What You Can Do About Khrushchev's Visit

There's not much to thie post except this pointer:

What You Can Do About Khrushchev's Visit

in case you want to read what Freedom House advised Americans to do when Khrushchev visited the U.S. in 1959. There is a sort of awkward interface provided by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette which lets you pan through the article with a virtual "magnifying glass". It was supposed to be half of an exchange of visits, however some developments increased US-USSR tensions between the U.S.

I was actually looking for, and am still looking for a copy of the full page (I think) ad by the Committee Against Summit Entanglements, a temporary sub-organization, perhaps "front" is a reasonable word, for the John Birch Society. It was one of their first significant acts. Some sources are saying that William F. Buckley was the "public face" of the Committee Against Summit Entanglements, although he would soon put some distance between himself and the JBS, after founder Robert Welch called Dwight Eisenhower a “conscious, dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy” and said the U.S. government was “under operational control of the Communist party.”

The JBS is, by the way, after decades in the political wildernes, a co-sponsor of the 2010 CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) -- see Article Provided by ABC News.

Speaking of ABC News, I'm somewhat confused -- do they have nothing to do with WABC (Radio) in New York, which is "all talk, all the time", and features Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Monica Crowley (who seemed, when I once listened to her, to never speak of the HR leader except as "Whorehouse Harry Reed", and never speak of the President as anything but "The Bama"). But the ABC News artical is titled "Far-Right John Birch Society 2010", and I see no evidence of "Liberal Baiting Merchandise" or other signs that their slant is at all like that of WABC Radio.

The Man With Only a Hammer

A major and perhaps the greatest problem with the purist libertarian position -- that the ideal government should only stop crime, enforce contracts, and protect us from outside threats -- is summed up in the aphorism "To the man with only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail." The Cold Warriors who wrote The Ugly American were quite ready to celebrate smart applications of violence. But they had quite a list of things for which the U.S. needed something other than that hammer with which to fight the Communist powers, and blamed much of our failure up to that time to our lack of capacity and willingness to use imaginative non-military methods to push back against the Communists. They pointed out things that the enemy did, like having embassy staff that knew the local language and lived much like the locals, like running schools in Southeast Asian countries teaching the skills people needed most -- a sort of Soviet Peace Corps 10 years before the U.S. tried that. The Communists seemed to value provision of peaceful benefits, as much as they valued the ability to pull off vicious underhanded dirty tricks, and both served them well, while U.S. policy-makers seemed to only envy their efficiency and freedom from scruples. It is a shame the title "Ugly American" became a byword for something that only played a small part in the book -- American boorishness. It was much more about lack of imagination (to use something besides the hammer) and common sense together with the ability to connect to people of dramatically different culture.

The Candy Bombers by Andrei Cherny (2009)

I read The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour by Andrei Cherny initially because my mother said she'd read it or listened to it on tape and really enjoyed it, and I wanted to read something she'd read so we'd have something to talk about. I'm 58 years old and she's about 20 years older, so the events took place some time in her teens. It narrates the story of the Berlin Air Lift, a key episode in the very early part of the Cold War. It is 1948. WWII had ended 3 years later with the the Western Allies, dominated by the U.S., and the Soviet Union rolling the Nazi empire up from both sides and meeting in the middle of Germany. Germany was divided into 4 sectors to be governed by the U.S., England, France, and the USSR, until such time as it seemed right to give sovereignty back to the Germans. The USSR having fought its way across eastern Europe occupied that whole area and it gradually became apparent they were going to hold onto it indefinitely. The line where the Western allies and the USSR met, crushing Germany was soon christened the "Iron Curtain" by Winston Churchill.

Although the line was to the West of Berlin, due to Berlin's special nature as the capital, it was itself "shared" 4 ways, like a microcosm of Germany itself. By 1948, the Western occupied parts of Germany were well on their way to becoming one new democratic nation. From the Western allies point of view, all four sectors should have been put back together, but that was not going to happen, so the 3 western sectors were on their way to becoming West Berlin, an island in the middle of East Germany, separated from the rest of West Germany by about 100 miles of East German territory.

Given the hostility that was developing between the U.S. and western Europe on the one side, and what would come to be known as the Warsaw Pact, on the other, to be antagonists in a "Cold War" for several decades, it would be a very peculiar situation to maintain this island, 100 miles inside of the Soviet Bloc, with more or less normal communications by train and/or automobile across that 100 miles of hostile territory, but until the summer of 1948 it continued that way, until the USSR decided to stop the trains running across Soviet occupied Germany, and surrounded Berlin with a Blockade of troops.

While roads and railroads could be made impassible by physical blockage, there were three agreed upon air corridors (the Potsdam agreement I believe), and planes cannot be stopped except by lethal force, which the Soviets feared could bring on a war with the U.S. with nuclear weaponry.  The USSR did not have any nuclear weapons until its first demonstration around the end of the Berlin crisis (and it would take several years to amass any significant quantity of weapons, and until the 1960s for them to have adequate delivery systems to pose a real threat).

It was not at all obvious that a city of 2 million people could receive enough food, etc. to live on via the three air routes and existing airports (during the airlift a whole new air port and a major new landing strip would be built).  The Soviets did obstruct the flying as much as they could with "accidental" close calls, one of which became a real crash, and various other ploys, but within a few months the air lift was working well, and it became a major embarrassment (while the USSR had a massive military, it also relied heavily on seduction and propaganda, whose effectiveness was damaged by an unending attempt to starve a city into submission).  For this reason, the blockaid was after about a year, lifted, which is to say that the Soviets and newly constituted East Germans would for the remaining decades of the Cold War give overland access to West Germany across 100 miles of East Germany.  It was a strange situation, and West Berlin was later completely walled in except for the explicitly allowed overland and air access, but it became part of a series of signals between the USSR and the US especially, of what they would and wouldn't do, what sort of provocations or embarrassments they would or wouldn't take, which became the currency of the Cold War.

The title The Candy Bombers is due to one airman who, all on his own, began to drop candy and gum in packets attached to miniature parachutes as his plain approached the runway.  When it was discovered, he feared a Court Martial but became a hero instead (a not so very uncommon experience in the military).

JOHN FOSTER DULLES BOOK OF HUMOR

Before getting down to reading some serious cold war books, I read The JOHN FOSTER DULLES BOOK OF HUMOR By Louis Jefferson. Yes, it's a real book. The NY Times published a rather dull review of it by Mark Russell at the time of publication, 1986. Jefferson served as Dulles security officer and all around guy who got things done in the 1950s. He was a probably physically imposing one sometime jazz musician. Some of his writing seems a bit hallucinogenic. He developed a deep affection for Dulles and seems to have pretty much accepted Dulles' cold war thinking. He does make a convincing case that Dulles was trying to save the world according to how he understood things. Unfortunately some of his understanding came from reading Stalin's Questions of Leninism and taking it as a sincere statement of Stalin's beliefs. Also, a career as a high powered lawyer for large international companies may have inculcated some prejudices along the lines of "What's good for General Motors is good for the country".

Jefferson apparently earned some instant fame (among the delegats and their retinues) at a summit with the USSR in Switzerland not long after Stalin's death. Dulles' car had somehow vanished (it later appeared that KGB officers seem to have gotten the driver drunk), and Jefferson commandeered Harold Stassen's car to pick up Dulles (he did offer Stassen a ride). It made quite an impression with the following result which I'll quote from the book.

"When the Soviets arrived ... I was standing with all the other gawkers in a hallway. Les Russes put on quite a show . . as they marched in two by two ... I found them quite entertaining and watched them whenever I could. When they arrived at my vantage point, Khrushchev stopped, and they all followed suit. There was wonder, and fear, on their faces. Something must be wrong. To stop was not in the accepted pattern. They stood like statues, but Khrushchev waddled over to me, laughing (one observer described his laugh as sounding like "a horse having an orgasm") and shouting in Russian. He started to punch me lightly in the stomach. The Punches came in harder. Then, he pinched my cheek. His protruding stomach backed me close into the wall, and the rest of the Russians surrounded me, pointing, clucking, laughing, wagging their heads. Then, very suddenly, Khrushchev turned serious and did an about face, and they all turned serious and did an about face and continued their march down the hall."
...
"When I asked a Russian-speaking Swiss detective what Khrushchev had been shouting at me, he said, "The Party Secretary was telling you that he was happy that the, uh, 'unpredictable' er, uh Mr. Dulles had not shot you for losing his car."

"Shot me, or had me shot?" I asked.

The Swiss detective thought a moment. "He seemed to believe that Mr. Dulles might, shall we say, have personally ... shot you."

The Politics of Putting "Missile Shields" on Russia's Doorstep (yes, it's old news)

[Thoughts from - September 2009, revised May 2010]

Long range goals in U.S. relations with Russia should focus on making Russia part of the web of trade with the more stable and especially democratic countries of the world. At present, I believe Russia's export capacity consists of (1) petroleum, (2) weapons, and (3) ability to build nuclear facilities. The latter two tend to bind Russia to the more dangerous countries of the world, while petroleum, whose value may soar again, requires little in the way of an educated middle class work force [which I think is the most powerful factor in at least making a nation inclined to be stable] to keep money flowing in. Very likely the best way to diminish the power of potentially dangerous Russian elites (and the same for Islamic countries) is to hold down the cost of oil, and the best way to do that is the course we are on now, mostly in the name of "greenness" or reducing global warming. Oil is not unlike the "monoculture" of tobacco and later cotton in early American history. It can support a small elite with an economy mostly based on trading with other parts of the world without requiring a well educated general populace with some ability to think for themselves, as is required by a more balanced and diverse (and more intramural) economy.

The missile shields once promised to Poland and (the Czech Republic?) may have had psychological significance to those countries, but my most immediate reactions are that (1) I don't see under what scenario the missle shields could be useful - esp. against Russia, and (2) the whole project rests on an obvious and continued lie -- i.e. that their purpose had nothing to do with Russia.

If Russia were to attack Poland or the Czech Republic with nuclear weapons, they would, missile shield or no missile shield, risk severe retaliation from the West (and maybe even China which for now is a big beneficiary of a peaceful and stable world). Russia also might well receive a comparable amount of fallout as the countries attacked - Russia is downwind after all. And what could they get from it? A radioactive desert to occupy? The use of non-nuclear missiles would, I think not be that effective - such weapons serve better as terrorist tools than strategic weapons (why?). What they could accomplish by any sort of aggression is also very hard to see. Some might say Russia occupied half of non-Russian Europe before, so why couldn't it happen again? Well, they only did it in a nothing-to-lose state of affairs. The retreating Germans left a vacuum for them to flow into, and the wrecks of nations with no government or weapons. Poles and Czechs may have a very understandable visceral fear of Russia, given history, including how many of them could say their grandmother was raped by a Russian soldier. But the missile shield would not be effective against any plausible action by the Russia of today or any future Russia unless it were to be ruled by insane religious fanatics or insane Pol Pot style Communists.

I believe Russia has to have lost a huge amount of ground technologically. I would like to see some statistics on university education. And with probably steeper drop off in general production of technological goods, they have probably lost more in experience than in education (but I would welcome any correction from knowlegable sources). And as long as Russia does not use nuclear weapons they can be pretty confident nuclear weapons won't be used against them. So I think we have much more reason to fear nuclear weapons that escape Russia's control then we have to fear Russia using them. Russian military might seems to be reduced to the ability to fight small wars of the sort that help keep regimes in power by rallying patriotism, and the ability to blow up much of the world -- the latter only useful for blackmail if one convinces the world that one puts no value on ones own life.

It appears to me the "missile shield" was little more than a pointless provocation, following on over two decades of pointless provocations and humilations of Russia going back to a time, in the last few years of the USSR, when their top leadership was energetically trying to rejoin the world of sane peaceful nations. Despite what I see as its uselessness, it was something the leadership could use to frighten the Russian population, which could tend to commit both leadership and population to continued hostility to the West and esp. the U.S. I suspect Obama needs to back off from quite a few such pointless provocations before we can begin to establish a new set of lines not to be crossed by Russia or other nations.

A History of Ideas of the Cold War?

[This essay was started some time prior to 5/12/2009. It is a bare beginning of an exploration of the idea of a History of Ideas of the Cold War]

It looks to me like the confusions of the cold war are coming back to haunt us again.

To study the ideas that had major impacts on the Cold War looks to me like entering a funhouse hall of mirrors. It is particularly obvious in the case of the USSR and its satellites that by the time of the Cold War, Socialist ideals were at best confused and warped out of recognition by expediencies, and at worst (in a certain moral sense at least) downright lies manipulated to maintain power.

The "Free World" was far less coherently structured, which sometimes resulted in a sort of inferiority complex, inspiring secretive and ruthless Machiavellian processes -- sometimes propagandistic manipulation of the public, and sometimes conspiracies within branches of the U.S. government, and others aligned with it -- justified by the supposed need to "fight fire with fire", or to be as merciless and Machiavellian as the forces we believed we were fighting.

On the other hand, many people in the "West", inclined to wish for a better world were taken in, and worked for the USSR's spy organs, with such results as Russia producing atomic bombs very soon after the U.S.

Maybe it is best to start with various interpretations that purport to give a straightforward view of both sides. I suspect Whittaker Chambers' view may have had a huge impact.

It is practically inevitable that today we have even more confused ideas of the phenomenon of Communism than we had when it was a worldwide phenomenon.

Today there are just remnants of the old "Communist Bloc", the most significant of which might be Cuba and North Korea. Then there is China, which is still semi-tyrannical, but doesn't make much pretense of being Communist. It seems to me they're mostly just ambitious for world power in an old fashioned (sort of 19th century?) way, and they are starting to have the resources to attain some very serious power.

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There were many misperceptions of the USSR -- that it was stronger or weaker, or more or less scientifically advanced than it actually was. Probably the biggest misperception was that they were driven in any meaningful sense by ideals of a socialist utopia. In part, I think that is part of a general tendency to see nations, and other social phenomena, such as "the terrorists" as like a person, driven by one set of ideals. Some people I've listened to recently on NPR have described the forces arrayed against the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan as a coalition of a small core of zealots, a lot of people denied any normal economic life by current circumstances, who are basically hired soldiers, and whatever else.

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5/12/2009
Just finished listening to an abridged version on tape of Atlas Shrugged. I am interested in the mindset of those for whom the book seemed like a blinding flash of revelation. Ayn Rand's imagined world is a very strange one. It seems modeled to some extent on depression America. Certainly economic conditions are depressed and becoming more and more so throughout the book.
The America of Atlas Shrugged is a strange parody of itself, with states treated as semi-autonomous, and no electoral politics in sight. The heroes are industrialists, though only some industrialists, and some engineers. Those who are smart and have a "can do" attitude are initially the success stories. At the start of the book, there are pernicious, more or less socialist, or altruistic ideas in the air though they are not dominant, though there is a lot of envy and disparagement of the successful industrialists as scandalously selfish. The many weaklings in the book, including many in industry frequently throw up their hands and say "You can't blame me -- such and such happenned; I couldn't help that". The also promote really silly business policies in the name of "fairness".
There is no Wall Street in evidence, and no dynamic of fickle stockholders affecting business. Ownership seems to rest with a handful of individuals. There is no USSR, though all countries besides the U.S. are called "People's Republic(s)" of France/England/Mexico/whatever. The U.S. seems to be some kind of microcosm recreating the early history of the USSR, except that it starts out as a somewhat successful industrial society (despite all the decline, it seems better than other countries, and towards the end of the book references are made to the U.S. supporting the other nations. Large numbers of stores are closing. There is an odd lack of pressure from the poor and working classes; at least half the rich just seem to want to give away what they have, to make arbitrary loans irrespective of borrower's credit worthiness in the name of "fairness". As the story moves along though, in the course of I think just a couple of years, the nation starts taking on aspects of Stalinist Russia - there is even a fantastic torture machine out of James Bond.

Before and After

It was the strange and awful history of the Soviet Union that first got me seriously interested in history -- back in 1981, when I walked into a Cambridge, MA bookstore. I had an expense-paid trip for an interview for some computer programming job. It's hard to remember what I used to read before that, but I came across Stephen F. Cohen's Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, maybe in my opinion the best single book on the subject.

After that came about 15 years of reading a good couple of shelves of books on the subject while working as a computer systems analyst. At some point, feeling satisfied that I had some sense of how the USSR had the trajectory it had, and having branched out to examinations of other tragic/horrendous states like Nazi Germany, and the evolution of modern China, I took an interest in how reasonably sane, free, and democratic states and/or civic culture came to exist in some places.

In the mid to late 80s I was doing way too much driving which got me started with Books on Tape. The selection was not so broad and was certainly more "West" centric (as in U.S. and Western Europe), and one of the first instances of turning in this direction was "reading" a book on tape about the period of the English Civil War and the Cromwell regime. Another important thing I read was Barbara Tuchman's Stilwell and the American Experience in China, which kind of bridges the gap between China and in general the dynamics that helped drive some of the more backward nations into Communist regimes -- and U.S. history (and military history at that). One could also say that Cromwell and the English Civil war bridged the gap between an interest in huge historical discontinuities that seemed to center around a charismatic leader/dictator (Lenin and Stalin, Hitler, Mao) and the path leading to (relative) civility and western democracy.

Around the same time I started wondering whether my growing understanding, such as it was, might be worth sharing in some way, and ultimately I was lead to a much more intense study than I had ever done before, of America's path to our Civil War. The very popular Civil war miniseries around that time got me thinking that this subject could possibly be used to entice Americans to look at history, and maybe better understand the paths that peoples and nations take through history.

That lead to around 10 years during which I managed to become to some degree a "real" historian, able to elicit some respect from much of the large community of historians studying the period of U.S. history sometimes called the "Early (American) Republic". There is a society called SHEAR (Society of Historians of the Early American Republic), with a discussion list and yearly meetings around the country, and a quarterly Journal of the Early Republic or JER, which I soon joined, and then became the society's web editor for a time, AND began publishing a mass of stuff on the web and through email, which is still up on www.EarlyRepublic.org aka JMISC.net. The most successful thing I did was an email newsletter called Jacksonian Miscellanies which consisted of typically chapter length excerpts scanned from books from the period (early 1800s) with some commentary. I tried to put it out weekly, then biweekly, then occasionally, then sporadically -- still in all, I produced over 100 issues which were subscribed to by many of the best historians of the "Early Republic".

These days I'm drawn back to taking another look at the USSR, but from the outside, and looking just as closely at the US and the sequence of actions and perceptions we call the Cold War, and its aftermath. Ultimately, I hope to build up "What Was the Cold War?" into a very wide ranging set of essays, timelines, bibliographies, biographical dictionary with strong use of hypertext links -- much like Tales of the Early Republic.

Stephen F. Cohen has recently (2009) written a book: Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, stressing the contingent nature of history. For some reason, people seem (often very stubbornly) drawn to the idea that things had to work out more or less the way they did -- from the Marxists' historical inevitability to the unfolding of the "last days" as believed in by Christian fundamentalists -- and many points of view in between. From studying the history of ideas, I've come to believe it is very difficult to make sense of an idea and why it takes hold without understanding the idea(s) to which it was largely a reaction. Early Protestant belief in predestination appears to me to be a sort of big club to wield against the economy of the Roman Catholic Church as it was at that time -- largely encouraging people to buy their way into heaven and to trust that the priesthood could help you get their if you treated them with proper reverence and humility. Similarly, historical inevitability served as a big club to wield against the "Great Man" theory of history, which tended to put "common people" in their places.

So predestination can be strangely liberating under certain circumstances. It seems mainly useful for breaking the spell of the powers that be. Later, however, in the religious domain at least, liberation seemed to take the less paradoxical form of saying, as the Methodists did "Yes I can get myself into heaven" (though not with the help of priests).

[to be continued]