Cam & Ray's Cold War Podcast

Cam & Ray's Cold War Podcast

The Cold War Podcast You've Been Waiting For.

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#103 – The First Indochina War (Part I)

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After Ho Chi Minh declared the independence of Vietnam in September 1945, the British and Chinese troops arrived in Saigon and Hanoi to disarm the Japanese and prepare the return of the French – and the shooting begins. Some scholars thing that *this* was the beginning of the First Indochina War. Meanwhile, Ho continues to try to get Truman’s support. But who will Truman stand behind? A people wanting self-determination? Or the French colonialists?

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#102 – Ho Chi Minh VI

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* As they grew stronger, Giáp’s forces took more territory and captured more towns
* And then on 15 August they heard that the Japanese Emperor had declared his country’s unconditional surrender to the allies.
* Unfortunately for Ho and Giap, the U.S. had a new President.
* Truman didn’t care, or maybe even know, about FDR’s plans for Indochina.
* And the French, of course, saw their opportunity to get in good with the new administration.
* And they wanted to make sure they would be able to reclaim colonial control after the war.
* The Truman administration wanted France to help them block Soviet expansion after the war.
* And so they decided to allow France to take back Indochina.
* When world leaders convened in San Francisco in late April and May to form the United Nations, senior U.S. officials did not raise the issue of trusteeship for Indochina.
* On the contrary, U.S. secretary of state Edward Stettinius assured French foreign minister Georges Bidault that “the record is entirely innocent of any official statement of the U.S. government questioning, even by implication, French sovereignty over Indochina.”
* A report prepared for Harry Truman on June 2 acknowledged that “independence sentiment in the area is believed to be increasingly strong” but declared that “the United States recognizes French sovereignty over Indochina.”
* When Truman met Chiang Kai-shek in Washington some weeks later, he dismissed any notion of trusteeship for Indochina.
* So much for The Atlantic Charter.
* Then came the Potsdam conference.
* DeGaulle wasn’t invited, because he annoyed the fuck out of everyone.
* And because he’d sent forces to the old French mandates of Syria and Lebanon, despite the Allies telling him not to.
* And at Potsdam the Vietnamese got well and truly shafted.
* In order to disarm the Japanese in Vietnam, the Allies divide the country in half at the 16th parallel.
* Chinese Nationalists would move in and disarm the Japanese north of the parallel while the British would move in and do the same in the south.
* And they agreed to return of all French pre-war colonies in Southeast Asia (Indochina).
* Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia will once again become French colonies following the removal of the Japanese.
* But in the meantime, the Chinese occupation of the north meant the Vietnamese had time to consolidate their position before the French came back.
* And the fact that China and Britain needed to do the cleaning up of the Japanese reinforced the idea in the minds of the Vietnamese that France was now a second rate power.
* Then, when Japan surrendered in August, it created a power vacuum which the Viet Minh were able to exploit.
* As Ho had always said, they had to wait for the right moment to strike.
* And this was it.
* DeGaulle, in the meantime, made a typically clueless speech.
* On August 15, he sent a message from “the Mother Country to the Indochinese Union,” expressing France’s “joy, solicitude, and gratitude” for Indochina’s “loyalty to France” and her resistance to the Japanese.
* Even as he uttered those words, however, in the jungles of Tonkin, Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh readied to make a triumphant entry into Hanoi.
* Their message to the crowds awaiting them: With Japan defeated and France prostrate, the moment of liberation was at hand.
* Hanoi is a city in the north of Vietnam.
* Near the coast.
* The name means “inside the river”
* Hanoi has been inhabited since at least 3000 BCE
* And was the administrative center of the colony of French Indochina.
* The French had built a new part of the city which was in Baron Haussmann, the man who designed modern Paris
* It had wide boulevards, shady trees, an opera house and formal gardens, French shops, sidewalk cafes.
* It was the Paris of Asia.
* Long Biên Bridge, built in 1899-1902 by the architects Daydé & Pillé of Paris, at that time, one of the longest bridges in Asia 1.68 kilometres (1.04 mi)
* And it was there in Hanoi on a hot September day in 1945, in front of hundreds of thousands, that Ho proclaimed Vietnamese independence.
* Ho was 55.
* It was his first time in Hanoi.
* He had travelled four days from his base to get there.
* By foot, boat and, because he was still sick, being carried in a stretcher.
* Giap tells the story:
* The strain had an effect on his health. He fell ill. For several days, in spite of the fatigue and the fever, he pushed himself and continued his work. Every day in coming to make my report, I worried about his condition. Invariably he responded: “It will pass. Come on in and bring me up to date.” But I clearly saw that he was weakening and had lost considerable weight. One day, I found him in a state of crisis, delirious with fever. We were terribly short of medicine, just had some aspirin and quinine tablets. He took them, but they had no effect. Ordinarily, except for his moments of repose, he never lay down. Now he lay on his cot for hours in a coma. Of all those who worked habitually by his side I was the only one who had stayed at Tan Trao, He was so tired one night that when I suggested that I stay the night with him, insisting that I was free, he opened his eyes and nodded his head slightly in agreement.
* The black night and the jungle held our little hut on the mountainside in a vice. Each time that Uncle Ho recovered his lucidity, he returned to the current situation: “The circumstances are favorable to us. We must at all costs seize independence. We must be ready for any sacrifice, even if the entire chain of the Central Mountains must catch fire.” When he could put a little order in his thoughts, he insisted on the points that preoccupied him: “In guerrilla war, when the movement rises, it is necessary to take advantage of it to push further, to expand and create solid bases, in preparation for critical times.” At that moment I refused to believe that he had confided in me his last thoughts, but on later reflection, I told myself that he felt so weak that he was giving me his final recommendations. The moments of lucidity and agitation succeeded themselves all night. In the morning, I urgently informed the Party Central Committee of his condition. Then I asked the local villagers if they knew how to make some mixture of wild plants. They told me of a man who … was reputed for his medicinal preparations against fever. I sent a courier immediately to fetch him. The old man, who was of Tay origin, took his pulse, burned a root that he had just dug up in the forest, sprinkled the cinders in a bowl of rice soup and fed it to the patient. The miracle occurred. The medicine was efficacious. The President emerged from his coma. The next day the fever diminished, he took that mixture two or three times during the day. His condition continued to improve. After the fever subsided, he arose and resumed his daily work.
* Since the news of the bombing of Japan and their subsequent surrender, Ho and the ICP had been furiously meeting to discuss their plan of action.
* It was decided that they would call for a nationwide insurrection to bring about an independent republic under the leadership of the Viet Minh.
* Using the name Nguyen Ai Quoc for the last time, Ho issued an “appeal to the people.”
* “Dear fellow countrymen!” he declared. “The decisive hour has struck for the destiny of our people. Let all of us stand up and rely on our own strength to free ourselves. Many oppressed peoples the world over are vying with each other in wresting back independence. We should not lag behind. Forward! Forward! Under the banner of the Viet Minh, let us valiantly march forward!”
* So here’s a question.
* Did Ho and the ICP create the revolution?
* Or did they just exploit the conditions?
* Famine, the weakness of the French, the defeat of Japan?
* I’d say it’s both.
* They waited for the right conditions to strike.
* One of the things Fidel and Che both stressed 15 years later in their writings and speeches was the need for the right conditions for a revolution.
* And then Che forgot that when he went to the Congo and Bolivia.
* He thought he could create the conditions.
* And Fidel criticised him for that, both at the time and later.
* Throughout the third week of August, Viet Minh forces took control in towns and villages in various parts of Annam and Tonkin.
* Resistance was usually minimal, as local authorities simply handed over power to the insurgents and as Japanese forces, now part of a defeated empire, stayed neutral.
* In Hanoi on August 19, Viet Minh forces seized control of all important public buildings except the Japanese-guarded Bank of Indochina, and announced their seizure of power from a balcony of what was then and remains today the Hanoi Opera House.
* For the first time since Francis Garnier seized it for France in 1873, the city was in Vietnamese hands.
* In Hue, Emperor Bao Dai announced he would support a government led by Ho Chi Minh, but a mass rally in Hanoi demanded that he abdicate his throne.
* He did so on August 25, declaring his support for the Viet Minh regime and handing over the imperial sword to the new national government, with all the legitimacy that that symbolic act conferred.
* He gave a short speech where he said: “Citizens, let me be understood. I prefer to be a free citizen than an enslaved king.”
* He wrote a letter to DeGaulle:
* “The Vietnamese people do not want, and cannot abide foreign domination or administration any longer. I implore you to understand that the only way to safeguard French interests and the spiritual influence of France in Indochina is to openly recognize Vietnam’s independence and to disavow any idea of reestablishing sovereignty or a French administration here in any form. We could understand each other so well and become friends if you would stop pretending that you are still our masters.”
* When Ho entered the city, streets were festooned with Viet Minh flags and banners
* FESTOONED, there’s a fun word.
* A Festoon is a garland, or a lei, a chain.
* Even though the ICP forces had taken the city, Ho knew it was still dangerous.
* He quoted Lenin’s famous warning: “Seizing power is difficult, but keeping it is even harder.”
* Starvation was still a real threat.
* Farmers had taken to eating next year’s seed stock in order to survive.
* And there were other Vietnamese nationalist parties that were reeling by how quickly the ICP had taken control and wanted a say in affairs.
* And of course there was still the French.
* And the position of the Allies regarding Vietnamese independence wasn’t known.
* On August 29, Ho Chi Minh quietly formed his first government.
* Then on September 2—the same day that Japan signed the instruments of surrender on the deck of the U.S. battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay—he presented the government to the country and, at a rally before hundreds of thousands, proclaimed Vietnamese independence.
* Thus came into being the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV).
* The rally took place in Ba Dinh Square, a spacious grassy field not far from the Governor-General’s Palace in Hanoi.
* Banners had been hung displaying the new Viet Minh flag—a lone gold star on a field of red
* Peasants made the trek from nearby villages and now mingled with merchants and mandarins.
* Schools were closed for the occasion, and teachers armed with whistles walked at the head of bands of children singing revolutionary songs.
* Scouts who had been mobilized by the French and the Japanese now enthusiastically supported the new national government.
* Cuz you just know you can’t stage a revolution with the scouts.
* Girl Scout cookies.
* The universal cry of revolutionaries everywhere – Dib Dib Dib.
* Do you know where that comes from?
* It’s called the Grand Howl
* Robert Baden-Powell and is based on the Mowgli stories in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book
* Baden-Powell wrote about it in The Wolf Cub’s Handbook.
* he describes how in the Jungle Book, “The wolves all sat round the council rock in a circle, and when Akela, the old wolf, the head of the pack, took his place on the rock, they all threw up their heads and howled their greeting to him.”
* So in the Scouts…
* Scouter: “Pack – Pack – Pack!” This calls the Cubs into a Parade Circle.
* The Cubs reply as they run to their places in the circle.
* Cubs: “Pack!”
* As the Scouter enters the circle, the Cubs squat down on their heels with their “fore paws” on the ground between their feet and their knees out on either side.
* Cubs: “Ah-kay-la! We-e-e-e-ll do-o-o-o o-o-o-u-u-r BEST!” On the word “BEST”, the Cubs jump to their feet with two fingers of each hand at the sides of their heads, to resemble a wolf’s ears.
* A Sixer: “Dyb – dyb – dyb -dyb” The word “dyb” means “Do Your Best” which is the first part of the Cub Promise and was the original Wolf Cub motto.
* On the fourth “dyb”, the Cubs lower their left hands and the fingers of their right hands extend to form the Wolf Cub salute.
* Cubs: “We-e-e-e-ll dob-dob-dob-dob”, meaning “We’ll do our best”.
* Speaking of Baden-Powell, In 1939 noted in his diary: “Lay up all day. Read Mein Kampf. A wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organisation etc. – and ideals which Hitler does not practise himself.”
* But some modern biographers think he was a a repressed homosexual, so he wouldn’t have had much fun in Nazi Germany.
* Not to mention – Baden-Powell’s name was included in “The Black Book”, a 1940 list of people to be detained following the planned conquest of the United Kingdom
* Because the Scouting movement was seen to be a threat to the Hitler Youth.
* Here’s something from his final letter to the scouts before he died in 1941:
* Try and leave this world a little better than you found it and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate you have not wasted your time but have done your best.
* Ho Chi Minh arrived in a prewar American automobile with outriders on bicycles.
* He strode to a hastily built platform decked out with white and red cloth; with him were members of the new government’s cabinet.
* More than strode, he bounded, to the surprise of onlookers who expected rulers to walk in a careful, stately manner.
* While almost everyone on the stage wore Western suits and ties, Ho chose a high-collared faded khaki jacket and white rubber sandals—his standard uniform as head of state for the next twenty-four years—and an old hat.
* He shouted out “Compatriots, can you hear me!?”
* They shouted back “WHAT?”
* And he repeated himself louder.
* And they repeated “WHAT?” Even louder.
* And a good time was had by all.
* And then he gave his speech.
* I want to read it in full:
* All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
* This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.
* The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of the French Revolution made in 1791 also states: All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.
* Those are undeniable truths.
* Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice.
* In the field of politics, they have deprived our people of every democratic liberty.
* They have enforced inhuman laws; they have set up three distinct political regimes in the North, Center, and South of Vietnam in order to destroy our national unity and prevent our people from being united.
* They have built more prisons than schools. They have mercilessly slaughtered our patriots; they have drowned our uprisings in bloodbaths.
* They have fettered public opinion; they have practiced obscurantism against our people.
* To weaken our race they have forced us to use opium and alcohol.
* In the field of economics, they have fleeced us to the backbone, impoverished our people and devastated our land.
* They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials. They have monopolized the issuing of bank notes and the export trade.
* They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty.
* They have hampered the prospering of our national bourgeoisie; they have mercilessly exploited our workers.
* In the autumn of 1940, when the Japanese fascists violated Indochina’s territory to establish new bases in their fight against the Allies, the French imperialists went down on their bended knees and handed over our country to them. Thus, from that date, our people were subjected to the double yoke of the French and the Japanese. Their sufferings and miseries increased. The result was that, from the end of last year to the beginning of this year, from Quảng Trị Province to northern Vietnam, more than two million of our fellow citizens died from starvation.
* On March 9 [1945], the French troops were disarmed by the Japanese. The French colonialists either fled or surrendered, showing that not only were they incapable of “protecting” us, but that, in the span of five years, they had twice sold our country to the Japanese.
* On several occasions before March 9, the Việt Minh League urged the French to ally themselves with it against the Japanese. Instead of agreeing to this proposal, the French colonialists so intensified their terrorist activities against the Việt Minh members that before fleeing they massacred a great number of our political prisoners detained at Yên Bái and Cao Bằng.
* Notwithstanding all this, our fellow citizens have always manifested toward the French a tolerant and humane attitude. Even after the Japanese Putsch of March 1945, the Việt Minh League helped many Frenchmen to cross the frontier, rescued some of them from Japanese jails, and protected French lives and property.
* From the autumn of 1940, our country had in fact ceased to be a French colony and had become a Japanese possession. After the Japanese had surrendered to the Allies, our whole people rose to regain our national sovereignty and to found the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
* The truth is that we have wrested our independence from the Japanese and not from the French.
* The French have fled, the Japanese have capitulated, Emperor Bảo Đại has abdicated. Our people have broken the chains which for nearly a century have fettered them and have won independence for the Fatherland. Our people at the same time have overthrown the monarchic regime that has reigned supreme for dozens of centuries. In its place has been established the present Democratic Republic.
* For these reasons, we, the members of the Provisional Government, representing the whole Vietnamese people, declare that from now on we break off all relations of a colonial character with France; we repeal all the international obligation that France has so far subscribed to on behalf of Viet-Nam, and we abolish all the special rights the French have unlawfully acquired in our Fatherland.
* The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer the country.
* We are convinced that the Allied nations, which at Tehran and San Francisco have acknowledged the principles of self-determination and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam.
* A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eighty years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent!
* For these reasons, we, the members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that:
* Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country—and in fact it is so already. And thus the entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilize all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.
* When he finished, Giap took the stage and gave a speech in which he called up the United States and China to support their independence.
* Neither Giap nor Ho mentioned the USSR.
* “Following in the steps of our forefathers,” Giap exclaimed, “the present generation will fight a final battle, so that generations to follow will forever be able to live in independence, freedom, and happiness.”

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#101 – Ho Chi Minh V

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* Ho believed the army’s job was largely going to be propaganda until the conditions were right for war.
* But he also decided that for propaganda purposes, they had to win a military victory within a month of being established, so on 25 December 1944 Giáp led successful attacks against a couple of French outposts.
* Two French lieutenants were killed and the Vietnamese soldiers in the outposts surrendered.
* The Viet Minh suffered no casualties.
* A few weeks later, Giáp was wounded in the leg when his group attacked another outpost at Dong Mu.
* Through the first half of 1945, Giáp’s military position strengthened as the political position of the French and Japanese weakened.
* On 9 March the Japanese removed the titular French regime and placed the emperor Bảo Đại at the head of a puppet state, the Empire of Vietnam.
* Bao Dai was the 13th and final Emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty, the last ruling family of Vietnam
* he renamed his country “Vietnam”
* He was 32
* Ho summed up the situation like this: “The Japanese became the real masters. The French became kind of respectable slaves. And upon the Indo-Chinese falls the double honor of being not only slaves to the Japanese, but also the slaves of the slaves—the French.”
* By April the Vietminh had nearly five thousand members, and was able to attack Japanese posts with confidence.
* In one of the ironies of history, between May and August 1945 the United States, keen to support anti-Japanese forces in mainland Asia, actively supplied and trained Giáp and the Viet Minh.
* The U.S. will work with anyone who is the enemy of their enemy.
* Just like they worked with Osama bin Laden and the Mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
* Captain Charles Fenn of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) sought out a meeting with Ho in early 1945.
* He had heard about Ho’s organization and about Ho’s role in helping locate downed American pilots and providing intelligence on Japanese troop movements.
* According to Fenn, Ho saved 17 US pilots before the war ended.
* He also heard that when Ho got out of prison in China, he used to drop by the Office of War Information in Kunming in Southern China to read Time Magazine.
* Ho was still hoping to get the support of the US.
* He believed they would be even more eager than the Soviets to help him get rid of the colonialists.
* After their first meeting in March 45, Fenn wrote the following description of the meeting in his diary:
* Ho came along with a younger man named Fam. Ho wasn’t what I expected. In the first place he isn’t really “old”: his silvery wisp of beard suggests age, but his face is vigorous and his eyes bright and gleaming. We spoke in French. It seems he has already met Hall, Blass, and de Sibour [OSS officers in Kunming], but got nowhere with any of them. I asked him what he had wanted of them. He said—only recognition of his group (called Vietminh League or League for Independence). I had vaguely heard of this as being communist, and asked him about it. Ho said that the French call all Annamites communists who want independence. I told him about our work and asked whether he’d like to help us. He said they might be able to but had no radio operators nor of course any equipment. We discussed taking in a radio and generator and an operator. Ho said a generator would make too much noise—the Japs were always around. Couldn’t we use the type of set with battery, such as the Chinese use? I explained they were too weak for distant operation, especially when the batteries run down. I asked him what he’d want in return for helping us. Arms and medicines, he said. I told him the arms would be difficult, because of the French. We discussed the problem of the French. Ho insisted that the Independence League are only anti-Jap. I was impressed by his clear-cut talk; Buddha-like composure, except movements with wrinkled brown fingers. Fam made notes. It was agreed we should have a further meeting. They wrote their names down in Chinese characters which were romanized into Fam Fuc Pao and Ho Tchih Ming.
* He later wrote:
* “Baudelaire felt the wings of insanity touch his mind; but that morning I felt the wings of genius touch mine.”
* Fenn, who had studied graphology, the study of handwriting analysis, also provided an analysis of Ho’s handwriting, from which he concluded:
* The essential features are simplicity, desire to make everything clear, remarkable self-control. Knows how to keep a secret. Neat, orderly, unassuming, no interest in dress or outward show. Self-confident and dignified. Gentle but firm. Loyal, sincere, and generous, would make a good friend. Outgoing, gets along with anyone. Keen analytical mind, difficult to deceive. Shows readiness to ask questions. Good judge of character. Full of enthusiasm, energy, initiative. Conscientious; painstaking attention to detail. Imaginative, interested in aesthetics, particularly literature. Good sense of humor.
* Faults: diplomatic to the point of contriving. Could be moody and obstinate.
* Graphology, BTW, is a load of crap.
* At their second meeting a few days later, Ho asked if Fenn could introduce him to Claire Chennault, adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, founder of the famed “Flying Tigers,” and commander of the Fourteenth Air Force
* The Flying Tigers were The First American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Chinese Air Force in 1941–1942
* They used to paint shark faces on the front of their planes.
* There was a squadron of the Flying Tigers called the Hell’s Angels.
* The biker gang took their name from the squadron.
* Which in turn took its name from the Howard Hughes 1930 film Hell’s Angels about fighter pilots.
* Winston Churchill, upon seeing Chennault make his entrance at a conference earlier in the war and learning of his identity, whispered to an aide, “Well, thank God he’s on our side.”
* Fenn agreed to set up the meeting with Chennault on one condition:
* I agreed to arrange this if he would agree not to ask him for anything: neither supplies not promises about support.
* Ho agreed.
* A few days later, Ho had his meeting with Chennault.
* Chennault thanked Ho for his efforts to save U.S. pilots, and Ho responded by expressing his admiration for Chennault and the Flying Tigers.
* Before he left, Ho asked if he could get a photograph of Chennault.
* He wanted a selfie, but he hadn’t invented the iPhone yet.
* As Fenn recalled: There’s nothing Chennault likes more than giving his photograph.
* Chennault’s secretary pulled out a glossy and Chennault autographed it for him
* And Ho then waved it around like a flag everywhere he went, proof that he had the support of the USG.
* Which wasn’t far from the truth.
* Before he left Kunming to return to Vietnam, Ho provided his U.S. contacts with his interpretation of the Japanese coup in Indochina.
* In a note signed “Luc” that is now in the U.S. archives, he declared that it had brought an end to the French domination in Indochina, a domination that had begun eighty-seven years previously. \
* “Thus,” he said, “the French imperialist wolf was finally devoured by the Japanese fascist hyena.”
* He admitted that in the overall scheme of things in the world at war, this was only “a minute event,” but he claimed that it would have “a serious bearing on the World War in general, on Indo-China, France, Japan, and China in particular.”
* He was trying to persuade the Roosevelt administration to attack Japan in Indochina, which he called “Japan’s only road of retreat.”
* He wrote that “from Japan to New Guinea, the Japan force lays like a long snake whose neck is Indo-China. If the Allies knock hard on its neck, the snake will cease to move.”
* The OSS began to air-drop supplies, including medicine, a radio set, and a few weapons for training.
* In return, the Viet Minh provided the United States with intelligence reports and rescued several U.S. airmen.
* The OSS called its Vietnam operation the Deer Mission.
* On July 16, a Deer Team led by Colonel Allison Thomas parachuted into Ho’s new forward base, a tiny village in the jungle called Tan Trao, not far from the Thai Nguyen provincial capital.
* Claire and Allison.
* You didn’t need to have a woman’s name to be a senior U.S. military leader in WWII, but it helped.
* Many people don’t know that Douglas MacArthur’s first name was Shirley.
* Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first name was actually Mary.
* After disentangling himself from the banyan tree into which his parachute had slammed him, Thomas spoke a “few flowery sentences” to two hundred Viet Minh soldiers assembled near a banner proclaiming “Welcome to Our American Friends.”
* Ho, speaking in good English, cordially greeted the OSS team and offered supper, but it was clear to the Americans that he was ill, “shaking like a leaf and obviously running a high fever.”
* The next day Ho denounced the French but remarked that “we welcome 10 million Americans.”
* Thomas was impressed by what he heard.
* “Forget the Communist Bogy,” he radioed OSS headquarters in Kunming.
* “Viet Minh League is not Communist. Stands for freedom and reforms against French harshness.”
* He wasn’t the only one who was confused.
* The Soviets and the Chinese also weren’t sure if Ho was really leading a communist revolution.
* He played his cards very close to his chest.
* As Fidel Castro would 15 years later.
* Other OSS personnel soon parachuted into the Vietnamese countryside, including a medic who diagnosed Ho Chi Minh’s ailments as malaria and dysentery.
* Another theory is that he had contracted tuberculosis during his long months in Chinese prisons.
* Quinine and sulfa drugs restored his health a bit, but Ho remained frail.
* To a remarkable degree, he made a winning impression on these Americans, who invariably described him as warm, intelligent, and keen to cooperate with the United States. As a sign of friendship, they named him “OSS Agent 19.”
* Everywhere the Americans went, impoverished villagers thanked them with gifts of food and clothing, no doubt especially welcome after the devastating famine of that spring.
* The villagers interpreted the foreigners’ presence as a sign of U.S. anticolonial and anti-Japanese sentiments.
* Major Archimedes Patti, – real first name Bridget – head of the OSS base in Kunming, China, taught the Viet Minh to use flamethrowers, grenade launchers and machine guns.
* In a single month they succeeded in training around 200 hand-picked future leaders of the army they were to oppose a few decades later.
* Ho told the OSS that he hoped young Vietnamese could study in the United States and that American technicians could help build an independent Vietnam.
* He said “your statesmen make eloquent speeches about … self-determination. We are self-determined. Why not help us? Am I any different from … your George Washington?”

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#100 – Ho Chi Minh IV

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* Welcome to #100!
* And we are still talking about 1944!
* When we finished last time, Ho Chi Minh was making his way to the Red River Delta.
* The Japanese have chased the French out of Vietnam and didn’t bother to protect the northern regions.
* So Ho and the ICP are getting ready to make their move.
* Surprisingly, they talk about a “post coup euphoria”.
* Apparently the Vietnamese were so happy to see the end of the French, they were happy to replace them with the Japanese.
* They realised the Japanese were probably going to lose the war, which is a good thing for the Vietnamese.
* In October 1944, Ho wrote a “Letter to All Our Compatriots,” in which he analyzed the current situation and said “the opportunity for our people’s liberation is only in a year or a year and a half. The time approaches. We must act quickly!”
* So the ICP decided to start with introducing the Viet Minh flag and doctrine to the people.
* And preparing themselves for a general uprising once the Japanese had been defeated by the Allies.
* Which even THEY knew was going to happen sooner or later.
* And the Viet Minh would be the force greeting the Allies when they came to Vietnam.
* They had already started to build connections with the Americans.
* On November 11, 1944, a U.S. reconnaissance plane piloted by Lieutenant Rudolph Shaw had engine trouble while flying over the mountains along the Sino-Vietnamese frontier.
* Shaw was able to parachute to safety, but was spotted by French authorities stationed in the vicinity, and patrols were sent to locate him.
* But Members of a local Vietminh unit got to him first, and they decided to deliver him to Ho.
* For the next several days, the Vietminh troops led him over mountains and jungle trails toward Pac Bo, the jungle location of Ho’s HQ cave, walking at night and resting during the day in caves to avoid the enemy.
* In the end, it took almost a month to cover a distance of only forty miles.
* None of Shaw’s escorts had been able to communicate with him
* according to his own account, they communicated only when he said “Vietminh! Vietminh!” and the Vietnamese responded, “America! Roosevelt!”
* but when he arrived at Pac Bo, Ho greeted him in English: “How do you do, pilot! Where are you from?”
* Shaw was reportedly so excited that he hugged Ho and later said to him, “When I heard your voice, I felt as if I were hearing the voice of my father in the United States.”
* Despite the fact that Wilson ignored his attempts to get the League of Nations to address Vietnam back in 1919, Ho was still hopeful that they would come to his aid.
* He had probably read about FDR’s position on Indochina.
* For example, he had said “France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that.”
* Another thing that helped the VM was the famine of 1944-45.
* The northern regions of the country had relied on rice to be shipped from the south.
* But then in 1944, a combination of French and Japanese policies, typhoons, drought, insect plagues, and Allied bombings, meant the south couldn’t produce enough rice for the country.
* The Japanese had also mandated shipments of rice to Japan
* and they ordered farmers in the north to shift their crops from rice to oil seeds, peanuts, cotton, and jute.
* Do you know what jute is?
* I had to look it up.
* plant or fiber that is used to make burlap, hessian or gunny cloth.
* The French and the Japanese, like the British in India, stockpiled rice for themselves while the native population starved.
* In 1944 when US bombing cut off northern supplies of coal to Saigon, the French and Japanese used rice and maize as fuel for power stations.
* The French authorities refused to reduce taxes or to increase the price of obligatory quotas of rice assigned to each farmer for sale to the government.
* Farmers tried to grow other drops, like sweet potatoes but it didn’t help.
* Then as supply levels dropped, prices went up and people couldn’t afford to buy food.
* Millions of Vietnamese died.
* Streets were littered with dying peasants, and oxcarts were filled with corpses.
* Families roamed from village to village, hoping to find grain.
* Or they retreated to their homes, shared the few remaining morsels, and died quietly, one by one.
* Some people, having consumed everything that could be eaten—bark, roots, leaves, dogs, and rats—resorted to cannibalism, causing parents to fear that their children would be stolen and eaten.
* Some parents sold their children for a few cups of rice.
* Duong Thieu Chi, a provincial official in Nam Dinh, a city in the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam, said he made sure to avoid eating in restaurants or stalls when he traveled during these months, for fear that the meat served might be rat or human flesh.
* A French observer wrote: “From looking at these bodies, which are shriveled up on roadsides with only a handful of straw for clothes as well as for the burial garment, one feels ashamed of being human.”
* In May 1945, as the crisis eased, officials used statistics from various provinces in Tonkin to declare that to that point, precisely 380,969 people had died by starvation.
* A year later, using more complete figures, analysts estimated that one million people had died in Tonkin, and another 300,000 in Annam.
* In later years, the estimates would climb higher still, to two million deaths in a five-month period in 1945.
* Even if we accept the lower figure of one million for Tonkin, the implications are appalling: 10 percent of the population in the affected region died of starvation in less than half a year.
* Is it just me or do we hear more about the Holodomor famine under Stalin or the famines in China under the communists than we do about the famines under Churchill – 2-3 million died in the Bengal famine of 1943 – and the French or the famines in China under Chiang KaiShek?
* But as tragic as the famine was, it was a boon for the VM.
* Nobody could argue with them now that the French and the Japanese were only interested in looking out for themselves.
* The ICP helped the people in the Red River Delta to break into grain warehouses and developed a reputation as being for the people.
* This is when Võ Nguyên Giáp (Jeeap) first came to prominence.
* Known as the “Red Napoleon”.
* One of the greatest military strategists of the 20th century.
* He was 34 or 35 at the time.
* He had no previous military experience.
* By training he was a history teacher.
* his maternal grandfather had taken part in the resistance movement against the French in the 1880s
* Expelled from school in 1927, he joined the Tan Viet party but eventually shifted to the ICP and was arrested for taking part in student demonstrations in Hué during the Nghe Tinh revolt.
* Released from prison in 1933, he resumed his schooling and eventually received a law degree from the University of Hanoi.
* Became a history teacher at a private school in Hanoi.
* When the ICP was outlawed by the French in 1940, he went into exile in China.
* According to his own account, Giap had been instructed to leave Hanoi for China by Hoang Van Thu (pronounced to), a young Party member who had been named to the Central Committee in 1938.
* Thu and Giap often talked about military matters and the potential of guerrilla warfare in a future struggle against the French
* Both were familiar with Maoist tactics in China and the use of similar forms of warfare during the traditional era in Vietnam
* Thu told him that he should go to China and meet up with Ho.
* After his discussion with Thu, Giap had launched preparations for his trip to China.
* In early May, after dismissing his last class at school, he said good-bye to his young wife and infant daughter.
* They agreed that she would join him in China once she could make arrangements for the care of their child.
* In fact, they would never meet again.
* His wife stayed behind and was arrested and sentenced to 15 years.
* His young daughter was also put in prison.
* In China, he met Ho.
* And he was one of the small group that went back to Vietnam with Ho to build the liberation army.
* It was in the summer of 1943 that Giáp was told that his wife had been beaten to death by guards in the central prison in Hanoi.
* Her sister was guillotined and his daughter died in prison of unknown causes.
* When the Vietnamese Liberation Army (VLA) was created in September of 1944, Giáp was its commander.
* Ho directed him to establish Armed Propaganda Brigades and the first one, consisting of thirty one men and three women, was formed in December 1944.
* Named the Tran Hung Dao Platoon after the great Vietnamese hero who repelled three major Mongol invasions in the 13th century, it was armed with two revolvers, seventeen rifles, one light machine gun, and fourteen breech-loading flintlocks dating from the Russo-Japanese War.
* Ho’s advise to Giap: “Secrecy, always secrecy. Let the enemy think you’re to the west when you are in the east. Attack by surprise and retreat before the enemy can respond.”

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#99 – Ho Chi Minh III

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* On December 7 1941, Japan’s main carrier force, seeking to destroy the American fleet and thereby purchase time to complete its southward expansion, struck Pearl Harbour.
* And the world celebrated.
* As De Gaulle said “that’s it, the war’s over.”
* He was totally confident in U.S. superiority.
* He must have been part American.
* Unfortunately FDR’s confidence in de Gaulle was much lower.
* He hated him.
* And the more powerful de Gaulle became, the less sure FDR was that the French should get their colonies back after the war.
* But if Indochina and potentially other colonies should not be returned to the colonial powers after the war, what should happen to them?
* Roosevelt proposed a trusteeship formula by which the colonies would be raised to independence through several stages.
* Those not ready for independence—which in FDR’s view included all of France’s possessions—would be placed under a nonexploitive international trusteeship formed by the United Nations.
* In laying out this plan to British foreign secretary Anthony Eden in March 1943, the president singled out Indochina as an area that should be controlled by this new system.
* Eden, who would end up playing a huge role in Britain’s Indochina policy for the next dozen years, wondered outlaid whether FDR was being too harsh on the French.
* FDR just ignored him and said that France should be prepared to place part of her overseas territory under the authority of the United Nations.
* Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, the man who wrote the original draft of the UN charter, Mr Ol’ Black Threesome himself, asked “But what about the American pledges to restore to France her possessions?”
* Roosevelt replied that those pledges applied only to North Africa.
* Sumner thought “hmmmm I bet there’s a lot of blacks in North Africa….”
* FDR’s trusteeship sounded a lot of like Wilson’s mandate system that divided up the Middle East after WWI.
* But this was going to be totally different.
* Because it had a different name.
* The way he saw it, the enforcement mechanism would be a greater degree of international accountability.
* As before, the core principle was that a colonial territory is not the exclusive preserve of the power that controls it but constitutes a “sacred trust” over which the international community has certain responsibilities.
* Eden knew that this was old wine in new bottles, and he didn’t like the taste.
* He and others in the Foreign Office suspected the Americans of seeking to use trusteeships to their own economic advantage—the “international supervision of colonies” would simply be a smoke screen by which America could facilitate access to the economic resources of the colonies and spread her influence globally.
* And the British didn’t like the sound of “international supervision”, especially of their own colonies.
* He suggested other countries would, at most, had an advisory capacity.
* FDR though insisted that it be an international trusteeship.
* So the Brits just changed the subject, talked about black threesomes, and that was that.
* So FDR went to Cairo for his only wartime meeting with Chiang Kai-Shek, the leader of China’s Kuomintang nationalist government.
* FDR wanted Chiang on board with his trusteeship program.
* But Chiang resisted, expressing a preference for outright independence for Indochina and other Asian colonies.
* Probably because it would make them easier for him to take over.
* FDR tried to sweeten the deal by saying he supported the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule.
* So Chiang said “go tell Winny The Poo that, then come back and talk to me about Indochina.”
* Meanwhile, the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong, who had been waging an intermittent struggle against Chiang’s Nationalist (Guomindang) government since the late 1920s, were gaining strength in the north.
* From Cairo, FDR traveled to Tehran for meetings with Churchill and, for the first time, Stalin.
* During their initial get-together, FDR stressed to Stalin the importance of preparing the people of Indochina for self-government along the lines of what the United States had done in the Philippines.
* Stalin agreed that Indochina should not be returned to France and said he supported independence for all colonial subjects.
* Because if Stalin was anything, he was a nice guy.
* A note taker at Tehran noted that “The president remarked that after 100 years of French rule in Indochina, the inhabitants were worse off than they had been before.”
* When Roosevelt brought up his trusteeship scheme, implying that Chiang Kai-shek agreed, and Stalin expressed support.
* As the meeting drew to a close, they agreed there was no point in discussing the India matter with Churchill.
* For the British, FDR’s idea was a dangerous game of dominoes:
* If Indochina was allowed to fall from colonial control, what would keep Burma, Malaya, India, and other parts of the British Empire from being next?
* after learning of another Roosevelt attack on the “hopeless” French record in Indochina, Alexander Cadogan, permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office, warned
* “We’d better look out. Were the French any more ‘hopeless’ than we in Malaya or the Dutch in the East Indies?”
* For the British, Indochina was the linchpin of all Southeast Asia, a barrier between China to the north and a string of prized British possessions to the south.
* Japan had used it as a forward base for her operations against Malaya and Burma, and this could not be allowed to happen again.
* As always, Strategic considerations – protecting British colonies – took precedence over morals about “freedom-seeking peoples of the world”.
* The Brits also knew they were going to need a friendly and powerful France after WWII to help them control Europe.
* And help maintain the balance of power with a powerful Soviet army, U.S. military and economic superiority, and possibly a revived Germany.
* How to secure such a cooperative France?
* Partly by supporting Charles de Gaulle’s determination to retain the French colonies, including Indochina, and partly by avoiding arguments with Washington on the issue.
* Churchill said to Eden in mid-1944 ““Roosevelt has been more outspoken to me on that subject than any other colonial matter, and I imagine it is one of his principal war aims to liberate Indochina from France.… Do you really want to go and stir all this up at such a time as this?”
* Quietly, London stonewalled American efforts in early and mid-1944 to negotiate on the colonial issue.
* Roosevelt continued to push his trusteeship plan and his opposition to a French return to Indochina, but with less urgency as 1944 progressed.
* Partly because he was having to re-think his “Four Policeman” plan for running the world after the war.
* China was getting deeper and deeper into an all out civil war and they probably weren’t going to be much help.
* And he knew he needed the co-operation of the British and the French.
* Who would be less inclined to give the U.S. what they wanted if they felt like their colonial possessions were being ripped out from underneath them.
* And then Eisenhower allowed de Gaulle’s Free French forces the honor of entering Paris first.
* Which really pissed FDR off.
* On August 25, 1944, de Gaulle announced the liberation of Paris.
* And everyone knew he was going to be the President of the new country.
* And you might be forgiven for thinking that a country who had recently been occupied and now had been given back its independence might have something of an awakening about their own position as a colonial power – but no.
* These is the French.
* But I’m kidding.
* Do you think many Israelis ever stop and think “gee after what happened to our people in WWII, maybe we shouldn’t be such cunts to Palestine?”
* Of course they don’t.
* They say “but they want to destroy us!”
* And I say “yeah that’s what the Nazis said about the Jews in the 1930s too.”
* Was it a justification back then? No? Okay then. Peace in the Middle East solved. What’s next?
* So there was no way under the Big Celery Stick that Indochina was going to be given its independence.
* At the Yalta conference in the Crimea in February 1945, Roosevelt backed off his insistence on enforcing an international trusteeship over colonial areas; except in the case of Japanese-mandated territories, he now said, such internationalization would happen only with the consent of the colonial power.
* At Yalta, he informed Stalin that he would not allow U.S. ships to be used to carry French troops to Indochina, but he also recommended to the Soviet leader that they not raise the Indochina matter with Churchill.
* “It would only make the British mad,” FDR rationalized. “Better to keep quiet just now.”
* Then FDR died in April.
* One month earlier, in March 1945, the Japanese took full and complete control of Indochina.
* The French just caved in completely.
* This Was A Pivotal Moment For France In Indochina.
* The March coup dealt a blow to imperial authority from which it would never fully recover.
* Colonial rule had been based on the notion of European cultural and military supremacy, and though France had offered little more than token resistance to Japan in 1940, only now did most Vietnamese fully grasp how hollow was the French basis of power.
* The Japanese diplomatic victories in 1940–41, important though they were in many respects, had not appreciably altered everyday sociopolitical relations in Indochina—French officials thereafter still governed in the countryside and the villages, where Japanese officials seldom if ever set foot.
* Now, however, in the space of a few days, French colonial authority had disappeared, in plain view of Vietnamese in both urban and rural areas.
* De Gaulle gave a big speech.
* “Not for a single hour did France lose the hope and the will to recover Free Indochina.”
* FREE Indochina.
* Nice one.
* Meanwhile….
* Ho Chi Minh had been arrested in China in August 1942 by local authorities suspicious of his political activities;
* By his own estimate he then passed through eighteen prisons before winning his release in August 1943.
* During his incarceration, he kept in touch with his closest colleagues via letters written in disappearing ink,
* When he got out he stepped up his efforts to form a broad united front to drive the French and the Japanese from Indochina.
* By late 1944, Ho Chi Minh, now back in Tonkin, could see the endgame.
* He predicted that Japan would lose the Pacific War, France would seek to regain Indochina, and before that Tokyo would overthrow the local French regime in order to protect its army.
* The result would be a power vacuum the Viet Minh could fill.
* But he was careful.
* He told his more militant comrades to slow the fuck down and avoid launching a premature insurrection.
* You know all about that, don’t you Ray? You’ve had a few premature insurrections in your time, Ray.
* Japan’s defeat was inevitable, why not wait until the fruit was ripe to be picked?
* Like you waited five years to pick Heather’s fruit.
* You’re like the Ho Chi Minh of Heather’s pussy.
* Ho knew that even in Tonkin, the Viet Minh controlled only a small part of the territory,
* And in the rest of the country—especially in Cochin China in the south—its presence was spotty at best.
* Some provinces remained devoid of Viet Minh organizing until well into 1945.
* Ho said, “The hour of peaceful revolution has passed, but the hour of the more general insurrections has not yet sounded.”
* Then came March 9, the auspicious moment.
* The removal of the French secret police after the coup, together with Japan concentrating her presence in the urban areas of Vietnam in preparation for a possible Allied invasion, gave the Viet Minh considerable advantages in their underground work and propaganda efforts.
* The Japanese, having chased French troops out of Vietnam, did not think it vital to keep a troop presence in the northern provinces of Tonkin in light of more pressing concerns, and thus the Viet Minh had the region largely to themselves.
* Slowly, in the late spring and summer months, the Viet Minh began to spread southward toward the Red River Delta.

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#98 – Ho Chi Minh II

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* Ho’s speech to the French socialist congress in 1920 was 12 minutes long and delivered without notes.
* It got some applause but that was about it.
* He realised that French socialists were more worried about affairs at home than they were about colonialism in a distant land.
* When a group of socialists broke off to form the French Communist Party, Ho went with them.
* He had read Lenin’s “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” a document that attracted him as a means of liberating Vietnam and other oppressed countries from colonial rule.
* Other Marxist writers whose work he knew seemed concerned only with how to achieve a classless utopia.
* Only Lenin spoke powerfully about the connection between capitalism and imperialism and about the potential for nationalist movements in Africa and Asia.
* Only Lenin offered a cogent explanation for colonialist rule and a viable blueprint for national liberation and for modernizing a poor agricultural society such as Vietnam’s.
* Lenin’s message was simple and direct.
* In their struggle to overthrow the capitalist system in advanced industrial countries, Communist parties in the West should actively cooperate with nationalist movements in colonial areas in Asia and Africa.
* He understood that Many of these movements were controlled by the native middle class, who, in the long run, were not sympathetic to social revolution.
* But the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
* Who said that first?
* The earliest known expression of this concept is found in a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, the Arthashastra, which dates to around the 4th century BC, while the first recorded use of the current English version came in 1884
* The king who is situated anywhere immediately on the circumference of the conqueror’s territory is termed the enemy.
* The king who is likewise situated close to the enemy, but separated from the conqueror only by the enemy, is termed the friend (of the conqueror).
* So any alliances with bourgeois nationalist groups should be implemented with care, and only on the condition that local Communist parties maintain their separate identities and freedom of action.
* But given such limitations, Lenin viewed the national liberation movements of Asia and Africa as natural, albeit temporary, allies of the Communists against the common enemy of world imperialism.
* It was the ability of the Western capitalist countries to locate markets and raw materials in underdeveloped countries that sustained the world capitalist system and prevented its ultimate collapse.
* Cut off the tentacles of colonialism in the far-flung colonies, and the system itself could be overthrown.
* Ho Chi Minh assured his Vietnamese allies in Paris that Communism could be applied to Asia,; more than that, it was in keeping with Asian traditions based on Confucian notions of social equality and community.
* On top of that, Lenin had pledged Soviet support, through the Comintern, for nationalist uprisings throughout the colonial world as a key first step in fomenting worldwide socialist revolution against the capitalist order.
* What could be more relevant to Indochina’s situation?
* Years later speaking of Lenin’s pamphlet, he said “What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled in me. I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted aloud as if addressing large crowds: ‘Dear martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is our path to liberation.’ ”
* Ho stayed in Paris for a few years – writing plays, writing articles for many magazines, reading victor Hugo and Voltaire and Shakespeare.
* Then he finally came to the conclusion that the French Communists cared for the plight of the Vietnamese only slightly more than the other French socialists, so in 1923 he moved to Moscow, hoping to meet Lenin.
* Unfortunately when he got there, in July 1923, Lenin was already ill and dying.
* He died January 1924.
* Ho took the news hard: “Lenin was our father, our teacher, our comrade, our representative. Now, he is a shining star showing us the way to Socialism.”
* He stuck around in Moscow for a while, attending meetings of the Comintern, giving speeches about Asian self-determination, but again felt like a “voice crying in the wilderness.”
* The Moscovites, like the French, were mostly interested in Europe.
* But his time in Moscow was useful and a relief.
* He didn’t have to watch over his shoulder for French police to arrest him for treason.
* And he got to know various Soviet leaders, including Grigory Zinoviev, one of the original Politburo, and Kliment Voroshilov, one of the original five Marshals of the Soviet Union.
* And he became known as a specialist in asian affairs.
* In the autumn of 1924, the Soviets sent him to southern China, ostensibly to act as an interpreter for the Comintern’s advisory mission to Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist government in Canton but in reality to organize the first Marxist revolutionary organization in Indochina.
* To do that, he published a journal, created the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League in 1925, and set up a training institute that attracted students from all over Vietnam.
* Along with Marxism-Leninism, he taught his own brand of revolutionary ethics: thrift, prudence, respect for learning, modesty, and generosity – which were principles he learned from Confucianism.
* In 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek began to crack down on the Chinese left, the institute was disbanded and Ho, pursued by the police, fled to Hong Kong and from there to Moscow.
* The Comintern sent him to France and then, at his request, to Thailand, where he spent two years organizing Vietnamese expatriates.
* Then, early in 1930, Ho Chi Minh presided over the creation of the Vietnamese Communist Party in Hong Kong.
* Eight months later, in October, on Moscow’s instructions, it was renamed the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), with responsibility for spurring revolutionary activity throughout French Indochina.
* There were already plenty of nationalist parties in Vietnam but as usual most of them suffered from the old Judean Peoples Front problem.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoIl7g8AAbM
* Which left the door wide open for Ho.
* French security services soon singled out the ICP as the most serious threat to colonial authority and devoted most of their resources to identifying the leadership.
* But Ho and his top lieutenants survived all French efforts to eliminate them.
* Ho kept constantly on the move in the 1930s, spending one year in Moscow, then in China, then in the USSR again, using different pseudonyms, his health often poor.
* In the mid-1930s, the party benefited from changes in the international scene.
* From 1936 to 1939, pressure from French authorities eased as a Popular Front government in Paris allowed Communist parties in the colonies an increased measure of freedom, the result of increased cooperation between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies against the common threat of global fascism.
* In late 1939, however, after Moscow signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, French authorities outlawed the ICP and forced its leaders into hiding.
* A few thousand French officials could maintain effective control over some twenty-five million Indochinese.
* as the 1930s drew to a close, only the most optimistic Vietnamese revolutionary—or pessimistic colonial administrator—could believe that France would soon be made to part with this Pearl of the Far East, this jewel of the imperial crown.
* But when WWII broke out in 1939 and France was on the brink of disaster, Ho saw his opportunity.
* At a meeting with his leadership colleagues in Southern China he said he saw “a very favorable opportunity for the Vietnamese revolution. We must seek every means to return home to take advantage of it.”
* When France fell to Germany in 1940, most Americans probably knew very little about Indochina.
* Not many lived there or had ever visited there or had much reason to pay attention to what was happening there.
* Which is one reason why the American government did nothing to assist the French authorities in Indochina when the Japanese threatened to invade and the Vichy government in France did a deal to let them in.
* Sensing opportunity with the fall of France in June, the ICP in the autumn launched uprisings in both Tonkin, the north eastern section of Indochina, and Cochin China, the very southern tip, against French authorities, only to be brutally crushed.
* Despite Ho’s objections.
* He thought the action as premature.
* YOU KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT PREMATURE THINGS, RAY. WHY…
* In Cochin China, the French used their few aircraft as well as armored units and artillery to destroy whole villages, killing hundreds in the process.
* Up to eight thousand people were detained, and more than one hundred ICP cadres were executed.
* It would take the southern branch of the party years to recover.
* But despite the losses, Ho still saw his chance to move.
* In 1941 he snuck back into his home country for the first time in 30 years.
* And he called for a plenary meeting of the ICP.
* He set up camp in a cave, just a mile from the Chinese border.
* The group slept on planks of wood in the cold and damp cave and had only one small oil lamp among them.
* The diet was meager, mostly soup of corn and bamboo shoots, fortified by fish caught in the stream.
* Each morning Ho woke up early to do calisthenics and then swim in the stream before sitting down to work at a flat rock he used as a desk.
* He spent long hours reading, writing—on his trusted Hermès typewriter—and conducting meetings, all for the purpose of setting up a new Communist-dominated united front and outlining a strategy for liberating Vietnam from foreign rule.
* The delegates sat on simple wood blocks around a bamboo table, and out of their discussions a new party came into being. Its official title was Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, or the Revolutionary League for the Independence of Vietnam—or, for history, the Viet Minh.
* This new party had a new platform.
* It moved the revolution away from the class struggle and toward national liberation.
* Women were to be an important part of the struggle and were to be given equal rights.
* Ho declared the vision of the party in a letter that was widely circulated in June 1941.
* “National Salvation is the common cause to the whole of our people. Every Vietnamese must take a part in it. He who has money will contribute his money, he who has strength will contribute his strength, he who has talent will contribute his talent. I pledge to use all my modest abilities to follow you, and am ready for the last sacrifice.”
* They were Communists, convinced that Marxism-Leninism represented the best path of development for their country.
* And their goal was to not only get mass support among the Vietnamese people but also to win the sympathy of the Allied powers.
* Which was going to be easy because that’s what The Atlantic Charter was all about – the freedom of people to determine their own future.
* But first they were going to have to deal with both the French and the Japanese.
* Who joined forces to crack down on the Viet Minh.
* Then in July of 1941, after they signed a neutrality pact with the Soviets, and then watched happily as the Nazi invaded the Soviet Union, Japan forced the Vichy government to let it send more troops to Indochina, build bases there, and to occupy strategic areas in the south, including the key port of Cam Ranh Bay and airfields at Da Nang and Bien Hoa.
* This gave the Japanese a forward vantage point from which to move quickly against Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), and the Philippines.
* Which finally got the Americans to sit up and take notice.
* Because, remember, the Philippines was controlled by the United States at the time.
* Why?
* Why not?
* This lead to FDR freezing all Japanese assets in the U.S. and embargoing all oil exports.
* For Japan, so poor in natural resources, the implications were dire.
* The country consumed roughly twelve thousand tons of oil each day, 90 percent of it imported, and also imported most of her zinc, iron ore, bauxite, manganese, cotton, and wheat.
* She could not survive a year of a thorough embargo—unless she seized British and Dutch possessions in Asia.
* Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, a moderate among hard-liners, proposed a summit meeting with FDR and indicated a willingness to withdraw from Indochina as soon as the war with China was settled.
* Roosevelt was tempted by this offer, but his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, persuaded him to insist on Japanese abandonment of China as a precondition for such a meeting.
* The proposal collapsed, and Konoe was ousted as prime minister in mid-October.
* Tojo replaced him.
* Diplomatic maneuverings continued, and in November Tojo offered to move troops out of Indochina immediately, and out of China once general peace was restored, in return for a million tons of aviation gasoline.
* Hull rejected the offer and repeated the American insistence on Japanese withdrawal from China and abandonment of the Southeast Asian adventure.
* Meanwhile in August 1941 FDR and Churchill met for the first time to sign The Atlantic Charter – we first talked about this back in Cold War 8 in April 2016.
* Two and a half years ago!
* This was when they talked about self-determination for all peoples.
* But remember.
* Two weeks before the Atlantic Charter meeting, the U.S. Acting Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, assured the French government that they could keep their empire intact after the end of the war.
* He wrote: “The US Government, mindful of its traditional friendship for France, has deeply sympathized with the desire of the French people to maintain their territories and to preserve them intact.”
* The Department of Defense history of Vietnam (The Pentagon Papers) noted that “in the Atlantic Charter and other pronouncements, the U.S. proclaimed support for national self-determination and independence” but also “early in the war repeatedly expressed or implied to the French an intention to restore to France its overseas empire after the war.”
* In late 1942, Roosevelt assured French General Henri Giraud: “It is thoroughly understood that French sovereignty will be re-established as soon as possible throughout all the territory, metropolitan or colonial, over which flew the French flag in 1939.”
* In May 1945, Truman assured the French he did not question her “sovereignty over Indochina.”
* And then On December 7, Japan’s main carrier force, seeking to destroy the American fleet and thereby purchase time to complete its southward expansion, struck Pearl Harbor.

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#97 – Ho Chi Minh I

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In 1919 a 29 year old Vietnamese man wrote a list of demands for political rights for his people to present to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference. Nobody paid him any attention. His name was Nguyen Ai Quoc. He devoted the rest of his life to achieving those demands. History remembers him as HO CHI MINH.

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#96 – Marshall Plan III

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* America’s approach to providing financial aid wasn’t popular with some of their allies either.
* Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, resented American dollar diplomacy, in particular the linking of desperately needed financial assistance to London’s submission on political matters central to British sovereignty.
* The American loan agreement, signed in December 1945 after nearly four months of difficult and often humiliating negotiations in Washington, required Britain to accept American air and naval bases on British and Commonwealth territory.
* Bevin’s decision to support the manufacture of British nuclear weapons was driven not by a German or Soviet threat, but by his belief that the country “could not afford to acquiesce in an American monopoly of the new development.”
* So, in other words – he wanted the UK to have nuclear powers to defend themselves against America.
* Britain, as Bevin saw his country, was “the last bastion of social democracy,” standing against both “the red tooth and claw of American capitalism and the Communist dictatorship of Soviet Russia.”
* This is coming from a country that, until recently, had imperial control over 25% of the world.
* Mmmmm smell that social democracy.
* Another recent ally was also suspicious.
* Russia.
* The Kremlin was receiving a constant flow of intelligence from highly placed British sources—among whom Guy Burgess at the Foreign Office in London and Donald Maclean at the British embassy in Washington.
* Maclean, who had access to all of the embassy’s classified cable traffic, was reporting that “the goal of the Marshall Plan was to ensure American economic domination of Europe.”
* The spies also warned Stalin that the Brits and Americans were getting ready to announce that they were going to renege on the Yalta agreement regarding reparations.
* They were going to cut off German reparations to the USSR, which at the time was the Soviet’s only source of foreign income.
* Instead, they were going to re-build Germany.
* Well the parts under their control, anyway.
* And the Marshall Plan aid was to be implemented outside the United Nations framework, because they wanted some of it to go to Germany – and Germany was not a member of the U.N.
* And the Soviets needed the German money and goods to finance their efforts to control Eastern Europe.
* And – in the early stages, the ERP funds were going to be offered to Eastern European countries and even the U.S.S.R.
* The United States offered immense grants of cash and material aid to all of the European nations, not just those in the West, on the sole condition that the recipient nations agree upon a common economic plan to use these resources.
* Of course, this economic plan had to be based upon market capitalism, a stipulation not mentioned formally in the proposal but obvious nevertheless.
* Eastern European nations that accepted the American offer, as many were initially keen to do, would therefore have become incorporated into the American economic system, gravitating naturally into the U.S. orbit as their material fate became dependent upon American, not Russian, alliance.
* In addition, the terms of the Marshall Plan, when released, as we’ve discussed, gave the Americans a very high degree of say in how the money was spent.
* And it forced the recipients to buy products from American companies.
* And to give up their own funds for the Americans to spend however they saw fit.
* SPECIAL PROVISIONS: The Administrator is authorized to use funds made available to promote an increase in production in participating countries of materials required by the U. S. where there are actual or potential shortages in the U. S.
* This involved strategic goods needed for military purposes, and it prevented recipients from selling these things to Moscow or Eastern European countries, so they could use Marshall Plan funds to buy raw materials, eg uranium and plutonium, that they needed. (the_marshall_plan_-_the_extension_of_empire.pdf)
*
* More on that later.
* But This of course was intolerable to the Soviets – as the Americans, of course, knew it would be.
* As we discussed with Benn Steil when he was on the show, it was planned from the beginning the the Soviets would have to turn down the American money, and insist that the countries in Eastern Europe that were in their sphere of influence would also turn it down.
* As Bevin said to his private secretary, after Molotov stormed out of their last Foreign Ministers meeting in 1947: “This is the beginning of the Western bloc.”
* The Marshall Plan, Molotov said, was “nothing but a vicious American scheme for using dollars to buy its way” into European affairs.
* If the Soviets had just said “yes sure wonderful” and jumped both feet into the Marshall Plan, they probably could have killed it from the inside.
* Which is what Ambassador Novikov had recommended.
* But instead, Stalin refused to be part of it on principle.
* Which turned out to have dramatic consequences for the world.

* So the Marshall Plan, like the Truman Doctrine, has to be viewed, at least in part, as a political tactic for Truman.
* But in order for it to be useful in the upcoming election, he needed to sell it.
* To build support with the public, the “Committee for the Marshall Plan” was established.
* also known as Citizens’ Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery
* The committee contained eminent people like:
* Allen Dulles, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, later to become the director of the CIA
* Alger Hiss, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Soviet spy
* Philip D. Reed, chairman of General Electric
* Dean Acheson, United States Under Secretary of State, who would later be Sec of State
* Robert Patterson, Secretary of War
* Hugh Moore president and founder of the Dixie Cup Company
* Winthrop W. Aldrich president and chairman of the board of Chase National Bank
* Union leader James B. Carey
* Another union leader David Dubinsky
*
* To sway public opinion, the committee advertised, issued various documents (press releases, editorials, policy papers), sponsored radio broadcasts, hired speakers bureaus. Targets included women’s clubs, church councils, and public affairs groups.
* Dean Acheson went on his own speaking tour around the country.
* His Message focused on American idealism, self-interest, and ideology – particularly, humanitarian and economic concerns.
* Allen W. Dulles: “The Marshall Plan … is not a philanthropic enterprise … It is based on our views of the requirements of American security … This is the only peaceful avenue now open to us which may answer the communist challenge to our way of life and our national security.”

* Government propaganda to convince the people to let them give THEIR money to American corporations in the name of European aid.
* A congressional committee headed by Representative Forrest A. Harness concluded its long study of the problem with this estimate in 1947: “Government propaganda distorts facts with such authority that the person becomes prejudiced or biased in the direction which the Government propagandists wish to lead national thinking.”
* Exactly ten years later, General Douglas MacArthur offered an even more biting commentary on the same pattern of distortion. “Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear—kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor—with the cry of a grave national emergency. . . . Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”
* (The Tragedy of American Diplomacy – William Appleman Williams)

* When the plan passed, as it easily did (with even Taft’s vote), the ink was hardly dry on the legislation when the ships full of goods hit the high seas.
* At any given moment over the next few months, 150 boats were carrying wheat, flour, cotton, tires, borax, drilling equipment, tractors, tobacco, aircraft parts, and anything else big domestic manufacturers could get their hands on.
* As with most goods shipped under the Marshall Plan, American producers had the advantage: 50 percent had to be sent on American vessels.
* Taking a leaf from the Roosevelt playbook, Truman bypassed the usual bureaucracy and established a new bureau—the Economic Cooperative Administration—to distribute the aid.
* It too was staffed by the heads of major industrial-corporate interests who stood to benefit at public expense.
* Paul Hoffman – the same guy who founded the CED – headed the group and passed out billions to well-heeled corporate powers.
* As historian Anthony Carew summarizes, the Marshall Plan “was in all major respects a business organization run by businessmen.”
* Most of all, the aid was used for purchases at distorted prices by American tax dollars in the hands of European governments.
* Like we see with Pentagon contract even today – when you’re taking taxpayer money, which they have no say over, and give it to corporations, particularly when there is an emergency, there’s no time or incentive to check how competitive the prices are that you’re being offered.
* The result was the largest peacetime transfer of wealth from the taxpayers to corporations until that point in U.S. history.

* The Marshall Plan aid was mostly used for the purchase of goods from the United States.
* The European nations had all but exhausted their foreign exchange reserves during the war, and the Marshall Plan aid represented almost their sole means of importing goods from abroad.
* Chomsky https://chomsky.info/200311__/:
* Of the $13 billion of Marshall Plan aid, about $2 billion went right to the U.S. oil companies.
* That was part of the effort to shift Europe from a coal-based to an oil-based economy, and parts of it would be more dependent on the United States.
* It had plenty of coal.
* It didn’t have oil.
* So there’s two billion of the 13.
* You look at the rest of it, very little of that money left the United States.
* It goes from one pocket to another.
* 90% of the funds were actually just a credit that had to be spent on American goods.
* And the recipient countries needed to match that amount in their own currency, known as counterpart funds.
* The remaining 10% was a loan that had to be paid back with interest.
* So the U.S. took $13 billion of taxpayers money and gave $11.7 billion of it to American companies.
* The counterpart thing is confusing.
* Here’s one explanation I read of how it worked.
* Each government that received grant funds had to put an equivalent amount into an account in their own currency.
* The governments reimburse themselves for the money they deposit in the counterpart funds by“selling” the ECA dollar credits to those of their citizens who require dollars with which to import goods from dollar countries.
* The importer, either a government agency or a private business firm, applies for use of ECA dollars to make a particular purchase that will contribute to the recovery of the country.
* If the importer’s application is approved (by the US), he buys the dollar credits with the currency of his country, e.G. Francs, lire Or pounds.
* Suppose a German construction company wished to purchase an American crane for reconstruction efforts in 1949. In a counterpart fund arrangement, company would buy the crane from the West German government in Deutschmarks, which would then be deposited into the central bank. The Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), the body mediating counterpart funds, would pay the American crane exporter in dollars authorized under the European Recovery Program (ERP). Meanwhile, the Deutschmarks would be used to finance a ECA-approved recovery project.
* There are several benefits to this transaction. First, instead of a direct transfer of an asset or converting currency for import, this system incentivizes participation in the economy using the local currency. For the construction company, the entire transaction occurred in West Germany and was arranged by the fledgling government. Furthermore, because the payment was in local currency, there is not a negative effect on West German balance of payments, which was a major concern of the ERP. Lastly, instead of resorting to inflationary policies as had often been done in post-war recoveries, the central bank had an inflow of currency to loan out for projects.[2]
* As I said before, the U.S. also had to approve how the counterpart funds were spent, via the ECA.
* EG Britain wanted to spend counterpart funds on rebuilding social welfare projects but the U.S. rejected that idea.
* They would only approve projects that would drive the economy – meaning the country would be able to buy more American products in the future.
* Those bags of wheat that fed Germans and others had to come from the U.S.’ mid-Western grain belt, and many were paid for in so-called counterpart local funds which the United States could technically spend as it wished in Europe. (https://www.rferl.org/a/1084818.html)
* And 5% of the counterpart funds were earmarked for the U.S. to spend as it liked.
* Which, according to the actual explanation on the George Marshall Foundation site, was to “stockpile critical materials needed for America’s defense”.
* In fact, a quarter of this money ended up as a $200 million slush fund for the CIA which it used for covert activities in France and Italy.
* Another way the funds were used was for a European propaganda tour.
* The ERP Train.
* A seven-carriage train that went around Europe extolling the virtues of the Marshall Plan.
* (Cold-War Economics: The Use of Marshall Plan Counterpart Funds in Germany, 1948-1960
* Armin Grünbacher)
* How is this not imperialism, when Country A gets to dictate to Country B how and where it spends its own money?
* This is taking imperialism to a new level.
* You don’t need to invade.
* You don’t need to threaten.
* You just BUY control.
* Or as Zbigniew (zuh-big-nef) Bresinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, put it, “co-optation”.
* “It likewise relies heavily on the indirect exercise of influence on dependent foreign elites.”
* And it’s “reinforced by the massive but intangible impact of the American domination of global communications, popular entertainment, and mass culture and by the potentially very tangible clout of America’s technological edge and global military reach.”
* (Brzezinski, Zbigniew – The Grand Chessboard; American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (1998).pdf)
* This is Keynesianism at its best.
* Even though Keynes died just before it got under way.
* He died in April 1946, a few weeks after participating in the negotiations for the Anglo-American loan in Savannah, Georgia, where he was trying to secure favourable terms for the United Kingdom from the United States, a process he described as “absolute hell”.
* (source)

* And yes – it helped get Europe back on its feet.
* And probably stopped socialist parties from gaining political power.
* And reduced the chances for the U.S.S.R. to build economic and political ties with Western Europe.
*
* Yet many U.S. and European historians have recently concluded that the Marshall Plan’s impact in Western Europe was more important politically and psychologically than it was economically.
* U.S. historian Charles Maier concluded that Marshall aid served as what he called the “lubricant in an engine — not the fuel — which allowed a machine to run that would have otherwise buckle and bind.”
* In fact, the more recent historians say, the Marshall Plan provided Europeans as much psychological reassurance as it did recovery.

* The Marshall Plan had one other great effect on West Europe’s evolution over the past four decades: It encouraged the economic integration that led, first, to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community among six nations -Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands -in 1950.
* Eight years later, the same six took a qualitative jump into the more integrated European Economic Community.
* Which then became the European Union.
* Which Britain is now leaving.
*
* The Marshall Plan stimulated European unification because its architects celebrated the benefits of economic integration and did what they could to bring it about.
* They believed that an integrated economic order, particularly one headed by central institutions, would help to channel constructively Germany’s revitalized strength -and so far, they have been proved right.
* These assumptions grew fundamentally out of U.S. domestic experience, where a large integrated economy has made vast economic growth possible.
* They were not all accepted by the West Europeans, but they had a great influence over them.
*
* Witness the recent words of former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt: “The United States ought not to forget that the emerging European Union is one of its greatest achievements: it would never have happened without the Marshall Plan.”
* (source)

* But did the Marshall Plan work to stave of America’s economic woes?
*
* It created jobs, especially in the export industries.
* Just as millions of Americans were being discharged from the armed forces and were looking for jobs.
* For the first time in its history, the United States did not suffer from a severe recession due to a lack of spending immediately following the cessation of a major war and a reduction in military spending by the federal government. The United States and most of the rest of the world experienced an economic “free lunch” as both the potential debtor nations and the creditor nation experienced tremendous real economic gains resulting from the Marshall Plan and other foreign aid giveaways. Despite the growth in output from foreign factories, however, the United States maintained a surplus merchandise trade balance of exports over imports until the first oil price shock in 1973. (source)

* And the U.S. economy boomed in the 50s and 60s, in part because of the spending of public treasury money on boosting the economy.
* And partly because the Marshall Plan created a massive market in Europe for American products.

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#95 – Marshall Plan II

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* Something that Marshall mentions only briefly in his speech is the effect that would have on the US economy. (around the 7’20″ mark)
* Europe’s economy might have been destroyed after the war, but America’s wasn’t looking too bulletproof, partly BECAUSE the European economy had been shattered.
* In 1947, there were serious concerns about the state of the US economy.
* Benn Steil:
* There was a report written in 1946, I think, by the SWNCC, the State, War and Navy department staff, which said “The conclusion is inescapable, that, under present programs and policies, the world will not be able to continue to buy United States exports at the 1946-47 rate beyond another 12-18 months.”
* They anticipated “substantial decline in the United States export surplus would have a depressing effect on business activity and empolyment in the United States.”
* And in 1946, the gross national product of the U.S. was already down 11.6% on the previous year, as the government stopped spending money on the war effort.
* Navy Secretary James Forrestal characterised American priorities in Europe as “economic stability, political stability and military stability… in about that order.”
* Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Clayton redefined the problem as one of disposing of America’s “great surplus.”
* He explained in May 1947 : “The capitalistic system, whether internally or internationally, can only work by the continual creation of disequilibrium in comparative costs of production.”
* “Let us admit right off that our objective has as its background the needs and interests of the people of the United States. We need markets — big markets — in which to buy and sell.”
* Clayton was saying implicitly what Dean Acheson had argued explicitly in 1944: the profitability of America’s corporate system depended upon overseas economic expansion.
* Marshall and other advocates of the program also spoke openly of the parallel between their policy and America’s earlier westward expansion across the continent.
* America needed to expand.
* But wait!? I thought it was the SOVIETS who were trying to take over the world?
* Marshall argued that the nation faced an either-or situation.
* He claimed that Unless the plan was adopted “the cumulative loss of foreign markets and sources of supply would unquestionably have a depressing influence on our domestic economy and would drive us to increased measures of government control.”
* So by defining America’s expansion as the key to prosperity, Marshall defined foreign policy as the key to domestic problems and to the survival of democracy at home.
* (The Tragedy of American Diplomacy – William Appleman Williams)
*
* If the European economy didn’t recover quickly, it would crash the US economy.
* It’s all connected.
* And if the European economy DID recover, but as part of a Soviet trading bloc, it would STILL crash the US economy.
* (Cox, Michael, and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe. “The Tragedy of American Diplomacy? Rethinking the Marshall Plan.”):
*
* And so they came up with a plan.
* A plan to give $13 billion to European countries over 4 years.
* So The Plan, Contrary to popular mythology, it was not just a simple program of aid.
* It had a TON of conditions.
* It wasn’t like the U.S. just dumped pallets of cash on Europe’s doorstep and said “have at it”.
* This was very carefully engineered and managed so that it would benefit the American economy.
* And Truman politically.
* As the influential British economist Sir Alec Cairncross pointed out, US Aid to Europe had been flowing across the Atlantic for the better part of two years even before Marshall’s speech.
* What made the June 1947 initiative different, he noted, was its attempt to link aid to the reform of European institutions and practices.
* Moreover, although the tone of the speech was mild and nonideological, its implications were anything but.
* it was the most dedicated effort so far to reduce Communist influence in Europe and was intended to affect not only the most obvious countries like France and Italy, but also the smaller states under Soviet control.
* This was certainly how George Kennan conceived of the Plan.
* Although Kennan continued to believe that the basic cause of the crisis in Western Europe was not Communism as such but the need to restore the continent’s economic health, he was in no doubt that the Plan had a deeply subversive purpose.
* Dean Acheson agreed, noting that what US “citizens and the representatives in congress alike always wanted to learn in the last analysis was how Marshall aid operated to block the extension of Soviet power and the acceptance of Commu nist economic and political organisation and alignment.
* At a meeting on 28 May 1947, when U.S. Officials decided that the East European countries would be allowed to participate in the program, they stipulated that any countries taking part would have to reorient their economies away from the USSR toward broader European integration – and capitalism.
* Because most of the resources and goods purchased with Marshall Plan funds came from the US itself, this benefited American exporters and domestic industries.
* It allowed the US to recover from a short-term economic slump in 1946-7 and enter a period of economic boom. (http://alphahistory.com/coldwar/marshall-plan/)
* But the real upshot of the Marshall Plan was a political maneuver to loot American taxpayers to keep influential American corporations on the government dole.
* The Plan’s legacy was the egregious and perpetual use of foreign aid for domestic political and economic purposes.
* It was the beginning of large scale Keynesian Economics during peacetime.
* Using government spending to bolster the economy.
* But of course “government spending” is the spending of the people’s money.
* The public treasury.
* And that money ends up going to private companies and their owners and shareholders.
* A little-known business group, founded in 1942 and called the Committee for Economic Development, was elevated into a think tank for a new international order—the economic counterpart to the Council on Foreign Relations.
* Founded by a group of business leaders led by Paul G. Hoffman, President of Studebaker Corporation; William Benton, co-founder of Benton & Bowles advertising firm; and Marion B. Folsom, treasurer of Eastman Kodak Company.
* These groups understood that they owed their profit margins to government subsidies provided by the New Deal and wartime production subsidies.
* Faced with post-war peace, they feared a future in which they would be forced to compete on a free-market basis.
* Their personal and institutional security was at stake, so they got busy dreaming up strategies to sustain a profitable statism in a peacetime economy.
* CED successfully worked to garner support among the American business community for the Marshall Plan.
* As Julius Krug, secretary of the interior, said in his memoirs, the Marshall Plan, “essential to our own continued productivity and prosperity,” was a Tennessee Valley Authority on a world scale.
* “It is as if we were building a TVA every Tuesday.”
* But it was going to take some selling both to the American people and the politicians.
* Unlike today, they weren’t as familiar with the concept of Keynesian Economics and how it benefited their constituents.

* Benn Steil:
* Henry Wallace, FDR’s old VP, the man who SHOULD be President, led the attack from the left.
* Far from reviving the European economy, he said, the ERP would undermine the most positive elements of it, such as nationalization of industry, social welfare expansion, and government controls on trade.
* The State Department, which he believed to have been captured by monopoly private interests, was determined merely to perpetuate Europe’s “semicolonial dependence on the United States.”
* Its program would cleave the continent into rival blocs, slow recovery by severing traditional East-West trade links, and fan international tensions—possibly leading to “World War III.”
* In the United States, Wallace said, the ERP would boost the profits of agricultural, oil, steel, and shipping “trusts” at the expense of “American workers and farmers and independent businessmen,” who would have to contend with the resulting shortages, inflation, union busting, and social service cuts.
* In its place, Wallace advocated creation of a $50 billion fund, three times as large as the administration was calling for, run by the United Nations, which would finance a European “new deal.”
* The primary beneficiaries would be the victims of Nazi aggression, including the Soviet Union and the east European states.
* But of course if the UN is running it, how can they make sure it will benefit U.S. interests?
*
* Henry A. Wallace’s Criticism of America’s Atomic Monopoly, 1945-1948 By Mayako Shimamoto:
* Wallace claimed that although Western Europe was forced to buy non-essential items from America, they were banned from buying essential items from their neighbors.
* The economically weak Western industries were vulnerable to competition with American corporations.
* So they American companies would end up dominating the market for those products in Europe, shutting out European manufacturers from their own markets.
* And Wallace could see, even then, that this was a giant sham.
* American money spent on this gigantic scheme of the ERP returned to American pockets.
* To Wallace’s eyes, the huge rush of American taxpayers’ money worked well as a pump primer, returning huge profits only to American corporations as a justifiable reward in the name of humanitarian aid programs.

* Steil:
* But the Marshall Plan wasn’t only getting attacked from the left.
* Guys like Ohio Republican senator and presidential candidate Robert Taft attacked it from the Right as well.
* Also four-term Republican congressman from Nebraska, Howard Buffett.
* Father of Warren Buffet.
* He was a critic of the Truman Doctrine as well.
* He once said, on the floor of Congress: Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. Persuasion and example are the methods taught by the Carpenter of Nazareth, and if we believe in Christianity we should try to advance our ideals by his methods. We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics.
* He and Taft and others on the Right were critical of the MP, but not for the same reasons as Wallace.
* They didn’t have a problem with aid.
* They just believed the amount of funds Truman wanted Congress to approve — $17 billion ($184 billion in today’s money) over four years — was much too large.
* Taft argues that giving them too much money would create a dangerous dependency on the United States, sapping both private sector and governmental incentives to manage Europe’s own resources properly.
* It’s a big like people on the Right today saying that giving poor people welfare is just making them dependent on hand-outs.
* Like they will just put their feet up and say “that’s it for me for the rest of my life”.
* Which is horseshit, for the most part.
* Democrats tried to undermine Taft by arguing that he was only aiding the Soviets and their supporters.
* “Those who oppose the Marshall Plan, I think,” said Illinois senator Scott Lucas before an eight-hundred-delegate Women’s Patriotic Conference on National Defense, “should suffer some slight embarrassment in finding themselves in agreement with the Communist Party.”

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#94 – Marshall Plan I

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* One of the greatest pieces of mythology to ever be produced in America is the “Marshall Plan”.
* It’s right up there with the idea of glorifying the “Founding Fathers”, who were actually just tax dodgers who orchestrated a bloody coup.
* It’s also of course one of America’s greatest pieces of foreign policy.
* The Marshall Plan is sold to Americans as the greatest gift mankind has ever received since Jesus died on the cross.
* Even today, 70 years later, it’s almost impossible to find analysis of the MP that doesn’t position it as a ‘gift’ or ‘humanitarian aid’.
* But the truth is, it was really neither of those things.
* The Marshall Plan was completely self serving.
* You will often hear it it was about stopping the Soviets from spreading Communism and stopping another World War, and those things are partially true.
* But that’s also missing the point.
* Both for the U.S. as a whole and, particularly, for Truman.
* And it was a genius move.
* It was, at the time, the biggest transfer of wealth from the public treasury into the hands of the wealthy during peacetime probably in history.
* But nearly nobody understands it.
* I’ve been researching this topic for years and the lack of understanding of it blows my mind.
* But let’s go back a bit and provide some background.
* The European winter of 1946-47 was the worst in a hundred plus years.
* widely believed to be the snowiest winter since 1813-14
* Not the coldest, but it was the snowiest winter in a long time.
* Known as a “hunger winter”
* And of course everyone was still living in the aftermath of war.
* The Germans, Brits and Americans had been terror-bombing civilian populations for years.
* railways, bridges and roads were blown up, factories smashed, farms and fields ravaged by tank battles and firefights
* The war had also forced the old European colonial powers, most notably Britain and France, to begin the painful and, they soon learned, financially costly process of withdrawing from some of their overseas possessions, either as a result of military retreat or simply because they could no longer afford their imperial commitments.
* Or because the Americans insisted on it.
* Open door policy, free trade, and all that.
* Apart from complete destruction of their economies and infrastructure and the deaths of tens of millions of their people, Europe had to contend with something else.
* The realisation that they sucked.
* At the beginning of the 20th century, European countries prided themselves on their superiority.
* But In the space of thirty years the most powerful nations in the history of the world had set upon themselves in two ruinous wars.
* They had killed tens of millions of their citizens, injured tens of millions more, and had stripped from each of themselves of the rank of first-class power.
* Even Great Britain who was victorious in both wars.
* At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a belief in the superiority of European civilization.
* Now that seemed like a cruel joke.
* Superior civilizations don’t elevate warmongers to absolute political power in order to destroy themselves in unremitting industrial warfare.
* They don’t bombard defenceless civilians, or send conscripted soldiers to certain death in battle after battle, or massacre ethnic minorities, or attempt to commit genocide.
* So The conclusion seemed inescapable: the European way of politics had wrought disaster.
* So across Europe, people wanted dramatic changes.
* And political movements arose to drive those changes.
* And most of them were left leaning.
* Because these superior European countries had all been capitalist.
* Yes, even Nazi Germany.
* Nazi Fascism was extreme capitalism.
* They believed in private property and a market economy – they just wanted it to serve the State.
* And the monarchies were all capitalist.
* So after WWII, people are exploring new ideas, creating left parties, which were being supported by Moscow.
* Because who else is going to support left-leaning parties?
* These parties were in a good position to seize political power in places like Greece, Italy, and France, where they had huge political credibility as a result of their dominant role in resistance campaigns against fascism.
* And those parties talked about the economic state of affairs in Europe, which was obviously atrocious.
* In France, you could only buy meat on the black market, and bread was almost as hard to get.
* And hard when you got it
* In Britain, which suffered far less than most of Europe, the economy had hit rock bottom.
* Even in the once-mighty British realm, two years after a war they had technically won, people lived on bare rations and in unheated homes, often without electricity.
* The worst suffering by far, however, was taking place in Germany.
* So it’s all well and good to contain the Soviets.
* But what do you do if the people in Europe are starving and looking for new political leadership that only the Soviets can provide?
* The argument from American strategists was that America needed to get directly involved in re-building the economies of Europe.
* Truman thought it was only common sense to “spend twenty or thirty billion dollars to keep the peace” over the coming four years than to spend multiples of that annually fighting a war.
* WWII had cost the U.S. $350 billion.
* Here’s how one economist put it in 1948:
* Another war would cost considerably more: not only because the war would not be paid for out of additional output as was World War II, but also because warfare is going to be much more devastating in the future. We can be certain that after the next war, we shall not raise our income from $70 billion (as in 1939) to $160 billion (at War’s peak) and $205 billion in 1947. Even in stable prices, our income is up almost 75 per cent since 1939. Another war should cost us at least twice the last war, say $150 billion a year over 5 years; or if it is a knock- out war, an optimistic guess would be the loss of half to three- quarters of our income over a period of at least 10 years or, say, $1, 500 billion. It is well to ask whether we should take the prudent risk of spending $25 billion over 10 years in order to save $1, 000 billion (say), on the assumption that the stabilization of a democratic Europe will contribute substantially to saving us from a war.
* (* https://www-jstor-org.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/stable/pdf/2975441.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A51ed83cc6d9ab6a23c1c636ccb6403ee * Seymour E. Harris Source: The Journal of Finance, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Feb., 1948))
* And so the European Recovery Plan was born.
* It was conceived mostly by George Kennan.
* But it was announced by another George – Marshall, now the Secretary of State.
* And so it became known as the Marshall Plan.
* As Ray mentioned on the last episode, he’d replaced Jimmy Byrnes.
* And Marshall was a very serious guy.
* Remember the story about the time when FDR called Marshall by his first name?
* Marshall apparently responded, “It’s General Marshall, Mr. President.”
* What happened to Byrnes?
* On Jan 6, 1947, Byrnes had been TIME’s Man of the Year.
* A day later he was gone from Truman’s cabinet.
* He’d only been in the position for a 18 months.
* Why?
* The official reasons were his health.
* He was 67.
* It can’t have been that bad though.
* Four years later he was Governor of South Carolina.
* We know today that there was a ton of tension between Truman and Byrnes, from day one.
* Byrnes died in 1972, at the age of 89 – so he had another 25 years in him after 1947.
* It seems quite obvious that he was pushed out by Truman, as was his predecessor, Big Stetty, Edward Stettinius.
* And Truman wasn’t holding up too well politically at this stage.
* His reputation was pretty damaged.
* Remember the leaks about the Soviet spies, how the Manhattan Project had been infiltrated, the Soviets weren’t playing nice, and the US economy is struggling.
* 14 percent inflation in 1947 and rising unemployment
* The huge growth the economy experienced during WWII, thanks to Military Keynesianism, was over.
* The military budget had been massively reduced.
* Here are Truman’s opening paragraphs when he presented his budget to Congress in January 1947:
* To the Congress of the United States: As the year 1947 opens America has never been so strong or so prosperous. Nor have our prospects ever been brighter. Yet in the minds of a great many of us there is a fear of another depression, the loss of our jobs, our farms, our businesses. But America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand. The job at hand today is to see to it that America is not ravaged by recurring depressions and long periods of unemployment, but that instead we build an economy so fruitful, so dynamic, so progressive that each citizen can count upon opportunity and security for himself and his family. Nor is prosperity in the United States important to the American people alone. It is the foundation of world prosperity and world peace. And the world is looking to us.
* But people weren’t buying his optimism.
* According to Walter Lippmann, regarded as the most greatest political commentator of his day, Truman was an embarrassment.
* He said Truman’s bravado and quick decisions were a facade for an essentially insecure man filled with anxieties.
* WOW – does that sound familiar?
* He’s had to fire his Secretary of State for undermining him.
* And there’s an election coming in 1948.
* Marshall, on the other hand, had huge respect.
* His appointment as SOS was unanimously accepted by Congress.
* Even though he’d just come from a massive failure as you mentioned on the last episode.
* He’s been sent to China by Truman to try and negotiate a peace between Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao.
* And there was a report that came out after WWII about the intelligence and operational failures that allowed the Pearl Harbour attack to take place and some of the blame was being laid on Marshall.
* Although modern scholars tend to give him a pass on that one.
* Do you know something Truman and Marshall had in common?
* Both Freemasons.
* https://web.archive.org/web/20131110000739/http://www.nymasons.org/about-freemasonry/famous-masons-ii.html
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Freemasons_(E%E2%80%93Z)#M
* According to Lolly Zamoysky, formerly a senior KGB analyst, the Freemasons were responsible for the outbreak of the Cold War.
* ‘Freemasons’, he claimed, ‘have always controlled the upper echelons of government in Western countries Masonry in fact runs “remotely controls’ bourgeois society… The true centre of the world Masonic movement is to be found in the most “Masonic” country of all, the United States… Ronald Reagan has been characterised as an “outstanding” Mason. ‘
* Zamoysky’s explanation of the Cold War was startling in its simplicity:
* The first ever atomic attack on people, the use of atomic weapons for blackmail and the escalation of the arms race were sanctioned by the 33-degree Mason Harry Truman.
* The first ever call for the Cold War was sounded by Mason Winston Churchill (with Truman’s blessing).
* The onslaught on the economic independence of Western Europe (disguised as the Marshall Plan) was directed by the 33 -degree Mason George Marshall.
* Truman and West European Freemasons orchestrated the formation of NATO.
* Don’t we ‘owe’ to that cohort the instigation of hostility between the West and the Soviet Union…?
* So there you have it.
* I’ve met some Freemasons and I can tell you, they were crazy.
* But anyhoodles.
* Here’s Marshall’s June 1947 Harvard Commencement speech https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/05/70-years-ago-a-harvard-commencement-speech-outlined-the-marshall-plan-and-calmed-a-continent/
* He was a pretty boring speaker.
* He hints at the idea of European aid, but it’s just a hint, and most of the media the next day ignored it.
* “Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products — principally from America — are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help.”
* He said that Without such support Europe would “face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character.”

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