912, led America through the First World War. Initially, he tried to keep the US neutral, but after Germany closed the seas to American ships, in 1917 Wilson declared war on Germany. American forces were sent to Europe in 1918 to defeat Germany. After the war, Wilson helped to negotiate a peace treaty that included a plan for the creation of a League of Nations, the aim of which was to maintain peace and cooperation between the nations of the world. Although the Senate rejected US membership in the League, Wilson received the Nobel Prize for his peace-making efforts. The years of optimism and prosperity. After the war America experienced a massive economic boom and became the wealthiest country in the world. Americans enjoyed a period of carefree wealth, partying, music and dancing, and the motor industry was growing rapidly . Mass consumerism was becoming widespread. People spent money on commodities such as the radio and home appliances, travel, holidays and entertainment. The cinema industry was also developing fast. THE GREAT DEPRESSION. The Wall Street Crash. Optimism and prosperity ended with the Wall Street Crash in 1929, marking the beginning of a worldwide Great Depression that lasted ten years. The causes for the Depression included overproduction of goods, bank failures, bank speculation and consumer debts. During this time people were ruined overnight. Many banks failed, and companies went out of business. Thousands became unemployed and homeless because they couldn't pay their homes. Last but not least, a series of dust storms that greatly damaged agriculture forced thousands of agricultural labourers to migrate to California. The New Deal. The election of Roosevelt in 1982 lift up the American economy. His 'New Deal' created employment in public works, offered assistance to the Jim Crow laws The Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation. These laws passed by the Southern states and cities from 1880s. In 1896 the Supreme Court ruled that separate facilities for whites and blacks were constitutional and thus encouraged the introduction of discriminatory laws. The laws—which existed for about 100 years, from the post-Civil War era until 1968-—were meant to marginalize African Americans by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education or other opportunities. Those who attempted to defy Jim Crow laws often faced arrest, fines, jail sentences, violence and death. The roots of Jim Crow laws began as carly as 1865, immediately following the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States. Black codes were strict local and state laws that detailed when, where and how formerly enslaved people could work, and for how much compensation. The codes appeared throughout the South as a legal way to put Black citizens into indentured servitude, to take voting rights away, to control where they lived and how they traveled and to seize children for labor purposes. Railways and buses, public waiting rooms, restaurants, boarding-houses, theatres and public parks were segregated; separate schools, hospitals and other public institutions, in theory 'separate but equal' but in practice generally of inferior quality, were designated for 'blacks' or 'coloured' people. It was not until after the Second World War that this situation slowly began to change. Blacks in the South used legal suits and boycotts to accelerate desegregation. A march on Washington by over 200,000 people in 1963 dramatised the movement to end the 'Jim Crow laws'. In the same year Martin Luther King gave his famous 'I have a dream' speech in Washington, standing in front of the memorial to Abraham Lincoln who had emancipated black slaves exactly 100 years earlier. Southern whites often responded with violence, and federal troops were needed to preserve order and protect blacks. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 finally ended the injustices and inequalities of the 'Jim Crow laws'. Thomas Eliot (1888/1965). Poet, playwright and critic, Eliot was born in the Unite States of America from a British family. He studied at Harvard University and then he moved to Paris, where he achieved a doctorate in philosophy. He moved to London and began to work as a teacher, and there he met the poet and critic Ezra Pound. He left his job at the bank for a position with Faber and Faber, a respected London publishing house. In 1927 Eliot became an Anglican and a British citizen. Considered one of the leading figures of the Modernist movement and of the avant-garde poets. Eliot was impressed by the French Symbolist from whom he took the ability to combine intellectualism and sensuous language but his style was innovative and original. He was awarded the nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 THE WASTE LAND His main work is “the waste land” (1922). It is composed of five parts and the most important is the first part, “ The Burial of the Dead”, in which the author presents a series of juxtapositions between life and death, fertility and sterility and hope and despair. The poem is written in free verse and is characterized by a high level of experimentation of the verse form, the length of lines and the use of punctuation. The language has different tones, from the solemn to the colloquial. Eliot's poem rejects any kind of narrative structure and contains different and apparently disconnected themes. This structural fragmentation makes Eliot's poem one of the best of Modernist poetry. Eliot's poem is full of quotes from ancient and classical sources such as Dante, Shakespeare and the Bible. AIl of these sources are juxtaposed in an apparently incoherent way and represent the relics of a world that has been destroyed by modernity which Eliot represents as a sterile and arid land. The result is a poem in which meanings and characters are not clearly represented and events cannot be easily located in a specific time or place. Eliot's poem seems to be structured as a series of 'broken images' which are juxtaposed to the chaos of the modern world. THE GENERAL MEANING OF THE POEM.The Waste Land is a very complex work, the title of which refers to the situation in Europe after the Great War, seen as a cultural and spiritual desert. The work moves away from traditional verse forms, combining cultured allusions to classical literature and ancient myths with references to popular culture as it presents shallow, deeply ordinary people leading meaningless lives. The only hope that can be found lies is faith. The aridity of the land is a symbol of the aridity in the life of a man without God. This work expresses the conception of the sterility of modern society in contrast with societies of the past. Eliot believed that modern society lacked a vital sense of community. The waste land of the poem is modern European culture, which had come too far from its spiritual roots. In Eliot's poem, human beings are isolated. THE ROLE OF MYTH. One of the most peculiar features of The Waste Land is the constant juxtaposition between the contemporary world and the world of classical myths. In his poem Eliot makes frequent references to the myth of the Holy Grail. Similarly to what Joyce does in Ulysses, Eliot uses these ancient myths to add a layer of spirituality and wisdom to the squalid reality of the modern world. THE OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE It stands at the very heart of the poetic method used by Eliot in The Waste Land. In his poem Eliot does not describe the sterility of Western civilisation in clear terms, but juxtaposes a series of apparently incoherent images and symbols whose aim is to produce the idea of ‘sterility' in the reader's mind. ‘The theory of the objective correlative in literature was developed by Eliot by a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion' that a writer seeks to evoke in the reader. The purpose of the objective correlative is to express a character's emotions by showing rather than by describing them and to create emotion through external factors and evidence.