The Aftermath of World War II

World War II, with the global devastation it unleashed on all dimensions of life – political, economic, and psychological – set the stage for the second half of the twentieth century. The dropping of atomic bombs by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 signaled a turning point not only in the war itself but in the geopolitical balance and the nature of international conflict as well. For the postwar generation, nuclear attack became a very real threat. Indeed, the two nuclear superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, divided the world into spheres of influence, and each regularly intervened politically, economically, and militarily wherever and whenever it considered its interests to be at stake.

The period from 1945 to 1980 also brought upheaval in the cultural sphere. In the United States, for example, the struggles for civil rights for African Americans, for free speech on university campuses, and for disengagement from the Vietnam War led to a rebellion of the young, who took to the streets in often raucous demonstrations, some with violent repercussions. The prolonged ferment produced a new system of values, a “youth culture,” expressed in the radical rejection not only of national policies but often also of the society generating them. Young Americans mocked their elders’ lifestyles and adopted unconventional dress, manners, habits, and morals deliberately subversive of mainstream social standards, a phenomenon that continues today in different forms.

The end of World War II in 1945 left devastated cities, ruptured economies, and governments in chaos throughout Europe These factors, coupled with the massive loss of life and the indelible horrors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis, resulted in a pervasive sense of despair, disillusionment, and skepticism. Although many people (for example, the Futurists in Italy) had tried to find redemptive value in World War I, it was nearly impossible to do the same with World War II.^[1]