#the Cold War

[darthstitch]

If it looks like a Nazi,

Talks like a Nazi,

Walks like a Nazi,

Salutes like a Nazi,

They're a Nazi

And therefore,

You punch the Nazi.

[pureamericanism]

I always thought it was odd that the acts that finally drove a wedge between the Soviet Union and her western fellow-travelers were the crushing of the '56 and '68 uprisings. Not that these were particularly nice or good things, mind you, but after having held their noses for all of Stalin's megacidal atrocities, the systematic extermination of millions and the industrialization of slavery across half a continent, to finally have this be the bridge you're unwilling to cross? Again, the brutal crushing of pretty legitimate and popular protest movements is not very nice at all, but even if you don't buy the official Soviet explanations of foreign agents and counterrevolutionaries (and why would you, tbh), the existential stakes of the cold war make it a tad more justifiable than your ordinary repression. These were, frankly, the actions of a pretty normal state engaged in the grim realities of great power politics.

But that's the thing, isn't it? The very hugeness of Lenin and Stalin's atrocities helped them to be justified. If you're expecting the advent of Communism to usher in a millennarian utopia, you might expect this awesome revelation of the new order for the ages to be preceded by terrible heralds and to be birthed, screaming, in whole rivers of blood. But to achieve the earthly paradise through the ordinary machinations of great power politics? No, believing in that was too much to ask.

[stone-cold-groove]

Missile attack!

[crow2222]

Darry has a stroke fic but wakes up with a French accent

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[tomorrowusa]

Jimmy Carter's emphasis on human rights contributed to the fall of the Soviet empire.

President Carter had an almost instantaneous effect on human rights in Latin America when he became president. The Nixon-Kissinger policy of officially propping up dictators was replaced with one of supporting democracies. A majority of Latin American countries in 1976 were authoritarian. Within a decade, a majority were democratic or at least democratizing.

The Carter human rights policy had a more subversively indirect effect on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Historian and journalist Kai Bird said this at Washington Monthly:

He put human rights, that principle, as a keystone of U.S. foreign policy, and none of his successors have been able to walk back from that or ignore it completely. They’ve talked about some of the hypocrisy and impracticality of the policy, but you can’t ignore it. I make this argument in my biography, that human rights, the talk about human rights, and the focus on dissidents in the Soviet Union, and in Czechoslovakia, and Poland—all of that did much more to weaken the Soviet empire in eastern Europe than anything Ronald Reagan did by increasing the defense budget or threatening Star Wars. The Soviet Union was a weak adversary, not a strong adversary. It was falling apart, and along comes Carter, talking about human rights, and as Jon has said, ideas are powerful, and this idea remains powerful, and it really contributed monumentally to the falling of the Berlin Wall and people seizing power in the streets, and wanting to have personal freedom. That, in part, can be attributed to Jimmy Carter.

Michael Hirsh of the journal Foreign Policy (archived) was more emphatic.

Perhaps the least understood dimension of Carter’s much-maligned, one-term presidency was that he dramatically changed the nature of the Cold War, setting the stage for the Soviet Union’s ultimate collapse. Carter did this with a tough but deft combination of soft and hard power. On one hand, he opened the door to Reagan’s delegitimization of the Soviet system by focusing on human rights; on the other hand, Carter aggressively funded new high-tech weapons that made Moscow realize it couldn’t compete with Washington, which in turn set off a panicky series of self-destructive moves under the final Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. [ ... ] Although he was mocked for being naive at the time, it was in large part thanks to Carter and his more hawkish national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, that human rights issues later came to the fore inside the Eastern Bloc, acting like a gradually rising flood that eroded the foundations of Moscow’s power. Helped along by the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which authorized “Helsinki monitoring groups” in Eastern­ Bloc countries (perhaps most famously with Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, which set the human rights movement in motion with a 1977 petition), these newly formed dissident groups during the 1980s undermined the legitimacy of Warsaw Pact communist satellites—and thus the Soviet bloc—from within.

Daniel Friend, former US ambassador to Poland, has this to add at the Atlantic Council.

An implicit axiom of President Richard Nixon’s détente was that the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, marked by the imposition of the Iron Curtain, was a sad but by then immutable fact. Official Washington and most of US academia regarded the Soviet Bloc­­—communist-dominated Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea east of West Germany—as permanent and, though this was seldom made explicit, stabilizing. Talk of “liberating” those countries was regarded as illusion, delusion, or cant. Maintaining US-Soviet stability, under this view of Cold War realism, required accepting Europe’s realities, as these were then seen. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Final Act of Helsinki, a sort of codification of détente concluded under President Gerald Ford, did include general human rights language, and this turned out to be important. [ ... ] Carter’s shift toward human rights challenged this uber-realist consensus. It came just as democratic dissidents and workers’ movements inspired by them began to gather strength in Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland. Carter, and his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, put the United States in a better position to reach out to these movements and to work with them when communist rule began to falter as Soviet Bloc communist regimes started running past their ability to borrow money on easy “détente terms,” making them vulnerable. More broadly, by elevating human rights in the mix of US-Soviet and US-Soviet Bloc relations, Carter put the United States on offense in the Cold War and on the side of the people of the region.

President Carter's human rights policy was also popular among Americans of Eastern European descent.

[demons]

Crew members of the U.S.S. Hornet enjoying downtime during recovery operations for astronauts, 1969.

[usualgangofidiots]

November 1955 cover

Artist: Wally Wood Mad Logo Art: Harvey Kurtzman Border Art: Will Elder

[bonnieura]

1962

[adastra-sf]

Russian & North Korean Underwater "Radioactive Tsunami" Drones

image from full story at Popular Mechanics: X

Russia and North Korea have both developed underwater uncrewed vehicles (UUVs) designed to carry nuclear warheads capable of generating catastrophic waves of radioactive water, threatening coastal cities and entire regions - called “radioactive tsunamis” by the Korean Central News Agency.

This significant and challenging threat is all the more dangerous because of a growing military collaboration called “Joint Sword,” including North Korea, Russia, Iran, China, and others. Russia and North Korea have officially signed a defense treaty, codifying their relationship.

Putin was first to publicly showcase such a weapon, described as a “doomsday device.” Russia’s Poseidon nuclear-powered torpedo is capable of creating destructive, radioactive waves that could wipe out entire coastal populations and infrastructures.

Concerns among global military strategists are sharp when it comes to Joint Sword’s uniquely capable UUVs.

The primary advantage of these weapons is their potential to launch surprise attacks on unsuspecting nations. Both Russia’s Poseidon and North Korea’s Haeil could, if deployed, create massive radioactive waves, not just inflicting devastating damage on coastal regions but also spreading fear and chaos through misinformation online, to which we are susceptible due to increasingly unreliable content on social media.

Perhaps most concerning is the West’s apparent lack of preparedness for these radioactive tsunami weapons - there is no indication that the US Navy has developed countermeasures designed to protect against such threats or to emulate their abilities. No US officials have so much as acknowledged the phrase “radioactive tsunami” as something they're aware of or addressing in any real way.

The stealth and unpredictability of these weapons is changing the dynamics of the world's growing conflicts, making military attacks more unpredictable and harder to defend against. Experts emphasize that such weapons will have severe psychological and other impacts, particularly if targeting major cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Tokyo, which lie along vulnerable coastlines.

[irregularincidents]

Twelve days into the Korean War, on 7th July 1950, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover approached President Harry S. Truman with a list of 12,000 names.

These names (97% of which were American citizens) were of people that Hoover felt should be indefinitely arrested and placed in concentration internment camps due to his claims that the people named were necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage" in the event that America were to go to war against the Soviet Union.

The letter wherein he proposed these arrests stated that eventually the interned people would be allowed to have a hearing. The hearing board would have been a panel made up of one judge and two citizens. But the hearings “will not be bound by the rules of evidence,” his letter noted.

Who would have been these people that Hoover wished to detain? His usual suspects. People with socialist or communist beliefs or sympathies (real or manufactured), pacifists, early members of the civil rights movement such as the African-American singer and actor Paul Robeson...

Truman, to his credit, didn't agree with Hoover's suggestion and chose to veto it, although Congress reportedly would later vote to overturn his veto.

This was one of several documents declassified in the mid-2000s that underlined for as terrible as J. Edgar Hoover was, there were still even worse things he wanted to do that even Truman (who was brought on as FDR's vice president because the Democrats thought he'd make them look tougher on communism than Roosevelt's former VP, the socially progressive Henry Agard Wallace*) was against it.

*Wallace wanted to do things like ending segregation, bringing about gender and racial equality, and establishing a national health service (like the UK eventually adopted several years later), so OBVIOUSLY he had to go.

[whispering-about-the-tmnt]

As I mentioned yesterday, here is the layout for my 1970s TMNT AU Lair (fallout shelter). My son and I had a lot of fun doing this! I doubt there are any questions, but if you want to know anything, ask away!

Edit: I had the wrong streets mentioned when I first posted this, so I edited it to put the right ones on!

[richo1915]

Now I don’t go in for these American traditions (actually European) as an Australian. Bad influence on our youngsters. But being a Trade Unionist and a bit Bolshie, I couldn’t go past this.

[shattered-pieces]

Americans: just because you never heard of Ukraine before or it wasn't on your radar doesn't mean it doesn't matter, doesn't mean it's a "fake country", doesn't mean it hasn't existed long before you knew about it

[stone-cold-groove]

Cover from Bell Telephone’s civil defense pamphlet, The Big Call - 1950.

[themesopelagiczone]

cookiecutter sharks took down nuclear submarines during the cold war!! they'd bite off chunks of the rubber around sonar domes and cause the oil to leak, blinding submarines and forcing them back for repairs. the americans thought it was some kind of secret soviet technology but actually, it was these little cat-sized, glow in the dark bitches that will bite anything that moves.

medium | business insider

photos: noaa observer project

[codesquire]

If you're teaching US History and you mention the Cuban Missile Crisis without mentioning, in the god-damned preface, that the US had put missiles in Turkey, you lose serious credibility.

This sort of US aggression abroad, being ignored, is part of how we got to where we currently stand...

I've unfollowed 2 history YTers over this.

This sin of omission is its own form of propaganda.