Yeah I almost put in Bretton Woods. James has pretty good sections on the Marshall Plan broken down by country, but I've already forgotten the details----the usual manipulations that have become more obvious with time. There was also an added twist of attempting to not reconstruct German industry, where the Brits were stealing the machinery in the name of a Pastoral Germany...that didn't work so well. I kinda of laughed at that one.
``In general the traditional arts were almost entirely lacking in any meaningful way to appropriate the experiences of millions. There was nothing like Goya's Disasters of War. You have to change over to film and documentary or neorealist movement to get to the war.''
> And even then. What have we got?
About the only explanation I can come up with is pretty much what stalled me out. Beside huge industrial piles of bodies, what else was there to say? I drew a lot of bodies partly because they gave me the excuse to work on anatomy and grotesque expressions. It turned out to be pretty good practice because Vietnam was just around the corner. But the photographs were just stunning and unmatchable...a Buddhist in lotus position on fire.
And then there was the scale of mass societies at war.
Other sections worth mention are those on India, South East Asia, and to a lesser extent China... These along with North Africa and the Middle East set the stage for most of the Cold War struggles where liberation was only one step toward a new series of smaller wars of suppression ad seriatim ... Capital needs subjugated masses in order to function. The very last thing the captains of industry want whatever their uniform are liberated masses.
The thread has morphed, well as it probably should. The trouble with later writers that Angelus Novus mentioned is they are more my generation. and in particular I am not interested because they like me, had no experiences, except the distant effects on domestic life. They might be good reads for other reasons, but that's a different matter.
My parents (or one set of them) lived disordered lives after the war, lose, bohemians, sort of outcasts. Most of their friends were living off the GI Bill, trying to paint or write, and avoid work as much as possible. The kids were pretty much on their own. Maybe it was their age. They went into the military at 18 or so and hadn't really lived their own lives and they simply wanted that back. When I think back on them they were certainly conducting their own war of liberation. It had the same result in the small form as it did on the grand scale, a complex and ambiguous disaster.
CG