Sunday, March 24, 2013

Chapter 22 pg. 659-667


Karl Marx is the man who influenced the political and philosophical teachings modern communism.  Communism was at its prime in the 1970s where about one-third of the world’s population lived under communist rule.  This was commonly found in the Soviet Union and in China but it also made its way over to Eastern Europe.  There were different interpretations of communism but they shared the common ideology derived from European Marxism.  This influenced the lower classes and a worldwide socialist federation to bond together to form an international revolutionary movement.  The Russian Revolution served as a catalyst for others to revolt while providing them with aid and advice.  Soon, a Treaty of Friendship between the Soviet Union and China in 1950 joined the two communist giants in an alliance that caused many in the West to view communism as a unified international movement aimed at their destruction.
The Russian Revolution is like an echo of French Revolution because the people wanted their freedom and to treated as equals.  The beneficiaries of the French Revolution, the middle class, suffered due to rise of communism.  At an attempt to put an end to the threatening communistic ways, America created the Marshall Plan in attempts to be friendly with the USSR but they quickly caught on to the Americans and the plan failed.  Stalin, head of the USSR, acted to install fully communist governments, loyal to himself, in Poland, East Germany, Czech, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria.  Many years following the likes of the Russians, the Chinese experienced an on-going battle with communism that took decades to achieve.  The Chinese imperial system had collapsed under the pressure of foreign imperialism.  This took much longer to achieve because in Russia they have been studying and following Karl Marx for years while China had only recently discovered it making it difficult to gain as many followers as Russia did.

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