#the Cold War

[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.

[usualgangofidiots]

November 1955 cover

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

[stone-cold-groove]

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

[bonnieura]

1962

[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

[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.

[thoughtportal]

The myths of the atomic bomb

Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick[4] (director of American University's Nuclear Studies Institute) began working on the project in 2008. Stone, Kuznick and British screenwriter Matt Graham co-wrote the script.[5] The documentary miniseries for Showtime had a working title Oliver Stone's Secret History of America. Kuznick objected to the working title "Secret History", claiming that "the truth is that many of our 'secrets' have been hidden on the front page of The New York Times. If people think the secrets will be deep, dark conspiracies, they'll be disappointed. We'll be drawing on the best recent scholarship".[6] It was subsequently retitled The Untold History of the United States.[7]

[madame-helen]

[hiraethstar]

I’ve been rereading The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis and I think there’s a reference to nuclear warfare towards the end.

When they are in the Wood Between the Worlds with Aslan, he shows them the hollow that was once Charn and warns them that their world could end up like Charn. When Polly questions it, he elaborates: ‘you are growing more like it. It is not certain that some wicked one of your race will not find out a secret as evil as the Deplorable Word and use it to destroy all living things.’

The book was published in 1955, after the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Around that time was the Korean war where more countries were starting to take up nuclear arms.

The disturbing thing is it’s still very poignant 68 years later.

[stone-cold-groove]

Missile attack!

[thedestinysunknown]

Tomb Raider 2 The Golden Mask Remastered - The Cold War:

"Now, we talk about Tomb Raider 2's expansion, The Golden Mask, and I hope you like ice themed levels, because that's most of em. Also, I hope you don't mind dealing with strong enemies, because there's a lot of em as well. Either way, this is a decent way to start this pack."

PS: the gameplay used for this gifset is not mine. The original video belongs to the user: Steven3517, on Youtube.

[irregularincidents]

While the shadow Senator Joseph McCarthy left over the latter half of the 20th century in the United States is largely unavoidable, what is less well known are the circumstances under which his infamous witch hunts under the umbrellas of the Red and Lavender Scares (where he pursued people with real or imagined communist or lgbtq leanings) came to a close.

This itself is a story with several contributing factors.

McCarthy's Chief Counsel was a lawyer by the name of Roy Cohn (on the right on the main image, McCarthy on the left), a virulent anti-communist who was also the chief prosecutor for the Rosenburg Spy Case (arguing successfully for their executions despite even J Edgar Hoover thinking executing a mother with two young children would be unpopular). He was also a closeted homosexual, although his own leanings were an open secret among the US government, not that this deterred him from purging the US government of suspected gay and lesbian people (leading to 5000 people getting fired from their jobs).

Now, in November 1953, one of Cohn's associates by the name of G. Davies Schine (with whom Cohn had toured Germany previous to remove books by suspected communist authors from United States Information Agency libraries) was drafted into the US army. Cohn and McCarthy attempted to use their influence to pressure the army into having Schine stationed near to them in the US (some have read this as Cohn wanting his friend close by, others have suggested they were romantically involved, no confirmation is available that I can see, either way preferential treatment was demanded), and when the army told them no, the pair decided to threaten the army by turning their anti-communist hunts against them in retaliation.

And if you'd think that threatening the United States army in the early 1950s, when a former WWII general Dwight D. Eisenhower was president was a poor decision, you'd be right!

As such, in early 1954 the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, usually chaired by McCarthy himself, was given the task of investigating whether McCarthy had indeed improperly sought preferential treatment. And unlike some of the other trials, the decision was made by ABC to televise the hearings, giving the American public their first view of what McCarthy's hearings were actually like as he turned his standard tricks against the army prosecutors.

You'd be right in thinking that it was more than a touch cynical that what it took to turn America against McCarthy was him attacking white, straight army dudes, but nevertheless that's what happened.

The army hired Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to make its case. At a session on June 9, 1954, McCarthy charged that one of Welch's attorneys had ties to a Communist organisation (the attorney in question, Fred Fischer, had been a member of the progressive National Lawyer's Guild). As an amazed television audience looked on, Welch responded with the immortal lines that ultimately ended McCarthy's career: "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness." When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, "Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?".

Public support began to immediately drain from McCarthy, helped along by such things as the pioneering TV documentary series See It Now, where journalist Edward R Murrow (picture below) used clips of McCarthy's own behavior to underline how the senator had been exploiting the public's fear and spreading lies (such as implying the FDR and Truman administrations were treacherous) for his own political gain.

(Transcript of the episode here)

McCarthy was cleared of the charges, with sole responsibility being laid at the feet of Cohn, who resigned. By March of 1954, Joe's own Republican base in his home state of Wisconsin launched the Joe Must Go campaign, wishing to oust the senator for disrespecting the army, President Eisenhower, and for ignoring the plight of local dairy farmers facing price-slashing surpluses (y'know, the kind of issues he was elected to deal with rather than wandering around the United States harassing people for being gay, communist or being a gay communist).

He was eventually censured by the Senate on various charges that essentially amounted to making his colleagues look bad by association, and his political career limped along for a further two and a half years before finally dying of "Hepatitis, acute, cause unknown" on May 2, 1957. A diagnosis possibly made worse by both his heavy drinking and morphine addiction.

Schine, for his part in the proceedings, dropped out of politics following the hearings, where he entered the private sector, where among other things he made a cameo appearance in the 1966 Batman show (the Entrancing Dr Cassandra). He would eventually die in 1996 alongside his wife, and their 35 year old son in a private airplane accident.

And what of Roy Cohn... Well... While there are folk who'd go through an experience like this and try to either fade into obscurity or try to improve their image, Roy was not one of those people. He worked for the Mob in New York, the Catholic Church, Rupert Murdoch... and Donald Trump.

Cohn gathered a reputation for being willing to do whatever he felt was necessary to enrich either himself or to get his clients whatever they desired. This eventually led to his getting accused of theft, obstruction of justice, extortion, tax evasion, bribery, blackmail, fraud, perjury, and witness tampering. Indeed, Cohn's willingness to happily commit crimes for his clients has reportedly led to frustrations with Trump's recent legal trouble, with him being annoyed his current legal representatives aren't willing to do criminal stuff for them like Roy did back in the day.

Despite all of this though, Cohn remained a popular figure in conservative politics, even introducing Roger Stone to Trump, and was notably close friends with Ronald and Nancy Reagan, with whom he acted as an informal advisor and even ran Ron's presidential campaign in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey.

In 1986, Cohn was disbarred for, among other things, attempting to forge a client's will to make himself the beneficiary upon their death. On 2 August of that year, he died of complications from AIDS, having been cut off by Trump despite Cohn's loyalty (and help with lucrative mob contracts) over the years.

The IRS promptly seized his property, due to his owing the US government $7million in back taxes.