Category: USH: Cold War

Video: They Chose China

Oscar nominated filmmaker Shuibo Wang aims his camera at the astonishing story of 21 American POWs who, after the Korean War ended, chose to live in China instead of returning the USA.

Using rare archival footage, excerpts from American and Chinese TV programs, as well as period and contemporary interviews, They Chose China chronicles the fascinating history of this group of young Americans who were hailed in China as “peace fighters” and denounced in America as “turncoats” and “traitors.”

U.S. media claimed that these young POW’s had been “brainwashed” by the Chinese communists. The film shows conditions inside these Chinese camps, featuring never-before-seen footage, plus contemporary interviews with some of the camps’ Chinese translators, instructors, lecturers, and officers.

'Operation Delirium:' Psychochemicals And Cold War

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, journalist Raffi Khatchadourian writes about a secret chemical weapons testing program run by the U.S. Army during the Cold War.

Khatchadourian’s article, “Operation Delirium,” profiles Jim Ketchum, one of the military doctors who helped lead the project. To this day, Ketchum maintains that the tests were conducted in the interest of a greater good.

Khatchadourian calls him “an unreconstructed advocate of chemical warfare,” and says that he “went about his work in the belief that chemicals are more humane instruments of warfare than bullets and shrapnel.”

Listen to an interview with Raffi Khatchadourian

Video – Cuban missile crisis: The other, secret one

maximum peril.

On the 50th anniversary of the crisis, the BBC has had exclusive access to new information that paints an even more dangerous picture of how the crisis unfolded.

Papers to be published next week reveal that far from the crisis ending neatly with the deal struck by President Kennedy and Soviet leader Khrushchev at the end of October, there was a second secret stage to the crisis with staggering implications for the world.

Joe Matthews spoke to Dr Svetlana Savranskay, Director of Russia Programmes, National Security Archive in Washington DC, about her research and has this report.

The End of History? by Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama  is an American political scientist, political economist, and author. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. Before that he served as a professor and director of the International Development program at the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University. He is best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies may signal the end point of humanity’s sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government.

Read this article which is based on a lecture he presented at the University of Chicago.

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affair’s yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in. the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.”

Zinn, A People’s War? (Ch 16)

The victors of World War II were the Soviet Union and the United States (also England, France and Nationalist China, but they were weak). Both these countries now went to work–without swastikas, goose-stepping, or officially declared racism, but under the cover of “socialism” on one side, and “democracy” on the other, to carve out their own empires of influence. They proceeded to share and contest with one another the domination of the world, to build military machines far greater than the Fascist countries had built, to control the destinies of more countries than Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan had been able to do. They also acted to control their own populations, each country with its own techniques-crude in the Soviet Union, sophisticated in the United States–to make their rule secure.

The war not only put the United States in a position to dominate much of the world; it created conditions for effective control at home…

Read Ch 16 of the People’s History

Answer these questions

George Kennan, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" (1947)

The single document that best illustrated American anti-communism and general suspicion of Soviet aspirations, was George Kennan’s famous Long Telegram of 1946. The Long Telegram was perhaps the most cited and most influential statement of the early years of the Cold War.

George Kennan had been a American diplomat on the Soviet front, beginning his career as an observer of the aftermath of the Russian Civil War. He witnessed collectivization and the terror from close range and sent his telegram after another two years’ service in Moscow from 1944 to 1946 as chief of mission and Ambassador Averell Harriman’s consultant. In 1946, Kennan was 44 years old, fluent in the Russian language and its affairs, and decidedly anti-communist.

The essence of Kennan’s telegram was published in Foreign Affairs in 1947 as The Sources of Soviet Conduct and circulated everywhere. The article was signed by “X” although everyone in the know knew that authorship was Kennan’s. For Kennan, the Cold War gave the United States its historic opportunity to assume leadership of what would eventually be described as the “free world.”

George F. Kennan’s Cold War

When historians discuss American actions in the Cold War, usually the first texts they cite are the Long Telegram, which Kennan composed in February, 1946, and the so-called X article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which he published, in Foreign Affairs, a year and a half later. Vietnam seems the lineal offspring of those pieces. Was Kennan misunderstood? The question is at the heart of any assessment of his career.

Read Menand’s review of Gaddis’ bio of Kennan

George Orwell: You and the Atomic Bomb

This George Orwell piece was originally published by the Tribune on October 19, 1945 within two months after atomic bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan by the only country ever to have used them to kill people and destroy cities, viz., the U.S.A. Orwell had written enough about the same (re: A. Bomb) but this particular piece was exceptional for the insights it shared about the world dispensation that lay ahead in the age of atomic weaponry. In addition, it was clear that the groundwork for his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four had been completed by this writing.