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Post by jdredd on Aug 10, 2019 12:16:25 GMT -5
The title of this thread has a dual meaning: Was the Cold War actually "won"? And if so, who was responsible? At least the Cold War ended with a whimper, not a bang. But as success has many fathers and failure is an orphan, lots of people are claiming to be responsible.
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Post by jdredd on Aug 11, 2019 2:06:10 GMT -5
The conventional wisdom now in America is that Reagan/Bush spending massive money on defense somehow brought the Soviet Union down. Is it true? I'm not at all certain history will validate that theory.
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Post by jdredd on Aug 13, 2019 3:54:45 GMT -5
For me, it seems obvious what ended the Cold War: The change of generations from Brezhnev to Gorbachev in Russia.
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Post by jdredd on Aug 16, 2019 1:23:32 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/movies/edward-lewis-dead.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Obituaries"Edward Lewis, an award-winning producer who hired the banned screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to write the movie “Spartacus” and then demanded that he be publicly credited, heralding the end of Hollywood’s anti-Communist blacklist, died on July 27 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 99. His death was confirmed by his daughter Susan. “Spartacus,” which was released in 1960, received four of the nine Oscars awarded to films produced by Mr. Lewis, as well as a Golden Globe. All told, his 33 movies received 21 Academy Award nominations. His producing credits included nine movies directed by John Frankenheimer (among them “Seven Days in May” in 1964) as well as films by John Huston (“The List of Adrian Messenger,” 1963) and Louis Malle (“Crackers,” 1984). " Now here was a Cold War hero.
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Post by jdredd on Aug 31, 2019 2:26:23 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/opinion/world-war-ii-anniversary.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Contributors"For several years many commentators, including me, have written about the parallels between the prewar era and the present. There’s the rise of dictatorial regimes intent on avenging past geopolitical humiliations and redrawing borders: Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia then; China, Iran and Russia now. There’s the unwillingness of status quo powers to coordinate their actions, confront dictatorships, stamp out regional wars and rise to global challenges. The League of Nations then; the G7 now." Same tired noise from the right: We're all a bunch of pussies if we don't get more belligerent with the Bad Guys De Jour Iran, Russia, and China. Are you buying this, Millennials?
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Post by jdredd on Sept 27, 2019 16:14:09 GMT -5
I just finished reading Michael Lind's book Vietnam: The Necessary War, which argues that the Vietnam War needs to be viewed in context of the Cold War. Frankly, I am unconvinced. The Vietnam War continues to emotionally resonate with many Americans IMHO, while the Cold War seems only to be of passing interest when we want to brag how awesome America is for "winning" it. Why is that? Maybe it's because it was Americans who fought and died in Vietnam, while all we did for the Cold War is give moral support for the anti-Communists in Eastern Europe and Russia who eventually overthrew their own Communist governments. Did Vietnam have much to do with that? I doubt it.
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Post by jdredd on Sept 29, 2019 1:23:33 GMT -5
www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/chinese-communist-party-has-broken-catholic-rch-western-business-elite-opposition/"The Berlin Wall fell when I was just in primary school. Later in life, as I was beginning to develop my convictions about life and politics, I was taught that the West had faced down this threat to history, that institutions such as the Catholic rch and major Western business interests had brought down the dreadful and wicked Communists in the name of political, religious, and economic freedom. At the time, it stood to reason that the Western religious and business establishments had played such a big part in winning the Cold War. The Soviet Union tried to crush and humiliate Christian institutions wherever it went; indeed, many radicals became Communists precisely because of Communism’s inherent and fanatical anti-clericalism. Free enterprise was suppressed under the Communist regimes of the 20th century." Here is the author of the cheesy My Father Gave Me Ireland praising the marriage made in Hell of Capitalism and Christianity that he claims "brought down the dreadful and wicked Communists". Whatever. Of course he wants it revived to take on the evil Chicoms, and is whining about the lack of enthusiasm of the Vatican and Wall Street to get on board. Makes you cry, doesn't it?
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Post by jdredd on Oct 21, 2019 14:56:45 GMT -5
I'm doing some reading on Harry Truman, who left office very unpopular, but has since been rehabilitated for partisan reasons. Such is history. And now I am also reading current perspectives on the Cold War, and the trend seems to be that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were pretty much equivalent. I don't feel the need to argue the point, as the saying goes, "History is written by the victors". What is also a cliche is "Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it", but the problem is when people learn flawed history.
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Post by jdredd on Nov 2, 2019 1:26:41 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/opinion/armenia-genocide-resolution.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage"YEREVAN, Armenia — It has been 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. A guard threw open a gate, the Soviet imperium folded, more than 100 million people in Central and Eastern Europe were freed, a divided continent was made whole, and the end of history was announced. What to make of the three decades after Nov. 9, 1989? Poverty receded. Lives got longer. Human exchange became borderless. Artificial intelligence started making things smart. China rose, as did sea levels. The United States, attacked and wounded, tried managed decline, and at last, in wild frustration, elected a loudmouthed con man to its highest office. History, not terminated after all, ushered in a new wave of nationalism, nativism and xenophobia. Water is the new oil. Data is the new plutonium. Climate is the new Armageddon. The talk in 1990 of the inevitability of a world of liberal democracy turned to predictions of a world of autocrats buttressed by the surveillance states that technology has enabled. It has proved impossible for technology companies to do no evil. The best of all possible worlds was deferred yet again. Joachim Gauck, the Lutheran pastor and anti-Communist East German activist who later became president of a united Germany, captured the illusions and shattered hopes of 1989 best: “We dreamed of paradise and woke up in North Rhine-Westphalia.”
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Post by jdredd on Dec 24, 2019 4:22:20 GMT -5
The cliche is that "The victors write the history books", and some of the more recent books I've been reading seem to justify that comment. It's a lot of heroic Free World forces routing the evil Soviet empire. Whatever, it makes no difference. History is all spin.
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Post by jdredd on Mar 1, 2020 16:14:36 GMT -5
Been reading a history of the end of French colonialism in Indochina. I just got past the inspiring part where the Viet Minh defeat the French at Dien Bien Phu, but now I'm at the depressing part where Russia and China stab the Vietnamese in the back by pressuring them to accept partition. Of course there was supposed to be elections but Eisenhower nixed them and put Diem in power.
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Post by jdredd on Mar 31, 2020 23:14:59 GMT -5
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_West"With her characteristic fierce passion, West argues in her new book that the Communist infiltration led to a successful 'assault on our nation's character' during the Cold War that left us the 'heirs to a false and hollow history' and 'unwitting participants' in 'a secretly subverted pageant.' In other words, perhaps we didn't win the Cold War after all. ... West argues that the impact of this 'deep occupation' did not simply fall away with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It lives today in our embrace of the Communists' false historical narrative, exemplified in our 'denial of the Soviet regime-engineered Famine in the Ukraine ... a seminal moment in the history of the world. The seminal moment, perhaps, of the twentieth century.' It lives also in our weakened resistance to their ideology. 'Americans are not equipped,' West notes, 'not prepared, to regard anything resembling Communism ... as an existential threat to liberty.' Instead, we still romanticize Moscow's agents as 'idealists' and 'are continually conditioned to embrace Communistic principles, all serving to expand the power and authority of the state over the individual.'"[7] The Ukrainian famine the "seminal moment...of the 20th Century"? Personally, I think 1914 and 60M dead in WWI was a more likely candidate. But it's subjective, like most history. I do like the phrase "secretly subverted pageant".
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Post by jdredd on Apr 23, 2020 10:43:14 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/world/europe/coronavirus-american-exceptionalism.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage"America once told a story of hope, and not just to Americans. West Germans like Mr. Maas, who grew up on the front line of the Cold War, knew that story by heart, and like many others in the world, believed it. But nearly three decades later, America’s story is in trouble. The country that defeated fascism in Europe 75 years ago next month, and defended democracy on the continent in the decades that followed, is doing a worse job of protecting its own citizens than many autocracies and democracies. There is a special irony: Germany and South Korea, both products of enlightened postwar American leadership, have become potent examples of best practices in the coronavirus crisis. But critics now see America failing not only to lead the world’s response, but letting down its own people as well." In this narrative, America successfully "defended democracy" in the Cold War. WWI was also promoted as "Saving the world for Democracy." I'm not disputing the concept, I just want to understand history. Another narrative is that we picked up where Hitler left off in his War on Bolshevism, but certainly HE wasn't defending Democracy.
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Post by jdredd on May 29, 2020 12:11:31 GMT -5
www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/opinion/united-states-cold-war.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage"It’s unsurprising that establishment pundits, American policymakers and their allies would be alarmed about American decline. The United States and Western Europe have been the winners of the process that created this globalized world, the main beneficiaries of Washington’s triumph at the end of the Cold War. But a lot of people feel very differently. In early April, I received a message from Winarso, a man I know in Indonesia who runs an organization that cares for the survivors of the mass murder that took place there in the 1960s. He was trying to raise money to buy rice so his community wouldn’t starve under lockdown. A dollar still goes a very long way in Indonesia, as Winarso knows too well. To explain America’s economic and political power, he points to the Cold War. It’s easy to see that Washington was truly victorious in the 20th century, he told me, because “we all got the U.S.-centered version of capitalism that Washington wanted to spread.” I asked him how America won. He answered quickly. “You killed us.” Here's a guy who thinks America won the Cold War with mass murder. But America's version of the world, no matter how much fun for the wealthy, is showing cracks.
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Post by jdredd on Jul 30, 2020 3:09:42 GMT -5
America is still gloating how it "won" the Cold War. But a word of caution for those who think we can do the same to China: The Soviet Union was an economic weakling. Not so China.
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