<>1946:European
RESULTS OF WORLD WAR TWO AND BEGINNINGS OF THE COLD WAR
- Over all Europe "the debris covered the graves of some 35 million people". The figure might
more accurately be 45 million deaths
- A scholarly commission appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin studied the question of Soviet
casualties, for the first time accurately and comprehensively
- They reported 26,640,000 deaths in the USSR during WW2
- This means that over the 1519 days of the Soviet/Nazi war -- nearly four years -- just over 17,538 Soviet
citizens died on average every day
- About one out of every seven Soviet citizens were killed in the war
- Double or triple that fraction for the number wounded
- Dead and wounded equaled something like half the population of the USSR
[W illustrates Soviet losses in WW2]
- A leading American (English-born) historian David
Kennedy has written about the impact of WW2 [David M. Kennedy, "War transformed America" [1985my27:ERG] =
More than half of all Europe's war dead were civilians.
America lost about 400,000 lives...almost none civilian.... Four years of bitter
fighting and Hitler's scorched-earth retreat from the Soviet Union had destroyed
1,700 Soviet cities and towns, 70,000 villages. Three-quarters of the Soviet
Union's industrial plant was wiped out, a loss that President John F. Kennedy in
1963 compared with 'the devastation of this country east of Chicago'. In
Germany, massive Allied bombing had blocked harbors, blasted bridges and gutted
homes. Someone estimated that to clear the mountain of rubble from Berlin would
require continuous hauling of 500 freight cars per day for 16 years. In all of
Europe, production of food, clothing and other goods had all but ground to a
halt. Contraband cigarettes pilfered from the U.S. armies of occupation served
in many places as a substitute for currency. England, for 200 years the seat of
the world's greatest empire, was impoverished and demoralized, destined never
again to play the part of a great power
About USA, Kennedy wrote =
record breaking billion-bushel wheat harvests in 1944 and
1945, 196,000 aircraft and more than 40 billion bullets since 1940. Gross
national product vaulted from less than $100 billion in 1940 to more than $200
billion in 1945. Corporate profits rose from about $6 billion in 1940 to almost
twice that amount four years later. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans had
never had it so good--and they wanted it a lot better. [...] Almost in one
stroke, the war swept away the blight of economic depression that had afflicted
the United States for 12 stagnant years before Pearl Harbor.
Roosevelt's best New Deal unemployment rate was 14-plus per cent; in 1945, it was close to 1%.
Millions came into the labor market: 3 million housewives, or 30% of total workforce.
The South received a disproportionate volume of defense contracts, including nearly
$6 billion of federally financed industrial facilities. These wartime federal dollars
helped give birth to the Sun Belt -- ironically, a region that would in time form the electoral base for
assaults on the idea of government intrusion in the economy.
Indeed, "the war amplified to unprecedented proportions the role of the federal government in American
life."
In summary: "Alone among the combatants, America emerged from the global conflict not merely intact, but invigorated."
\\
*--LOOP on "finance"
*--Website on USSR WW2 casualties
*--RT News| "‘Children of War’: Heart-rending WWII diaries of Soviet children" [E-TXT]
*--Gerold Frank, The Tragedy of the DP's [displaced persons, refugees
(rfg)] [P20:281]
*--Bruno Foa, specialist in Inter-American Affairs and member of the Board of Governors of
the Federal Reserve System, described Europe in Ruins [P20:284
| Notice Foa's stunning disregard for destruction and death in the Soviet Union
and eastern Europe (indirectly corrected by editors of P20 on p. 333)]
*--When the English biographer of Winston Churchill, Martin Gilbert, looked back
on the role of the Soviet Union in WW2, he made pains to emphasize the
remarkable flow of material aide from England and other Allies to the USSR
during the war. One set of statistics implied something of the gruesomeness of
modern warfare =
Medical supplies were likewise on a vast and comprehensive
scale, including more than 10 million surgical needles and half a million pairs
of surgical gloves. Other medical supplies, as the Soviet casualties mounted,
included 20,000 amputation knives, 15,000 amputation saws, 100 portable X-ray
sets, 4,000 kilograms of local anesthetics, more than a million doses of
the recently discovered antibiotics, ... sedatives, heart and brain stimulants,
800,000 forceps for bone operations, instruments for brain and eye operations,
and a million meters of oilcloth for covering wounds. [1985my19:MGW:10]
One-million meters worth of oilcloth to cover wounds equals 660 miles, the
distance from Eugene OR to San Francisco CA and yet 100 more miles further
south
Under the shadow of WW2 death and destruction, the forty-year-long "Cold War" broke out
*--LOOP on "Cold War"
<>1946:French author, philosopher, pundit and public
figure Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) published 1945 speech "Existentialism is a Humanism"
[CWC:482-503] and "Existentialism" [CCS:587-608 |
CCS,2:873-94 | BMC1:675-9 | BMC4:677-82] and
"Materialism and Revolution" [BMC4:766-8]
*--Sartre was scholar and fighter. He participated in the underground French resistance
to Nazi rule in France and spent nine months in a prison for that
*--Sartre built on existentialist teachings of Heidegger,
with whom Sartre studied in 1933:1934; Berlin
\\
[W]
<>1946:German émigré philosopher Ernst Cassirer,
The
Myth of the State [P20:293]
*--In this same year, German Historian of broad and enduring European fame, Friedrich
Meinecke (1862-1954), reflected on what he called The German Catastrophe [P20:308]
<>1946:Russian émigré religious philosopher Nikolai
Berdiaev, The Russian Idea. A remarkable
40-year career was winding down
*1946:USA. Émigré Russian scholar George Fedotov published
The Russian
Religious Mind [cf. KMM:257-81]
<>1946ja10:England,
London | United Nations Organization
[W] [UNO] General Assembly met for first session
*--The UNO Charter reads,
We the peoples ... determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge
of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind [presumably referring to WW1
and WW2 without enumerating the dozens of lesser but devastating 20th-century military episodes] ...
reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person
\\
*--Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The
Past, Present and Future of the United Nations | This book "rests on the reasonable assumption
that whether we approve of the organization's past record or not, the changes taking place in world
society will make us turn to it again and again"
*2006jy21:TLS:4-6 | Rosemary Righter offered a broad "hard-nosed" critique of Kennedy's optimistic account
<>1946fe:Moscow | USA ambassador to USSR George
Frost Kennan sent "Long Telegram" [TXT] which
laid out the urgent need to "contain" Soviet ambitions with firmness and clear
adherence to the powerful principles of US life, all in anticipation of a time
when the doomed Soviet experiment would surely collapse
<>1946fe24:1955;
Argentina elected Juan Domingo Perón president
- Juan Perón's version of statist government lasted nearly 10 years and was called
Peronismo, combining certain features of militaristic Fascism with Soviet-style
proletarianism and more ancient Catholic authoritarianism
- Perón was very popular among wage-laborers and managed a planned economy
in ways that were remindful of Soviet 5-year plans or Turkish economic modernization [ID]
- His wife, Evita, was a movie star who dazzled Argentineans
- 1946:1949; Perón speeches [SWH:392-7]
- Autarchic [stand-alone or independent] and protectionist economic policies as well
as the pro-labor stance alienated USA
\\
*--LOOP on "fascist" and "fascism"
<>1946mr:Moscow | English charge d'affaires Frank Roberts telegraphed British
Foreign Office, and later dispatched a copy of Kennan's "Long Telegram" and a
statement [TXT]
that he had collaborated in the composition of it [Kennan,Origins]
<>1946mr05:USA MO, Fulton |
Winston Churchill delivered "Iron Curtain" speech [TXT], which
was taken my many as a sufficient strategic vision for
international relations in the post-WW2 world
- This speech is often taken as the Symbolic beginnings of the "Cold War" which shaped
the destiny of much of the globe over the following forty-five years and led to the creation of two
unprecedented "military-industrial complexes"
- Vast collection of website documents relating to the Cold War, with keyword
search [W]
- 1941:1949; Documents of US foreign
policy [W]
- UO website MAP moves dynamically through the main eras of Cold War in Western
Europe [MAP]
\\
- CRH::414-29| David C. Engerman, "The Cold War"| An
early 21st-century summary from a Russian & world historian's point
of view [ID#1 |
ID#2 |
ID#3]
- Some of the more interesting general accounts of the Cold War were written by neither
Americans nor Russians. EG=
- French journalist Andre Fontaine, History
of the Cold War, and his English counterpart =
- D. F. Fleming, The Cold War
and Its Origins, 1917-1960
- Those two put the Cold War in a satisfying long-term historical context
- Mexican poet Octavio Paz, One Earth,
Four or Five Worlds:Reflections on Contemporary History, a broad interpretation,
esp. ch. 2, "Imperial Democracy" and ch. 3, "Totalitarian Empire". Paz wrote the very
popular Labyrinth of Solitude (1962)
where, among other things, he compared Mexico and other Latin American nations with western Europe
- If Paz favored the USA in his account, English writer John Strachey,
The End of Empire (1960) was
more balanced in his criticism. See two chapters (19 and 20, both titled "New Empires for Old?")
- William A. Williams, American-Russian
Relations, 1781-1947 (1952) was the first influential US "revisionist" history of
American-Russian relations
- He sought to correct the one-sided picture of Soviet responsibility and US innocence
- Williams measured US responsibility for the military build-up after WW2 and at the beginning of the Cold-War
- Walter LaFeber's America,
Russia and the Cold War, 1945-...., (many editions) has been perhaps the most influential "revisionist" history of
the Cold War itself
- Williams and LaFeber were both limited by the astonishing fact that neither was able to use
Russian-language sources. However critical of the USA, these two were essentially USA-centric
- Paul Dukes brought a critical attitude to the comparative study of the
cold war, balancing English language and Russian language sources and placing the question
in the broadest possible context of long-term shared historical experience. Dukes
published several studies =
- John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold
War, 1941-1947 is arguably the most balanced account. Like Williams and
LaFeber, Gaddis could be called "USA-centric"
- Mark Garrison and Abbott Gleason
edited Shared
Destiny: Fifty Years of Soviet American Relations (1985) which was a joint
US/Soviet project with articles on mutual (mis)perceptions (83-145). This
publication included a good memoir by George Frost Kennan (1-18)
\\
*--LOOP on "Cold War"
<>1946mr15:1951; USSR
fourth Five-year Plan actually lasted five years
*--Nikolai Voznesenskii now served as Chairman of the State Planning Commission of the USSR,
delivered a "Report on the Five-Year Plan, 1946-1950", but did not survive to
see its conclusion
<>1946mr08:mr18:USA, GA Savannah |
Inaugural meeting of boards of governors of the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund [IMF]
*--World Bank [W]
*--IMF [W]
*--Critical articles on history of World Bank [W]
*--CF=Bretton Woods Conference [ID]
\\
*--William Easterly, The White Man's Burden:
Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
*2014no:Political underpinnings of IMF policy stretched into the new millennium
[EG]
*--LOOP on "finance"
<>1946mr19:USSR renamed its "Commissariats".
It adopted the older term "Ministries" for the main central state institutions
*--New Sovet ministrov [Soviet (or Council) of Ministers] with
Stalin as chairman, replaced old revolutionary-sounding Sovnarkom
[Soviet of Peoples' Commissariats]
*--Party and state were now even more closely and firmly joined as a single unit
in the critical months of post-WW2 recovery
<>1946ap:Manchuria by this time
was free of Soviet
troops who had stripped regional industry as they pulled out
*--Soviet troops soon out of Sinkiang Province (and Tungsten mines) of far western China
<>1946ap25:jy15; Paris | Allied Council
of Foreign Ministers meeting #2
*--USA Secretary of State Byrnes report [W]
<>1946my26:Czechoslovak elections
gave plurality (38%) of vote to Communist Party
<>1946je14:UNO Atomic Energy Commission heard USA
"Baruch Plan" for international atomic development authority [RFP2,3:88-92]
<>1946je19:UNO Atomic
Energy Commission heard Soviet plan for international control of atomic energy [RFP2,3:97-9]
*--Soviet response followed by US response
<>1946jy29:oc15; Paris Peace Conference
[W]
<>1946se19:USSR kolkhoz (collective farm) reestablished [SGv:356-61]
<>1946se27:Washington DC | USSR ambassador to USA Nikolai Novikov
sent 19-page cable to Soviet Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov
<>1946oc:German zone occupied by USSR staged first elections,
as described (along with much else of great interest) by ex-Party member Wolfgang
Leonhard, Child of the Revolution
<>1946oc23:New York City | United Nations Organization General Assembly
met
*1946de05:NYC became permanent headquarters of UNO
<>1946no04:de12; NYC | Allied Council
of Foreign Ministers meeting #3 [W]
*--LOOP on "Cold War"
<>1947:1948; USSR cultural
apparatchik Andrei Zhdanov on literature and the arts [RRC1,3:695-704]
<>1947:Amsterdam | German theorists and
culture critics, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, published Philosophische
Fragmente [Dialectic
of Enlightenment] with a chapter titled "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass
Deception" [TXT]
- Adorno and Horkheimer were bitter critics of the pop-arts
- They wrote about the culture industry that "its appeal to its own properly commercial nature [...] has long been
a subterfuge that it uses to evade responsibility for lies."
- 1941:Adorno launched himself on commercial culture in an essay written with George Simpson, "On Popular
Music" [TXT]
- 1963:Adorno returned to the topic of commercial culture with a radio address, "Culture Industry Reconsidered"
[TXT]
- 1949:Soviet propaganda cartoon assailed influence of USA jazz [FLM] in
a way that echoed Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov's warning against cultural imperialism
[ID]
\\
*1984mr30:Gordon Welty essay on Adorno's critique of
pop-arts
[W]
<>1947:USA composer and businessman Charles Ives won Pulitzer Prize for his
"Fifth Symphony" [Wagar:179]
<>1947:Scottish-born USA political philosopher
Robert M. MacIver argued in his book
The Web of Government (CF=Georg Simmel [ID]) that diversity and multiplicity, rather than
unity and harmony, were the essence of liberal
democratic society [CCS,1:988-1006]
<>1947ja:AJS published USA anthropologist Robert
Redfield's "The Folk Society" which opened with its main hypothesis =
"Understanding of society in general and of our own modern urbanized society in
particular can be gained through consideration of the societies least like our own: the
primitive, or folk, societies" [CCS,1:568-89]
*--Redfield gave new vitality to the late-19th-century ideas of
Tönnies,
Durkheim and
Veblen
<>1947fe14:UNO Security Council heard Andrei
Gromyko's critique of Baruch Plan [RFP2,3:92-7]
<>1947mr10:UNO Security Council heard US critique of Soviet atomic energy plan [RFP2,3:99-101]
<>1947mr10:ap24; Moscow
| Allied Council of Foreign Ministers meeting #4. USA Secretary
of State George Marshall report [W]
<>1947mr12:USA "Truman Doctrine" announced
[TXT = (1) F/militant minority/ and (2) read next 12 short
paragraphs to learn Truman's definitions of (a) the problems and (b) the solutions for Greece]
- Full set of documents
describes how USA decided to provide military and other assistance to nations threatened by "communist takeover"
- Greece and Turkey were at the center of attention
- 1952:1962; US aid to 90 countries around the world amounted to
$50 billion, of which $45 billion (90%) was devoted to military buildup [Zinn:430]
- US manufacturers of military hardware were able to meet the needs of these military buildups
- They thus succeeded in their efforts to keep up earlier WW2 production and profit levels in the post-WW2 world
- US tax dollars were routed through the budgets of US aid recipients and applied to procurement of US-made military hardware
- Particularly among US allies in the "Third World" [ID], ruling authorities now worked strenuously
to militarize against their domestic political oppomemts and against potential international opponents
- All international and domestic opponents of US post-war plans were packaged together as "a national security threat" and
labeled as threat of "communist takeover"
<>1947mr22:ap28; USSR Foreign Ministry considered the German problem [RFP2,3:104-6]
<>1947je05:USA Secretary of State (General) George C. Marshall
(1947-1949 = Secretary of State | 1950-1951 = Secretary of Defense) announced "Marshall Plan" for US-funded economic recovery of Europe
[P20:290]
- George Frost Kennan (in Garrison, Shared Destiny)
summarized meaning of Marshall Plan with accent on European and Japanese economic recovery from the devastation of war
- This was the dominant motive, the strategic vision, of US officials like Kennan and Marshall in the early Cold War period
- Kennan contrasted the economic motive with the militarist motive
- The economic motive sought to restore or create market economies in areas of strategic and economic importance to the USA
- The militarist motive was based on an inflated national security threat posed
by Soviet military power and on a desire to preserve or enhance US power
- Inflated fear provided a motive for the creation of NATO and a shift of attention from civilian
economic recovery to military defense and the construction of a huge military-industrial complex
- All those who promote this shift, said Kennan, "mistake the Soviet threat for a
military one, and feel that there must be a military response, in the form of the NATO alliance"
- 1947jy:"European Recovery Program" (Marshall Plan) offered to USSR but rejected. USSR was not excluded, but participation would have been nearly
impossible since the Plan was designed for capitalist markets [Martin Walker paragraph on this issue]
- Over $13B distributed in four years
- European manufacturing rose 35% above pre-WW2 levels
- Agricultural output rose 10% above pre-WW2 levels
- The Marshall Plan [US governmental "bail out" of the old European market
economies] was a major component of post-WW2 European recovery
- Within three years, a similar but less publicized and far more unilateral US
program was introduced in Japan [ID]
\\
*-- LOOP on "NATO"
<>1947je23:USA Taft-Hartley Act
moved toward reversal of the more progressive features of the Roosevelt "New Deal"
<>1947jy:FoA.
George Frost Kennan,
"The Sources of Soviet Conduct" (so-called "Mr. X" article)
[TXT], a refinement of Kennan's "Long
Telegram" with an eye to providing a strategic vision for the
Marshall Plan
*--Compare Kennan's views with the views of Kennan's Soviet counterpart
\\
*--See Decline of the West? George Kennan and His Critics,
with a debate by John Lewis Gaddis and Eduard Mark on Kennan's famous "Mr. X article"
<>1947jy08:USA, Roswell NM| Opening of the "UFO" era = Roswell Daily Record
ran this headline: "RAAF [Roswell Army Air Field] captures flying saucer on ranch in Roswell region", and the story was
picked up across the country
\\
*2016:Aljazeera| "Aliens on the mind: Roswell and the UFO phenomenon"
[E-TXT]
<>1947au:Soviet economist Evgenii Varga interpreted
post WW2 world in which what he called "new democracies" would play a decisive role [RFP2,3:159-66]
- Varga focused on Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Albania but in a manner
widely relevant to the emerging global Cold-War era
- The gravamen of Varga's strategic vision was
the notion of a wide world of nations neither capitalist (like USA) nor socialist (like USSR)
- Varga's insights were relevant to the ruined industrial economies of Europe and more broadly
to what was coming to be called "The Third World"
- These would be the decisive arena of opportunity and conflict in the
post-WW2 era
- The presumed First World and the Second World were, in one order or the other, USSR and USA
- Which "world" was First and which Second was never settled, but these two "worlds" were now to
function as the dominant global metropols dueling for advantage in Europe and the "Third World"
- Mazower.GOVERNING:ch#9 presumes the USSR was the
Cold-War era "Second World"
- 1952au14:French political pundit Alfred Sauvy [Wki]
possibly coined the phrase "Third World" =
- Sauvy wrote in L'Observateur, "...ce Tiers Monde ignoré, exploité, méprisé comme le Tiers Etat, veut lui aussi,
être quelque chose" ["...this ignored, exploited, scorned Third World like the Third Estate
[Wki], wants to become something too"]
- It is of some deep significance that Sauvy perceived the parallel between, on the one hand, domestic social and
political issues in the time of the French Revolution [ID] and, on the other, the
international social and political issues 150 years later, in the time of the Cold War
- Who was the first and who was the second world, USA or USSR, was not relevant to the main argument, namely, that
the primary arena of opportunity and conflict in the post-WW2 era would not be there, directly between the first and the
second worlds
- The main arena of opportunity and conflict would be, first, war-ravaged Europe and then elsewhere in the globe, in Asia, Central and
South America, "AfroAsia" and sub-Saharan Africa in a vast periphery now called the Third World [W]
- Soviet Views of the Post-war World Economy: An Official Critique of
Eugene Varga's "Changes in the Economy of Capitalism Resulting from the Second World War (1948)
- But was the opportunity and conflict just a matter of military confrontation?
- Many assumed so [EG]
- But some, like Sauvy [above], saw broader social and economic issues
- And others saw broader issues of international development =
- 1938:African nationalist Jomo Kenyatta was an early advocate of independence from "Western" colonial/imperialist
dominion [SWH:376-81]
- The political ideology of Kwame Nkrumah illustrated the
influence of American, Soviet and European ideas on a Third World leader
- The Vietnam War and Afghanistan War illustrated
how the "Cold" War got "hot" in the Third World
- The long-term fate of the Congo basin
illustrated many features of this new Third World, as did the troubled experiences in AfroAsia in the areas north of equatorial
Africa and in the "Near East"
- 1947:Russian veteran Mikhail Kalashnikov invented a remarkable weapon, a machinegun, the "Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947"
- Kalashnikov was himself wounded in WW2, and was angry and disappointed by the number of fellow Soviet
soldiers killed for want of good weaponry
- The AK-47 automatic assault rifle was soon acknowledged as the finest, cheapest, simplest and most
reliable field weapon of the modern epoch
- Over the next half century nearly 100 million were produced and distributed to the Red Army and to all
Warsaw Pact [ID] members
- The People's Republic of China adopted its version of the AK-47
- Regular and irregular military and paramilitary units throughout the "Third World" picked up the weapon
- Afghan warriors used it effectively against the Soviet Army itself in the 1980s
- Kalashnikov, in his memoirs, The Gun that Changed the World, wrote, "When I see Bin Laden on
television with his Kalashnikov, I'm disgusted, but what can I do about it?"
- USA also produced a military rifle which gained broad "civilian" use
[E-TXT]
\\
*2016my04:
The Guardian| "Caribbean neighbors Cuba and Puerto Rico wonder who really won cold war"
*1986:Jerry Hough, The Struggle
for the Third World: Soviet Debates and American Options
*1986:Jan Triska, ed., Dominant
Powers and Subordinate States: The United States in Latin America and the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe
- See especially Robert A. Packenham, "Capitalist Dependency and Socialist Dependency: The Case of Cuba" [ch13:310-41]
- Jeffrey L. Hughes, "The Politics of Dependence in Poland and
Mexico" [ch14:342-70]
- Jan F. Triska, "Summary and Conclusion" [440-70]
- LOOPS = Poland | Cuba
*1985:Joseph Manfredi, US-Soviet
Resource Competition in Central and Southern Africa
*--Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World
*--Ellen M. Charlton studied women in the Third World, caught between Soviet and US developmental
influences [PWT2:396-401]
*--More on Third-World women confronting European-style modernization
[SWH:427-46]
*--László Borhi, Hungary in the Cold War, 1945-1956 - Between the United States and the Soviet Union suggests that
Hungary's position was not unlike that of "Third World" peoples squeezed between USA and USSR
<>1947au15:India and Pakistan were declared independent
of English imperial rule and separate from one another as two sovereign nation-states
- India independence leader, dissenter, and resistance leader, long
imprisoned by the English, Jawaharlal Nehru became Indian Prime Minister [for some of his writings, see
CCS,2:776-99]
- 1942au:1945mr; Nehru, wrote The Discovery
of India, which described in one section India's resentment of British rule [P20:323]
- Almost a century of struggle against English imperialist rule, stretching back at least to
the Sepoy Rebellion, had now achieved its main objective
- 1948ja30:Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu militant who opposed cutting Pakistan loose from India
- Gandhi's nearly 30-year struggle was however crowned with success
- India as a sovereign and independent nation had very broad global significance
- The new independence of India, and then soon China and Indonesia, can
be understood in a much broader historical context =
\\
*--LOOP on "AfroAsia"
<>1947se:USSR established
Cominform [Communist Information Bureau] as umbrella structure over eastern European territories, with
Andrei Zhdanov playing a key role [RFP2,3:77-87
and 167-71 | RWP1,3:172-8 | ORW:240-3]
*--Was this in reaction to the "Truman Doctrine" and the "Marshall Plan"?
[ID]
*--Was it an independent act of Soviet diplomatic aggression?
*--Did the Cominform represent the rebirth of the Comintern? [ID]
*--LOOP on "Cold War" ends temporarily here, after
covering the initial 2-year-long chronology|
Much that follows in SAC over the next 40 years is directly relevant to the full
sweep of the world-shaping "Cold War"| F/Cold War/
<>1947oc:Geneva | Twenty-three nation-states
stepped outside the UNO to sign the first General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT) [ID]
*--The agreement was meant to be taken up as a function of the UNO, where it would have
come under some degree of global administrative oversight within an International Trade Organization (ITO), but
that world institution was never created [ID]
*--GATT lasted, with expansion and amendment, up to the 1995 creation of the WTO
//
[W]
<>1947oc:USA Department of State publication
Korea's Independence reviewed
international agreements on free and independent Korea (with particular
attention to USA-USSR agreements) [Excerpts = RFP2,3:123-34]
<>1947no+: France was rocked by a
two-month general strike, provoked by post-war shortages
- 1948jy:Italy soon also in the grip of a general strike
- The most ambitious and famous post-WW2 policy, the Marshall Plan [ID], was aimed
to satisfy the needs of war-torn western European economies in such a way as to
- Bolster standard free-market arrangements
- Avoid any further wage-labor drift into radical social-democratic policy, and most important
- Block any drift toward Soviet-style policy
- The growing military confrontation characteristic of the Cold War helped put a great
Europe-wide social-economic
crisis in the shade of a great global military crisis
- Fear of the "Soviet threat" masked an even deeper fear in European and North American financial
circles that post-WW2 Europe might of its own political volition move toward radical policies, with or without subversive
action on the part of the USSR
- Repeated outbursts of popular discontent over the next few years required serious efforts to meet the
needs of wage-labor, and not just in "The West"
<>1947no25;de16; London | Allied
Council of Foreign Ministers meeting #5
*--USA Secretary of State George Marshall report [W TXT]
<>1947no25:1960s; USA House of Representatives Committee
on Un-American Activities issued the first systematic "Hollywood blacklist" and launched
an "anti-communist" witch-hunt that lasted more than a decade. Anti-Bolshevik
hysteria spread beyond
the entertainment industries, and not without encouragement from certain
quarters
*--In the weeks prior to the issuance of the blacklist, Ronald Reagan
(actor and future USA President) and
Walt Disney (the creator of Donald Duck) gave the Committee damaging testimony about insidious communist
influence in one of the major film-industry labor unions [E-TXT]
*--Just as before WW1
[LOOP on "wage-labor", 2 hops, 1912+], so also as the Cold War unfolded, establishmentarian fear of domestic political mobilization of
post-WW2 wage-labor
played a role in shaping international policy. Chauvinism (whether nationalistic
or world-revolutionary) can work as an antidote to domestic unrest
\\
*--Wki
*1992:Dan Georgakas, "The Hollywood Blacklist" [E-TXT]
*--Website on HUAC reach beyond movies
[W]. You might click on
Paul Robeson, or
Aaron Copland, or
Langston Hughes, or
Dorothy Parker.
And read on =
<>1947no26:USA National Security Act
[E-TXT] created
National Security Council [NSC] and Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]
*--WW2 was over, but influential interests in Washington DC felt the USA ought to take
these big steps in the direction of something like a "national-security state"
to meet perceived and much advertised national security threats, mainly from
abroad but also generated domestically
*--The post-WW2 era provided many episodes that could be construed as apparent national security threats to the
USA = [EG#1 | EG#2 | EG#3 |
EG#4]
\\
*--Official website of the CIA
*--A website history of the NSC
*--Soon these national security agencies much expanded earlier WW2-era efforts to shape public knowledge about
world events when they introduced "Project Mockingbird", a USA example of what SAC calls "positive" state
censorship of mass media [ID]
*--Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA played America
*--Garry Wills traces the results of "national security" from this time until well
after the end of the Cold War in the time of the early 21st-century "war on terror"
[TXT = five paragraphs]
\\
*--LOOP on Censorship
<>1948:1951; USA Economic Cooperation Agency (ECA) administered
*1951:1955; Mutual Security Program
*1955+: Previous organizations absorbed into US State Department as International Cooperation Administration
<>1948:English activist and pundit
George Orwell [W] wrote
anti-utopian novel, 1984 (KNIGHT call number PR6029.R8N5+1 is a
good student's edition, with text plus documents and commentary)
- Website devoted
to the writings of Orwell (sent to SAC by Melissa Rowe)
- With 1984, Orwell warned the post-WW2 world of the future which, he feared, loomed in the early Cold-War era
- Orwell, in his novel's words, characterized that looming future as "a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever"
- The significance of this depressing futuristic novel derived less from its obvious critique of the previous thirty
years of European totalitarian statism (EG=Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR) and more from its
broader critique of an emerging modernizing managerial political culture and the threat
to traditional "Western" values posed by military-industrialism
- A central motif of the tale was how ruling elites more often manipulate public opinion and harass dissidents in connection
with constant national security threats emanating from vaguely defined but demonic enemies
- The demon Orwell exposed in this seminal work did not come from the USSR, it simply sank its claws deeper and
sooner there than in "The West"
- This demon threatened Orwell's own island nation and other areas
of the post-WW2 world (the geographical setting of the novel is England in the future year 1984)
\\
*--Ian Slater, Orwell: The Road to Airstrip One [UO E-TXT
especially part IV, pp. 175+, "THE GLOBAL VISION"]
*2013oc12:Truthout|>Sharp,Kathleen | "Living the Orwellian Life"
[E-TXT]
<>1948:English philosopher C.E.M. Joad
attacked contemporary cultural "subjectivism" and lamented the failure of standards earlier common in "The West"
[BMC4:658-9]
- 1948:English historian Arnold Toynbee seemed to go a different direction
than Joad (above). Toynbee seemed to welcome a "multi-cultural" future. He wrote =
Our own descendents are not going to be just Western, like ourselves. They are going to be heirs of Confucius
[ID] and Lao-Tse
[ID] as well as Socrates
[ID], Plato
[ID], and Plotinus
[ID]; heirs of Zarathustra
[ID] and Muhammad
[ID] as well as Elijah
[ID] and Elishah and Peter
[ID] and Paul
[ID]; heirs of Shankara
[ID] and Ramanujah
[ID] as well as Clement
[ID] and Origines
[ID]; heirs of the Cappadocian Fathers of Orthodox Church
[ID] as well as our African Augustine
[ID] and our Umbrian Benedict
[ID]; heirs of Ibn Khaldun
[ID] as well as Bossuet
[ID]; and heirs, if still wallowing in the
Serbonian Bog of politics [EG], of Lenin
[ID] and Gandhi
[ID] and Sun Yat-Sen
[ID] as well as Cromwell
[ID] and George Washington and Mazzini
[ID]
[Civilization on Trial:90]
- What a playful but obviously serious ecumenical vision of a highly educated, international and
multi-cultural future generation, feeding on world-wide traditions of inherited wisdom
- Toynbee identified this future generation as a global, rather than Western, civilization
- Apparently these future folks, once enrolled in a good university, will take and do very well
in some sort of lower-division "group-satisfying" world history course
- In a contrary direction here in this same 1948 publication, Toynbee presented an updated version of
a lecture, "The Dwarfing of Europe", originally delivered in 1926 under the shadow of post-WW1 collapse
- The original troubled lecture was distinctly less comfortable with "multi-culturalism" and
more concerned to protect the values of "Western Civilization", much like Joab (above)
- Now, this second time around, the updated lecture was delivered in the shadow of post-WW2 anxieties, and it
showed the influence of costly victory for England in WW2
- But Toynbee now was more optimistic and perhaps even aggressive
- He sought to encourage those who were inclined to launch themselves on a crusade against
the USSR, here at the beginning of the Cold War
- Throughout the first 32 minutes of the approximately 40 minute lecture, Toynbee used the word "West" over sixty times
(in its several standard permutations: Western, Westernization, etc.), at a rate roughly
equal to once every 30 seconds
- The civilization now said to be "on trial" was "The West"
- Then, in the final eight minutes of this lecture, as he turned his attention to the
new and dominant relationship of the USA to Europe, he dropped the morpheme "West" altogether
- He would not, of course, imagine any sense at all in the phrase "Western
influence on the USA" or "Westernization of the USA"
- That appears, however, close to what he wanted to say
- His central theme was the post-WW2 "dwarfing" of Europe next to the two great super-powers
- But Toynbee thought the post-WW2 era offered better options
than the post-WW1 era because the USA would now protect "The West", rather than scoot back home and turn its back
on Europe as it did after WW1 [ID]
- Michael Kraus, The North Atlantic Civilization was a collection of documents (with several
interpretive secondary essays to strengthen his argument)
- Kraus described the "North Atlantic" as a distinct transnational civilization, more focused or coherent
than "Western Civilization" or "The West", certainlly more so
than any other civilization, EG= "the Communist Bloc" and those out there in the "Third World"
- Kraus labored in this cause over the first ten years of the military alliance called North
Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO]
- You might try F/The West/ just on this SAC page to get some sense of the phrase's hypnotic ubiquity
\\
- Thomas C. Patterson's vigorously argued Inventing Western Civilization seems unaware
of the creative "invention" by Russian Slavophiles at least 100 years earlier
- Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, "Toynbee's Interpretation of Russian History";
Edward Pessen, "Toynbee on the United States"; and Theodore H. Von Laue, "Toynbee Amended and Updated",
in Toynbee: Reappraisals (1990)
- GO 1993:USA
<>1948:USA mathematician and computer pioneer
Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) published a pioneer work, Cybernetics
<>1948fe:Atlantic
Monthly | Walter Lippmann addressed the need for USA to avoid abstract or
ideological principles in international politics
- The need was for constant political/diplomatic balancing and rebalancing of inevitable clashes of interest
among nation-states
- USA failures since WW1 followed from moments of impractical "ideological" fervor and absence of seasoned
this-worldly judgment [RWP1,2:102-13]
- For three decades since WW1, Lippmann played
the role of influential pundit, near the center of US political power
<>1948fe25:Czechoslovakia fell under USSR dominated
Communist Party rule
*--Defenestration of Jan Masaryk
*--G.E.R. Gedye witnessed the coup [P20:334]
*1950:1954; Political trials [as per 1968:Dubcek Government's
Commission of Inquiry, P20:347]
<>1948mr:Cuba, Havana | Charter of
International Trade Organization (ITO) adopted, but US and other nations refused to ratify
<>1948ap30:Colombia, Bogotá | Twenty Latin American
republics and the United States of America signed the Charter establishing the
Organization of American States [OAS] [W]
<>1948my14:Israel
declared itself an independent republic, breaking free of the UNO mandate "Palestine"
- The UNO had for six months tried to effect a partitioning of Palestine into two states, one Jewish, the
other Arabic
- Jerusalem was to be administered by the UNO as an international city
- Israel could cite the 1917 Balfour Declaration [ID]
as precedence in international politics for creation of an independent Jewish state
- A civil war broke out between the two Semitic peoples who lived in the territory defined by the UNO mandate --
the Jewish and Arabic peoples of Palestine -- and a tragic civil war raged on and off, mainly on, well into
the 21st century
<>1948je07:London Conference on German problems (USA,
England, France, Belgium, Nederland, and Luxembourg) [RFP2,3:106-9]
- Neither divided Germany nor the USSR were invited as participants in the London Conference
- Western Allies acted alone, bringing increasing pressure to bear on Soviet relations in the
area it now occupied and dominated in eastern Europe
- USSR responded with its own "Warsaw Conference" (USSR, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania and Hungary)
- The Warsaw Conference took a position strongly critical of the London Conference and excluded its
participants [RFP2,3:109-13]
- A Soviet alliance system was forming up in response to the consolidation of
a "Western" alliance system
<>1948je24:1949my; Soviet Union and its Warsaw
Conference allies imposed Berlin Blockade for 11 months
*--USA air transport kept American, English, and French zones supplied
<>1948je28:Yugoslavian (Croatian) leader of
anti-fascist resistance to Hitler Germany, Joseph Broz Tito was expelled from the Soviet
dominated Cominform (a successor institution to the now disbanded Comintern)
<>1948au:Andrei Zhdanov death terminated
14-year career of Stalin's right-hand man
<>1948au:USSR ideological botanist T.D. Lysenko came to prominence in agriculture
[BMC1:634-7]
<>1948au:South Korea declared independence from
Korea. North Korea followed suit the next month
*--USA Department of State publication Korea, 1945-1948
detailed mounting crisis [Excerpts = RFP2,3:134-7]
<>1948fa:USSR Five-year Plan expert
Nikolai Voznesenskii disappeared. He led
the Soviet economy through WW2
<>1948de:Polish political
parties were dissolved into a single pro-Soviet organization, consolidating Soviet dominance
in Poland
<>1948de:Soviet troops out of North Korea
- Several months later: USA troops out of South Korea
- But Korean crisis mounted
<>1948de10:UNO
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
[TXT]
- US public leaders explored the opportunities and assessed the difficulties involved in the establishment
of institutionally enforceable transnational law (to be distinguished from international law) and stable,
effective institutions of world governance, Foundations
for World Order
- While we are at it, we do well to remind ourselves of the significant distinction between
multinational and transnational corporations
- The President and Chancellor of the University of Chicago, Robert M. Hutchins, made an eloquent plea for a
constitutional world order [RWP1,3:24-38]
- 1950:Grenville Clark, US lawyer and Vice President of the United World Federalists,
published A Plan for
Peace [Excerpts = RWP1,3:50-85]
- UNO became a focal point for post-WW2 hopes that
unrestrained aggressive acts of sovereign nation-states could be brought under
some sort of rule of law
<>1948de23:Hungarian dissident
Catholic primate Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty was arrested by Communist authorities
*--He later described his experience in his Memoirs
[P20:351]
<>1949:English economic theorist, member of the
Labour Party [LOOP] and government figure E.F.M. Durbin expounded on state planning and socialism in Problems of
Economic Planning [CCS:861-78 | CCS,2:317-34]
<>1949:French writer and intellectual Simone de
Beauvoir, The Second Sex [TXT],
was an inspiration to women seeking to define their independent identity and role
*--Her influence was particularly great among European and North American women's movements which
flourished for more than a century [P20:374]
<>1949:USA | Leading American and European Communist
intellectuals from previous decades described their disenchantment in The God that
Failed [CCS,2:580-601]
*--Italian Ignazio Silone
*--Arthur Koestler [P20:206]
*--Afro-American activist and novelist Richard Wright
*--French novelist André Gide
*--American journalist Louis Fischer
*--English poet Stephen Spender
<>1949ja:USSR announced formation of Council for
Mutual Economic Assistance [SEV or "ComEcon"] to manage economic development and relationships within USSR dominated
eastern European region
- 1961:Albania expelled from SEV
- 1962:Mongolia became member of SEV
\\
LOOP on Poland and SEV
<>1949mr:Hungarian Communist Party leader and
state official Jozsef Revai defined nature of Hungarian revolution [RFP2,3:186-95]
<>1949mr29: Syrian coup organized by CIA
<>1949ap04:USA leading force in creation of
NATO
(North Atlantic Treaty Organization)
[W]
- Founding states = USA, Canada, Great Britain, France, Nederland, Belgium,
Luxembourg, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Portugal
- 1951:Greece and Turkey
- 1955:Federal Republic of Germany ("West Germany")
- NATO documents website
[thanks to Toni Tayler for help with this link]
- 1959: NATO Secretary General Paul-Henri Spaak reflected on the 10th
anniversary of NATO [P20:320]
- Moving MAP
traces 9 chronological hops that define the expansion from 1949 through 1952, 1955, 1982, 1985, 1990, 1999, 2004, and up to 2009
\\
*--LOOP on NATO
<>1949my23;je20; Paris | Allied Council of Foreign
Ministers (USA, USSR, England, France) meeting #6, again with the questions of Germany and
Austria before them
[W TXT]
*--This was the last such meeting for joint diplomatic resolution of post-WW2 problems
*--Three and a half years of Council
meetings failed to resolve conflicting interests of WW2 Allies
<>1949au12:Geneva Conventions renewed, expanded into four international
treaties [ID], and signed
\\
*--Websites [W]
[W]
<>1949:Germany divided into two "sovereign" nation-states, one under the close
supervision of the WW2 western allies and the other under close Soviet control
- 1949my23:West-German Occupation Zones of USA, England and France created
a unified Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland, aka "West Germany")
- Leader of the Christian Democratic Union Party and first Chancellor (1949my23-1963) of the German Federal
Republic, Konrad Adenauer, reflected on the principles of his work to advance and protect democratic politics and
Christian ideals [P20:305; pay close attention to the editors' introduction
to this section. What do they mean by "Anglo-American"?]
- 1949oc07:Four months later, the Soviet Sector of defeated Germany was declared to be
the nation-state German Democratic Republic (GDR, aka "East Germany")
- 1949-1989: For forty years of Cold War, there would be two Germanies [Wki]
<>1949oc01:China, Beijing | People's Republic of China
[PRC, aka "Red China" or "Communist China"] proclaimed, with Mao Tse-Tung
[Zedong] as President
- Mao stated his understanding of events [RFP2,3:211-23]
- Peasant/military revolution defeated the "nationalist" Chinese who were supported
by "The West" with the help and urging of USA media mogul Henry Luce
- The Chinese Communist revolution chased out former
Guomindang Nationalist rulers and forced them
into exile on the Chinese island Taiwan where they relocated what was called "Nationalist China"
- Henceforward the world recognized two Chinas (CF: two Koreas, two
Vietnams, and two Germanys, all artifacts of disordered Cold-War politics)
- The "Great Powers" allowed Nationalist China to remain a member of UNO
- But the mainland government, PRC, was not admitted to membership
- USA would not even grant diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of China
- The century of China under imperialism, beginning in 1839:1842
(with only two decades of slight recovery beginning in 1912) was now at a close
- It could also be said that this marked the end of China's 18 year epoch of military and revolutionary chaos that
preceded WW2, spanned the war years and
stretched into (and contributed to the origins of) the Cold War
- Chinese industrial modernization now in hands of sovereign authority of the
Communist Party of the People's Republic of China
- The new independence of India, China and
Indonesia can be understood in a much broader historical
context = the rise and fall of European
mercantilist imperialism over the previous 300+ years
- Among the big SE-Asian regions still under imperial dominion,
Vietnam had to wait yet 25 more years
<>1949de:European-wide Socialist International
reconstituted itself
- German theorist Paul Sering (Richard Loewenthal's pseudonym) provided theoretical
encouragement in his Beyond Capitalism (1948) [CCS,2:292-316]
- German-born economist K. William Kapp's
The Social Costs of Private Enterprise
(1950) also contributed to the post-WW2 revival of Social Democracy
in western Europe [CCS,2:195-221]
<>1949de27:Indonesian independence formally recognized,
after nearly a decade of intense national-liberationist struggle, first against Japanese imperialist occupation
then against re-imposition of Dutch imperialist rule
<>1950:Average annual alcoholic intake of the Soviet adult=7 litres. More than
doubled by 1983:14.6 [Kerblay,Mikhail Gorbachev:15]. In fiscal terms,1984:51B
rubles (16% of consumer spending). By 1987:35B rubles. Thus the state lost between 1.5 and
2B rubles in tax revenue. Money flowed to bootleggers
<>1950:London | Russian philosopher Simon Frank published
Reality and Man [Edie,3:281-305; 306-14]
<>1950:USA | Norbert Wiener
[ID]
published The
human use of human beings; Cybernetics and society
[ID]
<>1950:USA | American Economic Association issued report
which sought to define the best balance of private enterprise with governmental initiative
in order to stabilize the "boom and bust" cycles of the unregulated laissez faire capitalist
economy [CCS,2:373-409]
<>1950ja12:USA Secretary of State Dean Acheson confirmed
USA defense perimeter in Pacific which did not include Korea or Formosa (Taiwan [ID])
<>1950ap14:National Security Council Report 68 "United States
Objectives and Programs for National Security" [NSC 68] [TXT]
- The author, Paul Nitze, laid out one of the most
enduring of the many strategic visions offered over the previous four years in the unfolding of the Cold War =
- "The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to
our own [?old fanatic faith?], and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world"
- Nitze was a central figure in the creation at this time of "The Committee on the Present Danger"
[Official W |
W#1 |
Unofficial W]
- Dean Acheson [ID] admitted later that the administration felt justified in issuing such a report
and mobilizing public opinion to their cause because there was need to "bludgeon the mass mind of ‘government' "
- Over the next decades, the USA deliberately and frequently exaggerated the threat to national
security posed by the USSR
- Truman quadrupled the defense budget, and the "arms race" was on
- The USA nuclear arsenal grew to monstrous proportions =
- 1950: 1,400 nuclear warheads in US arsenal
- 1960:20,000 nuclear warheads in US arsenal
- 1966:32,000 nuclear warheads in US arsenal
- But, then, so did the Soviet defense budget grow, financed out of the hides of the Soviet nation and economy
severely mauled by WW2 and much needing to devote resources to the task of post-war rebuilding
<>1950my09:French government spokesperson Robert Schuman proposed European Coal
and Steel Community
<>1950my23:USA note
to USSR opposing "re-militarization" of GDR ("East Germany") [RFP2,3:113-14]
*--GO se19
<>1950sp:USSR gripped by bitter ideological dispute about
linguistics and the theories of N. Ya. Marr (1864-1934) [CCS:968-89]
*--Stalin made so bold as to enter this technical dispute with his amateur but authoritative [authoritarian?] views
*--Soviet dissident Roy Medvedev later described Stalin's last years
[P20:343]
<>1950je25:North Korea invaded the South in an
attempt to reunite the peninsula
which had been artificially cut in two as part of post-WW2 Allied agreements
- Under USA leadership, UNO adopted resolutions against North Korean aggression, formally
opening the Korean War (called a "police action" rather than a "war")
- USSR was not in a position to vote on this critical UNO resolution because it had walked out
just before, in connection with the UNO refusal to grant membership to
the People's Republic of China [RFP2,3:137-41]
- Not one of the 200 CIA officers stationed in Korean during the 1950-1953 war spoke
Korean [Weiner,Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA]
- 1952:I.F. Stone, Hidden History
of the Korean War, a compilation of several critical exposés, published over previous months in his
newspaper I.F. Stone's Weekly
- Stone sought to refute what he took to be false explanations of which side started
the Korean War
\\
- Bruce Cumings (2007no22:NYR:67-8) took a more
scholarly approach than I.F. Stone (above), but largely confirmed the
dissident
journalist's suspicions
- The North Korea/South Korea civil war did not just "break out" when one or the other side attacked
- It was the result of mounting civil war pressures felt on both sides of the artificial division of the Korean peninsula
- For many years, attacks had been mounted on and off by both sides, with South Korea most active in the
months leading up to June, 1950 =
Commanders of the respective Korean armies had chosen different sides in the
long anti-colonial struggle against Japan [North Korean leaders, working in
association often with the Comintern [ID], had led the national
resistance to Japanese aggression; South Korean leaders had accommodated
themselves to Japanese power], and it should not have been surprising that once
they had the means to do so, they would again clash with each other. What is
more surprising is the direct American role, during the US occupation of Korea
from 1945 to 1948, in putting in power an entire generation of Koreans in
the military and the national police who had served Japanese imperialism
- As WW2 ended and the Cold War expanded, resistance movements
that arose during WW2 were often denied the fruits of their struggles [EG]
<>1950se19:USA, England, and France (without other
"Big Four" ally USSR) formally signed communiqué on ending state of hostility with
Germany and combination of the three western Allied sectors into a new Federal Republic of
Germany [RFP2,3:114-15]
*1950oc22:USSR-led Prague Conference of east European states took stand against the actions of the erstwhile
"Western" allies [RFP2,3:116-17]
<>1950oc25:People's Republic of
China entered Korean War to aid North Korea
- In this month, officials in WDC came to understand that USA General MacArthur intended to expand
the Korean War to China, possibly with the goal of forcing the USSR into the conflict
- Decrypted messages revealed that MacArthur desired to use nuclear weapons to "wipe out the seat of Bolshevism"
- Furthermore, MacArthur was apparently determined to act on his conclusion that civilian government had
failed the people of the USA since the outbreak of the war. He believed that the military should "take over"
- MacArthur contributed to the growing sense through the late 20th century that
restraints on military adventurism and occasional military failures were because civilian
government "wouldn't let our soldiers win"
\\
- 1959:John Spanier, The Truman-MacArthur Controversy and the Korean War
- 2009:Matthew M. Aid, The Secret Sentry. The
information on the decrypted messages was based on interviews with Paul Nitze
- 2010ap02:TLS:6
<>1951:1955;USSR Fifth Five-year Plan
<>1951:English economist Joan Robinson tried to
reconcile ideas of Marx and Keynes in an essay "Marx and Keynes" [CCS:829-39]
*--The image of Keynes had come full circle since his earliest days
<>1951:French author Maurice Duverger published a study
later translated into English as Political Parties:
Their organization and Activity in the Modern State (1959), a theoretical critique of political parties over more
than a century. Suggested reading =
- Introduction (xxiii-xxx)
- Mass and "cadre" parties, with observations on the Leninist hybrid, or
"devotee party" (62-71)
- Single parties (255-80)
- Party control of nominations and distortion of public opinion (354-92)
- Conclusions (422-7)
<>1951:German professor of philosophy at Heidelberg
University Karl Jaspers (having returned to his post after the Nazis threw him out),
published Way to Wisdom in which he extolled intense personal involvement and
choice [BMC4:682-3]
*--He also wrote Man and the
Modern Age
<>1951:German-born political philosopher Hannah
Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism
- 1958:The Human Condition [translated in 1960 into German with the better title, Vita Activa]
- 1959:Lectures on Lessing [CWC:560-83]
- 1967:On Revolution
- Search UO holdings by Hanna Arendt [also, selected essays with particular attention to the Nazi
variation on the totalitarian theme in CCS:1037-73 |
CCS,2:670-703]
- Her most controversial work explored the notion that the atrocities of the
Hitler era, the viciousness of the Nazis and the fate of their victims, could be
understood as tragic examples of a general "banality of evil"
which can pop up under the "wrong circumstances" in human societies
- 1999:In the first decade of political independence from the USSR, many eastern
Europeans turned to Arendt for inspiration
- For example, the Estonian journal Trames#3,3:141-61 carried an article by Rainer
Kattel, "Hannah Arendts politische öffentlichkeit" [Hannah Arendt's (concept of) political openness]
- Kattel reflected mainly on Arendt's 1958 and 1967 publications and praised her sense of
immediate political engagement as the essence of democracy
- The central question of all Hannah Arendt's writings was the tension between community and isolation
- Isolation of the individual, or "atomization" of the public, was a characteristic consequence of
modern "total statism"
- At all times the light of the public and the darkness of the private were in play with one another
- Total statism cancels the light of the public and forces individuals fully into the darkness of isolation
- Family association, private enterprise so long as it kept a low profile, small independent but innocuous
groups might still function, but only in the general darkness of isolation
- Arendt explored natal or family forms of association and identity and contrasted private association with public forms
- She developed a personal theme of "political öffentlichkeit"
- She took plurality to be the essence of political openness
- Interests are varied, thus there should be transparency of governmental acts and free but open
mobilization of public interest groups
- The political action of either institutions or groups should be awash in "publicity"
- That is the meaning of the widely used German term öffentlichkeit, and it has been used in that
sense to explore the meaning of "civil society" from the time of Hegel [ID]
- In the 1960s the idea of öffentlichkeit was developed in the theoretical works of Jűrgen
Habermas [EG]
- What made Arendt useful was that she went beyond Habermas
- Habermas' concerns about the media and the possibility of "reasoned discourse in
the public sphere" was not enough
- Arendt took the question from these high and learned "spheres" of discourse
right on down to street level, to concrete "public spaces", to the everyday
actions of governments and people, lifting the issue out of the somewhat
self-congratulatory and more confined Germanic or specifically "Western" context
and into the life of actual people trying to liberate themselves
- At any given moment, open public activism was the only effective
check on power
- Public activism, rather than long historical traditions ("Anglo-Saxon", "Aryan", etc.) was the only
guarantee of liberty
- Active exercise of political freedom, even where it has never existed before, was the crucial and pan-cultural prescription
- Tyranny and plurality were in direct, eternal conflict with one another
- Humans are essentially "political animals", just as Aristotle once said
- Without open political action, humans slide back toward being simply animals
- That was no more true in regions peripheral to "Western" culture than it was in the land
of Goethe, Hegel and Habermas
- Arendt considered a public, here and now -- anywhere and any time -- to be the only source of
workable ethics and politics
- Arendt believed that the political public alone in a brutalized 20th-century world
was capable of restoring humanity
- It alone was capable of checking the general flight of "Western" civilization into either
private darkness or false transcendence
- In the 1980s, political openness in its Russian form -- glasnost' -- was tried by Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev whose futile efforts toward extensive domestic and international reform -- perestroika
[ID] -- were able to go only part way toward realization of the Arendt ideal
<>1951:Russian thinker and historian of thought Nikolai Losskii,
History of Russian Philosophy
<>1951:UNO | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
[UNESCO] questionnaire, drawn up by Oslo [Norway] University Professor Arne Naess, on
ideological conflicts about democracy, collated and published as Democracy in a World
of Tensions
*--Naess concluded from the replies of hundreds of world "experts" that "for the first time in the history of the world, no
doctrines are advanced as undemocratic" [BMC4:752-7]
*--UNO could be naive in its global optimism
<>1951:USA foreign policy specialist Hans Morgenthau
published In Defense of the
National Interest
*--Morgenthau warned about confusing two great issues: Russian imperialism and genuine revolution =
American foreign policy ought not to have the objective of bringing the blessings of some social and
political system to all the world or of protecting all the world from the evils of some
other system. [...] If we allow ourselves to be diverted from this objective of
safeguarding our national security, and if instead we conceive of the American mission in
some abstract, universal, and emotional terms, we may well be induced, against our better
knowledge and intent, yet by the very logic of the task in hand, to raise the banner of
universal counter-revolution abroad and of conformity in thought and action at home. In
that manner we shall jeopardize our external security, promote the world revolution we are
trying to suppress, and at home make ourselves distinguishable perhaps in
degree, but not in kind, from those with which we are locked in ideological
combat.... [RFP3:431-2]
*--Morgenthau's was a lonely voice of warning about the damaging
consequences of inflated threats to national security
<>1951ap11:USA commander in Korea, General Douglas
MacArthur, came out in favor of carrying Korean War into China
- General MacArthur directly opposed the policy and disobeyed the orders of
his civilian Commander-in-Chief, President Harry Truman
- MacArthur, a much admired military commander who had presided over the signing of Japanese
surrender at the end of WW2, was fired and forced into retirement
<>1951je:English Foreign Office senior diplomat R.H. Scott
wrote to Britain's ambassador in Kabul reporting that the French were suggesting an "obvious solution" to the
Afghanistan problem, an "engineered partition". He went on =
If there is to be an upheaval sometime, as looks not unlikely, the
ultimate disappearance of Afghanistan (as we now know it) might be no tragedy. In modern
conditions, Afghan viability may in the long run be doubtful
*--Behind the English concern was the growing dependence of Afghanistan
on Soviet trade and diplomatic support
*--At an even deeper level, there was also the growing independence
of Afghanistan as it associated with other "Third World" countries to function
outside the network of either "Western" or Soviet control
*--Afghan developments threw into question the bi-polar myth that sustained the Cold War
and provided camouflage for continuation of old imperialist practices
*--The English "senior diplomat" still presumed authority to draw and redraw borders, even
to erase Afghanistan from the AfroAsian map
<>1951se:USA Senator
Joseph McCarthy attacked Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall, accusing
this major USA government figure of being a communist sympathizer
- McCarthy said that General Marshall was part of "a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so
black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man" [2006je08:NYR:53]
- WW2 General and ex-Secretary of State (1947-1949) Marshall resigned just days after McCarthy's
slanderous attack
- USA was now in the grip of "McCarthyism" in which many lost jobs and were otherwise persecuted
as "subversives". The Marshall accusation was an especially deranged moment in the scurrilous Senator's career
- The Senator might have been deranged, but newly invigorated and powerfully
rational "military-industrial complex" procurement factions felt threatened by important USA
political figures, like Marthall, who were emphasizing diplomacy, economic aid and other forms of support
for recovering Europe, rather than military confrontation with the USSR [ID]
- Perhaps these factions were apprehensive about the recent speech of another prominent General, MacArthur
- But Senator Joe McCarthy's accusation was absurd, in any case, and would
have been seen as such in any ordinary time free of the rising anti-Communist
demagoguery
- Partial documentary on McCarthyism [FLM]
- Joseph McCarthy made no distinction between dissent
and treason, and there were political factions who knew how to take advantage of the hysterical
atmosphere provoked by the outrageous Senator
\\
- The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist
Purge under Truman and Eisenhower
<>1951no13:UNO General Assembly heard Andrei Vyshinskii's objection to
international commission on general elections throughout Germany [RFP2,3:118-19]
*--GO de19
<>1951de19:UNO Resolution on investigation of possibilities for general elections
in Germany [RFP2,3:119-21]
<>1952:English economic historian and labor party
supporter R.H. Tawney published the last of three editions of his defense of
liberal democracy
against its many different sorts of enemies, Equality (1931:First ed., 1938:Second ed.) [CCS,1:825-43]
<>1952:USA (German-born) Protestant theologian Paul
Tillich published The Courage To Be [BMC4:655-6]
*--"Neo-orthodox theology" thrived from the WW1 period,
through the tumultuous depression era, through WW2, and into the Cold War
*--In this same year, Wladimir Weidle [Vladimir Veidle] published English translation of his
socio-cultural explanation of why the Russian old-regime collapsed and the
Soviet Union arose, Russia: Absent and
Present
<>1952mr01:India held first national elections
*--Pandit Nehru's and Congress Party win 3/4th of seats in the National Assembly
*--India's century and a half under European imperial dominion was over
*--Imperialism came under widespread assault in South-Asia, AfroAsia and in Eastern-Europe
\\
*--LOOP on "AfroAsia"
<>1952my15: Lansing, Michigan|
Douglas MacArthur delivered a puzzling speech, in view of USA political events over the 14
months since he was fired for disobeying his Commander In Chief, President Harry Truman,
and in view of the hysterical anti-Communism that
filled this election year
- He was only a year back in the USA, for the first time since 1937
- In these early days back in his homeland, this beleaguered military hero was
under pressure from supporters to enter into political life, ostensibly to rehabilitate
himself and all that he stood for in his monumental clash with Truman
- MacArthur delivered these words (should we
call them "surprising"?) on the subject of what would soon be widely
called "the military-industrial complex" =
It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our
country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially
induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of
fear. While such an economy may produce a sense of seeming prosperity for the
moment, it rests on an illusionary foundation of complete unreliability and
renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their
fear of war [General MacArthur Speeches and Reports 1908-1964 (
E-TXT:206)]
<>1:European Coal and Steel Community
[ECSC--France, West Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg] came into
force, representing the first substantial accomplishment of the pan-European
idea
- Seasoned champion of European unity, Jean Monnet [W], became
first president of ECSC
- 1953je22:Speeches before the Joint Meeting of the Members of the Consultative Assembly
of the Council of Europe and the Members of Common Assembly of the ECSC [CWC:553-9]
- This was a forerunner of the European Economic Community [EEC] and the matrix out
of which the European Union [EU] grew
\\
- John Gillingham, European
Integration, 1950-2003
- LOOP on EU
<>1952jy27:Volga-Don Ship Canal completed, realizing a
Russian
dream of economic development delayed more
than 260 years
*--The Ottoman Turks were the first to attempt
this project nearly 400 years earlier
<>1952au08:German elections commission adjourned
indefinitely [RFP2,3:121-2]
<>1952se:oc02;
Stalin stated Cold War
views [RFP2,3:227-32 | RFP3:433-8 |
ORW:244-6]
<>1953:1956; Eastern Europe in the grip of anti-Soviet disturbances
*--1953mr05:Joseph Stalin died [SGv:176-8]
- The Manhoff Archives = Stalin's funeral [E-TXT]
- Unique, uncensored color footage of Stalin’s funeral shot by US diplomat unearthed
[VIDEO]
- A BRIEF TWO-YEAR COLD WAR THAW FOLLOWED =
- 1953mr09:Georgii Malenkov delivered funeral oration which touched on Cold War
issues [RFP2,3:153-4]
- 1953mr15:Supreme Soviet heard Georgii Malenkov speech which emphasized need for
new policies in two vital areas =
- increase industrial production of consumer goods and
- improve international relations, especially with USA
- The Eisenhower administration reacted with skepticism,
but old "Iron-Curtain" Winston Churchill urged Eisenhower to arrange a summit meeting
- Guided by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the USA however refused to
follow Churchill's advice
- Instead Eisenhower offered what one historian
has called a hortatory and optimistic, but ultimately hollow, speech, "Chance for
Peace" [2009se25:TLS:6 Jeffrey Brooks letter to the editor]
- Many dreamt that the post-Stalin USSR might liberalize censorship control
- 1953:Vladimir Polyakov, The Story of Fireman Prokhorchuk [P20:131]
- Anti-Soviet dissent mounted after Stalin's death
- 1953:Polish émigré in Paris (later he came to the USA) Czesław Miłosz
[ID] published
The Captive Mind [CCS,2:602-25]
- The Soviet Union and eastern Europe began to stir, and the politics of Cold War, east and west,
were challenged, however ineffectively, in the aftermath of Stalin's death
\\
*--Yaram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold
Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-1953
*--LOOP on dissent
<>1953mr27:First post-Stalin amnesty for political
prisoners [SGv:256-7]
<>1953ap16:USA President
Dwight Eisenhower used occasion of Stalin's death to call for end to the Cold War
- Eisenhower defined the Cold War largely in terms of expanding arms buildup, robbing the world of
peaceful economic development. W. W. Rostow had a hand in writing this
speech [TXT |
RFP2,3:155-6] =
What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for if no turning is found on this dread road?
The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated.
The worst is atomic war.
The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the
wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system
or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples
of this earth.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final
sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms in not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is
humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
- Rostow later related how two ardent "cold-warriors", Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles and Ambassador to the USSR Charles Bohlen, came to regret the lost opportunity for
taking up at this time the problem of divided Germany
- The speech was reprinted in full in the official Soviet newspaper Pravda
- This was an era of broad effort to reinterpret the nature of the Soviet "threat". Was it Russian imperialism or Soviet
Communism? [RFP2,3:233-88]
- Eisenhower's speech touched on the dangerous
possibility that policies thought to enhance national security could
themselves be threats to national security
<>1953my25:USA
composer Aaron Copland's "Americanism" questioned by Senator Joseph McCarthy, chairman of the US
Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
\\
*2005my03:Minnesota Public Radio | Bill Morelock, "Conscience vs. McCarthy: the Political Aaron Copland" [TXT]
*--Compare with earlier experience of Soviet composer Dmitrii Shostakovich
*--Was "McCarthyism" a form of "negative convergence" of USSR & USA?
*--Was it
designed to re-ignite Cold-War hysteria and to stifle the post-Stalin optimism
and the new atmosphere of hope?
<>1953my:Siberia | Norilsk revolts in GULag system
<>1953je17:GDR ("East Germany") | Liberalization stimulated riots in the
streets, put down by Soviet power
*--Dissent vigorous but vulnerable in the uncertain months after
Stalin's death
<>1953je27:Korean
War armistice
*--Six-year
crisis in Korea over, though Korea remained divided long after most other areas
divided by "Cold War" had been rejoined
<>1953je18:Egypt
declared self an independent republic. Peoples throughout AfroAsia were awakening to a new era of struggle
for sovereign identity
\\
*--LOOP on "AfroAsia"
<>1953jy10:Moscow | Beria denounced and "purged" [SGv:179-81]
<>1953:USA. B. F. Skinner,
Science and Human Behavior
[Read chapter one = TXT]
*--Some feared that Skinner's "behavioral science" was designed less to promote
scientific understanding of behavior and more to explore ways to make people behave
<>1953au09:Iran | Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh
[Muhammad in more common Arabic transliteration] [ID] was arrested
as a result of US and English intervention in Iranian domestic politics
- 1950de28:Tehran, USA Embassy letter to the State Dept. in WDC over two years earlier described the strategic
vulnerability of Iranian petroleum fields. It warned of the Soviet threat to "Western" energy sources
[E-TXT]
- However, the threat actually emerged from within Iranian domestic political life
- Around the time of the US diplomatic warning, Mossadegh had been duly appointed as Prime Minister
in the Iranian constitutional, parliamentary government. Shah Reza Pahlavi was the monarchical figurehead
- Mossadegh was a forceful supporter of Iranian liberation from imperialist control, and his position
found a lot of democratic support in the Iranian parliament
- He worked to craft new and more equitable contract agreements with British Petroleum [BP] which enjoyed
managerial control over the extensive and productive Iranian oil fields
- BP refused to accept the new Iranian contract
- Mossadegh then moved to seize all foreign-owned petroleum facilities in Iran
and nationalize Iranian petroleum industries
- The tenure of Prime Minister Mossadegh was one of great political agitation
that reached far beyond the issue of fair agreements with big oil companies and only
indirectly related to the contest between USA and the USSR
- In the struggle, domestic political rivals briefly ousted Mossadegh
- Popular pressure -- including that exerted by the large Iranian communist party
Tudeh and other Iranian political factions -- forced the Shah to bring Mossadegh back to power
- In the aftermath, pressure built among Mossadegh supporters to strip power
from the Shah and to enhance secular and representative governmental power
- Many began to feel that a new, authentically independent and modern Iran could be built
- A leading figure among the Iranian liberationists was Hossein Fatemi
[Wki]
- Through the year 1953, CIA Operation Ajax,
approved by US President Eisenhower and in collaboration with transnational petroleum corporations and the
embattled Shah, conspired to overthrow the elected Iranian government headed by Prime Minister Mossadegh
- CIA and US State Department offered the ostensible justification for its actions as prevention of
further "communist takeover"
- This was an important moment in the early years of the Cold War, carried out by "The West"
right under the nose of the USSR
- In August of 1953, the elected and modernizing Iranian government of Mossadegh
was forcefully replaced by police-state policies, carried out by the notorious Iranian intelligence agency SAVAK.
equipped, trained and advised by the CIA
- An important moment, but was it a victory for "The West" and an affirmation of "Western" values
against "Communist dictatorship"?
- Under these new circumstances, influential Islamic clerics, including Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
turned against the Shah and were eventually forced into exile
- The ostensible victor, the Shah, was profoundly compromised in the minds of many Iranians
- Modernization of Iran was not halted altogether, but the groundwork was laid for the rise in the 1970s of an anti-US
[anti-"West"] Islamic (Shiah) political opposition and the eventual creation of an Iranian Islamic Republic
- The Iranian Islamic Republic would be sharply hostile to "The West" and
to the "satanic" forms of modernization for which it stood
- How does Iran after the victory of "The West" compare with Iran under Mossadegh?
- Was national liberation and indigenous modernization in AfroAsia threatened by both of the Cold War hegemons,
by both the USA and the USSR?
- In the unfolding of the Cold War, how does "The West" in Iran so far
compare with the USSR, for example, in Poland [LOOP]?
- CF=Twelve years later in Indonesia
\\
*--Wki summary of CIA involvement
in international "regime change", from 1949 (Syria) to early 21st century
*2015:|>Talbot,David|_The_Devil's Chessboard| The journal Mother Jones interviewed Talbot about the
harsh punditry that went into this book about CIA Director Allen Dulles (brother of Sec. of State John F. Dulles)
[E-TXT]
*2016my19:RT News| " ‘Distrust brings distrust:’ Iran seeks compensation from US for ‘hostile action’ over past 63 yrs"
[E-TXT]
*--LOOP on "AfroAsia"
<>1953se:Nikita Khrushchev became
First Secretary (and Politbiuro member) of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
*--The "succession crisis" caused by Stalin's death was on its way to solid resolution
<>1953no:1955no; New Yorker published in
serial form four chapters from Russian émigré writer Vladimir Nabokov's fourth English-language
novel, Pnin, in
serial form
\\
*2016my24:NYT| "On the Trail of Nabokov in the American West" [E.TXT]
*--Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991)
*--Gennady Barabtarlo, Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov's Pnin (1989)
*--Leona Toker, Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (1989)
<>1954:USA geochemist Harrison Brown, a
professor at the California Institute of Technology, raised social,economic
and environmental questions and described a grave but avoidable future of global modernization in
The Challenge of Man's Future
[CCS:643-59 | CCS,2:48-64]
- This pioneering analysis of impending global disaster was also a pioneer experiment in "thinking the unthinkable"
[ID]
- The book, one might say, was not meant to appeal to "good-morning-America" complacency
- Humans are, in Brown's view, now forced to take charge of their world and manage its evolution
- Those in positions of authority must find appropriate institutional mechanisms and significant new
fortitude to exert themselves pro-actively in order to avert the disastrous future posed by
world-wide environmental and resource depredation
- Affection for continued "invisible-hand" approach to the world's unspoiled "wilderness" is the
utter opposite of the imperative hands-on or managerial efforts required
- The future is not an "opportunity", it is a grave "challenge"
- "Business as usual" will not work
- The urgency and imagined modes of response to the ecological challenge Brown expressed paralleled
the moods of pre-war rhetoric and the boldness of depression-era policy deliberation
- Among other things, Brown dealt with population control
\\
- 2009au05:"John Holdren and Harrison Brown", an anonymous internet blog on "zombietime" traces in meticulous
and photo-copy detail the lineage of certain ideas held and expressed by President Obama's top science
adviser, John Holdren [W
- Do shudder with SAC editor to see yet another example of the expanded use of Czar, as a
spelling of tsar and as an institutional concept here in these U. S. of A.
- The website traces Holdren's ideas back to the pages of Brown's Challenge where
population management (="eugenics"?) is recommended
- Here are some big questions =
- Is population control a form of eugenics (EG=Chinese "one-child" policy, US tax breaks
for those with children, sex-education classes, encouragement of birth-control practices)?
- Is wide-spread concern about "over-population" always in support of eugenics
[EG]?
<>1954:1956; USSR "Virgin Lands" campaign
extended agricultural cultivation into dry steppe regions
<>1954mr:USSR KGB [F/] (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti; Committee of State
Security) created out of earlier security police agencies
<>1954ap:jy; Geneva Conference
met to discuss the status of Vietnam
- Participants = USA, USSR, Great Britain, France, PRC ("mainland" China),
North Korea, South Korea, Vietnam (Viet Minh party [League
for the Independence of Vietnam]), Laos, Cambodia
- The French had been defeated at Dienbienphu and were now driven out of their old imperialist domain,
Vietnam
- "The West", however, was unwilling to give the
victorious Viet Minh forces authority over a whole and independent Vietnam. [Compare with Congo
events]
- Political settlement divided Vietnam into North and South
- USA soon provided significant aid to the South and worked to move it toward
permanent separation and independence from the North
- The foundations were "diplomatically" laid for the USA-Vietnam War
\\
*2017fe07:NYT| "The 30-Years War in Vietnam: The conflict was a conflagration fueled by civil strife,
colonial tensions and the Cold War
[E-TXT]
<>1954je:Guatemala
suffered coup d'état engineered by USA international spy agency CIA, a
very independent subsection of the USA Executive Branch of government (as are the FBI and
Pentagon)
- The CIA worked in close collaboration with
the United Fruit Company [TXT]
- Neither United Fruit nor the US government were ready to support sovereign national
independence in its "own" hemisphere
- In the lands around the shores of the Caribbean Sea at mid-century, United Fruit's operations
stretched over about 3 million acres
- Its size and the range of its activities made it as much like a nation-state as like a
traditionally conceived business enterprise
- The governments of territories where it operated were more dependent
on it than it was dependent on them
- It bankrolled many Western Hemispheric nation-states that were willing to accommodate
its transnational managerial dominance over regional economies
- United Fruit and its hireling governments provided the very model of what, in a 1904 story published
in Cabbages and Kings, US writer O.Henry [William Sidney Porter] famously dubbed "banana republics"
- Since 1899, United Fruit Company
was a main creator of, and operator in, the many "banana republics" of Central America
\\
*--Webpage devoted to Guatemala in the era of "Cold War"
<>1954oc03:London
conference of nine European nations deliberated on the question of European Union [EU]
*--They were expanding the 1948mr17:Brussels Treaty
*--Along the way, they agreed on a very provocative plan to bring West Germany into NATO
<>1954oc23:USA, USSR, England and France agreed to end
occupation of Germany
- On the same day, a nine-power agreement, created Western European Union [WEU], a military expression of the
movement that was heading toward the creation of a very similarly titled
"European Union" [EU]
- The WEU was a military union. The EU was a political union, more concerned with civilian and economic issues than
with "national security" issues
\\
*--WEU website with menu hop to its "history"
*--LOOP on EU
<>1954no29:Moscow Conference of
east European "sattelite" nations,
with PRC (China) as observer
<>1954de02:USA Senate adopted resolution censuring
Joseph McCarthy
<>1955mr:European
Union [EU] ratified by Italy, West Germany and France
*--[W]
<>1955ap18:ap24; INDONESIA | Bandung
Conference, formally "Asian-African Conference at Bandung" [SPE2:1030-2]
- Final Communiqué was published [Excerpted TXT]
- The anti-imperialist movement was gaining momentum in the "Third World" [ID]
- The six-year-old Chinese Revolution [ID] was an inspiration
- Such independence and initiative on the part of historically imperialized peoples displeased "The West",
but it also displeased the USSR
- The two towering Cold-War "super powers" preferred the role of supervisor over "Third-World" development
- They had by now devised elaborate but tolerable systems of checking one another, but neither welcomed independent
pressure from "Third World" peoples, or frin any outside force
- Thus USA was blinded to the meaning of the Bandung Conference, seeing it as a "commie front". (If
so, what was Japan, Philippines, Saudi Arabia and Turkey doing there?)
- As for the USSR, it turned an increasingly cold shoulder toward revolutionary Communist China [Peoples'
Republic of China]
- People's Republic of China Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai addressed the Conference
- He emphasized that "The Third World", however different and divided by location on three great world continents, shared
similar problems = poverty, backwardness, and exploitation at the hands of the great imperialist powers
- The Third World needed to unite its efforts to solve these problems [BNE:317-20]
- 1956my17 (one month later)=Indonesian President Sukarno [ID] addressed
the USA Congress [RWP2:291-301]
- Participants in the Bandung Conference =
<>1955my09:Federal Republic of Germany ("West
Germany") became sovereign nation-state, combining the US, English and French zones
without including the Soviet zone ("East Germany")
- West Germany was in the midst of an "economic miracle" engineered by a pragmatic market-oriented
policy largely the result of the efforts of the "neo-liberal" Ludwig Erhard
- Erhard combined free-market with social welfare policies and other forms of state
involvement with the economy. [CWC:515-27]
- "Western" allies gave aid as they sought to counter both Soviet and Social Democratic
influences in Germany
- The Bismarckian legacy of conservative
welfare lived on
- It would be possible to say that the forty-year
doldrums of European liberalism were now at an end if it weren't for festering Cold-War militarism =
- The Federal Republic of Germany joined military alliance NATO,
forcing the USSR into a formally militarized relationship with eastern Europe =
<>1955my14:USSR created Warsaw
Pact [W]
in direct response to the establishment of NATO and especially to the creation of "West Germany"
as a NATO state
- On the tenth anniversary of the end of WW2, the Warsaw Pact united "iron curtain" countries
in military alliance, in imitation of the previous NATO unification of "free world" countries
in a military alliance
- Members of the Warsaw Pact = German Democratic Republic (GDR, aka "East Germany",
the old Soviet Zone of post-WW2 Germany, now a separate nation-state), Albania (1962:Expelled), Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
German Democratic Republic [GDR or "East Germany"], Hungary, Poland, Romania, and
the USSR
- In this same year the formal charter of the 6-year old Soviet dominated east European economic association, SEV [ID] included each of
these Warsaw Pact members
- Six years passed before USSR created a military alliance among these
proximate and subordinate east European nations in 1955 = The Warsaw Pact
- The Warsaw Pact was unstable from the beginning
- It endeavored to bring East Germany, Albania and Hungary into harmony with
Slavic states of the old "Byzantine Commonwealth "[ID]
- And among these Slavic states there was memory of long but troubled relationship with Russian-speaking authority
(EG=Romanian-speaking peoples)
<>1955my15:Vienna Treaty was signed by USSR USA, England and
France
- The Vienna Treaty restored Austrian independence. Soviet troops withdrew as agreed
- Some were pleased to see easing of Cold War; others felt threatened
- Soviet behavior in Austria did not fit Cold War cliche-ideas about the USSR
- It threw into question some guiding justifications for expanding military expenditures
- And it created a neutral Austria, unfettered within either NATO or Warsaw Pact systems
<>1955jy:COLD WAR: Winter again. Geneva Four-power
meeting involved USA, USSR, Great Britain and France
- Disarmament talks broke down
- Eisenhower proposed mutual aerial inspection and exchange of information on military
establishments, which the Soviets would not accept
- USSR gave priority to weapons reduction, which USA would not accept
- Expanded cultural exchange made some headway (1958 agreement followed)
- But generally, the "spirit of Geneva" quickly dissipated
- The smile of the Cheshire cat evaporated as "the last Great Game" -- the Cold War -- got earnestly
under way [ID first "Great Game"]
- French pundit Raymond Aron offered his "third party" perspective to these
developments in The Century of Total War
ch8 and 9, "The Atomic Age" and "The Conventions of the Cold War"
- American strategists were seriously divided at this critical juncture
- On the conflicting global views of George Frost Kennan
and Paul Nitze, see T. Von
Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization:166-178
- Lissa Roche, ed., Scorpions
in a Bottle: Dangerous Ideas about the United States and the Soviet Union, with essays by
leading Reagan-era conservative pundits, the original neo-cons, EG=Jeanne
Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, and William Bennett
- They were anxious to discredit any effort to see "both sides" of the big Cold War issues
- They condemned any thought that the USA and USSR were quite a bit alike in their Cold War strategies, in their shared hegemony
over world events
- One definite similarity, however, was that "military-industrial complexes" within
the two superpowers were gaining increasing influence over national policy
- Much hinged on the question of whether NATO ought to be the main face
of "The West" in the wider world or should more "civilian" agencies and
approaches lead the way
\\
*--MORE BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THE COLD WAR
<>1955fa:1956no;
USA AL,Mongomery (state capital) | Mrs. Rosa Parks, a 43-year-old seamstress
whose skin color made her legally ineligible to ride in the front of a public
bus, refused to move to the back
- Local black leaders organized a boycott of city buses
- City leaders had hundreds of boycotters arrested. Many went to jail
- Bombs were set off in four black churches
- A shotgun was fired through the front door of the home of The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
(1929-1968)
- King was an emerging charismatic leader of black resistance to all forms of discrimination
- His reputation and his movement spread across the USA
- Within a year, the US Supreme Court ruled that segregated local bus lines were unconstitutional, but this was
not the end. It was the beginning =
- The Montgomery boycott launched a ten-year nation-wide civil rights struggle, a central
component of an emerging US era of dissent and open resistance
\\
*--Zinn:442-4
<>1956fe14:USSR. Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist
Party heard Khrushchev's so-called secret
speech [TXT]
- Nikita Khrushchev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
denounced Stalin's "cult of the individual" [kul't lichnosti]
- That Russian phrase is generally translated as "cult of personality", thus
missing the central point of Khrushchev's critique =
- Khrushchev was accusing Stalin of substituting his personal self for the general councils of the Party
- Khrushchev assaulted other "crimes of the Stalin era", the most important of which were
connected with abuse of the Party and its members in the time of the great
purges [ID] 20 years earlier [RFP3:522-8 |
ORW:263-8]
- News of Khrushchev's "secret" speech spread quickly throughout eastern Europe
- It was taken as highest possible authorization to expose and perhaps correct all crimes of the
Stalin
era, not just crimes against the Party
- Ideological "thaw" seemed to encourage dissent within the USSR and
instability within the Warsaw Pact
- In the previous year, historian of philosophy Fedor Konstantinov (Communist Party member since
1918) explored anew the Marxist theory of Basis [Unterbau] and
Superstructure [überbau] [Jaworskyj:400-06]
Compare this with a similar effort over thirty years
earlier, in the time of Lenin
<>1956mr28:Iceland demanded revision of
1951 agreement with USA and withdrawal of USA troops
*--Cracks in "The West" accompanied cracks in the Soviet Bloc
<>1956ap25:se08; Nikita Khrushchev
labor reform [SGv:433-37]
*--In this year, Machine Tractor Stations abolished
<>1956ap28:Soviet law on state secrecy provided list
of censored topics, state secrets [PS&C:136-7]
<>1956my:USA stepped up
spy-plane over-flights within territory of USSR
<>1956je:Polish industrial
wage-labor disturbances were an
early harbinger of disorder and dissent in the Soviet dominated Warsaw Pact
<>1956jy26:Egyptian President
Gamal Abdal Nasser seized Suez Canal from English-dominated, imperialist corporation, the Suez Canal Company
*--"Western" client states were as restive as Soviet client states
*--AfroAsia was a place of resistance to the discredited but still persistent west European imperialist states
*--Much as eastern Europe was a place of resistance to the discredited but still persistent Soviet form of
imperialistic dominion
\\
*--LOOP on "AfroAsia"
<>1956au:Pakistani troops infiltrated Kashmir to start a rebellion
*--International war between Pakistan and India: Nationalist rebellion WITHIN AND AMONG "Third World" countries
\\
*2015se05:BBC summary of events and their long-term consequences [E-TXT]
<>1956se:Moscow editors of
Novyi mir [New
World] rejected MS of Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago [58de03:CDP#10,43:6-11,32]
*--The novel was first published abroad by a "left-wing" Italian publishing house,
but hailed as a hymn to freedom by all political factions, left to right, in
"The West"
<>1956oc:Poland
| Gomulka became First Secretary
[General Secretary] of Polish United Worker's Party
<>1956oc:Hungary
| Budapest gripped by general industrial labor strike, the most serious crack in
the Warsaw Pact in this season of unrest
- 1956oc23:Hungarian uprising opened with student demonstrations in Budapest. Student manifesto and
other documents [RFP3:602-21]
- Andor Heller gave an eyewitness account of The Hungarian Revolution [P20:358]
- 1956oc29:Hungary invaded by USSR; Janos Kadar became First Secretary [General
Secretary] of Hungarian Workers' Party
- The Soviet Army issued appeals "against the unbridled forces of reaction" [P20:361]
- Over the next twelve years eastern Europe fell quiet, went into a protective crouch
- But a Cold-War epoch of global dissent was coming to a boil =
<>1956oc29:Israel invaded Egypt in the Sinai Peninsula
- England and France jointly demanded that both combatants cease fire and withdraw ten miles from either side
of the Suez Canal
- Egypt did not comply
- Israel did comply in part = Israel held onto the Gaza Strip
- 1956oc31:England and France attacked Egypt with a vague goal of returning the Suez
Canal to European control. They failed
- Anachronistic imperialist intervention failed everywhere but in Gaza
- USA and USSR responded to the crisis in unusual diplomatic harmony. Both
condemned English and French
actions [BNE:320-4]
- Israel stayed in Gaza
- AfroAsia and eastern Europe were coming to a boil
<>1956no19:New Leader published
Yugoslav political figure and theorist Milovan Djilas [Đilas], "The Storm in Eastern Europe" for which he
was imprisoned [RFP3:630-7]
- 1957:Yugoslav pundit Djilas published The New Class
[
E-TXT |
Excerpts= CCS:990-1014]
- Within a year, Yugoslavia-USSR relations were again on the rocks [RFP3:548-73]
- Djilas defined a new managerial elite in the middle of the 20th century
- He found the near perfect expression of it in the Communist Party of the USSR
- But Djilas was an associate of that remarkable Yugoslavian intellectual movement called
"Praxis" [ID] which only very
rarely adhered to simplistic or black-and-white partisan interpretations of global trends
- He saw that his concept of "The New Class" had world-wide significance
- In much the same way, Orwell knew 1984 [ID]
was about a lot more than the Soviet Union
- The core of Djilas' argument was that 19th-century presumptions about social/economic classes
no longer worked to define actual, functioning political/economic formations in the post WW2 world
- The 20th-century world was not ruled by a social class called the "bourgeoisie"
- And the USSR was not ruled by a social class called the "proletariat"
- Djilas identified a "new class", a dominant managerial elite
- "New Class" perspective unified thought about a single global phenomenon, whether in the form
of Communist Party apparatchiki or "cadre-party" operatives (whether a one-party or two-party
political system, such as had become evident over the previous 130 years
of cadre party existence)
- Djilas' "new class" perspective applied also to corporate executives, KGB and CIA
"assets", or commanders of vast strategic military forces
- Djilas made it possible to comprehend them all as variations on the same central theme =
managerial elitism [W-ID]
- 1957:Russian-born Hollywood scriptwriter and ideologist of extreme libertarianism Ayn Rand
published Atlas Shrugged
- She was born Alisa Rosenbaum in St.Petersburg, Russia, in 1905
- During WW1, she attended St.Petersburg University where she majored in history, with a special interest in USA
politics
- The Soviet revolution scattered her family and instilled in her an
abiding hatred of Communism, of socialism in general, of all forms of statism or empowered
managerial elitism
- She was nearly equally disdainful of democracy
- She became one of the most widely read popularizers of the anti-managerial theme
- Her views fit most comfortably in the Russian and
two-century-long general European tradition of highly intellectual anarchism, with a special American
affection for unfettered business economics and an inclination toward violence to forward that cause
- In Hollywood she worked as an acolyte of the pop-arts giant Cecil B. De Mille
[W#1 | W#2]
- Atlas Shrugged and the earlier novel
The Fountainhead (1943) extolled the virtues of radically unshackled entrepreneurial
individualism, defiant in the face of governmental or corporate conformism
- She was an inspiration to the political movement known as "libertarianism", a movement that exerted
influence into the 21st century [EG=See The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, Ronald Hamowy, ed
(E-TXT) ]
- There is some irony in the fact that many USA corporate executives embraced Rand's preachy
harlequin-romance style dramas and identified with her heroes, despite the fact that her heroes suffered
as often under the authority of "big business" as under "big government"
[bibliography]
- For now we can let Djilas and Rand conclude the half-century SAC
LOOP on the "managerial revolution",
though the topic stretches on into the 21st century
- F/manager/ from this point on down through remaining SAC entries will yield more contemporary examples
- And a LOOP on the military-industrial complex continues to explore one
central facet of this
continuing phenomenon
- Three seasons after Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" [ID], the world
was in a state of unrest, within and well beyond the sphere of Soviet
influence
- The post-WW2 enthusiasm for significant change was marked by wide-spread and growing dissent against
unjustifiable and oppressive power in the lives of various peoples
- None of this was the intention of the Khrushchev speech
<>1957:1958; USSR proposals called for East-West [i.e.,
Warsaw Pact and NATO] non-aggression pacts and nuclear-free zone in all of middle Europe
*--West European and US public opinion was waxing strong in this direction, but NATO
powers rejected the Soviet proposal
<>1957:French
(Algerian-born) existentialist author
Albert Camus (1913-1960) [ID] won the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Camus wrote about the modern meaning of revolution and dissent in The Rebel
(1951) [E-TXT] and again in a 1957
lecture [BMC4:768-71]
- F/Lenin/ about 2/3 of the way through The Rebel E-TXT. Keep hopping until the end of the text
- Notice how Camus links Lenin with the managerial/militarist trends
of the 20th century, with what SAC calls the third of three phases of European and World Revolution
[ID]]
<>1957:USSR and The People's Republic of China
experienced sharp deterioration in their international relations
- The two states were ruled by Communist parties that usually celebrated a certain familial closeness
- But the Sino-Soviet conflict grew, even to the point of military clashes along often ambiguous borders (especially in winter)
- China accused the USSR of being a "state capitalist" rather than "communist" society
- This conflict, with all its global implications, highlighted the fact that economic
modernization (industrial "capitalism", whether liberal capitalism or state capitalism) did
not always produce liberal societies
- By the mid-20th century the relationship between capitalism and coercion varied
over a fairly broad spectrum [ID]
<>1957mr25:European Economic Community [EEC or
"Common Market"] founded, Treaty of Rome, a direct outgrowth of the vision of Jean Monnet
[ID] and a result of the early accomplishments of
the ECSC. It reinforced the emerging concept of European Union [EU]
\\
*--LOOP on EU
<>1957my10:Nikita Khrushchev
introduced economic reforms [SGv:93-101]
<>1957je29:Moscow | Central Committee
backed Nikita Khrushchev vs. "Anti-Party Group" [SGv:182-7]
<>1957fa:USSR | For the first time in
human history, two artificial satellites were launched into orbit around the earth
- 1957oc04:Gigantic Soviet rockets lifted Sputnik I, which was a beeping 184-lb. ball with
whiskery antennas
- 1957no03:Sputnik II carried a dog into space where it died
- This Soviet achievement prompted a vigorous reaction on the part of the USA military-industrial complex
- 1957no07:Gaither Report, written by Paul Nitze for a National Security Agency Panel
after a half year of deliberations, was submitted under top secrecy to President
Eisenhower. It recommended sharp increases in military expenditures. ["Gaither
Report" text, with some explication]
- 1957no21:WDC | Committee for Economic Development
(Fifteenth Anniversary Meeting) reflected deep concerns about the strenuous competitive relationship developing
between USA and USSR, and about its effects on customary industrial and military policy
- The meeting produced a "confidential" publication, Soviet Progress vs. American
Enterprise [TXT]
- Concerns were mounting over the dangers of a "military-industrial
complex" arising to address the problem of expanding Cold-War competition
<>1958:Brussels World's Fair (1st
world's fair since 1939:NYC)
- The Brussels World Fair marked the beginning of new era of open cultural exchange between USA and USSR
- This was the year of the US/USSR Cultural and Academic Exchange agreement
and the popular victory of the Texas pianist Van Cliburn at the Tchaikovsky
festival in Moscow
- 1958ja06:Time Magazine named Nikita Khrushchev "man of the year" for
1957. In part, the selection was based on the following =
In 1957 the Russians opened on the Volga the world's largest hydroelectric station, developed west of
the Urals the world's biggest new oilfield, built at Dubna, outside Moscow, the
world's largest synchrocyclotron (particles accelerator). In 1957 Russia
graduated three times as many engineers as the U.S. and published five times as
many book titles. In the judgment of their U.S. peers, Russian
scientists in
1957 excelled in such fields as astrophysics, very high energy studies,
cosmic-ray research and certain branches of higher mathematics, and ran close to
U.S. performance in oceanography, cryogenics and geology. The Russians moved up
in air defense, long-range bomber capacity, and in reorganizing their
traditionally massive ground forces into small, fast-moving units capable of
using tactical atomic weapons.
\\
- Note alarmed reaction to the opening of closer cultural ties expressed by US Cold-War ideologue/scholar Frederick C. Barghoorn,
The
Soviet Cultural Offensive:87-91
- A later account, see Yale Richmond, Cultural exchange and
the Cold War : raising the Iron Curtain (2003)
- For Richmond's earlier views, US-Soviet Cultural Exchanges, 1958-1986: Who Wins? (Boulder:1987)
- For a broader view of the background to 1958, see J. D. Parks,
Culture, Conflict and
Coexistence: American-Soviet Cultural Relations, 1917-1958 (1983)
- USA has sometimes been slow to acknowledge the profound influence on "high
culture" exerted by Russian tradition, for example,
dance
- For other instances of cultural relations, see Gordon Dee Smith with S. A. Carmeau,
Jr., and Marla Price, Ten Plus Ten [10 + 10 here]:
Contemporary Soviet and American Painters
- On Russian and American literature, see Andrei Voznesenskii with John Updike and Bel
Kaufman, The Human Experience:
Contemporary American and Soviet Fiction and Poetry
- On one aspect of this theme, see Lauridson, Inger Thorup Lauridson and Per Dalgaard,
eds., The Beat Generation and the Russian New Wave (1990) ORBIS
- A significant example of Russian cultural influence on USA is explored by Ewa Majewska
Thompson, Russian Formalism
and Anglo-American New Criticism: A Comparative Study (1971)
<>1958:English pundit and author
Aldous Huxley returned to earlier
themes in Brave New World Revisited
*--A quarter century of political
totalitarianism and total war, followed by disturbing nuclear remilitarization,
suggested several new perspectives
<>1958:Gustav Wetter published his complex analysis
Dialectical Materialism:
A Historical and Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union
(1963)
<>1958:USA | John Kenneth Galbraith published his influential critique of American
society, The Affluent Society
<>1958fe01:Egypt played leading role in
formation with Sudan of the United Arab Republic
*1958fe21:Nasser elected head of state by plebiscite
*--In the fourth century Egypt played a role in
the original "Easternizaton" (i.e., Christianization) of "The West"
*--Egypt now joined the ranks of modern nation-states
\\
*--Wki account of Egypt's years
as independent Republic, 1952 to 2011
<>1958mr27:1964oc15;
Nikita Khrushchev replaced Bulganin as president
of the USSR Council of Ministers, thus held highest state and Party posts for over 5 1/2 years, a time of
sometimes bold but nearly always ineffective reform
<>1958mr:USSR completed heavy-yield, heavy-fallout tests of nuclear weapons and
announced unilateral suspension of such tests, pending reciprocal suspension among other
nuclear powers
<>1958my:Algerian disorders signaled
intensification of five-year anti-imperialist struggle against France
*--Algeria inspired national liberation movements throughout the Arabic world of AfroAsia
*--Algerian rebellion quickly shook down the French government
*--WW2 General Charles de Gaulle led the new French Fifth Republic
*--Algerian disorders continued
*--1958my19:Paris press conference [CWC:544-50]
\\
*--THE BATTLE of ALGIERS [videorecording of 1965
semi-documentary movie]
*--LOOP on "AfroAsia"
<>1958:African (Nigerian) writer Chinua
Achebe published Things Fall Apart which explored the shock of
modernization on village folk
*--Two years later he published
No Longer at Ease [Excerpts from both, SWH:414-23]
<>1958oc:Geneva | USSR, USA, England opened talks on practical sides of enforcing
cessation of nuclear testing
<>1958oc:Russian poet and gentle
dissident
Boris Pasternak, author of the novel Dr. Zhivago, awarded Nobel Prize
<>1959:USA author William Burroughs published
Naked Lunch and shocked
reading public [Wagar:179]
<>1959:USA sociologist William Kornhauser published
The Politics of Mass
Society [CCS:532-51]
<>1959ja:Cuban revolution, led by Fidel Castro, successfully
entered and took control over the capital city Havana
<>1959ja08:French Fifth Republic proclaimed
Charles de Gaulle President, an office he held for ten years
*--For a collection of characteristic political pronouncements, see CWC:540-53
*--Executive-branch centralism of the "Gaullist" type dominated French politics until early 1980s
<>1959my:European Council began deliberations on USA "Dillon proposal"
regarding international trade negotiations (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade [GATT]
)
\\
*--LOOP on EU
<>1959se:Camp David Summit,
outside WDC | Summitry initiated by USA President Dwight David Eisenhower and First Secretary of the Communist
Party of the USSR Nikita Khrushchev
- 1959de09:USA, Indiana, Indianapolis| Growing radical "right-wing" dissent
against the Eisenhower administration and its drive for peaceful resolution of
Cold War tensions contributed to the creation of the John Birch Society
[ID]
- John Birch founder, Robert W. Welch, explained in outline form the main
tenets of his society [FLM#1
| FLM#2]
<>1959no:German Social Democratic Party,
which had been making a comeback over the
previous ten years in several European polities, adopted its
"Bad Godesberg Program", replacing its doctrinaire 1925 program in favor of a
more moderate but still socialist platform [CWC:527-39]
<>1960:USA. Herman Kahn published his "thoughts on the unthinkable",
On
Thermonuclear War [summarized in CCS:1183-98; more on
public debate in USA:1199-1226]
*--Communist Party issued its thoughts on the economic crisis of modern
capitalism [Jaworskyj:477-85] Soviet aversion
to capitalist cultural crisis (squalid commercial media, permissiveness, ethical
relativism, etc.) was also a theme of that era [ibid:526-8, 564-9], not just for
Soviet pundits and ideologues, but also for a growing "cultural-values" or
"family-values" dissent movements
in the USA
*--W. W. Rostow published his influential
The Stages of Economic Growth:
A Non-Communist Manifesto with its theory of economic development and
underdevelopment. Here is his list of "Some tentative, approximate
take-off dates" into self-sustained, modern industrial development (p.38),
followed by his "rough symbolic dates for technological maturity" (p.59) =
| Great Britain |
1783-1802 |
1850 |
| France |
1830-1860 |
1910 |
| Belgium |
1833-1860 |
--- |
| United States |
1843-1860 |
1900 |
| Germany |
1850-1873 |
1910 |
| Sweden |
1868-1890 |
1930 |
| Japan |
1878-1900 |
1940 |
| Russia |
1890-1914 |
1950 |
| Canada |
1896-1914 |
1950 |
| Argentina |
1935- --- |
--- |
| Turkey |
1937- --- |
--- |
| India |
1952- --- |
--- |
| China |
1952- --- |
--- |
<>1960:USSR announced policy of
"Peaceful Coexistence" [ORW:269-8]
<>1960ap28:German Federal Republic Economics Minister
Ludwig Erhard delivered speech to his Christian Democratic Union
Party on West Germany's social market economy [P20:391]
<>1960my:Paris Summit ended when USA
spy-plane, the U-2, was shot down, followed
by strong Khrushchev denunciation [ORW:259-62]
<>1960je30:Belgian Congo was granted
independence from colonial rule
- President Joseph Kasavubu and Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba were the leading figures in the new national government
- The army mutinied against Belgian officers still on the scene, but close aide to Lumumba and army chief of
staff, General Mobutu Sese Seko, brought order to the army
- The Belgian government was reluctant to let go of Congolese natural resources
- It organized secessionist movements in mineral rich territories of its ex-colonial domain
- The UNO intervened, but solely to "maintain order"
- The UNO made no special effort to support the independent Kasavubu regime
- Desperate for help, Lumumba appealed to the USSR and received an enthusiastic response
- The USSR dispatched massive military and technical aid (about 1000 advisers arrived within six weeks)
- USA saw this as the spread of communism and identified Lumumba as the on-site
agent of this global conspiracy
- In a sense, the USA stepped in where Belgian imperialists could no longer prevail. [Compare with Vietnam
events]
- The US encouraged Kasavubu and Mobutu in their enmity with Lumumba
- Kasavubu ordered Mobutu to arrest Lumumba, and Lumumba ordered Mobutu to arrest Kasavubu
- Mobutu was the man between
- 1960se04:General Mobutu assumed power (with US backing) but retained Kasavubu as President. Lumumba was arrested and eventually assassinated
- 1965no25:Mobutu assumed exclusive power with direct CIA support
- Six years later, renamed the country Zaire
- Ostensibly US support for Mobutu was rendered in order to prevent "communist takeover"
- Ironically, new US ally Mobutu created a dictatorial single-party state and a government-dominated program of economic
development which utterly ruined the nation
- After three decades of pro-"Western" rule, the main result was the
massive enrichment of Mobutu himself. His rule has been called the greatest kleptocracy [rule of crooks] in human history
- 1997my:Mobutu was forced to flee, ending his 37 years at the center of post-colonial politics in
the old Belgian Congo
- 2000:Congo River voyage by Tim Butcher was recorded in his
Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart
- He met Louise Wright, one of the last English missionaries still running a school on the banks of the great river
- She told him about how, under the Belgians, native peoples were allowed to travel only if authorities issued
them temporary internal passports
- In fact, nothing of consequence could be done without the blessing of key
imperialist administrative authorities posted throughout the land
- She identified many survivals in recent times from the era of imperialism throughout the Congo basin
- This doleful form of "Westernization" remained long after the Belgians were forced out
and well into the time of USA influence there
- "By the time I got here in the 1980s the colonial era was long gone, but I found that
under Mobutu everything was run along exactly the same lines. Nothing has really changed", she said
- The traces of European imperialism could be felt into
the 21st century
- How would one list and evaluate the essential characteristics of the European/African confrontation
in the Congo since 1885?
- Through the last third of the 20th century, the US proxy-state Zaire may be compared with the
USSR proxy-state Cuba [ID] to gain some sense of the meaning of the Cold War in the Third World
[ID]
\\
*2011ja17:theguardian summed up the long-term African legacy of Patrice Lumumba
[E.TXT]
*2016se02:theguardian explored mysteries surrounding death of UNO Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld in connection with the unwinding of African imperialism
[E-TXT]
<>1960oc28:USSR Russian Republic published comprehensive
law "On the Conservation of Nature in the RSFSR" [Philip R. Pryde,
Conservation
in the Soviet Union (1972) translated extensive excerpts:184ff]
*--Environmental consciousness became a factor in Soviet
and US civic activism as the era of vigorous Europe- and USA-wide
dissent
approached
\\
*--Douglas R. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom:
Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev
<>1960oc31:Algerian Republic's
Provisional Government Prime Minister, Ferhat Abbas, commemorated the seventh anniversary of the Algerian
struggle for independence from a more than century-long French imperialist
dominion [P20:328]
*1961:Martinique-born psychiatrist Frantz Fanon published Les damnés de la terre
[The Wretched of the Earth (1968)
E-TXT | UO titles by Fanon]
*--Fanon was trained in his profession in France and was a decorated war hero
fighting for the French in WW2. However, he turned against French imperialist authority
when he joined the Algerian national liberation movement. He urged African states to
seek their own revolutionary future independent of the models
imposed by European colonists. "The West" did not share its virtues with the non-European
world when it imposed its dominance there. Here is one example of how he
contrasted the "Western" with the colonial relationship between the powerful and
the weak [SAC editor inserted boldface] =
In capitalist societies, the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure
of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who
are given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal service, and the affection which
springs from harmonious relations and good behavior -- all these esthetic
expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the
exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens
the task of policing considerably. In the capitalist countries,
a multitude of moral teachers, counselors and "bewilderers" separate the
exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the
contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence
and their frequent and direct action, maintain contact with the native and
advise him by means of rifle-butts and napalm not to budge [BNE:324-8 |
PWT2:385-7]
*2017fe16: eurotopics.net| Well into the 21st century, imperialism and colonialism remained sensitive political topics =
Progressive-minded political figure and candidate for the French presidency, Emmanuel Macron, condemned colonization of Algeria and became the target of "conservative" or "reactionary" opinion
[E-TXT]
<>1960de:Geneva talks on nuclear testing recessed with
little accomplishment, especially in USA election year in which John Fitzgerald Kennedy
(JFK) attacked Dwight Eisenhower for allowing a "missile gap"
to develop,
an incorrect assertion that USA had fallen behind USSR in intercontinental military
capability
*--Inflation of threats to national security continued
to work as an effective political ploy
<>1961:Africa | Ghana President
Kwame Nkrumah wrote several
books in which he
laid out his anti-imperialist ideology
- 1948:English Commission of Enquiry reported on some of the roots of the
anti-imperialist movement that created independent Ghana [BNE:312-14]
- Beyond Ghana, the Kenyan leader of the unsuccessful Mau Mau uprising against English imperialism, Waruhiu
Itote, described his own anti-colonial education [BNE:314-17]
- 1961:USA sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein
[ID] published
Africa: The Politics of
Independence [Excerpts in CCS:1153-64]
- This regionally focused study established Wallerstein as a major "World System" theorist.
[SAC recommends the phrase in quotes be put in the singular]
- In part, Wallerstein wanted to reject the popular Cold-War notion of "Third World" [ID]
by putting it in a vaster historical long-duration
- In his view, global events reflected nothing like a workable three-worlds taxonomy
- There was just one world, and it had for the longest time been dominated by one system =
- His notion of "World System" is defined by the interrelationship between two entities, Core and Periphery
- Often those who employ the theory will pluralize "cores" and "peripheries"
- Sometimes (as for example here in SAC) the expression "metropol and periphery"
- Notice how the Wki entry
on "World Systems Theory" +MAP breaks the world's "countries" into four categories =
- Core
- Periphery
- "Semiperiphery" in between the first two, and finally (and vaguely)
- "Other". The theory has some leaks =
- Notice how post-Soviet Russia and eastern Europe are demoted to category (2), rather than (1) or (3).
Does this seem right?
- It does and it doesn't. And that's vaguely suggested in the Wki article itself =
While in the sphere of influence of some cores [NB! the word is pluralized
now], semiperipheries [ditto] also tend to exert
their own control over some peripheries. Further, semi-peripheries [NB! hyphenated
now] act as buffers between cores and peripheries, thus "partially
deflect the political pressures which groups [?!] primarily located in
peripheral areas [?!] might otherwise direct against core-states" and
stabilize the world-system. [The quotation in this Wiki passage is from Frank Lechner,
Globalization theories: World-System Theory (2001)]
- The Wiki entry not only introduces Lechner's uncertain expressions
"groups" and "areas", and his compound "core-states", but it reflects
another ubiquitous ambiguity in the theory when it shifts back and forth between
pluralized "World Systems" and the singular expression "World System",
sometimes with hyphen, sometimes without
- The Wiki entry emphasizes "core/periphery" relations between nation-states and
it devotes insufficient attention to "core/periphery" relations within the borders of nation-states,
IE=domestic political/economic relationships
- "World System" theory is about two paired macro-economic situations (one aggressive and
the other vulnerable)
- It has far less to do with any indefinite inventory of exploiting or exploited
nation-states, "groups" and/or "areas"
- It is less a defined geographical system than it is a global commercial or financial system
- The Wiki entry has some useful suggestions about recent evolution of
World-System analysis [TXT]
- It's a bit of a mess, but from the 1960s forward, Wallerstein exerted powerful influence on contemporary ideas about
imperialism [ID]
- HOWEVER, THE VERY BEST SUMMARY OF "WORLD SYSTEM THEORY" CAN BE READ IN
WALLERSTEIN.2011 [CF= Final "reprise" chapter of volume I]
- LOOP on "finance"
- The unhealed wounds inflicted by European imperialism lasted longest and strongest
in what is called "The Middle East" and in central & northern Africa
- SAC has designated this combined area "AfroAsia" (ID)
- Globe shaking disorders rock that region well into the 21st century
- 1961:Soviet theorists explored the relationship between war and revolution
[Jaworskyj:586-94]
\\
*2016au18: The Guardian| "Uncovering the brutal truth about the British empire" [The "Western" historiographic controversy
surrounding Harvard Professor Caroline Elkins' account of suppression of the African anti-imperialist Mau Mau uprising]
[E-TXT]
*2011my11:Vestnik: The Journal of Russian and Asian Studies| Jeremy Bervoets (an
undergraduate at the College of Wooster), "The Soviet Union in Angola: Soviet and African Perspectives on
the Failed Socialist Transformation" [E-TXT]
<>1961:German school teacher Hannah Vogt published
The Burden of Guilt in
order to fill the gap in school histories which had hitherto ignored the Nazi period [P20:311]
<>1961:English radical dissident
and dramatist Raymond Williams published
The Long Revolution
in which he expanded on the standard European concepts of democratic revolution
and industrial revolution by adding "cultural revolution" [CWC:592-623]
<>1961ja16:USA President Eisenhower's farewell address
[TXT] included a
passage that must have been provoked in part by the alarming military-industrial
inclinations of the newly elected USA President Kennedy.
However, this was not a new theme for Eisenhower [EG]
- Now Eisenhower warned more pointedly =
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether
sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the
disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
- Military-industrialism was to be a major USA/USSR shared feature of the Cold War era
- The failure of the USSR to demobilize after 1945 and the US re-mobilization after 1947, and
the joint evolution of unprecedented military-industrial complexes must be considered a central
element of Cold War history
- Military-industrialism became a dominant feature of political and economic life in experience of both big Cold-War contenders
- It was shared in the national experience of many areas of the world
because international sale of military weaponry grew each year
- The Cold War served the interests of those who benefited from the military budgets of the
two "superpowers", those who held powerful positions of managerial authority within these systems
of national defense and their various associated clients, dependent nation-states and corporate
enterprises (some were "free-market" corporations, some were state companies run by managerial apparatchiki)
- It is best to define "military budget" more broadly than either USA or USSR wished
- We cannot exclude espionage, secret police, pseudo-diplomatic representation, foreign aid, massive
cooperative construction projects, GULag factory prisons, "space programs", and semi-entrepreneurial
enterprise abroad
- It is useful to include all agencies funded or contracted in state budgets, producing commodities
and services associated with the nation-state in the wider world and involved in projection of
nation-state power or reaping benefit abroad
- Those in charge could be described as a "neo-imperialist" or "neo-mercantilist" executive and managerial
elite
- As a reminder of what these big trends, now labeled "neo", were at the beginning, take a
few historical hops on mercantil
- Also hop through the LOOP on "managerial"
for a more than 100-year history of that contemporary phenomenon
- This new managerial "neo" elite was not "capitalist". It was directly or indirectly
dependent on governmental budgets, authorities and opportunities
generated by the contingencies of the Cold War and the several "Third World" [ID]
military adventures that broke out, increasing in frequency and intensity in the 1960s
- 1973:It was a quarter-century into the Cold War era before a social-scientistic effort was made to assess the meaning
of "military industrialism",
Testing the Theory of the
Military-Industrial Complex [TXT excerpts]
- The priorities of military-industrial complexes since the end of WW2
shaped the fate of all contending parties, their allies and subordinated
peoples, and all those who were the targets or arena of the world-threatening
competition
- [Continue the LOOP on "national security threat"]
- Much as Khrushchev five years earlier unintentionally emboldened a
growing culture of dissent
[ID], so also did Eisenhower now =
- In the very year of Eisenhower's speech, wartime military-industrial administrative culture was lampooned in
USA author Joseph Heller's Catch 22[W]
- Heller saw that the actions of those in charge were motivated not by the widely evoked ideals of "freedom"
or "democracy" or "equality" or "liberation", but by the sordid and laughably petty interests embedded
in his characters' military-industrial institutions and authority
- However outrageous the lampoon, Heller was pointing his finger at one anatomical feature of the very
same elephant that his contemporaries, Serbian statesman and theorist Milovan Djilas [ID] and
English pundit George Orwell [ID] described
- Neither George Orwell nor
Milovan Djilas had an ounce of Heller's hearty levity
- In this year also, USA economic historian David Granick published
The Red Executive: A
Study of the Organization Man in Soviet Industry [TXT], where he found
surprising similarities in the managerial styles of the two cold-war industrial economies
- Europeans caught between the two superpowers now began to chafe
- See all introductory material and text to p. 36, and as time allows pp.322-34, in Alva Myrdal,
The Game of Disarmament: How the United
States and Russia Run the Arms Race (1976)
- Myrdal served as Swedish Ambassador to several countries and was a leading figure in the global movement
for disarmament during the Cold War
- In 1982, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for her disarmament
work. Website biography
- English historian and social critic, E.P. Thompson, Beyond
the cold war: A new approach to the arms race and nuclear annihilation (1982)
and, more pointedly The Heavy
Dancers (1985) drew USSR and USA together in his bipartisan condemnation of Cold-War nuclear militarism
- Salman Rushdie [ID],
reviewed Heavy Dancers in the Manchester Guardian Weekly
- Rushdie celebrated this example of serious English dissent against power
- He endorsed Thompson's warning that opposition to "the bomb" alone was not really sufficient unto the
needs of humanity because the bomb was but an expression of "the full power of
the state"
- It was only "the sharp end of the power structure which rules our
lives"
- It was but the most obvious means of violence in the arsenals of two
main and several lesser "heavy dancers"
- The public "must now take on also the whole state-manipulated and media-endorsed ideology"
- Rushdie summarized the argument = Citizens of all nations -- "The West", the Soviet Bloc and the rest
of the world -- must take a stand against the "armed state", against the
whole statist system with its global threat of violence
- Rushdie expressed himself with power = "[T]he nuclear state -- unaccountable, unresponsive, half in love with death -- is the enemy of the
people"
- The apprehension that Europe was destined to fall under the power of the two
peripheral giants, Russia and USA, had been a theme of European diplomatic and theoretical
discussion since the 19th century [EG]
- The situation was not altogether new. Prior to WW1, public figures agonized
over the way an arms race ("balance of power") ought to work
[EG]
- The famous "Sixties" [1960s] were a feature of world history = Growing unease with overweening
managerial military and bureaucratic control over national life fed a growing mood of dissent
in "The West" as well as in "The East"
\\
*--Continue chronology in SAC
NARRATIVE EXTENSION PAGE on Military-Industrial
Complex
*--Hop back here to continue SAC LOOP on military-industrial
<>1961mr:Geneva talks renewed but broke down quickly
<>1961ap14:Moscow, Mayakovskii
square | First arrest in connection with the illegal reading of poetry. The Soviet dissent movement
broke into the open [E-TXT]
<>1961ap17:Cuba repulsed USA
CIA sponsored invasion at Bay of Pigs
<>1961ap27:NYC| USA President John Kennedy addressed
gathering of US press professionals on the role of the press in the emerging dangerous domestic and international
threat from conspiritorial secret societies [Illustrated recording]
<>1961my04:Soviet law
vs. "parasites" [SGv:301-3]. The struggle
against dissent also broke into the open
<>1961je:Vienna Summit Meeting | President JFK clashed
with First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR ("the Soviet ruler") Nikita Khrushchev
*--"Khrushchev and Kennedy: Vienna Summit 1961" [YouTube]
<>1961jy:Berlin | JFK delivered speech announcing US military buildups, adding
"Ich bin ein Berliner" ["I am a jelly roll" was a translation popular at the time in some waggish circles.
(Berliner was the name of a German jelly roll)]
<>1961au:USSR announced plan for atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons
<>1961au13:Berlin wall under construction
*1971:Soviet political cartoon illustrated the purpose of the wall, implying
that it prevented Nazi return to power and encouraged eventual diplomatic ties between USSR
and Germany [FLM]
<>1961se:USA announced underground nuclear testing
<>1961oc:Communist Party congress22; remarkable new political party program
announced by Khrushchev [SGv:188-206]
*--The new program projected that the USSR would achieve its strategic goal of "communism" by the year 1984
*--The Party ideologists were exploring the question of dictatorship and the state in the time of transition from
Socialism to Communism [Jaworskyj:580-5] Compare
with a discussion of this topic nearly forty years earlier
<>1962:USA environmental
consciousness raised by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring [ID]
<>1962je01:je03:USSR | Novocherkassk wage-laborers
staged a bloody but successful general strike against managerial authorities
[Wki | Derluguian,"Contradictions":14]
*1988my:Eye-witness account [E-TXT]
<>1962je20:USA-USSR presidents Kennedy and
Khrushchev agreed to create "hotline" telephone connection
<>1962se08:Cuba, Havana harbor | USSR unloaded medium-range ballistic missiles
(MRBM). Beginning of "Cuban Missile Crisis"
[W]
*--Tensions between USA and Cuba had intensified in the three-plus years since
Fidel Castro's successful revolution in Cuba
*--A curious cultural interlude
played itself out in the midst of this emerging and most dangerous moment in the Cold-War
epoch =
<>1962se12:1962oc09;
Moscow & Leningrad | After 48 years in west European and USA emigration (since
1914), Igor Stravinsky made a triumphal visit to his erstwhile homeland, Russia
*--Stravinsky traveled with his wife, Vera, and
with his chronicler, the musician
Robert Craft [Craft,
Stravinsky, Chronicle...:313-42]
*--Stravinsky lived the last decades of his life in Los Angeles = F/Stravinsky/ in KNIGHT LIBRARY HOLDINGS
*--In some ways the Russian visit was the crowning moment in an international
career that had opened with a bang a
half-century earlier
*--Now back to the unfolding "Cuban Missile Crisis" =
<>1962oc22:USA imposed blockade on Cuba
*--If but one rocket were to be released in W. Hemisphere, USA would attack USSR
*--Squadrons of B-52s, w/ hydrogen weapons flew to tactical positions around USSR
*--USA nuclear submarines trained Polaris missiles on USSR
*1962oc18:WDC| JFK & his advisers and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko & his advisers met
[E-TXT]
*1962oc19:WDC| USA national leaders met [E-TXT]
*--USA army prepared Cuban invasion
*--Twenty-five USSR ships approached Cuba
*--Suddenly all stopped but one, an oiler
*--JFK let it pass
*1962oc22:WDC| USA President John Kennedy [hereafter "JFK"] sent letter to USSR
Chairman Nikita Khrushchev [hereafter "XrwNS"] [E-TXT]
*1962oc24:WDC| Telegram From the USA Department of State to its Embassy in
Turkey [E-TXT]
*1962oc24:Moscow| XrwNS to JFK [E-TXT]
*1962oc27:USSR, Moscow| XrwNS to JFK [E-TXT]
*1962oc28:Moscow| XrwNS to JFK [E-TXT]
<>1962oc28:Khrushchev announced dismantling of its missiles in Cuba
*1962oc30:Moscow| XrwNS to JFK [E-TXT]
*1962no03:WDC| John Scali of the American Broadcasting Co. met with Aleksandr S. Fomin, Counselor at the Soviet Embassy in WDC
and reputedly head of Soviet intelligence there [E-TXT]
*1962no03:WDC| JFK to XrwNS [E-TXT]
*1962(ND):Moscow| XrwNS to JFK [E-TXT]
*1962no06:WDC| JFK to XrwNS [E-TXT]
*1962no12:Moscow| XrwNS to JFK [E-TXT]
*1962no12:WDC at Soviet Embassy reception for the visiting Bolshoi Ballet| USA Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy gave
USSR Ambassador Anatolyi Dobrynin an oral message [E-TXT]
*1962no14:Moscow| XrwNS to JFK [E-TXT]
*1962no15:WDC| JFK to XrwNS [E-TXT]
*1962no16:WDC| JKF met with his Joint Chiefs of Staff [E-TXT]
*1962no19:WDC| Rbt. Kennedy met with USSR Press Attaché Georgii Bol'shakov (KGB operative close to XrwNS)
[E-TXT]
*1962no20:WDC| Scali memo on conversation with Fomin [E-TXT]
*1962??:Moscow| XrwNS to JFK [E-TXT 2016se26:file unavailable]
*1962no21:WDC| JFK to XrwNS [E-TXT]
*1962no22:Moscow| XrwNS to JFK [E-TXT]
*1962de11:Moscow| [E-TXT]
*1962de14:WDC [E-TXT]
*1963ja08:WDC| JFK & staff met with bipartisan Congressional leadership
[E-TXT]
*1963ja09:WDC| JFK & staff me with USSR Deputy Foreign Minister Vasilii Kuznetsov, resume of Cuban crisis and
summary of issues still ahead [E-TXT]
*1963ja26:WDC| Hurwitz report on meeting with Cuban Prime Minister Castro
[E-TXT]
*--USA reciprocated by removing some of its missiles from Turkey
*--USA settled into tense but largely peaceful relationship with revolutionary Cuba
<>1962no:1975;COLD WAR era of dissent
*--USSR and USA "Sixties", a dozen years of domestic social, political and cultural dissent; era of "civil rights"
and "human rights" movements
*1962:1975; USA journal of dissent, Ramparts, worked to expose "the dark side" of USA
life [E-TXT]
\\
*2015:NYC:NYU:|>Young,Ralph|_Dissent: The History of an American Idea| a{UO}s{Full crn of USA dsn,
from "New World" beginnings up to early 21st c| "The Sixties" to now = ch#19 to the end [pp 407-522]}
*1950s:1960s; USA Afro-American civil rights movement, Zinn, ch17 ("Or Does It Explode"):435-59
<>1962no:USSR
dissenter Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
[TXT] with official approval
*--On the basis of personal experience and memory of fellow prisoners' personal testimony in post-WW2 Soviet prison camps,
Solzhenitsyn described life in the infamous GULag [ID]
<>1962no23:Nikita Khrushchev split Communist Party apparat [bureaucracy].
This was a fateful move [SGv:214]
<>1963:Nikita Khrushchev on literature and the
arts [RRC1,3:704-8]
<>1963ja:French
President Charles de Gaulle vetoed English application for EEC membership
*--Nationalism blocked evolution of the European Union [EU]
<>1963mr08:Syrian coup brought Ba'ath [Baath]
Party [W-ID] to power
\\
*--[Wki]
*--LOOP on "Syria"
<>1963ap+: USSR hosted 38-day visit by
Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro [pix]
*--The Cuban revolution was now relatively secure after three years in power
<>1963au06:USA, USSR, and England signed treaty banning nuclear
weapons tests in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater
<>1963au28:USA
dissent figure and
civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream"
speech [TXT]
<>1963no22:Dallas TX | USA President JFK assassinated
\\
*2013oc:Smithsonian| "What Does the Zapruder Film Really Tell Us?"
[E-TXT]
<>1964:USA NYC | Zbigniew Brzezinski and
Samuel P. Huntington, _Political Power: USA/USSR [JK31.B7], compared the two superpowers
[TXT excerpts]
- Of especial interest is the definition of what was called "The Theory of Convergence"
[TXT]. The authors' refute that idea in the final section of the book
[TXT], but their first objective is to explain it =
- Devised in the 1950s, the theory of convergence held the optimistic view that modernization
would force the USSR to become like "The West", like us
- The universal transformative power of industrialization and the inescapability of market
economics were at the center of this idea [TXT]
- In addition, Brzezinski and Huntington harbored a hedged but distinct affection for technocratic managerialism [TXT]
- Soviet ideologists rejected the theory of convergence [TXT]
[More detail in Jaworskyj:529-38]
- Over the years the idea that cold-war "convergence" had a dark side -- that it might
tend toward making USA like the USSR -- inspired outrage among some USA citizens [EG]
- With no questions asked, Brzezinski and Huntington presumed that the comparative welfare of USA and
Soviet populations was a vital measure of comparative quality of the two systems
- If that is so, what should we make of tables generated forty years later
[ID], tables that measured comparative welfare of US and certain other
industrialized populations in such a way that in nearly every category the USA was in the worst positions?
- Should we ask whether the two towering competitors in the Cold War, USA and USSR, both sacrificed the
welfare of their own populations in the name of military-industrial investment-and-procurement prosperity
[ID]?
- It had taken a century, but welfare was now a nearly universally
accepted legitimate function of government
- Here are several other especially interesting points of comparison in Political Power (not excerpted
in the SAC TXT but available in the print copy) =
- Ch.#7:301-330 = Agriculture
- Ch#8:331-365 = Military/civilian conflict = Marshal Zhukov vs. Politbiuro & General Douglas MacArthur
vs. President Truman
- Table 153 = Primary occupations of top political leadership
- Table 183 = Turnover at the top
- Table 231 = Major policy innovations, 1945-1963
- Table 302 =Grain production
- Table 303 = Man hours and productivity
- Pages 439-40 = Soviet and American Societies in general statistical terms
\\
*--LOOP on Brzezinski | LOOP on Huntington
*--GO 1927de02 for comparisons of USSR and USA economic systems
*--_Economic Comparisons, USA-USSR: Population and Area, Basic Production, Exports, Levels of Living, Military [HC106.5.N268]
*--Gail W. Lapidus and Guy Swanson, eds., _State and Welfare, USA/USSR: Contemporary Policy and Practice | See especially
Joseph Berliner, "Comparison of Social Welfare Systems":1-13 and Alex Inkeles, "Rethinking Social Welfare: The United States and
the USSR in Comparative Perspective":383-457
*--Urie Bronfenbrenner with the assistance of John C. Condry, Jr., _Two Worlds of Childhood: U.S. and U.S.S.R.
[HQ792.R9+B75]. On comparative family and education, pp. xi-xxviii, 1-5; especially from the final section of ch#5
("Soviet Upbringing Revisited") to the end]
*--Paul Hollander, _Soviet and American Society: A Comparison [HN65.H56+1978].
Intro (ix-xxxi) addresses problem of Cold War outlook, problems of anti-Soviet bias, and antagonistic attitude toward the
1960s era of dissent (USA student movement). This widely-read book was a "Time/Newsweek"
level of commentary on certain quotidian themes of USA political-economic comparison (cf. p. xxv). Weak comparison or
exploration of shared experiences, more a skein of personal opinions on supposed key features of contemporary USA and
USSR, seen solely within the Cold War framework [cf. p. 82, and Perceptions:3-36 and Conclusions:374-405]. This book
is a classic example of US "cold-war" narrative. Should be compared with Soviet "cold-war" narrative, such as =
*--Vladimir Nikolaev, _The_Americans, as seen by a Soviet writer [E169.N6313]. One implication
at center of both Nikolaev and Hollander (above) was that "things are so bad over there, no sane person could complain about things over here"
*--_European Communities, Statistical Office, Basic Statistics of the Community: Comparison with Some European
Countries, Canada, the United States of America and with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 31 volumes (1961-1994)
*--W. H. Parker, _The_Superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union Compared (LND:1972)
*--American Bar Association, _A_Contrast Between the Legal Systems in the United States and in the Soviet Union [KLA50.A44 1968]
*--For a later legal comparison in the same celebratory vein, see Arpad Kadarkay, _Human Rights in American and
Russian Political Thought [JC599.U5k27 1982]
*--Remember Custine, Tocqueville,
Haxthausen, List, Marx,
Weber, Keynes, and Toynbee earlier
<>1964jy03:USA President Lyndon Johnson signed civil
rights legislation
*--Civil rights dissent intensified, and Alabama
Governor George Wallace reacted
[W]
<>1964jy15:Nikita Khrushchev's agriculture
reform [SGv:370-5]
<>1964jy23:French President
Charles de
Gaulle delivered his tenth press conference =
In discussing Europe and in trying to distinguish what it should be, it is always necessary to ascertain
what the world is.
At the end of the last World War, the distribution of forces in the world was
as simple, as brutal, as possible. It appeared suddenly at Yalta
[ID]. Only America and Russia
had remained powers, and all the more considerable powers in that all the rest found
themselves dislocated, the vanquished engulfed in their unconditional defeat and the
European victors destroyed to their foundations.
For the countries of the free world,threatened by the Soviets' ambition, American
leadership could then seem inevitable. Of all the countries of the free world, the New
World was the great victor of the war.
[... However, the world has changed since 1945. The result is this: ]
The division of the world into two camps led by Washington and Moscow
respectively corresponds less and less to the real situation. With respect to the gradually
splitting totalitarian world, or the problems posed by China, or the conduct
to be adopted toward many countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, or the remodeling
of the United Nations Organization [UNO] that necessarily
ensues, or the adjustment of world exchanges of all kinds, etc., it appears that Europe,
provided that it wishes it, is henceforth called upon to play a role which is its
own. [based on translation in BNE:329-34]
<>1964au05:Tonkin Gulf
resolution [TXT]
followed from false claims by US military and President Johnson that US warships were
under attack from North Vietnam
- After a decade of heavy involvement in the politics and
economy of the South, including sending large contingencies of "advisers" to the
South and engineering a recent bloody coup d'etat, US involvement in the civil war between
the North and the South escalated into a full-blown "Vietnam War"
- The war was often justified by what was called the "domino theory", i.e., if
Vietnam fell to Communism (that is, to competitors with American imperial power), then
other US possessions might soon fall
- 1965:1968; Eyewitness accounts of Vietnam War experience [Eye:668-76]
- Terrified Vietnam peasants crouch in slough next to USA soldiers under fire
[pix]
- Returned vets march under banner, "We won't fight another rich-man's war"
[pix]
- 1970s,middle|Pop-art rock group, the Rolling Stones, provide "Paint it Black" as soundtrack for a clearly
dissent-minded video of scenes from the Vietnam War [YouTube]
<>1964se14+; USA CA University of California at
Berkeley erupted in huge student protest movement called "The Free Speech Movement"
[ID#1 |
ID#2]
- Over the next eight years or so, west coast, east coast and everywhere between,
university students (children of the highly conflicted and draft-eligible middle and upper
classes) played a central role in USA dissent against the
Vietnam War
<>1964oc:China detonated its first nuclear device
<>1964oc15:Moscow | First Secretary of
the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev
was deposed
*1964oc17:Two days later, Pravda announced Khrushchev's fall
from power [ORW:280-3]
*--Leonid Brezhnev became General Secretary [First Secretary renamed] and held that post until his death in 1982
*--This marked the end of the era of
Khrushchev "thaw" and the beginning of an eighteen-year period called the "Brezhnev Era"
*--or "Generation of Victors" (remembering World War Two)
*--or "Era of Stagnation [zastoi]"
*--or the Soviet dissent era at its peak
\\
*2016au18: Мария Баронова: «Лучшими правителями России были Брежнев и Александр
II [ID]» | The Insider E-TXT
*--Kerblay,Mikhail Gorbachev:12
<>1964no16:Communist Party apparat restored [SGv:214-23]
<>1965wi:Russian
dissident poet
Joseph Brodsky on trial [Eisen:60-77]
*--Brodsky later emigrated to the USA and served for a
while as US poet laureate
*--Compare with Mstislav Rostropovich who became conductor of US
National Orchestra in WDC
*--Consider also Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author and
ethicist, who lived for years in USA exile
*--Soviet dissent spilled with benefit into "The West", but not without tension
| "Western" dissent had to be "edited" for Soviet
consumption
<>1965fe27:USA State Department bulletin "AGGRESSION
FROM THE NORTH"
[TXT]
[TXT]
(mr22:published), about Vietnam War
- In this year, Malcom McLean's NC-based container shipping company contracted with the US government to
transform the method by which multiple tons of war materiel were delivered to a new Vietnam container port built
on Cam Ranh Bay
- For a decade, McLean had been revolutionizing industrial shipping
- Before his container ships, it cost almost $6/ton to load a cargo ship. Afterwards, it cost less that sixteen cents/ton
- Old industrial docks withered away, along with the huge army of longshoremen
wage-laborers required by pre-container technology
- Previously the largest land-based transportation device was a coal train capable of shipping 23,000 tons
- McLean's container ships were capable of transporting three or four times that weight
- Later developments allowed up to 4200 semi-truck-trailer sized containers to be loaded on one vessel
- Fuel consumption of sea-going ships is not affected by cargo tonnage, so the more on board, the cheaper the per-unit shipping costs
- Global trade was utterly transformed [Wki]
- In this way, it can be said that the US military-industrial complex contributed
to the explosive expansion and rapid evolution of world trade
- The containers emptied at Cam Ranh Bay were brought back to USA via new container ports in Japan, where they were
filled with the first splashes of what soon became a tsunami of Japanese goods hitting the US shore
\\
*--Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container
Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
<>1965mr24:Leonid Brezhnev criticized Nikita Khrushchev's agriculture reform [SGv:376-9]
*--The
twelve-year Khrushchev era was quickly put aside
<>1965ap27:French President
Charles
de Gaulle criticized USA dominance over European policies. "In the end, our
reappearance as a nation with free hands obviously alters the global context which, since
Yalta [ID], seemed henceforth limited to two
partners. But since the liberty, equality, and fraternity of peoples decidedly do not
profit from this partition of the universe into two hegemonies, and, thus, two camps, a
different order and a different equilibrium are necessary for peace."
*--In these days,
he criticized USA policy in Vietnam and announced withdrawal from
the NATO military alliance [CWC:550-3]
<>1965ap28:Dominican Republic invaded and occupied by USA military
[ID#1 |
ID#2]
<>1965se:USSR Central Committee accepted economic reform
package created by Evsei Liberman and sponsored by newly appointed Soviet Premier Andrei Kosygin
*1966:Planning, Profit and Incentives in the USSR.
Vol. I: The Liberman Discussion: A New Phase in Soviet Economic Thought
*1972:Liberman authored Economic methods and the effectiveness of production [Ekonomicheskie metody
povysheniia effektivnosti obshchestvennogo proizvodstva]
\\
*1987no02:KIARS, Archie Brown drew parallel between Kosygin's 1960s economic policies and Gorbachev's 1980s Perestroika
[ID]
<>1965se:1966fe:USSR | Arrest and then trial of Andrei
Siniavskii [ID] and Yulii Daniel for slandering the USSR in their writings; Soviet dissent deepened
*--In the 1990s the by-now world-famous Siniavskii accepted a one-term visiting
professorship in the Russian Department of the University of Oregon
\\
Wagar:173
<>1965oc01:Indonesian Revolution got under way
with a failed coup d'état
- Soon the US-backed "New Order" regime came to power in the oil-rich nation
(and ruled for 33 years, until 1998)
- 2015:CIA yielded to pressure to release documents relating to USA involvement in the coming of the
Indonesian "New Order" [E-TXT]
- CF=Twelve years earlier in Iran
\\
*--W-ID#1 |
W-ID#2
*2016je02:BBC | "Looking into the massacres of Indonesia's past" [E-TXT]
*2015de10:Al Jazeera| "A people's tribunal puts Indonesia on trial"
[E-TXT]
*2015no02:NYR| Margaret Scott, "The Indonesian Massacre: What Did the US Know? [E-TXT]
((Excerpt = "The Indonesian massacre was a critical moment in the cold war. In the early morning of October 1,1965,
six Indonesian generals were killed by a group of junior officers who claimed they were forestalling a takeover
by a CIA-backed “Council of Generals.” The putsch was poorly planned and collapsed in twenty-four hours. At the time,
Indonesia was led by the leftist, romantic revolutionary-turned-autocrat Sukarno, and also had the third largest
Communist Party in the world, the PKI, with some 3 million members. The Indonesian Army and the US government quickly
blamed the botched coup on the PKI. (There is still much we don’t know about these events, but the head of the PKI,
D. N. Aidit, was at least aware of the coup attempt; he was killed shortly thereafter by the army.) Seizing on an
opportunity to unseat Sukarno and roll back communism, the army unleashed a campaign of violence in which perhaps
five hundred thousand or perhaps one million suspected Communists were killed—no one knows for sure"))
*1985:Hollywood film, THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY [W-ID]
<>1966:USSR Decree on the Structure and Staffing of the Central Apparatus of the
Council for Religious Affairs of the Council of Ministers [PS&C:305]
<>1966fe21:23; Syrian coup d'etat
\\
*--[Wki]
*--LOOP on "Syria"
<>1967:1972; USSR dissent movement into high gear, with
accent on overweening statist policies and "Human Rights" violations in the Soviet Union
- Soviet leaders were inclined to blame these growing protest movements throughout eastern Europe on an insidious
influence of "the decadent West"
- The "Western" establishment frequently blamed its own dissent movements on the insidious influence of "international
communism" -- EG=Civil rights movements, anti-Vietnam war protest and even organizations of wage-laborers
and their activities
- This was the tactic of J. Edgar Hoover, for more than three decades Head of the USA Federal Bureau of Investigation
- This was the tactic of US Senator Jessie Helms who, much like Hoover, described
the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King as communist inspired
- Right-wing "ultras" made a significant national appearance in the 1964 Goldwater
campaign, in the very months of growing "left-wing" dissent in USA cities and campuses
- 1971:Soviet scholar Viacheslav Nikitin presented a
Soviet interpretation of the political purposes of US "anti-communism" in his
book The Ultras in the USA [TXT (?1981 edition?)]
- In Nikitin's view, radical conservatism was a characteristic form of
"dissent" in the USA
- In USA right-wing dissent got under way in the late 1940s-early1950s (McCarthyism, the
John Birch Society, the Minutemen, some now-retired WW2 generals, and radio/TV preachers, financed by
various corporate millionaires)
- Over the next several decades, into the 21st century, the billionaire Koch brothers rose to central
prominence among vigorous organizers and financiers of ultra-right-wing anti-establishment politics in the USA
[ W#1(MayerJane) |
W#2(philanthropy roundtable) |
W#4(all
4 brothers) ]
- 1974:USA KS Wichita| Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute [W-ID |
Official website]
- 2014my:Mother Jones, "Koch vs. Koch: The Brutal Battle That Tore Apart America's Most Powerful Family"
[E-TXT]
- 2015je12: Salon, "The Koch brothers just took a huge step toward a GOP civil war"
[E-TXT]
- As dissent exploded on the US scene in the 1960s, "Young Americans for Freedom" was
funded by not-so-young corporate activists as a counter-weight to radical civil-libertarian and anti-war
activists [W-ID]
- Whereas USA Cold-War pundits preferred to see dissent in the USSR and its satellites as a moral condemnation of Soviet
socialism, they never gave serious consideration to the possibility that dissent in their own midst might represent a moral
condemnation of "The West"
- They had to assert, as did Soviet propagandists, that anti-establishment dissent, that any form of "ultra"
opposition in their nation, could not possibly be of domestic origin
- For these US pundits, resistance to the status quo had to be alien, had to be "communist", "fascist" and/or "un-American"
- Another tactic was employed in the USA by those who felt most righteous about Soviet dissent
- They switched off moral compasses and averted their eyes from similar forms of dissent in their own midst
- They turned their gaze from the protest literature, the bloody streets and the burning buildings in their own US cities
- They were able to make judgments about Soviet abuses in a tightly contained ethical vacuum
- Possibly the most interesting tactic was the Soviet effort to make cynics of all Soviet citizens
when it came to issues of governmental abuse
- This they did by emphasizing the falseness of liberalism, especially its claim in The West to
have created democratic societies
- By the 1970s, Soviet presentation of public suffering in "the capitalist world" in essence said this =
"Even in the world of liberal civil rights and the long traditions of democratic rule, life can be unbearably cruel
and exploitative. What makes you think it should be better here?"
- This was an appeal not for acceptance of the Soviet system but for political cynicism
- Political cynicism is a great boon to undemocratic powers, an even
greater boon than outright support
- Resignation is much desired
- Support is of little significance
- In fact efforts to lend support can be an outright annoyance in an undemocratic environment
- Soviet and Western propagandists most often worked without any serious or even honest bench-marks to guide them in their
judgments about increasing levels of irresponsible and abusive power and increasing instances of popular resistance to it
- It suited their polemical ends to insist on their own unblemished superiority and the malevolent decrepitude of others
- Much of the great moral stature of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
derived from his extreme and "old-fashioned" but relatively evenhanded condemnation of Soviet and Western culture
- Solzhenitsyn had his particular take on the global discontent that erupted in the late 1960s
- US authorities loved him best when he lambasted the USSR
- Russians found some pleasure in those moments when he condemned The West
- See Ali Tariq, ed., 1968: Marching in
the Streets, especially pp.20-23 (USSR dissent) and the pages that put the spring
and summer of 1968 in full global context, especially the months of April (pp. 65-87) and August (pp. 121-163)
- Rodger Streitmatter, Voices of
Revolution: Dissident Press in America (2001)
- The optimistic 1950s idea of "convergence" of the
two Cold-War super powers had begun to realize itself in some decidedly dark
ways, as in the case of dissent which mounted in reaction to deplorable state
policies pursued by both of the super powers, USSR and USA
\\
*--1995: Terry Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties [E-TXT]
*--2011: John McMillian, Smoking Typewriters [KNIGHT LIBRARY entry has detailed table of contents which outlines a
significant era of USA dissent]
*--LOOP on "fascist" and "fascism"
<>1966:1976; Chinese Peoples' Republic fell into more than a decade of extreme expansion and
revivification of the near-20-year-old revolution that earlier brought the Chinese Communist Party and its People's Liberation
Army [PLA] to power [ID]
- Poster propaganda emphasized the revolutionary actions of the PLA at this time and was one stunning representation of how the Cultural
Revolution promoted itself [lxt]
- Disorder threatened the stability of revolutionary China as the situation spiraled out of control
- The PLA was at first dispatched to participate in the Cultural Revolution. Afterwards the PLA was called upon to restore
order [W]
\\
*--[W]
*2016my16:BBC News| "China's Cultural Revolution: 50th anniversary unmarked by state media"
[E-TXT]
*2016my07:The Guardian| "Fifty years on, one of Mao’s ‘little generals’ exposes horror of the Cultural Revolution"
[E-TXT]
*2014au10:The Guardian| "Film-maker [F/Hu Jie/ in KNIGHT] defies China's censors to reveal horrors of the Great Famine"
[E-TXT]
*1966au-1967wi: Pacific Affairs#39,3/4:269-289|>Gittings,John| "The Chinese Army's Role in the Cultural Revolution"
[E-TXT]
<>1967:France |
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber warned of the US threat to Europe in
Défi américain [translated in 1969 as
The
American Challenge]. "Fifteen years from now it is quite possible
that the world's third greatest industrial power, just after the United States and Russia,
will not be Europe, but American industry in Europe"
*--Dissent from American hegemony gained a new
international dimension, and it was being felt at home as well
<>1967:USA | Canadian literary scholar and wildly
insightful and shameless pop-arts media critic, Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
[ID] published The
Medium is the Massage. He reached the peak of his fame and influence in this
year, a fame characteristic of the era known as "The Sixties". Major works =
*1951:The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of industrial Man
*1962:The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
[W]
*1964:Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
*1967:A balanced critical study reflected a wide range of contemporary opinion, positive
and negative, with McLuhan responses: McLuhan: Hot and Cool (with a bibliography
of his many and diverse writings up to 1967)
*1968:Harold Rosenthal, McLuhan: Pro and Con
*1969:London | Rebecca West delivered a cranky address on the
implications of McLuhan [TXT] and other "cool", "hip" ("hippy") or "counter-culture" figures,
for example, Oregon's Ken Kesey [TXT]
*--Here are some McLuhan aphorisms =
- "We are increasingly living in a global village."
- "People don't actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath."
- "With telephone and TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is being sent."
- "One of the nicest things about being big is the luxury of thinking little."
- "When a thing is current, it creates a currency."
- "If it works, it's obsolete."
- "Tomorrow is our permanent address."
- "The peculiar and abstract manipulation of information is a means of creating wealth."
- "The medium is the message."
- "The medium is the massage."
- "The user is the content."
- "We look at the present through a rearview mirror; we walk backwards into the future."
- "The future of the book is the blurb."
- "The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially."
- "Technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented."
- "Television is teaching all the time. It does more educating than all the schools and all the institutions of
higher learning."
- "Once we surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit
from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves
to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere
to a company as a monopoly."
\\
*--[ W#1
| W#2 |
W#3 |
W#4 ]
<>1967ap04:USA | Preacher and civil rights leader
Martin Luther King delivered speech, "Beyond Vietnam" [TXT]
*--The speech not only specifically addressed the relevance of his Christian religion to US
politics, it also linked international military aggression with domestic injustice
*--Thus opened the final year of Martin Luther King's life
<>1967my:Yuri Andropov replaced Semichastnyi as head of KGB
[Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti or Committee of State Security]
*--Andropov brought a new toughness to the job, but also a new understanding and political practicality
*--In dealing with dissent, the fist was still in evidence, but it was now lightly gloved
*--Andropov had the reputation of being an intellectual [intelligent]
<>1967je08:International waters of the Eastern Mediterrainian Sea,
north of Egypt, during the Arab-Israeli "Six-Day War", deliberate Israeli attack on USS Liberty, an electronic "spy-ship"
monitoring the conflict
\\
*2014oc30:Al Jazeera journalistic summary of the event
[E-TXT]
*--USS Liberty Dead in the Water - Top Documentary Films
<>1967au16:USA GA Atlanta | Martin Luther King delivered
the Annual Report at the 11th Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, "Where Do We Go
From Here?"
[E-TXT]
*--Dissent was becoming more than a domestic problem for the USA and the Soviet
Union. Dissent took on international dimensions
<>1968ja:Czechoslovak Communist Party elevated Alexander Dubcek
to the post of First Secretary [General Secretary] and introduced changes that came to be
called "Socialism with a human face"
*--Twenty years after falling within the Soviet sphere of influence, Czech
and Slovak independence began to assert itself
*--The fragrance of internal reform rising out of Soviet-dominated border states refreshed
all varieties of dissent
*1968ap:Czechoslovak Communist Party "Action Program" [P20:362]
*--The Prague spring 1968 : A national security archive documents reader
*--PRAGUE SPRING [videorecording
(29 min.)]. Dubcek's attempt to liberalize Communist rule in Czechoslovakia resulted in Soviet tanks in the streets of
Prague. This program presents both the political "detente" behind Brezhnev's position and the dissent that was
silenced within the Warsaw Pact alliance. In addition to extensive archival footage, contemporary interviews
with leading Dubcek supporters and opponents provide insights into the dissent
that arose in the USSR's Eastern Bloc in the 1960s
<>1968mr31:USA WDC National Cathedral | Martin Luther King delivered
a sermon, "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution", which gave unmistakable sign that he was beginning to see the
domestic civil rights movement in a much broader context of economic justice. The middle sections of
the sermon focused on the plight of the poor, whatever their race or color [F/poor/ on the following
webpage
<>1968ap03:USA TN Memphis | Civil rights leader, now increasingly a leading
social-political critic and voice of national dissent, Martin Luther King, delivered his last sermon, "I've Been to the Mountain"
[W].
Then on the next day =
- 1968ap04:Martin Luther King assassinated in the prime of his life
- The remarkable and globally significant 13 year dissent career of Martin Luther King was
over, but the legacy grew in significance =
- 1983:US Senator (NC) Jesse Helms led the unsuccessful fight to prevent creation of a national holiday in honor of civil
rights dissident Martin Luther King
- A Helms aide in this fight later wrote a memoir of the event to justify Helms' antagonism to
King. Does this effort at justification suggest that Helms' antagonism to King was motivated
only by "racism"? Specifically what was the political essence of Helms' antagonism, as recorded by his
erstwhile aide? [TXT]
- Anti-communism for years provided Helms a cover for his broad and
strong southern-style "anti-progressivism"
- 2006ja16:Almost forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King,
and a decade and a half after the collapse of the USSR, the US political "right"
still pursued the question of King and the Communist menace [TXT]
- Debate on the meaning of MLK continued to rage into the 21st century [2001:TXT
(before "9/11")] [2006:TXT (after "9/11")]
\\
*2000ja18:PBS "Newshour" interviewed MLK biographer Michael Eric Dyson
[W], author
of I May Not Get
There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.
*2017ja16:POLITICO Magazine| "The MLK History Forgot"
[E_TXT]
<>1968ap:USSR |
Chronicle of Current Events #1 appeared; Samizdat
[underground, uncensored dissident publishing] under way
*--The Chronicle specialized in publishing official governmental documents that embarrassed officials, exposed in the public realm
*--Are there grounds for a comparison of Samizdat with Wikileaks?
[ID]
\\
*--LOOP on Censorship
<>1968ap20:English conservative Enoch Powell addressed the
problem of Bringing the Immigration Issue to the Center of
Politics [P20:414]
<>1968my20:French youth leader and dissident
Daniel Cohn-Bendit was interviewed for Le Nouvel Observateur by Jean-Paul Sartre
about the French Student Revolt [P20:378]
<>1968jy15:Warsaw Meeting of Five Communist and Worker Parties urged
Czechoslovak Central Committee to bring an end to liberal reforms, "To the Czechoslovak
Communist Party Central Committee" [P20:364]
<>1968au:USSR invaded
Czechoslovakia to put down Dubcek
liberalization, which was called the "Prague Spring" or "Socialism with a
Human Face"
*--Warsaw Pact still restless
<>1968au:USA,
Chicago National Nominating Convention of the Democratic Party
*--Days of rioting
in the streets gave concentrated expression to broadening atmosphere of USA dissent
and provided opportunity for significant deployment of paramilitary police units
against protesters
*--In addition to everything else, this was a major media event. USA could not
ignore mounting disorder in social/political life [EG#1
| EG#2 | EG#3 |
EG#4]
\\
[W]
<>1969:Soviet dissident intellectual Len Karpinskii
wrote Words are Also Deeds [CVG:297]
<>1969fe07:Decree on Tightening Control over the Implementation of
Legislation on Religious Cults (esp. Islamic organizations in Uzbekistan) [PS&C:306-11]
*--Certain Islamic practices were offences against Soviet legality (blood feuds
and various courtship and marriage customs) [PS&C:312-14]
<>1969:1972; US lawyer William Kunstler
[ID] successfully defended the "Chicago Seven"
[ID]
*--They were accused then acquitted of crimes in connection with anti-Vietnam-War demonstrations
during massive street protests at
the 1968au:Chicago National Democratic Convention
*--Kunstler was a resolute and articulate defender of those being abused within the legal
system
*--He was a significant USA dissident. See his presentation
"Disturbing the Universe" [TXT1 |
TXT2 |
FLM]
*--1969no:Asian Survey#9,22:862-867| Howard Zinn, "Vacating the Premises in Vietnam"
<>1969se01:Libyan army officers formed the Revolutionary Command Council
and overthrew King Idris
*--They proclaimed a Libyan Arab Republic, elevated Revolutionary Command Council Chairman Lt. Col. Muammar Qadhafi
to the head of the independent Libyan government, and began to process of creating an independent Arab nation
*2011:Forty-two years later, The Qadhafi government was overthrown. Qadhafi was captured and killed
[W-ID]
*1796no04:2008au14; Significant Events in USA-Libyan Relations
<>1969no27:USSR kolkhoz (collective farm) law [SGv:383-404]
<>1970fe23:Leonid Brezhnev law vs. "parasites"
was almost like a full-scale assault on youth culture [SGv:312-6]
- Yet Brezhnev unexpectedly developed an affection for the dissent-laden "author-songs" or "bard-songs" of Vladimir Vysotskii
[ID]
- Brezhnev OK'd Vysotskii's appearance on a Soviet TV program
- Vysotskii sang "I Do Not Like" [TXT
| FLM |
W]
- Vysotskii has been compared with the early Bob Dylan
[EG#1 |
EG#2], but consider the way Vysotskii thinks of himself as bridging high culture with
pop-arts and folk-arts [FLM]
- Bulat Okudzhava also appeared on the dissenting bard-song scene [W]
- In these days, reform-minded and mildly dissident intellectual Aleksandr Tvardovskii was dismissed as editor
of Novyi mir [New World]
- Novelist Yurii Trifonov (1925-1981) was an active contributor to Novyi mir
- Trifonov won the Stalin Prize for his 1950 novel Studenty
- Yet his writings increasingly expressed a subtle dissident attitude
- He was at this time completing a historical novel about Andrei Zheliabov, a terrorist member of the populist
party Narodnaia volia [ID]
- In 1973 Trifonov's novel appeared under the title Neterpenie [Impatience]
- Populist terrorists had been from the very beginning the object of high scorn on the part of Russian
Marxists
- In the 1930s, Stalin had furthermore declared that the study of revolutionary populism should cease
- Teaching that history taught the virtues of underground and sometimes violent opposition to oppressive central governmental
authority
- For reasons not fully explained, Stalin found that dangerous
- Now Trifonov joined the many scholars and cultural figures in this era of dissent who
were re-thinking the populist legacy, as well as the Stalinist legacy and the qualities of their own time
- Soviet authorities issued a list of censored topics in the open press and radio or TV
broadcasts [PS&C:140-2]
- 1960s:1970s; In this era, USA pop-arts came to fork in the road
- One route was into rock'n'roll | EG=Jon Koonce of Portland OR [W#1]
| W#2 |
W#3
| Read comments)]
- The other route was into country-and-western folkisms [EG#1]
EG#2=Johnnie Cash album "Ride
This Train" with song "Lumberjack" (Roseburg OR with raucous weekends in Eugene OR)
EG#3=Dolly Parton, "Eugene Oregon"
- Musical pop-arts were like all pop-arts
- They were not high culture
- They were not folk culture
- They were commercial culture [EG]
- And they struggled all the time to transcend the limits imposed by the immediate need to
hawk a commodity to the largest number of buyers, that immediate need dictated by
quotidian necessities like eating, clothing, housing, etc
- Consider this fabulous ad for a crackling sugar drink
- Consider these lists of OR groups and venues [W#1 |
W#2]
- At the dawn of the "internet era", will YouTube transform pop-arts?
\\
*2016no18:"Awful Avalanche", an engaging and thought-provoking website tries to dissolve Russian pop-arts into
Russian and world high culture
[E-TXT]
*--And here is another "Awful Avalanche" presentation especially relevant in the regions of Duck/Beaver conflict
[E-TXT]
*1991:Carolina DeMaegd-Soëp, Trifonov
and the Drama of the Russian Intelligentsia
*1992:David Gillespie, Iurii Trifonov: Unity through Time
*1991Nina Kolesnikoff, Yury Trifonov: a Critical Study
*-- LOOP on Censorship
<>1970mr05:USSR/USA Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons went into
effect [TXT]
<>1970oc08:Canada, Quebec | Front de Libération
du Quebec (Quebec Liberation Front; FLQ) broadcast over CBC/Radio-Canada a manifesto declaring federal independence
of their province from Canada
*--This can be thought of as a North America variety of national minority independence movement and dissent
*--Primary and secondary sources on FLQ [W]
<>1970de:Polish industrial
wage-labor disturbances
brought workers into the ferment of intellectual dissent
*--Gierek replaced Gomulka as First Secretary
*--In the following decade of Soviet "stagnancy" [zastoi], the nations
of the Warsaw Pact grew relatively quiet,
regrouping, making adjustment toward a time of national assertiveness
<>1971:USA political philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002) published
A Theory of Justice
*--Some think Rawls was the most important liberal political theorist of the 20th century,
a renewal of the Mills tradition [ID]
\\
Here is a SAC page summary of the main ideas of John
Rawls
<>1971ap23:Vietnam War vet
John Kerry testified before the US Senate
*--Army veterans took stand against war [Eye:677-9]
*--USA dissent against
Vietnam War intense
<>1971je13:NYT began
publication of what came to be known as "The Pentagon Papers" [W-ID].
The era of dissent was electrified
In 1969, [Daniel Ellsberg] photocopied the 7,000 page study [top secret McNamara study
of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68] and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee; in 1971 he gave it to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers.
His trial, on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed
in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him, which led to the convictions of
several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon
[Citation from pgf#5 of Ellsberg's brief E=TXT
biography]
*2002: Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets? A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
[
E-TXT of preface and ch#1]
<>1971au23:USA corporate lawyer and board member at 11 large enterprises,
Lewis F. Powell, published a memo [
TXT] written for his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the US Chamber of Commerce
*--Never widely publicized in this era of "The Pentagon Paapers", this memo nonetheless became something like a manifesto
of the embattled and dissent-minded right-wing of US politics
*--Two months after publication and in part as a result of this influential manifesto, President Nixon nominated Powell
to the Supreme Court
<>1972:USSR| As if a prelude to Gorbachev's perestroika
[ID],
Soviet voluntary societies and other social organizations grew in number
\\
*1976:Aron Shchiglik, Dobrovol'nye obshchestva (1990:English translation, "Voluntary Societies", in UO library)
*--Also see Ts. A. Yampol'skaia
<>1972ja30:Ireland,Derry |
Bloody Sunday: UK paratroopers murdered 13 Irish civilians as part of a military suppression of
anti-English demonstration, officially excused as action against "terrorism"
\\
*2013no22:RT News on the suppression of the demonstration [E-TXT]
*2016mr01:RT News on continuing legal proceedings against paratroopers [E-TXT]
*2016je09:Guardian| "Loyalist informers smuggled weapons used in dozens of Troubles murders"
[E-TXT]
<>1972mr:China | US President Richard Nixon, who built his political
career through excoriation of opponents "soft on communism", paid friendly visit to "Communist China"
\\
*--BBC documentary "The Reputation of Richard Nixon" [FLM]
<>1972my26:Moscow summit meeting, after two and a half
years of negotiation, the first round of SALT was brought to a conclusion when USA President
Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev signed the ABM Treaty and the Interim Agreement on
strategic offensive arms
- A new era of COLD WAR Détente suggested possibility of closer and more
peaceful relations between USA and USSR
- However, forces on both sides, Soviet and USA political activists and officials whose interests
had become so dependent on Cold War procurement privileges, profits and administrative power, resisted
- On the US side, Paul Nitze and Albert Wohlsetter (a University of Chicago professor)
formed "Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy" which recruited Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle
into an active role
- Their objective wwnt beyond the desire to protect USA security. They sought to resist arms reduction
and decline in procurement profit
- More on nuclear arms control treaties = U.S. Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency [E-TXT]
\\
*--A specialist on international arms control, Richard Rhodes
[ID], says Paul Nitze
"unleashed a team of sorcerer's apprentices whose trail of wreckage extends well into the
present [21st] century"
*1988:Henry Trofimenko and Pavel Podlesny, USSR-USA:
Lessons of Peaceful Coexistence, Fifty-five years of Soviet-American Relations
<>1972su:USA-USSR agreed to a massive export of
wheat to the USSR. Grain merchants made millions, farmers continued to suffer
- Cooperation on the world grain market enhanced by new dominant role of corporate "agribusinesses" in USA
- USSR worked through a centralized Soviet institution, Eksportkhleb [Export-grain], and dealt with USA departments of Agriculture,
Commerce, and Transportation, as well as the State Department
- The six great transnational or global grain companies were involved = Cargill (Minneapolis),
Cook (Memphis), Continental, Dreyfus, Garnac and Bunge [Bunge hired US
Agriculture Department official Clifford Pulvermacher to represent it (Solkoff:50)]
- 1975:Six big transnational grain corporations controlled 95% of the world's $11b/year grain export business
- USA rural farm population burgeoned after the 1862 Homestead Act, now
the number of "farmers" was in steep decline
- As everywhere else, so also in USA, economic modernization resulted in
the complete transformation rural life
\\
*--Dan Morgan, Merchants of
Grain (1979) puts these events in world historical perspective
*--Joel Solkoff's The Politics of
Food: The Decline of Agriculture and the Rise of Agribusiness in America (1985) puts
a political edge on this story
*--Robert B. Porter, The US-USSR Grain
Agreement (1984)
*--John De Pauw, Soviet-American Trade
Negotiations (1979)
*--Philip J. Funigiello, American-Soviet Trade
in the Cold War (1988)
*--Nish Jamgotch, ed., Sectors of Mutual Benefit
in U.S.-Soviet Relations
(1985)
<>1972se:Georgia [Gruziia in Russian] | Eduard
Shevardnadze became First Secretary [General Secretary] of the Georgia Central Committee
<>1973:Germany brought end to decade-old policy of
allowing "temporary" immigration of foreign "Gastarbeiters"
("guest workers", largely Turk, but also Spanish, Italian, Greek and
Yugoslav)
*--By the 21st century, 10% of the united German population were such guest
workers
*--Zehra Onder described Muslim-Turkish Children in Germany: Sociocultural
Problems [P20:418]
*1993oc:German journalist Joachim Krautz tried to explain "The Grapes of
Neglect--Violence and Xenophobia in Germany" [P20:422]
<>1973se11:CHILE | General Augusto Pinochet
with support of USA executive branch, via its CIA, seized power, murdering
elected President Salvador Allende
*--An economic boom followed this coup d'etat [Documents]
*--THE PINOCHET CASE | Videotape with Chilean
judge Patricio Guzmán who, against all odds, fought to bring Pinochet to justice
\\
*2017oc26: Reuters| "New exhibit reveals declassified documents on U.S. role behind Chile coup"
[VIDEO]
<>1973no07:WDC| War Powers Resolution passed by US Congress
\\
*2012ap22:Richard Grimmett, for the Congressional Research Service, The War
Powers Resolution: After Thirty-six Years
<>1974fe:USSR deported Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He
became émigré and soon settled in USA
- Solzhenitsyn published abroad the first of three volumes of his Gulag
Archipelago
- This massive and overpowering literary exposé informed the world of some
awful truths about Soviet labor camps
- These truths were known before in broad outline and by a relatively small number of specialists
- Now, largely from memory of what he saw and what fellow prisoners told him, Solzhenitsyn brought this
incredible 20th-century experience to millions of readers, and in numbing, relentless detail
- Solzhenitsyn had a word or two of warning for his hosts in exile =
- Solzhenitsyn's 22-year career was not over
- He eventually returned to his native land after the collapse of the USSR and died there in the era of Vladimir Putin
- Lev Razgon remembered his days in the Stalinist Gulag, True Stories [P20:135]
- Two decades after the death of Joseph Stalin, Soviet political culture still struggled to expose and cast off all vestiges of
"Stalinism"
- Soviet dissent was becoming an international scandal
<>1974au28:USSR passed new passport rules [PS&C:167-75]
<>1974au:WDC, White House | US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned
appointed President Gerald Ford that he and his influential White House advisers -- including later Bush-era Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld -- were making a grave mistake to put pressure on the unstable Iranian Shah to lower oil prices
*--Kissinger feared the collapse of the Shah and the rise of yet another "radical regime" in Iran. "We can't tackle him without
breaking him", said Kissinger
*--The warning was not heeded. Emerging neo-conservatives in the Ford administration greased the skids for the fall of the
Iranian Shah and destabilization of the whole of AfroAsia
\\
*--Andrew Cooper publications
*--LOOP on "AfroAsia"
<>1975:French philosopher and social historian Michel
Foucault (1926-1984), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
*1982:Progress report on study of "power" [CWC:583-92]
*--Noam Chomsky and others in debate with Foucault
*--A "home-page" website with links to etexts
\\
*--[W]
<>1975ap30:Saigon fell to North Vietnamese military forces,
marking end of Vietnam War
*--YouTube
"Fall of Saigon"
*--Vietnam came under unified governance with its capital in the North, in Hanoi. Saigon was soon renamed "Ho Chi Minh City"
*--Vietnam now on the road to recovery, having
finally slipped the yoke of imperialist dominion over the previous 85 years
*--Thus developments in Vietnam can be understood as an episode in the rise and fall of
European mercantilist imperialism over the previous 300+ years,
though it could be said that, under new circumstances, European imperialist traditions lived on
\\
*--A USA-oriented and angry website account of "Black April", with many photos
[W]
<>1975jy:New York City airports greeted travelers with pamphlets
headlined “Welcome to Fear City" and subtitled “A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York”
*--The pamphlet featured a hooded death’s head on the cover and warned “Until things change, stay away from New York City if you possibly can”
[W]
<>1975oc:Soviet nuclear physicist and prominent dissent
activist Andrei Sakharov awarded Nobel Peace Prize one year after
Sakharov Speaks was published [DSC:17-25]
*--The Soviet KGB kept a detailed dossier on Sakharov,
The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov
[2005oc20:NYR:18-20 review article]
*--As the Vietnam war came to a close for the USA, and as the USSR sank further into the Brezhnev era
of "stagnancy", the dozen years of most intense dissent waned
[You could consult the Kimball essay on dissent [TXT] or
return to it if you hopped onto the dissent LOOP from there]
*--Into the 1980s,
dissent continued to play a role in
global events
<>1975no:France, the United
States, Britain, Germany, Japan and Italy met to discuss economic policies of the
"economically most advanced countries"
*1976:Puerto Rico, San Juan Summit| Canada joined these "advanced" countries
*1977:London Summit invited the European Community into the advanced circle
*--Soon they called themselves "G7"
[W]
*--GO
1998my15:my17
<>1976:USA
=
Two hundred years after declaring its independence from the Old World in order
to "be a standing monument and example for the aim and [194/196] imitation
of like peoples of other countries", the United States had left the protective shell of
its exceptionality, adapting itself to the anarchic and competitive global community of
which it now was an integral part.
[Theodore Von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization...]
*--USA, "at a price to itself", was now a leader in the "world revolution of
Westernization" [Von Laue:195]
*--"It had also become more like its archrival, the Soviet Union...." [Von Laue:196]
*--Soviet contributions to 20th c. world revolution [Von Laue:232-5]
<>1976:USA CIA Director
(and future President), George H. Bush created what
came to be known as "Team B", staffed by private "experts" picked by the Nitze
group and vetted by US President Gerald Ford's Chief of Staff, Dick Cheney, and
the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld
- Nitze's quarter-century influence on US military policy continued
- CIA influence had much the same duration
- 1976de:"Team B", headed by Harvard Professor Richard Pipes, reported a month after
Republican Party defeat in US national elections, an election that suggested the voting public was not
ready to support the bellicose vision of the George H. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld team
- Team B sought to rekindle popular hysteria
- It asserted that the USSR was hell-bent on world conquest
- Aggressive preemptive action on the part of the USA was necessary, including possible
first-strike use of nuclear weapons against its fearsome enemies
- Newly elected President Jimmy Carter rejected this report and disbanded Team B,
winning an enduring hatred from the "military-industrialist" camp
- Team B was disbanded, but its core membership regrouped as a revived "Committee on the Present Danger"
[W] and
attracted as members Norman Podhoretz, Edward Teller, William Casey, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick
- They fabricated the notion that the USSR was now able to make a first strike and wipe out the USA, unless a
huge military build-up were initiated by the USA
\\
*--Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA believes she has shown,
point by point, that Team B was wrong in all its main findings
*--See also Richard Rhodes [ID]
<>1976:1983; Argentine military coup brought dictator General Jorge Videla to
power. At first supported by USA, Videla oversaw the forced disappearance of up to 30,000 opponents
*2016au05: USA offers Argentina declassified docs on own role in military dictatorship in 1970s-80s — RT News
[E-TXT]
*2016au09:USA
former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger hindered President Jimmy Carter's effort to end mass killings in Argentina, according to files | The Guardian
[E-TXT]
<>1977:USA signed treaty vowing eventually to relinquish Panama Canal
*--Won praise for President Jimmy Carter in Latin America, but yet further serious enmity at home within
the military-industrial community
<>1977:USSR adopted new constitution
[E-TXT]
<>1978:French sociologist and pundit Jacques Ellul
published a defense of "Western" moral values,
The Betrayal of the West
*--Ellul did not reject other civilizations or extol Western Civilization =
In fact, I think it absurd to lay claim to superiority of any kind in these
matters. What criterion would you apply? What scale of values would you use? I
would add that the greatest fault of the West since the seventeenth century has
been precisely its belief in its own unqualified superiority in all areas.
The thing, then, that I am protesting against is the silly attitude of western
intellectuals [NB! reluctance to capitalize "Western"
in this case] in hating their own world and then illogically exalting all other
civilizations [excerpts = PWT2:387-91]
<>1978ap:Afghanistan
coup d'état led by two pro-Soviet factions of People's Democratic Party of
Afghanistan: Khalq ["the masses", rural based] and Parcham ["banner", urban
based]. Afghanistan had for fifteen years moved closer to the USSR. The USSR
was its biggest trading partner by a wide margin. Now political disorder and rivalry
threatened that favorable position
*--"For many educated people in pre-modern societies, communism offered a way of both
catching up with and resisting The West; and the ideology had a powerful, and often
generous, sponsor in the Soviet Union. But the hasty, ill-adapted borrowings from Soviet
communism -- the simplistic notion, for instance, of Afghans as feudal people who had to be
turned into proletarians -- more often than not imposed new kinds of pain and
trauma...." [2001no15:NYR:19, Pankaj Mishra, "The Making of
Afghanistan"]
\\
*--Bowker:11-27
<>1978ap12:USSR Extraordinary All-Union meeting approved new constitution
<>1979ap01:Iran declared itself an Islamic Republic after
the USA creature [ID], Shah Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown and went into exile
- 1979wi:Ayatollah Khomeini returned after years in west European exile
to lead the Islamic revolution
- 2016je02:BBC NEWS| "Two Weeks in January [leading up to Khomeini's return from exile]: America's secret
engagement with Khomeini" [E-TXT]
- 2016je10:Guardian| "USA had extensive contact with Ayatollah Khomeini before Iran revolution"
[E-TXT]
- 1979no04:Iran, Tehran | Students seized the US Embassy
and took US diplomatic personnel hostage
- More than fifty US embassy personnel were held for well over one year (444 days)
- They were held then released by Iranian revolutionary leaders according to secret agreement with
representatives of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan (running against Jimmy Carter) who sought to
arrange release only minutes after Reagan was inaugurated as US President
- Reagan's representatives made and followed-up on illegal promises of USA
military aid if the Iranians would do as they were requested to do
\\
*--"The Iranian Revolution" [3-part E-TXT]
*--Axworthy,Michael|_Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic
*2016mr05:The Guardian| "American crossroads: Reagan, Trump and the devil down south"
[E-TXT]
<>1979jy:USA President Carter and his National Security
Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, took covert steps to involve America in Afghanistan disorder
- They decided to stir the pot of troubles into which the USSR had fallen
- They began to supply sophisticated military hardware to warlord factions ready to resist pro-Soviet authorities in Kabul
- A Presidential Directive called for financial backing out of the US budget, administered by the
CIA via the Pakistani intelligence service, the dreaded ISI
- Supplemental budget was eventually found in the newly flourishing opium trade out of Afghanistan (shades of old
English imperialist style [ID])
- All this was five months before the USSR invaded Afghanistan =
<>1979de:USSR intervened in Afghanistan, hoping to sustain its influence there and
stifle expanding chaos
- USSR airlifted troops who engineered a coup that brought the Parcham faction of the local Communist Party, led by Babrak Karmal, to power
- Soviet soldiers killed Columbia University trained Hafizullah Amin (leader of the the other Communist faction, Khalq)
- They saw to his replacement by Muhammad Taraki
- Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev committed to serious war
- It lasted over nine years, until 1989fe
- Ten years earlier, on the day of the Soviet invasion, Brzezinski wrote to President
Carter, "Now we can give the USSR its Vietnam War"
- Many compared the Soviet Afghanistan War with the USA Vietnam War
- These two wars were "hot" moments in the "Cold" War
- Both took place in what was called "The Third World" [ID]
- 1998ja15-21:Le Nouvel Observateur:76 interviewed Brzezinski = "We didn't push the Russians [i.e., USSR] to
intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would."
- As for the effect of all this on the Afghan people, Brzezinski said he regretted "having supported Islamic fundamentalism" and given
"arms and advice to future terrorists", but "what is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban
or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?" [quoted in
English translation in 2001no15:NYR:20]
- 1980s:USA CIA Director William Casey committed huge sums to the support of a
world-wide Islamic fundamentalist and terroristic jihad against communism [Bob Woodward,
Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987]
- What are best termed Soviet-American "proxy wars" were already being fought in Angola, Somalia, and Ethiopia. Brzezinski's
implied prescience of Soviet collapse was a post-facto rationalization of imperialist adventurism, such as came to dominate USA
tactical behavior in the 1980s
- Unfortunately, Brzezenski's sorrowful question -- "what is most important to the history of the world?"
[see 3 bullets up] -- was soon being asked all over the globe and by increasing numbers of widely various peoples
- Their widely various answers to the Brzezinski question shared at least one trait = they justified almost any extreme action.
International relations were becoming unusually brutalized = "New World
Dis-Order"
- Little effort was devoted to the study of the deep historical roots of conflict in Afghanistan
[LOOP] or in Vietnam [LOOP]
- Just as in the case of USA in Vietnam over the previous 20 years, so also for the USSR in Afghanistan
over the next ten, Cold-War hot-war militarism ended badly for all involved
\\
*--For comparison with the US Vietnam War, see Douglas A. Borer, Superpowers Defeated: Vietnam and Afghanistan Compared (1999)
[
E-TXT of intro material and ch#1]
*--William Zimmerman and Robert Axelrod, "The 'Lessons' of Vietnam and Soviet Foreign Policy" in World Politics
[E-TXT]
*--Also see Robert E. Harkavy, Lessons of Recent Wars in the Third World 2 vols. (skim intro, then let the index entries
on "Afghan", "Soviet/Afghan", and "Vietnam" guide your reading)
*1989je11:NYT Magazine| Peter P. Mahoney, "The Wounds of Two Wars: American Veterans of Vietnam, Russian Veterans
of Afghanistan" [E-TXT]
<>1979de03:Iran, under the leadership of
the Shiah Islamic Grand Ayatollah Khomeini, put a new constitution into effect
- That constitution served as the basis of politics and law in the Islamic Republic into the 21st century
- On the next day, the Ayatollah affirmed and regularized the central role of a quasi-military/quasi-managerial
organization, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, or Sepah
- Hooman Majd (below) argued that Sepah has functioned as an Iranian
version of the French E'cole Nationale d'Administration [ID]
\\
*2008fa::Ali Alfoneh, "The Revolutionary Guard's Role...." [E-TXT]
*2008:Hooman Majd, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ
[E-TXT of NYer rvw]
<>1980s:USA Republican Party campaign
manager Lee Atwater pioneered some of the most effective devices whereby the media and the
broader public sphere could be manipulated in the promotion of factional political
power [W#1 | W#2].
Did Atwater say something like "if it isn't on TV, it didn't happen"?
- 1979:Boston mayoral race was the first success of the USA public-relations firm "Sawyer Miller" in "controlling the
dialogue" (IE=controlling the media images of both their candidate and also the opposition)
- Over these years this new breed of political "communications professionals" introduced new terms,
like "spin" and "go negative"
- They now reached beyond the USA and out to the global arena =
- 1986:Philippines election brought Corazon Aquino to the presidency, defeating the incumbent Ferdinand
Marcos
- The corrupt Marcos had the support of USA President Reagan, but underdog Aquino had the support
of Sawyer Miller
- In the Philippines Sawyer Miller used a media technique known as "backboard shot" (the term from the
US sport basketball)
- Sawyer Miller operatives fed negative and distorted information about Marcos to
the press
- When the press asked the Marcos team to respond, the fabricated material became public
record
- The material was off the backboard and into the basket and now back in the hands of Sawyer Miller and
the Aquino team, ready to be used openly in the campaign
- At the end of election day, before official results were available, Sawyer Miller churned out bogus poll data
which indicated that Aquino had won, organized Manila street demonstrations in support of Aquino, and lobbied the
Reagan administration to back away from Marcos
- Aquino rushed ahead to declare victory
- Eventually Marcos withdrew under pressure from WDC (now persuaded to change sides)
- Sawyer Miller subsequently was awarded big contracts with Philippine government agencies
- Sawyer Miller expanded their version of "electronic democracy" to Chile, Bolivia, Columbia, Venezuela, Israel and Korea
- Soon their most lucrative business was with companies who suffered from "negative public images". EG=Transnational
tobacco corporations and bankrupt casinos
- After many consolidations and name changes, Sawyer Miller became "Weber Shandwick"
[?a technique like adopting an "alias"?]
- Firms like Weber Shandwick were beginning to shape US and global political, social and economic life
- Increasingly ad agencies and special interest "think
tanks" [sic!!] presented themselves as indispensible experts and specialists
- These well-funded organizations were beginning to assume a place among the broad
range of institutions that historically claimed authority in the realm of "mentalities"
-- religious establishments and, more recently, primary, secondary and higher education,
and an independent press
- "Think tanks" assumed a place among -- and sought to displace -- traditional organized authority in the realm of "mentalities"
- A new intelligentsia [ID], rooted in the habits and ethos of the financial establishment,
and sustained by their largess, was muscling aside traditional institutions responsible for "propaganda" -- clergies,
censors, educators -- and assuming a dominant role in the maintenance,
extension and protection of public "mentalities" or "public-opinion", largely through electronic mass-media
[ID]
\\
*1987se01:The American Political Science Review,81(3):982-983| Linda L. Fowler's review of
William Riker's The Art of Political Manipulation notes great contributions of Riker to
contemporary political theory, but places emphasis on Riker's reliance here on
twelve historical and more recent examples of his very theoretical and "Choice-Theory" based
concept of political rhetoric which he dubbed "heresthetics". Riker cites, for example,
Lincoln's outmaneuvering of Douglas in their debates and the parliamentary trick which
defeated the Virginia Equal Rights Amendment vote in 1980. Rigorous mathematical
analysis of politics helps explain what happens, but cannot predict or guide political action =
"There is no set of scientific laws that can be more or less mechanically applied to generate
successful strategies" [Manipulation:ix]. "Political realism" [SAC editor wishes we could
employ the neologism "political actualism"] compels all political operatives to structure (IE= manipulate)
political situations so as to maximize the possibility that they will win, by means of
agenda control, strategic voting, and reformulation of issues. The central question is this =
Can the USA constitutional system of representative democracy survive intensifying "manipulation"
by the growing mob of talented professional manipulators? Can it resist deterioration into a 21st-century
totalitarianism [ID]. [See 1988jy:Harper's]
*2008se19:TLS:12| John A. Gans, "Like Pizza"| A review of Harding (below)
*--James Harding, Alpha Dogs: The Americans who turned political spin into a global business
= The PR company
"Sawyer Miller" was a pioneer in the "globalization of politics", making "politics in country after country ... as similar
as Starbucks -- and about as surprising" [Abridged E-TXT]
*--LOOP on Censorship
<>1980au31:Poland
| Gdansk industrial labor disturbance;
an authentic labor union and movement called Solidarność
[Solidarity], under leadership of shipbuilder Lech Walesa [Wałęsa,
pronounced "vawENsa"]
[W], forced
government to sign agreement = (1) wage increases, (2) price rollbacks, (3)
right to strike, (4) right to form labor unions, independent of the Polish
Communist Party, (5) radio broadcasts of Catholic Mass
*--Inter-Factory Strike Committee of Gdansk Shipyard,
The Twenty-One Demands [P20:369
| PWT2:410-13]
*--As in the longer history
of European "civil society", labor organization played a leading role in the
Warsaw Pact countries in the 1970s-80s
*--"Western" leaders who worked to undermine labor unions in their own countries
applauded labor leaders in the Soviet sphere
\\
*2016 Archival discoveries implicate Walesa in collaboration with Polish state
police [E-TXT]
<>1981de:Polish
President Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law, briefly suppressing Polish wage-labor social mobilization, and
the Solidarity movement
*--"Western" political leaders, many strongly opposed to wage-labor movements in
their own countries, adopted Solidarity and applauded its organized resistance
as the sign of the people's righteous resistance to Communist exploitation
*--Through the 1980s in USA, wage laborers witnessed a "sharp rise in the firing
of pro-union activists during union organizing campaigns" [2007ja14:Report
released by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, based on data from the
National Labor Relations Board]
*1980s:English Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
[ID] remembered her
victory over the great steel industry strikes
[ID] [P20:393]
*--Wage-labor interests world-wide experienced serious ups and
downs in the decades after WW2
*--These trends continued into the following decades
<>1982+:
UNO took up question of "fourth world",
the situation of indigenous minorities within nation-states dominated by
majoritarian ethnic groups [W]
<>1982se14:USA President Reagan ordered overhaul of Secret Emergency Plans
and creation of the National Program Office (NPO) which came under the jurisdiction of Vice President
(ex-CIA Head) George Bush
*1987:USA House of Representatives Armed Services Committee and the Army began investigations into NPO contract
irregularities as the budget for the project approached $8B
*1991no17:CNN broadcast an investigative report which revealed four federal investigations which targeted Tom
Golden simply in retaliation for his cooperation with earlier investigations of fraudulent contract and
procurement schemes. At this time, NPO still was not operational
\\
*--[W#1]
*--[W#2]
<>1982no:USSR | Yuri Andropov became
First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party upon the death of Leonid Brezhnev
*--"Stagnancy" [zastoi] obvious to all; need for reform pressing [Example of
stagnancy in Eisen:54-9]
*--Nikolai Ryzhkov became a Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
*--Summary of whole period, 1982-1991 in
Miller:38-52; use of KGB (which
Yurii Andropov had recently headed) for reformist purposes
against organized crime [mafiia], in Walker:139-53]
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