THIS TURBULANT WORLD

By Thomas Griffith

People's endless struggles to change their lives

Change, when it was constant and fairly manageable, used to be called progress. At the deepest point in the Depression, Chicago held a 1933 World's Fair gamely celebrating "The Century of Progress." The slogan was forgivably boosterish then, but now change is regarded far more neutrally. The word describes not merely the advances but all the tumults, the violence, the wrenching readjustments of our era. Even necessary change has its costs, for as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it, "It is the first step in wisdom to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the society in which they occur." For good or ill, the processes of change have swept the whole world. World War II did more than end Hitler's nightmarish rule and Japan's conquests. It impelled the European great powers, exhausted as they were by victory or by enemy occupation, to let their colonial empires go. At the end of the war, only 18 fully independent nations existed in Asia and Africa; before long there were more than 80. Winston Churchill, who vowed he would not preside over the dissolution of the British Empire, was supplanted by a Labor Party that would.

The way to independence for much of what is now known as the Third World was charted by the courage and will of one frail man, Mahatma Gandhi, with his doctrine of nonviolent resistance. He was sadly disillusioned, however, by the savage separation of India and Pakistan, which he proved powerless to prevent. Only five months after India won its independence in 1947, he was killed by a fanatic.

Most of these new nations became one-party states, sometimes benignly, sometimes tyrannically led. In many of them, the educated elite was pitifully small and somewhat alienated from the people. Democracy often seemed a luxury. The new rulers, usually from a dominant tribe, generally retained the national borders that had been drawn by the colonial powers. They stood off from, but took support from, both the Western and Eastern worlds.

In China, the Communists took advantage of the process of change. Chiang Kaishek, his armies exhausted by the fight against the Japanese invader and his regime weakened by raging internal corruption, fled to offshore exile in Taiwan. The disciplined Communists brought literacy and better health to the masses, but ruthlessly exterminated much of the middle class and fastened a tight dictatorship on China. The Soviet Union and China, those historic enemies, proclaimed their "fraternal" unity, and though it did not last, the perception of a monolithic Communism had much to do with the later U.S. involvement in Korea and Viet Nam.

Gandhi had been lucky in his adversary, for the British, though they imprisoned him, did not silence him. His message spread to the Indian masses and abroad, to touch the world's conscience. How many similar brave defiances, unheard, unchronicled, have taken place in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union itself the world will never know. But sometimes the protests of entire nations do get heard. Revolts and mass demonstrations broke out in East Germany in 1953, in Poland and Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Poland again in 1981. Each was crushed. Hungary has since been allowed much economic flexibility, but the police state and the Soviet army's presence have prevailed every time. The short-term lesson is that totalitarianism is not easily dislodged. The recurrence of outbreaks, however, suggests a reckoning that is only postponed.

Beyond the reach of the Soviet army, only two nations have in effect volunteered themselves into the Moscow orbit, Viet Nam and Cuba. The presence of a Cuban ally so close to American shores tempted Nikita Khrushchev to install missiles there in 1962. The dramatic confrontation of the Cuban missile crisis ended with Khrushchev's backing down, hastening his own downfall and spurring the humiliated Soviet leadership into a costly arms buildup. As for Castro, his first attempts to spread his revolution through Latin America were rebuffed, but now he is trying again in Central America.

In most of these turbulences, the presence of superior force was decisive. During Watergate, the U.S. went through its most serious political crisis in the 20th century without any bloodshed. Richard Nixon's illegal abuses of power led to congressional hearings, court trials and Supreme Court decisions. By these constitutional processes, he was forced to resign. The system, it was said, worked. In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger added a bizarre footnote. Nixon's chief deputy, Al Haig, once warned Kissinger that "it may be necessary to put in the 82nd Airborne Division around the White House" to protect the President should he seek to stay in power. Even the belated report of this calamitous possibility created little stir. Whatever other nations might do in crisis, it seemed inconceivable to Americans that troops could be called out to protect or to overthrow their leaders. Change might be sweeping, but there were understood limits.

In fact, despite all the emphasis on change, and despite the acceleration of the rate of change during the past 60 years, another powerful force was simultaneously at work all over the world, a desire for stability. Often it has carried the day.

--By Thomas Griffith This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.