Word: westernization
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...late summer, the British crisis had an unreal look to it. Many a citizen could only take it on faith that behind the talk of the dollar gap, Britain's inadequate production and devaluation of the pound lay a dire threat to the stability of the Western World. In Washington, where men faced one another across the conference tables, the crisis was closely documented in bushels of unhappy statistics...
...blue-and-white sound truck, trailing behind it the jumble of static and jazz music, rolled along the narrow roads of western Pennsylvania last week into the town the maps call Brush Valley, and the 500 residents call Mechanicsburg. As it stopped before the general store, a dozen children gawked at its placarded sides: "Mrs. Robert L. Coffey Sr. for Congress. Brave Mother of a Brave...
MacArthur last week proclaimed anew Japan's conversion to democracy. Whenever talk of East Asia congealed with gloom, someone said: "Japan is the hope." And whoever looked at the possibilities of protecting Western Europe said: "The Germans will defend us." Winston Churchill, who used to call the Germans "the dull brute mass," more recently referred to them as "a mighty race without whose effective aid the glory of Europe could not be revived...
...Ironic" was the cheap and easy word for his and the Western world's change of attitude. Ten years after, four years after, was there a better word for the twist that had made the two great enemies of freedom the bulwarks against freedom's newly recognized enemy? Was the word redemption? Had the suffering of the vanquished expiated their guilt...
...those who doubted the regeneration of the Japanese and the Germans, there remained a hope that the Western world had been partly cleansed by World War II. It had clearly brought a recognition of evil back into a world that had been bemused for a hundred years with the idea of automatic, illimitable progress (i.e., heaven by osmosis). The world of 1949 was not one to call forth admiration; but it was no longer a smug world. It had not solved its problems, but it had begun to face them...