In April, sixteen Western European nations signed off on a plan
put forward by the US Secretary of State George Marshall and promising
them 17 billion dollars in economic and technical aid to be lined up in
the next four years. The Americans conditioned the assistance on the absence
of Communists in the governments of the recipient countries. The Marshall
Plan split Europe in two and the division became immediately felt in Germany
where the Western powers turned their occupation zones into an advance
line of their new policy of containing Communism. The Soviet government
reacted strongly to these developments and proceeded to enforce a blockade
of the Allied garrisons in Berlin and of about 2,5 million inhabitants
of West Berlin with the intention of driving out the western powers. The
blockade lasted from the summer of 1948 to the summer of 1949. The western
powers responded by organizing the supply of Berlin by air and the Soviet
did nothing to disrupt the airlift over East German territory.
Acting on the strength of what was going on in Berlin, Harry
Truman won a second term in the White House in November, 1948. The Democrats
also regained control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate
in a sign of a major turnaround in the American public opinion which was
now fully behind the policy of "containment in force" initiated
by the 33rd President of the United States.
On May 18, the Soviet Union granted formal recognition to the
State of Israel, roughly a year after the United Nations worked out and
approved a plan to divide Palestine into the State of Israel and the Arab-populated
Palestinian territories. The division sparked a space of armed clashes
and, after the State of Israel was officially proclaimed and the British
troops moved out, seven Arab states started the first Arab-Israeli war.
In 1948 Mahatma Gandhi, the 79 leader of the Indian national
liberation movement, died at the hands of Hindu nationalists opposed to
the country's partition into India proper and Pakistan. A devout pacifist,
Gandhi was an advocate of a peaceful struggle for independence and was
repeatedly incarcerated for his views.
1948 was the last in the life of Louis Jean, the younger of the
Lumiere brothers. His elder brother, Augustine Marie, survived him by six
years and died in 1954 at the advanced age of 92. The Lumiere brothers
invented motion picture projection and in 1985 they patented a kinetoscope,
which was a combination of a camera and a projector where the images sped
past the lens at the rate of 16 frames per second. The Lumiere Cinematographe,
which the brothers introduced in Paris on December 28, 1895, was the first
such cinema in the whole city showing their own films.
The year 1948 was the first in the life of the British composer
Andrew Lloyd Webber whose rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar took the whole
world by storm when the author was only 22 years old. It gave rise to a
whole new genre in music, followed by Evita, recreating the life of the
Argentinian leader Eva Peron, and the musical Cats, all of which play to
full houses all around the world. His first hit, Jesus Christ Superstar,
still sells in millions of copies worldwide.
1948 is rightly considered the beginning of cybernetics. It was
then that its founding father, US mathematician Norbert Wiener, published
a book where he outlined the fundamentals of the science which made computers
and software-operated units so commonplace at the end of the 20th century.
THE 20th CENTURY:YEAR AFTER YEAR series
of historical programs is prepared by Vladimir Zhamkin.
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