Between the Wars

Aftermath of WWI

• Russia–Bolsheviks–Soviet Union–Trotsky–Stalin

• farm communes• Killed 10 million people

–Communism

"There are, in my view, two factors that, above all others, have shaped human history in this century. One is the development of the natural sciences and technology, certainly the greatest success story of our time– to this great and mounting attention has been paid for all quarters. The other, without doubt, consists of the great ideological storms that have altered the lives of virtually all mankind: the Russian revolution and its aftermath – totalitarian tyrannies of both right and left and the explosion of nationalism, racism and, in places, of religious bigotry, which interestingly enough, not one among the most perceptive social thinkers of the nineteenth century had ever predicted."

– Isaiah Berlin (quoted in Einstein, History, and Other Passions, Gerald Holten)

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

– C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock

Aftermath of WWI

Aftermath of WWI

• Ireland–Part of United

Kingdom–Irish in Parliament

• Republicans gain majority

–1920 claimed independence

–Continued political fighting

Aftermath of WWI

• India– Nationalists supported

Great Britain in WWI– Hindus and Moslems

formed political alliance to gain independence

– Gandhi assumed leadership

– Non-violent resistance to unjust laws

Non-violence

“I do not believe in short-violent-cuts to success….However much I may sympathize with and admire worthy motives, I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest of causes….Experience convinces me that permanent good can never be the outcome of untruth and violence.”

– Gandhi

Non-violence

“Nonviolence is the law of our species as violence is the law of the brute. The spirit lies dormant in the brute and he knew no law but that of physical might. The dignity of man requires obedience to a higher law – to the strength of the spirit…”

–Gandhi

Civil Disobedience

“Civil disobedience is the inherent right of a citizen. He dare not give it up without ceasing to be a man. Civil disobedience is never followed by anarchy. Criminal disobedience can lead to it. Every state puts down criminal disobedience by force. It perishes, if it does not. But to put down civil disobedience is to attempt to imprison conscience… Disobedience to be civil must be sincere, respectful, restrained, never defiant, must be based upon some well-understood principle, must not be capricious and, above all, must have no ill will or hatred behind it.”

– Gandhi

Gandhi's march to the salt deposit at Dharsana (May 1930)

"Suddenly at a word of command, scores of native policemen rushed upon the advancing marchers and rained blows on their heads with their steel-shod latha. Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whack of the clubs on unprotected skulls. The waiting crowd of marchers groaned and sucked in their breath in sympathetic pain at every blow... They marched steadily, with heads up, without the encouragement of music or cheering or any possibility that they might escape serious injury or death. The police rushed out and methodically and mechanically beat down the second column. There was no fight, no struggle; the marchers simply walked forward till struck down. The police commenced to savagely kick the seated men in the abdomen and testicles and then dragged them by their arms and feet and threw them into the ditches... Hour after hour stretcher-bearers carried back a stream of inert bleeding bodies... By 11 A.M. the heat had reached 116 degrees and the assault subsided."

– United Press, as quoted in Gardner, Howard, Creating Minds, Basic Books, 1993, p.345.

Law“Nonviolence implies voluntary submission to the penalty for noncooperation with evil. I am here, therefore, to invite and submit cheerfully to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime, and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen. The only course open to you, the judge and the assessors, is either to resign your posts and thus dissociate yourselves from evil, if you feel that the law you are called upon to administer is an evil, and that in reality I am innocent, or to inflict on me the severest penalty, if you believe that the system and the law you are assisting to administer are good for the people of this country, and that my activity is, therefore, injurious to the common weal.”

– Gandhi

Integrity

“One man cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department. Life is one indivisible whole.”

–Gandhi

Example

“My life is my message.”–Gandhi

America

• Defeat of the League of Nations

• Disarmament• Restrictive tariffs• American values• The Great

Depression

Asia

• China– Ineffective

Manchu dynasty

– Sun Yat-sen Nationalists united the country

• Japan– Shoguns– Trade and

colonies (raw materials)

Literary Modernism

• James Joyce• Franz Kafka• Aldous Huxley

–Brave New World

• George Orwell–Animal Farm–1984

Cubism and Abstract Paintings

• Pablo Picasso: Three Musicians

“When we invented cubism, we had no intention of inventing cubism, but simply of expressing what was in us.”

– Pablo Picasso, as quoted in Gardener, Howard, Creating Minds, Basic Books, 1993, p.163.

Cubism and Abstract Paintings• Pablo Picasso: Guernica

Cubism and Abstract Paintings

• Marc Chagall:– Green Violinist

Cubism and Abstract Paintings

• Marcel Duchamp:– Nude Descending a

Staircase

"Dada (or Dadism) [such as practiced by Marcel Duchamp]. From the French word for hobbyhorse, a continental art movement conceived as a protest against the mechanized slaughter of World War I. It manifested a nihilistic [that is, nothing exists] irrationality calculated to inform the public that all established moral and aesthetic values were meaningless after the horrors of the war."

– Palmer, Donald, Does the Center Hold?, Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1991, p. 506.

“It is the viewer that completes the artwork.”

–Duchamps

Cubism and Abstract Paintings

• Piet Mondrian

Cubism and Abstract Paintings

• Salvadore Dalí: The Persistence of Memory

Modern Music

• Jazz– Louis Armstrong– George Gershwin

• Rhapsody in Blue

– Instruments “Singing”• Summertime (Porgy and Bess)

– Ella Fitzgerald– Miles Davis

Modern Music

• Big band era– Duke Ellington

• Satin Doll

– Benny Goodman• Sing, Sing, Sing

– Glenn Miller• Take the ‘A’ Train

• Cool Jazz– Dave Brubeck

• Take 5