Cam & Ray's Cold War Podcast

* 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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* 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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* 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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* The X Article.
* George Kennan, the Soviet expert who wrote the Long Telegram, wrote another piece, but this time published publicly and anonymously, in July 1947, just after Truman’s “Truman Doctrine” speech.
* The actual title of the article was “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”.
* It was published in Foreign Affairs magazine.
* He used the pseudonym “Mr X” and so it’s known as the X Article.
* It began as a private report prepared for Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in January 1947.
* It was never intended as a public document.
* But Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of Foreign Affairs, urged Kennan to publish it, so he obtained permission from Forrestal to publish the article under the pseudonym “X”.
* Whereas The Long Telegram was a review of how the Soviet Union saw the world – and The Clifford-Elsey Report took those facts and interpreted how they affected the world and what the United States should do about it – The X Article took the information presented in the two prior reports and constructed a road map for the Cold War.
* The first sections of the article provide a potted history of Leninist and Stalinst ideology and the current political reality of the Soviet Union under Stalin.
* His conclusion is kind of interesting.
* As you might expect, he talks about containing the expansion of the Soviets.
* “confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world.”
* He says Soviet power “moves inexorably along a prescribed path, like a persistent toy automobile wound up and headed in a given direction, stopping only when it meets with some unanswerable force.”
* Unfortunately he didn’t concentrate at all on how US power and expansion acted as contributing factors to Soviet behavior.
* As Thomas Paterson wrote in Meeting The Communist Threat:
* Too simply, he applied one interpretive model to Russia and another to the United States: Russia’s foreign policy derived from a response to internal needs not external threats; America’s foreign policy derived from a response to external challenges.
* Mostly he talks about America providing a good example to the world.
* He said that if America has internal fighting, if it struggles economically, if it doesn’t look after its own people, if it embarks on global wars, then it is playing right into the hands of the Communists.
* Because that what they predict the U.S. will do.
* However – if the U.S. keeps its nose clean, looks after its people, and doesn’t take an aggressive global stance, then the Leninist ideology will look stupid and will struggle to keep the faith of the people.
* And here we are, 71 years later, and I hate to tell you – the Russians were right!
* Anyway, back to Walter Lippman, The right-leaning influential journalist and one of the fathers of modern propaganda.
* He took issue with the X article – at the time, he didn’t know who the author was – and wrote a series of articles about it, which ended up as a book called “The Cold War”.
* Which popularised the term.
* It’s usually said that the term was first coined by Herbert Bayard Swope, another Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.
* called the greatest reporter of his time by Lord Northcliffe
* He is known for saying, “I can’t give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.”
* He did publicity work for Bernard Baruch in 1947.
* Swope wrote a speech for Baruch, which he delivered to Congress on 16 April 1947.
* The line was: “Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war.”
* HOWEVER
* On 19 October 1945, George Orwell published an essay “You and the Atomic Bomb” in which he wrote: Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery… James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications—that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours.
* So thanks George.
* Lippman wrote:
* My objection to the policy of containment is not that it seeks to confront the Soviet power with American power, but that the policy is misconceived, and must result in a misuse of American power. It commits this country to a struggle which has for its objective nothing more substantial than the hope that in ten or fifteen years the Soviet power will, as the result of long frustration, “break up” or “mellow.”
* He was concerned that Military entanglements in remote places might bankrupt the treasury and would in any event do little to enhance American security at home.
* American society would become militarized in order to fight a “Cold War.”
* To compensate for America’s comparative weakness in these locations, Washington would be forced to recruit an “array of satellites, clients, dependents, and puppets;’ any number of whom could be expected to pull in the United States to defend them when trouble arose.
* And then – he nails the major flaw in Kennan’s assessment of the Russians:
* We may now ask why the official diagnosis of Soviet conduct, as disclosed by Mr. X’s article, has led to such an unworkable policy for dealing with Russia. It is, I believe because Mr. X has neglected even to mention the fact that the Soviet Union is the successor of the Russian Empire and that Stalin is not only the heir of Marx and of Lenin but of Peter the Great, and the Czars of all the Russias.
* For reasons which I do not understand, Mr. X decided not to consider the men in the Kremlin as the rulers of the Russian State and Empire, and has limited his analysis to the interaction of “two forces”: “the ideology inherited by the present Soviet leaders from the movement in which they had their political origin” and the “circumstances of the power which they have now exercised for nearly three decades in Russia.”
* Thus he dwells on the indubitable fact that they believe in the Marxian ideology and that “they have continued to be predominantly absorbed with the struggle to secure and make absolute the power which they seized in November 1917.” But with these two observations alone he cannot, and does not, explain the conduct of the Soviet government in this postwar era–that is to say its aims and claims to territory and to the sphere of influence which it dominates.The Soviet government has been run by Marxian revolutionists for thirty years; what has to be explained by a planner of American foreign policy is why in 1945 the Soviet government expanded its frontiers and its orbit, and what was the plan and pattern of its expansion. That can be done only by remembering that the Soviet government is a Russian government and that this Russian government has emerged victorious over Germany and Japan.
* Having omitted from his analysis the fact that we are dealing with a victorious Russia–having become exclusively preoccupied with the Marxian ideology, and with the communist revolution–it is no wonder that the outcome of Mr. X’s analysis is nothing more definite, concrete and practical than that the Soviets will encroach and expand “at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.”
* Lippman then goes on to quote from Professor Robert Strausz-Hupe of the University of Pennsylvania, whose article on “The Western Frontiers of Russia” appeared in the July 1947 issue of The Review of Politics, quarterly published by the University of Notre Dame:
* The total area acquired by Russia between 1945 and 1947 is approximately as large as the total area lost between 1917 and 1921. Russia has redeemed the hostages she gave to defeat, revolution and national self-determination. The western frontiers of the Soviet Sphere of Influence coincide so closely with those Czarist Russia planned to draw after the defeat of the Central Powers that Czarist and Soviet policies appear to differ as regards methods only.
* Lippman then continues:
* The westward expansion of the Russian frontier and of the Russian sphere of influence, though always a Russian aim, was accomplished when, as, and because the Red Army defeated the German army and advanced to the center of Europe. It was the mighty power of the Red Army, not the ideology of Karl Marx, which enabled the Russian government to expand its frontiers.
* Lippman’s alternative strategy to containment is to sign a treaty with Russia where the US, UK and U.S.S.R. would all pull their forces out of Europe.
* In return for security guarantees for Russia.
* If that was indeed what they wanted, security, then they would get it.
* Then, if they move out of those borders without sufficient and acceptable justification – attack them.
* But until then – use diplomacy.
* If you go into a Cold War with them, there’s no hope of diplomacy.
* You’re at war.
* Even Churchill in his Iron Curtain speech had advocated seeking a settlement through “frequent and growing contact” with the Kremlin.
* It made sense to negotiate with Stalin particularly over the question of Central Europe, and above all Germany, if the containment of Soviet power within eastern Europe was the goal.
* You stay on that side, we stay on this side.
* Stalin, arch-realist that he had often shown himself to be and with his country still recovering from a brutal war, might agree to a treaty based on that.
* Or he might refuse.
* There was no way to know without trying.
* Ironically, Kennan agreed with much of this.
* He was unhappy with the black and white nature of Truman’s speech.
* And he thought he had neglected the role of diplomacy in both his Long Telegram and X Article.
* He believed in diplomacy and he knew the Russians did too.
* Kennan later claimed that he never meant the United States should undertake global interventionism or emphasize military means.
* But his article certainly hinted that they should and it was swallowed whole by the political establishment on both sides of the aisle.
* Whether he intended to or not, Kennan helped to establish undiscriminating globalism and interventionism as permanent features of American diplomacy.
* Kennan the intellectual would suffer as others used his ideas to support a multitude of interventions and a military establishment of enormous proportions.
* The father of containment would spend much of the rest of his life attempting to disown his offspring.
* He said he felt “like one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of the cliff and now helplessly witnesses its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster.”
* But in 1947 all of this containment talk was just theory.
* There was still no plan for just HOW the Americans would go about “containing” the Russians.
* It wasn’t until the following year, 1948, that they came up with the European Recovery Program, better known as – The Marshall Plan.

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* And so on March 12, 1947, before a joint session of Congress, President Truman articulated, for the first time, a comprehensive American foreign policy for the postwar world.
* He did not mention the Soviet Union by name, or refer to the need to contain its power in Europe, though he did place American freedom against “totalitarian regimes.”
* Appealing to American universalist ideals, he declared that U.S. foreign policy henceforth must side with any nation facing aggression, anywhere in the world.
* WATCH IT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=-LMXGFhfbCs
* READ IT: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/harrystrumantrumandoctrine.html
* Why not the UN?
* Because the U.S.S.R. would intervene.
* But that’s the POINT of the UN.
* International co-operation.
* Here we are, a year and change after the creation of the UN, and the U.S. is already acting unilaterally in European affairs.
* His key phrases:
* I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
* I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.
* I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes.
* What about the free peoples who are resisting armed MAJORITIES?
* What about the free peoples of Palestine?
* You’ll notice that in his speech, Truman never mentions the Soviets by name.
* But he hints at them.
* He mentions Yalta and “totalitarian regimes”.
* So the Soviets have officially gone from being Allied and friends to the boogieman.
* BTW.
* Please note that Truman in 1947 is referring to the U.S.S.R. as a “totalitarian regime”.
* When people point to the U.S.S.R. and say “look! Socialism doesn’t work!” I always point out that it wasn’t actually socialism or communism – it was totalitarianism.
* People seem to think that socialism has to be totalitarian.
* Which is, of course, nonsense.
* Australia has a form of socialism – “social democracy”.
* One of our two major political parties, the ALP, calls itself a democratic socialist party.
* So does Finland.
* So does Sweden.
* None of those countries have totalitarian governments.
* Socialism and democracy can go together.
* Just remember that.
* Back to Truman.
* His speech was really just a rehash of Churchill’s “We Will Fight Them On The Beaches” speech.
* Truman expanded on it.
* “We will fight them on the beaches… of other countries… even if they don’t want us to.”
* And how did the Soviets respond to his speech?
* Six days later, Nikolai Novikov, who had returned from Washington to Moscow to take part in a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers, discussed Truman’s speech with Molotov.
* He said The speech showed that the United States would support “reactionary regimes” in those countries where they existed, and would try to undermine the progressive regimes of Eastern Europe.
* Novikov writes in his memoirs That Molotov replied with an ironical smile
* Molotov said, “The President is trying to intimidate us,” “to turn us at a stroke into obedient little boys. But we don’t give a damn. At the meeting of the Council [of Foreign Ministers] we will firmly pursue our principled line.”
* Origins of Cold War; an International History, 2e (2005).pdf – page 73
* Now the implications of the Truman Doctrine were enormous.
* Until 1947, the U.S. had openly criticised countries that played power politics.
* Now it has committed itself to playing it on a global scale.
* But as a political tactic, it worked: Truman received the support he wanted from Republicans who wanted the U.S. to get tough with the Soviets.
* The bill to commit American funds to Greece and Turkey passed the Senate easily, by 67 votes to 23.
* HOWEVER
* When countries give “aid” to other countries, there is ALWAYS – ALWAYS – a quid pro quo.
* One quid pro quo here was hypothetical.
* Don’t give the Soviets a chance to increase their influence in these two countries.
* But according to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal – he was the first guy to ever hold that title by the way, Truman invented it – there was a direct link between foreign aid and the shortage in critical materials.
* For Forrestal, aid to Greece and Turkey under the Truman Doctrine was more than a simple effort to contain Communism; he labeled the doctrine “hard and selfish.”
* What did he mean?
* Well Seventy-three percent of America’s imports consisted of raw materials for the production of necessities for the United States, and 55 percent of these needed imports came from areas within the British Empire, mostly in Asia.
* Forrestal put it this way: “These raw materials have to come over the seas and a good many have to go through the Mediterranean. That is one reason why the Mediterranean must remain a free highway.”
* So the “aid” to Turkey and Greece was also an investment in keeping the shipping lanes open.
* Again, Forrestal told one skeptical friend that the materials problem “is the only thing that makes any impression on me at all,” and his listener observed that the “average fellow in this country” was not aware of the raw materials consideration. (Meeting the Communist Threat Truman to Reagan.pdf)
* Few Americans were aware either that the March 10 draft of the Truman Doctrine speech stated that Greece and Turkey were areas of “great natural resources which must be accessible to all nations and must not be under the exclusive control or domination of any single nation.”
* That section was later removed.
* But you get the idea.
* Truman officials in mid-1947 did not argue, however, that European aid was essential to head off an imminent recession.
* Rather, they stressed the long-range economic and political importance of such assistance in the familiar peace and prosperity idiom.
* In November 1947 the Council of Economic Advisers predicted an $8 billion decline in exports unless a new foreign aid program was initiated.
* Total exports in 1946 were only $14 billion. (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EXPGSA)
* So pulling $8 billion out of that would hurt.
* The Economic Advisers said losing $8 billion would not “inflict serious short-run damage on our economy, substantial problems of readjustment would be generated. Moreover, the industrial paralysis which could be expected to result in some other countries would have repercussions of major proportion upon our own economy and upon world stability.”
* So it might start a chain reaction.
* Truman was coming to the realization that if he wanted to obtain political advantage by talking and acting tough on the Cold War, he didn’t have to wait for the Soviets to give him a reason.
* Later in 1947, Clark Clifford and one of FDR’s old aides James Rowe wrote a long memo to the President that mapped out how to turn a potential future war against the Soviets into political GOLD.
* They predicted that relations with the USSR would be the key foreign policy issue in the upcoming presidential campaign.
* And it was pretty simple to predict that those relations would get worse during the course of 1948;
* and that this would strengthen Truman’s domestic political position.
* They wrote: “There is considerable political advantage in the administration in its battle with the Kremlin;’
* “The worse matters get … the more is there a sense of crisis. In times of crisis, the American citizen tends to back up his president.”
* So it’s pretty obvious what they are saying.
* If Truman can ramp up a fear about the Cold War in the U.S. – irrespective of what the Soviets are actually doing – it would help his domestic political situation.
* And the Red Scare was already starting to ramp up.
* In the 1946 midterm elections the Republicans had taken control of both houses for the first time since 1928.
* Many of those elected were more conservative and more anti-communist than the candidates they replaced; many resorted to Red-baiting in their campaigns.
* They made “anti-Communist” attacks upon Truman and the Democrats
* Republican National Chairman Carroll Reece talked about the “pink puppets in control of the federal bureaucracy”
* And of course, the Democrats didn’t want to get caught out sounding soft, so they upped their anti-Soviet rhetoric to match the Republicans.
* But this is before the Soviets have even done anything!
* Anyone who suggested diplomacy was accused of appeasement.
* And then Truman went after his own people.
* Two weeks after his Truman Doctrine speech, he established the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, which gave government security officials authorization to screen three million employees of the federal government for any hint of political deviance.
* Executive Order 9835
* The order specified that one criterion to be used in determining that “reasonable grounds exist for belief that the person involved is disloyal” would be a finding of “membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association” with any organization determined by the attorney general to be “totalitarian, Fascist, Communist or subversive” or advocating or approving the forceful denial of constitutional rights to other persons or seeking “to alter the form of Government of the United States by unconstitutional means.”
* Hundreds of federal employees were fired.
* Thousands quit in disgust.
* A few weeks later, Truman set up AGLOSO – the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations.
* This is two years before McCarthy starts his whole thing.
* AGLOSO, which was massively publicized in the media, became what amounted to “an official black list.”
* But they released little or no information about key aspects of the list, including how it was compiled, what criteria were used to list groups, why the decision was made to publish the list, and why listed organizations were not provided with any notice, charges, or hearings before they were designated.
* This first AGLOSO was compiled in secret, and the listed organizations were not informed or given any opportunity to challenge the listings.
* Imagine if Trump came out with something similar today.
* The Democrats would lose their fucking minds.
* But in 1947, it was a Democratic administration that put this together.
* Thousands of Americans with progressive or radical political beliefs signed petitions for, or became members of, these groups without being aware of the Communist ties of the group.
* Many were later persecuted and suffered personal consequences during the McCarthy era.
* And even if they HAD known about the communist ties – so what?
* The Soviets were their allies until yesterday.
* Supposedly American is the land of freedom.
* Freedom of speech. Freedom of thought. Freedom of expression.
* Yet here is a Democratic administration saying that you’re not allowed to belong to this group or that group.
* Because they have different ideas.
* Have the Soviets attacked America?
* Have they said they were going to attack America?
* Okay – they had spied on America.
* And I can understand you don’t want spies in your ranks of Federal employees.
* And not all of the organisations had Communist ties.
* The KKK were on the list and they HATED the Communists.
* But for the moment, being in one of these groups didn’t automatically mean you were going to be in trouble.
* It just meant you were going to be investigated.
* However In his 1991 memoir, Clark Clifford said that his “greatest regret” from his decades-long government service was his failure to “make more of an effort to kill the loyalty program at its inception, in 1946–47.”
* He said that neither he nor Truman viewed Communist infiltration of the federal government as a serious problem.
* He said the 1946 elections “weakened” Truman but “emboldened [FBI Director] Hoover and his allies.”
* Rather than combating the irrationality of the charges of softness on communism and subversion, the Truman Administration, sure that it was the lesser of two evils, moved to expropriate the issue, as in a more subtle way it was already doing in foreign affairs.
* So the issue was legitimized; rather than being the property of the far right, which the centrist Republicans tolerated for obvious political benefits, it had even been picked up by the incumbent Democratic party.
* It looks like, from an American perspective, the idea of using diplomacy with the Soviets had gone out the window.
* And not everyone was happy about that.
* Henry Wallace used it as the main platform for his 1948 run at the White House.
* The right-leaning influential journalist and one of the fathers of modern propaganda, Walter Lippmann, wrote that Moscow officials had genuine security fears, and were motivated primarily by a defensive concern to prevent the revival of German power-hence their determination to assert effective control over eastern Europe.
* It distressed him that the administration seemed blind to this reality, and to the possibility of negotiating with the Kremlin over issues of mutual concern.
* And then around this time, George Kennan published his famous X Article.
* But that’s for next week.

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* So here we are in 1946.
* The Truman administration has decided on a “containment” policy.
* But who is going to contain the containers?
* According to the Novikov telegram, the Soviets felt like they had to contain the US.
* And the U.S. felt like they had to contain the Soviets.
* So the Americans were trying to figure out how they were going to to it, and how much they were willing to spend on it.
* In terms of atomic weapons control, the United States Atomic Energy Commission developed a classified plan to achieve international control, which came to be known as the Acheson-Lilienthal report, and submitted it to Secretary of State Byrnes in January 1946.
* It was named after Dean Acheson, at the time the Under Secretary of State – we’ve mentioned him briefly before, but he’s going to be a major character during the 1950s – and David E. Lilienthal, Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.
* But it was written mostly by the committee’s chief scientific consultant, Robert Oppenheimer,
* They recommended that all global fissile material be owned by an international agency to be called the Atomic Development Authority, which would release small amounts to individual nations for the development of peaceful uses of atomic energy.
* But there was a twist.
* The stockpiles and atomic production plants would be strategically distributed geographically.
* Lots of different countries would have some inside their borders.
* So everyone would know what each country had.
* And the UN would have inspections and access.
* If a nation bent on atomic war seized the international plants within its borders, and refused access and inspections, everyone would know immediately what was happening.
* Other nations would have atomic plants within their own borders so that they would not be at a disadvantage.
* If a nation did seize the Authority’s installations that were located within its territory, it would still take at least a year or more to produce bombs.
* So the plan would provide a huge measure of security against surprise attacks.
* Not a bad plan.
* The report also said that the United States would have to abandon its monopoly on atomic weapons, revealing what it knew to the Soviet Union, in exchange for a mutual agreement against the development of additional atomic bombs.
* It made no mention of when the United States should destroy its nuclear arsenal, but it did acknowledge that doing so was a necessity.
* The background to this report is the Conference of Foreign Ministers held in Moscow between December 16 and 26, 1945.
* The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union agreed to create a United Nations commission to advise on the destruction of all existing atomic weapons and to work toward using atomic energy for peaceful purposes.
* The resulting body, the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission – UNAEC – was created on January 24, 1946, with six permanent members (the United States, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, China, and Canada) and six rotating members.
* That same month, U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes created a special advisory committee headed by Acheson and Lilienthal, to compose a report that the U.S. Government would present to the UNAEC.
* And of course, in that great American White House tradition, a great committee of serious and intelligent men was commission to spend many months of their time researching and writing a serious report about a very serious subject, so that, when it was delivered seriously to the President who commission the report, he could just go “nah fuck that” and throw it in the bin.
* But By the time they delivered their report, Truman had decided “nope, fuck that, we’re keeping the bomb to ourselves”
* But he couldn’t just come out and SAY that, because it would mean reneging on an important piece of FDR’s plan
* And something he had already agreed to in principle with the UK and USSR
* I mean, the very first sentence of the Acheson – Lilienthal report says:
* We were given as our starting point a political commitment already made by the United States to seek by all reasonable means to bring about international arrangements to prevent the use of atomic energy for destructive purposes and to promote the use of it for the benefit of society.
* A political commitment made by the United States!
* Which obviously didn’t mean much to Truman.
* So instead he came up with something called the Baruch Plan.
* Which was a sneaky way of painting the Soviets into a corner.
* The day before the United States submitted the Acheson-Lilienthal report to the United Nations, Truman appointed Bernard Baruch as the American delegate to the UNAEC.
* Baruch was a seriously rich stockbroker, known as the “Lone Wolf Of Wall Street” because he refused to join any financial house.
* He was a Democrat who had been involved with Woodrow Wilson and FDR and had helped finance Truman’s own 1940 Senate race.
* So Baruch delivered a speech to the commission in June of 46, stating that the United States would agree to transfer its bomb science and plans etc to the United Nations, but only under certain conditions.
* First, the UN Security Council would have to begin a process of thorough worldwide inspections to ensure that no state was attempting to build a bomb surreptitiously.
* Any state caught doing so would be subject to immediate and harsh penalties, which meant, as far as the Security Council was concerned, military attack.
* Second, no nation on the Security Council would be allowed to use its veto on matters of international atomic control.
* Truman and Byrnes quickly approved these new stipulations.
* Acheson and Lilienthal did not approve.
* It was a brilliant move.
* The administration knew from the espionage revelations that Moscow was working on a bomb.
* If the Kremlin accepted the new provisions, it would open itself up to a military attack by the United Nations that it could not veto.
* This the USSR would never do.
* And if it rejected them, the Soviets – not the Americans – would be held responsible for crushing the dream of international atomic weapons control.
* Sure enough, late in 1946 the Soviet Union rejected the plan.
* For the first time, but not the last, the United States had developed a strategy that forced Moscow to shoulder the blame for initiating a conflict to which the United States had already committed itself.
* Truman wrote to Baruch: ‘We should not under any circumstances throw away our gun until we are sure the rest of the world can’t arm against us.’
* The big question everyone was wondering about in late 1946 and early 1947 was to what extent the U.S. would leverage its military and economic superiority in Europe.
* U.S. diplomatic tradition stipulated that the United States should avoid direct intervention in European affairs during peacetime.
* There were several high profile politicians saying the U.S. should stay out of Europe’s problems.
* Including Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the son of the 27th President Taft, who also goes on to be a prominent critic of the Nuremberg Trials, and Joe McCarthy in Wisconsin.
* Traditionally isolationist publications, including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News, also pushed for the U.S. to stay out of it.
* Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace – the guy who was FDR’s Veep before Truman – saw right through the Baruch Plan.
* He knew it was about threatening the Soviets with the bomb, instead of diplomacy.
* In a speech he gave at Madison Square Garden audience in September 1946, he said that getting tough “never brought anything real and lasting-whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world powers. The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.”
* He also said: the US *should recognize that we have no more business in the political affairs of eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America, western Europe and the United States. ”
* In the same speech, Wallace said the Russians needed to stop “conniving” against the U.S. and must stop teaching that communism must triumph, by force if necessary.
* “And we must be certain that Russia is not carrying on territorial expansion or world domination through native Communists faithfully following every twist and turn of the Moscow party line. ”
* Which sounds reasonable?
* But Truman fired Wallace from the cabinet, privately calling him “a real Commie and a dangerous man.”
* Two weeks after Wallace’s firing, White House aides Clark Clifford and George Elsey – Clifford ended up being a senior adviser to every President from Truman through to Carter as well as being Secretary of Defense for a few years in the late 60s – Elsey was a naval commander who had been an advisor to FDR and Truman and ended up becoming President of the American Red Cross – submitted an 82-page report on Soviet-American relations solicited by Truman.
* They took a hard line, saying the Soviets wanted to take over Europe and the U.S. needed to do everything in its power to stop them.
* Stalin only understood tough talk and military power.
* Truman at this stage seemed to agree with the Clifford-Elsey position.
* Great story about Elsey BTW.
* He once gave this advice to Truman:
* “The President’s job is to lead public opinion, not to be a blind follower. You can’t sit around and wait for public opinion to tell you what to do. In the first place, there isn’t any public opinion. The public doesn’t know anything about it; they haven’t heard about it. You must decide what you’re going to do and do it, and attempt to educate the public to the reasons for your action.”
* People don’t know shit.
* The historian Thomas A. Bailey, author of a popular 1948 book entitled The Man in the Street, agreed: “Because the masses are notoriously short-sighted, and generally cannot see danger until it as at their throats, our statesman are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-term interests. . . . ” He went on: “Deception of the people may in fact become increasingly necessary, unless we are willing to give our leaders in Washington a freer hand. . . . The yielding of some of our democratic control over foreign affairs is the price that we may have to pay for greater physical security.”
* This is how political strategists think about the public.
* So Truman agreed with Clifford and Elsey but he needed a justification before he could act.
* And then he got one.
* On February 21, the British government under Clement Attlee informed Washington that it would no longer subsidize pro-Western forces in Turkey and Greece.
* There were two nations in which Britain had wielded informal colonial power since the nineteenth century.
* They were both part of the “naughty agreement”.
* This was a clear sign that the old empire was not going to take responsibility for European security, not even in cases where strategically important nations faced the risk of political collapse.
* So the U.S. strategists were trying to figure out what to do.
* If they didn’t jump in, they were convinced there would be revolutions in each country and they would fall into the Soviet bloc.
* Remember that the UK had already had to crush a Communist revolution in Greece to keep the King in power.
* In the 19th century the Ottoman Empire grew weaker and Britain increasingly became its protector, even fighting the Crimean War in the 1850s to help it out.
* They considered the Ottoman Empire an essential component in the balance of power in the region.
* When the war ended for some countries in 1918-19, it didn’t end for Turkey: the First World War led straight into the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923).
* Then the secret wartime agreements between the British and the French to divide up the Ottoman territory amongst themselves kicked in.
* All that was left behind to become the Turkish republic under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was primarily to the former empire’s Anatolian heartland.
* And of course the Turkish remembered that after WWII.
* They had lost their status amongst the great empires.
* And it felt betrayed by the British who had, during the war, formed secret alliances with Ottoman Arabs to stir up revolts against their Turkish imperial rulers and entered into the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 with the French, to take control of much of the empire’s former territory.
* So if the Brits pulled out, there was a good chance there would be a Turkish revolution.
* During a meeting on February 27 1947, Dean Acheson referred to the potential collapse of Greece as “Armageddon.”
* He said it was like “apples in a barrel infected by a rotten one;’
* its loss could “infect Iran and all of the East” and even Africa and western Europe.
* the “domino theory”
* Truman agreed.
* But how would they get the American public on board?
* It’s not like Turkey and Greece were in any immediate threat of being invaded by Stalin.
* He’d already promised Churchill he’d stay out of it.
* So together with George Marshall, they came up with the idea of generalising the problem.
* An abstract, universal case would have to be made emphasizing the importance of overseas American commitment generally, rather than the specific merits of supporting Greece and Turkey.
* As the Republican senator from Michigan, Arthur Vandenberg, – not to be confused with Art Vandalay from Vandalay Industries – and who
* Vandenberg also opposed U.S. involvement in World War II and urged Roosevelt to reach an accommodation with Japan – famously put it, Truman would have to “scare hell out of the American people” to get Congress on board.
* And so scare them he did.

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* The last, and certainly most conspicuous, of the four events that transformed the political culture of Washington in 1946 was a speech given in early March by Winston Churchill at Westminster College in Truman’s home state of Missouri.
* Like Stalin’s speech of four weeks earlier, it was prepared for public consumption.
* Truman had read a draft in advance and approved it, though he would later equivocate on this point.
* He sat behind Churchill as the legendary leader, speaking in the great rolling cadences now so familiar to Americans, declared that an “iron curtain” had fallen on Europe, dividing the free people of the West from a tyrannical, totalitarian regime in the East.
* Sometimes called the opening shot of the Cold War, this passage is one of the most often-quoted in post 1945 world affairs:
* Churchill said near the end: “I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines … What is needed is a settlement, and the longer this is delayed the more difficult it will be and the greater our dangers will be.”
* This is coming from the guy who bitterly opposed to collapse of the British Empire which controlled 25% of the world only a few years earlier.
* Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
* These four developments of February and early March 1946 – Stalin’s speech, Pearson’s revelations, the Long Telegram, and Churchill’s speech – went a long way toward solidifying American attitudes with respect to the Soviet Union.
* The Pearson revelations and the Stalin speech demonstrated to lawmakers of both parties that continued efforts at cooperation with the USSR would be risky to sustain in the hardening atmosphere of American politics.
* General suspicion of the Soviet Union moved to the mainstream-it was now the easier, politically safer stance for a congressional representative or senator to take.
* Add the four together and the picture was clear: Stalin’s Soviet Union presented no immediate danger, but neither could it be trusted.
* Because the Soviets could not be trusted, the United States needed to act, rather than stand idly by as it had in the 1930s.
* The questions now was – what to do about it?
* They didn’t want another war.
* And at this stage, the U.S. didn’t have a tradition of carrying a highly military budget during peacetime.
* Many in congress, and perhaps even Truman, believed that the expensive game of military readiness was something the old, defunct European nations did – the U.S. was an exception.
* Plus, Truman wanted to keep the government budget low and balanced and to avoid the inflation that a lot of people were predicting would come after the war ended and the economy returned to a consumer footing, with millions of soldiers returning home.
* As the Soviet threat seemed a long way off, Truman could afford to take his time and do it on the cheap.
* One of the first things he did was to screw Stalin on Iran.
* As we’ve mentioned in the past, Stalin had troops in Iran during WWII to stop the Nazis taking the oil reserves.
* As did the British, who of course had a long history with oil concessions – I think we talked about that on the Bullshit Filter series on Syria.
* Stalin demanded an oil concession from Iran that was equivalent to the one they gave the British.
* American and British diplomats worked with the Iranian leader Ahmad Qavam (and, secretly behind the scenes, with the heir to the Persian throne, Reza Pahlevi) to demand the removal of Soviet troops sent by Stalin to the northern part of the country and to suppress the Iranian communist party, Tudeh.
* Stalin agreed to withdraw his forces in exchange for an oil concession; but once the troops were out, the Iranians-backed by Washington-reneged on the oil agreement, and Iran settled back into the Western camp.
* At about the same time, the administration pushed through Congress a low-interest $3.75 billion loan to Britain.
* A tough sell initially, it won approval in July, justified not only by new geopolitical imperatives but also by the claim that the United Kingdom would become a lucrative market for American goods and by Britain’s willingness to make its pound sterling convertible to American dollars .
* In Germany, the U.S. tried to solidify their control over the political process in the regions they, and the other Western powers, controlled.
* The extreme economic deprivation that the people there were suffering under made them targets for communism.
* So the Americans, lead by General Lucius Clay, Cassius to his friends, supported anti-communist parties and tried to kick start the economy.
* But France and the U.S.S.R. blocked those efforts, because they didn’t want a revival of German power.
* So the U.S. needed to take it slowly.
* They were also backing Chiang Kai-Sheks’ Kuomintang in China against the communist forces lead by Mao.
* In Indochina, the Truman administration covertly backed French efforts to beat down nationalist foes dominated by the communist-led Vietminh under Ho Chi Minh
* But the real story I want to talk about is the Novikov Telegram.
* Nikolai Novikov, The Soviet ambassador in Washington, wrote his own telegram in September 1946.
* He was stressing the dangers of possible U.S. economic and military domination worldwide.
* Novikov attempted to interpret U.S. foreign policy for his superiors, much the same way George Kennan had done in his “Long Telegram” to the U.S. State Department earlier that year.
* It was a direct response to the Keenan telegram.
* And he accuses the Americans of the same thing they are accusing the Soviets of – expansion.
* I’m going to read some of it but as I do, keep in mind that this was a report written for Stalin and the Soviet leadership.
* It’s not a speech.
* It’s not propaganda.
* Like the Kennan telegram, this is intended for internal eyes only.
* In fact, the West only learned about the existence of it in 1990, during glasnost.
* He starts off:
* Reflecting the imperialistic tendency of American monopoly capital, US foreign policy has been characterized in the postwar period by a desire for world domination*. This is the real meaning of repeated statements by President Truman and other representatives of American ruling circles that the US has a right to world leadership [rukovodstvo]. All the forces of American diplomacy, the Army, Navy, and Air Force, industry, and science have been placed at the service of this policy. With this objective in mind broad plans for expansion have been developed, to be realized both diplomatically and through the creation of a system of naval and air bases far from the US, an arms race, and the creation of newer and newer weapons.
* Then he talks about how the European economy was destroyed by the second world war and America came out of it stronger than ever.
* However, he says:
* On the other hand, the expectations of those American circles have not been justified which were based on the Soviet Union being destroyed during the war or coming out of it so weakened that it was forced to bow to the US for economic aid. In this event it could have dictated such conditions which would provide the US with an opportunity to carry out its expansion in Europe and Asia without hindrance from the USSR.
* In reality, in spite of all the economic difficulties of the postwar period associated with the enormous damage caused by the war and the German fascist occupation the Soviet Union continues to remain economically independent from the outside world and is restoring its economy by its own means.
* In addition, at the present time the USSR has a considerably stronger international position than in the prewar period. Thanks to the historic victories of Soviet arms the Soviet armed forces are on the territory of Germany and other former enemy countries, a guarantee that these countries will not be used again to attack the USSR. As a result of their reorganization on democratic principles, in such former enemy countries as Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, and Romania regimes have been created which have set themselves the task of strengthening and maintaining friendly relations with the Soviet Union. In the Slavic countries – Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia – liberated by the Red Army or with its help, democratic regimes have also been created and are consolidating which maintain relations with the Soviet Union on the basis of friendship and mutual aid agreements.
* Right now US foreign policy is not being determined by those circles of the Democratic Party which (as when Roosevelt was alive) try to strengthen cooperation between the three great powers which composed the basis of the anti-Hitler coalition during the war. When President Truman, a politically unstable person with certain conservative tendencies, came to power followed by the appointment of Byrnes as Secretary of State it meant the strengthening of the influence of the most reactionary circles of the Democratic Party on foreign policy. The constantly increasing reactionary nature of US foreign policy, which as a consequence of this approached the policy advocated by the Republican Party, has created a foundation for close cooperation in this area between the extreme right wing of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. This cooperation of the two parties, formalized in both houses of Congress in the form of an unofficial bloc of reactionary Southern Democrats and the old guard of the Republicans headed by Vandenberg and Taft, is especially clearly demonstrated in the fact that in their statements about foreign policy issues the leaders of both parties are essentially advocating the same policy.
* At the same time the influence on foreign policy of the followers of the Roosevelt policy of cooperation with peaceloving powers has been sharply reduced.
* The increase in peacetime military potential and the organization of a large number of naval and air bases both in the US and beyond its borders are clear indicators of the US desire to establish world domination.
* For the first time in the country’s history in the summer of 1946 Congress adopted a law to form a peacetime army not of volunteers but on the basis of universal military conscription. The size of the Army, which is to reach 1 million men as of 1 July 1947, has been considerably increased. At the end of the war the size of the US Navy was reduced quite insignificantly compared to wartime. At the present time the US Navy occupies first place in the world, leaving the British Royal Navy far behind, not to mention other powers.The colossal growth of expenditures for the Army and Navy, comprising $13 billion in the 1946-1947 budget (about 40% of the entire budget of $36 billion) and is more than 10 times the corresponding expenditures in the 1938 budget, when it did not even reach $1 billion.
* These enormous budget sums are being spent along with the maintenance of a large Army, Navy, and Air Force and also the creation of a vast system of naval and air bases in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. According to available official plans, in the coming years 228 bases, support bases, and radio stations are to be built in the Atlantic Ocean and 258 in the Pacific Ocean. The majority of these bases and support bases are located outside the United States.
* The situating of American bases on islands often 10-12,000 kilometers from US territory and located on the other side of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans clearly shows the aggressive nature of the strategic designs of the US Army and Navy. The fact that the US Navy is studying the naval approaches to European shores in a concentrated manner is also confirmation of this.
* All these facts clearly show that their armed forces are designed to play a decisive role in the realization of plans to establish American world domination.
* In recent years American capital has been being introduced into the economies of Middle Eastern countries quite intensively, particularly in the oil industry. At the present time there are American oil concessions in all the Middle East countries which have sources of oil (Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia). American capital, which first appeared in the Middle East oil industry only in 1927, now controls about 42% of the total proven reserves of the Middle East (less Iran). Of the total proven reserves of 26.8 billion barrels of oil 11 billion belong to US concessions.
* Palestine, where the US has recently displayed great interest, creating many difficulties for Britain, can be cited as an example of the quite sharp differences in US and British policy in the Middle East as is occurring in the case of the demand of the US government to allow 100,000 European Jews into Palestine. American interest in Palestine, outwardly expressed in sympathy for the Zionist cause, actually only means that American capital is expecting to become rootedin the economy of Palestine by interfering in Palestinian affairs. The choice of a Palestinian port as one of the terminal points of the American oil pipeline explains a lot about American foreign policy on the issue of Palestine.
* And he concludes with this:
* All these steps to preserve the great military potential are not an end in itself, of course. They are intended only to prepare conditions to win world domination in a new war being planned by the most warlike circles of American imperialism, the timeframe for which, needless to say, no one can determine right now.It ought to be fully realized that American preparations for a future war are being conducted with the idea of war against the Soviet Union, which in the eyes of American imperialists is the chief obstacle in the American path to world domination. Such facts as the tactical training of the US Army for war with the USSR as a future enemy, the situating of American strategic bases in regions from which strikes can be launched on Soviet territory, the intensified training and reinforcement of Arctic regions as tactical approaches to the USSR, and attempts to pave the way in Germany and Japan to use them in a war against the USSR testify to this.
* So this is the internal view of the U.S. in 1946 from the Soviet ambassador.

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* Stalin’s speech in February 1946 wasn’t a declaration of war.
* It wasn’t anything that couldn’t have been said in the past.
* He issued no direct threats toward the United States, and emphasized above all else the security of the Soviet state and the communist experiment.
* Rather, Stalin showed, if his previous words and actions had been insufficient, that he regarded the postwar world as a continuing realm of competition in which the Soviet system would fight for its survival in the face of capitalist encroachment.
* Close ties with the West were not in the cards.
* The situation, as far as he was concerned, was the same as it had been before the Great Patriotic War: rivalry was inevitable, broad-ranging cooperation all but impossible.
* And that’s when George F. Kennan, counselor at the American embassy in Moscow, when asked to explain Stalin’s position, wrote his famous 5,500-word answer (not 8000 words, as it’s often referred to) in the form of a telegram he sent to the State Department.
* It’s known as the “Long Telegram”
* We’ve mentioned Kennan a few times in the past, but I think we should stop for a minute and do a small bio.
* After all, the man did more to shape United States policy during the cold war than any other person.
* George FROST Kennan was born in 1904
* His mother died two months later from a ruptured appendix.
* But for a long time Kennan thought she died giving birth to him.
* Which has to be some kind of burden as a kid.
* Growing up he wasn’t close to his father or stepmother.
* But at the age of 8 he went to Germany to stay with his stepmother in order to learn German.
* It was the first of numerous languages he would eventually master: Russian, French, Polish, Czech, Portuguese and Norwegian.
* So this would have been around 1912.
* Just before WWI.
* He eventually got a bachelor’s degree in History from Princeton in 1925 and went to work for the United Stated Foreign Service which had only been created the previous year.
* his first job was as a vice consul in Geneva, Switzerland
* Then he was transferred to a post in Hamburg, Germany where he was selected for a linguist training program that lasted three years.
* In 1929 Kennan began his program on history, politics, culture, and the Russian language at the University of Berlin’s Oriental Institute.
* He was following in the footsteps of his grandfather’s younger cousin, also called George Kennan,who was a major 19th century expert on Imperial Russia.
* And by 1931 he was in Latvia, where he worked on Soviet economic affairs.
* When the U.S. began formal diplomacy with the Soviet government during 1933, Kennan went to Moscow with the U.S.Ambassador, William C. Bullitt.
* Who of course Steve McQueen portrayed in the 1968 film BULLITT.
* Joking.
* Bullitt was actually fired from that job in 1936 when a journalist blew the whistle on him for being involved in the illegal money exchanges in Russia.
* He was briefly engaged to Roosevelt’s personal secretary and lifelong companion, Missy LeHand (Job), but she broke off the engagement after a trip to Moscow during which she reportedly discovered him to be having an affair with Olga Lepeshinskaya, who was Stalin’s favourite ballet dancer, and maybe mistress.
* Bullitt’s second wife, BTW, was Louise Bryant, author of Six Red Months in Russia, played by Diane Keaton in the 1981 film REDS.
* He divorced her when he found out she was having a lesbian affair with English sculptor Gwen Le Gallienne.
* ANYWAY.
* Back to Kennan.
* Kennan served as deputy head of the mission in Moscow until April 1946.
* Near the end of that term, the Treasury Department requested that the State Department explain recent Soviet behavior, such as its disinclination to endorse the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
* Kennan wrote his long telegram to Secretary of State James Byrnes, outlining a new strategy for diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
* In his “Long Telegram”, Kennan explained that at the “bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is the traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity”.
* After the Russian Revolution, this sense of insecurity became mixed with communist ideology and “Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy”.
* So The Soviet Union’s relations with the West were merely the latest rendition of the long Russian tradition of diplomatic cynicism and duplicity.
* Russian statesmen regarded international cooperation as a ruse to lower the guard of the gullible.
* Only fools kept their word on the international stage.
* This had always been the attitude of Russian leaders, and such cynicism was only magnified and given ideological depth by the struggle between Soviet socialism and the imperialist West.
* Nothing the United States might do would earn Moscow’s trust, so irreducibly hardened were these views.
* according to Kennan, Stalin needed a hostile world in order to legitimize his autocratic rule.
* Stalin thus used Marxism-Leninism as a “justification for the Soviet Union’s instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand … Today they cannot dispense with it. It is the fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability”.
* Now – you’re going to like this.
* Here’s the opening paragraph to the long telegram.
* Answer to Dept’s 284, Feb 3 involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be dangerous degree of over-simplification.
* Sound familiar?
* I want to read Part 1 of the telegram, because it does a pretty good job of setting out the worldview of Stalin.
* Part 1: Basic Features of Post War Soviet Outlook, as Put Forward by Official Propaganda Machine Are as Follows:
* (a) USSR still lives in antagonistic “capitalist encirclement” with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence. As stated by Stalin in 1927 to a delegation of American workers:
* “In course of further development of international revolution there will emerge two centers of world significance: a socialist center, drawing to itself the countries which tend toward socialism, and a capitalist center, drawing to itself the countries that incline toward capitalism. Battle between these two centers for command of world economy will decide fate of capitalism and of communism in entire world.”
* (b) Capitalist world is beset with internal conflicts, inherent in nature of capitalist society. These conflicts are insoluble by means of peaceful compromise. Greatest of them is that between England and US.
* (c) Internal conflicts of capitalism inevitably generate wars. Wars thus generated may be of two kinds: intra-capitalist wars between two capitalist states, and wars of intervention against socialist world. Smart capitalists, vainly seeking escape from inner conflicts of capitalism, incline toward latter.
* (d) Intervention against USSR, while it would be disastrous to those who undertook it, would cause renewed delay in progress of Soviet socialism and must therefore be forestalled at all costs.
* (e) Conflicts between capitalist states, though likewise fraught with danger for USSR, nevertheless hold out great possibilities for advancement of socialist cause, particularly if USSR remains militarily powerful, ideologically monolithic and faithful to its present brilliant leadership.
* (f) It must be borne in mind that capitalist world is not all bad. In addition to hopelessly reactionary and bourgeois elements, it includes (1) certain wholly enlightened and positive elements united in acceptable communistic parties and (2) certain other elements (now described for tactical reasons as progressive or democratic) whose reactions, aspirations and activities happen to be “objectively” favorable to interests of USSR These last must be encouraged and utilized for Soviet purposes.
* (g) Among negative elements of bourgeois-capitalist society, most dangerous of all are those whom Lenin called false friends of the people, namely moderate-socialist or social-democratic leaders (in other words, non-Communist left-wing). These are more dangerous than out-and-out reactionaries, for latter at least march under their true colors, whereas moderate left-wing leaders confuse people by employing devices of socialism to seine interests of reactionary capital.
* So much for premises. To what deductions do they lead from standpoint of Soviet policy? To following:
* (a) Everything must be done to advance relative strength of USSR as factor in international society. Conversely, no opportunity most be missed to reduce strength and influence, collectively as well as individually, of capitalist powers.
* (b) Soviet efforts, and those of Russia’s friends abroad, must be directed toward deepening and exploiting of differences and conflicts between capitalist powers. If these eventually deepen into an “imperialist” war, this war must be turned into revolutionary upheavals within the various capitalist countries.
* (c) “Democratic-progressive” elements abroad are to be utilized to maximum to bring pressure to bear on capitalist governments along lines agreeable to Soviet interests.
* (d) Relentless battle must be waged against socialist and social-democratic leaders abroad.
* The rest of the telegram makes for fascinating reading and his description of Stalin-era U.S.S.R. really sounds a LOT like the present United States.
* Take this, for example: The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth–indeed, their disbelief in its existence–leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another. There is good reason to suspect that this Government is actually a conspiracy within a conspiracy; and I for one am reluctant to believe that Stalin himself receives anything like an objective picture of outside world.
* And let me finish by reading his conclusions:
* As to how this approach should be made, I only wish to advance, by way of conclusion, following comments:
* (1) Our first step must be to apprehend, and recognize for what it is, the nature of the movement with which we are dealing. We must study it with same courage, detachment, objectivity, and same determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it, with which doctor studies unruly and unreasonable individual.
* (2) We must see that our public is educated to realities of Russian situation. I cannot over-emphasize importance of this. Press cannot do this alone. It must be done mainly by Government, which is necessarily more experienced and better informed on practical problems involved. In this we need not be deterred by [ugliness?] of picture. I am convinced that there would be far less hysterical anti-Sovietism in our country today if realities of this situation were better understood by our people. There is nothing as dangerous or as terrifying as the unknown. It may also be argued that to reveal more information on our difficulties with Russia would reflect unfavorably on Russian-American relations. I feel that if there is any real risk here involved, it is one which we should have courage to face, and sooner the better. But I cannot see what we would be risking. Our stake in this country, even coming on heels of tremendous demonstrations of our friendship for Russian people, is remarkably small. We have here no investments to guard, no actual trade to lose, virtually no citizens to protect, few cultural contacts to preserve. Our only stake lies in what we hope rather than what we have; and I am convinced we have better chance of realizing those hopes if our public is enlightened and if our dealings with Russians are placed entirely on realistic and matter-of-fact basis.
* (3) Much depends on health and vigor of our own society. World communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue. This is point at which domestic and foreign policies meets Every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqués. If we cannot abandon fatalism and indifference in face of deficiencies of our own society, Moscow will profit–Moscow cannot help profiting by them in its foreign policies.
* (4) We must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in past. It is not enough to urge people to develop political processes similar to our own. Many foreign peoples, in Europe at least, are tired and frightened by experiences of past, and are less interested in abstract freedom than in security. They are seeking guidance rather than responsibilities. We should be better able than Russians to give them this. And unless we do, Russians certainly will.
* (5) Finally we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After Al, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.

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* In October 1945, Navy Day 1945 in New York City, at the Commissioning of the aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman gave a speech.
* Here’s a clip.
* https://youtu.be/BjUz4BPWwbc?t=2m21s
* FAKE TRUMAN ACCENT: “We don’t seek any more land – because we already took as much as we could from the Native Americans, and the Mexicans, and the Hawaiians, and the Spanish.”
* He went on to say The world “cannot afford any letdown in the united determination of the allies in this war to accomplish a lasting peace.”‘
* So he’s all about working with the Soviets and finding a lasting peace.
* Or is he?
* Privately it seems like he didn’t believe peace with the U.S.S.R. was possible.
* Like FDR before him, Truman envisioned a world with open international trade – something the U.S. economy desperately needed – which meant global capitalism.
* But the U.S.S.R. had just turned back the Nazis, fighting them for years without much support, and had played a huge role in their final defeat.
* and they had the world’s largest land army.
* They weren’t about to kowtow to the American new world order.
* The only way the USA could force the Soviets to go along with it was war.
* And the Soviets had just proven – again – how difficult their country was to invade.
* And the American people wouldn’t support another war.
* Especially not to overthrow a recent ally, just because they wanted to enforce their own new world order.
* Not yet, anyway.
* Some in Washington believed the U.S. had no real choice but to find a way to work with the USSR
* Other believed the Soviets couldn’t be trusted, and pointed to Poland, Bulgaria and Romania.
* They conveniently ignored the places where the Soviets had kept to their agreements – Greece, Czechoslovakia, Hungary.
* As of October 1945, Truman and his inner circle seem to have no grand strategy regarding working with the Soviets at this stage.
* But over the next few months, they started concluding that they weren’t going to be able to work with Stalin.
* And by late 1947, the term “Cold War” had already entered the political lexicon.
* and America’s containment strategy had been implemented.
* At the end of World War II the United States possessed far and away the world’s largest economy.
* Its GDP was five times that of Great Britain, four times that of the Soviet Union.
* As we’ve pointed out many times – this was mostly due to the fact that the U.S. was the only major economy not flattened by the war.
* And now it also had the bomb.
* Initially Truman and Byrnes, his new Sec of State, thought they could dangle the bomb in front of Stalin as a way to induce him to accept their view of the world.
* Not in a “do it or we’ll drop it on you” approach, although that was always an unspoken threat, but in a “do it and we might share our atomic secrets with you” approach.
* Of course, what they didn’t know at the time, was they didn’t HAVE any secrets.
* Stalin knew it all.
* In the first Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) conference, which took place in London from September 11 to October 2, Byrnes tried to use a combination of threats and sweets to get Molotov to budge on a range of issues – the control of Germany and eastern Europe – but Molotov just laughed in his face.
* By December, Byrnes had been told by Truman to stop trying to woo the Russians.
* In fact, Truman got all up in his face for trying to conclude a deal without the White House’s approval.
* He felt Byrnes had over-stepped his authority.
* It’s like Truman has become Stalin and Byrnes is Molotov.
* Truman is beginning to mistrust and sideline Byrnes already and he’s only six months into the job of SoS.
* Now Truman is going to start playing tough again with the Russians.
* In September the departing secretary of war, Henry Stimson, suddenly made an impassioned plea for international atomic control, spelling out to the president and the rest of the cabinet very clearly exactly what was required.
* “I consider the problem of our satisfactory relations with Russia as not merely connected but as virtually dominated by the problem of the atomic bomb;” the veteran statesman said in a secret White House meeting.’
* His logic was simple.
* The United States and Great Britain had kept the building of the bomb a secret from their Soviet ally and had used it ruthlessly to end the war in Japan.
* This collusion and secrecy with respect to a manifestly powerful weapon was so threatening to the Kremlin that it would take all steps necessary to build a comparable weapon for itself.
* Once it did so, Stimson maintained, an arms race would ensue and the prospect of international cooperation would disappear. Hence the necessity of moving quickly to reach a deal with the Soviet Union that could lead to the establishment of a truly international agency in control of all atomic technologies.
* Without such an agency, the two new powers would sooner or later commence an atomic arms race.
* But his plea fell on deaf ears.
* Speaking to reporters “on the record;’ Truman vowed that the United States would never transfer its atomic material and scientific facilities to an international agency, and added that if other nations wanted the bomb they should acquire it “on their own hook.”
* In a speech to Congress in December he called for a foreign policy built on military power.
* He was quite clear – The United States would not cooperate seriously with the Kremlin on the question of atomic control and would not use its bomb monopoly as a negotiating tool to secure Soviet concessions either.
* This was partly about domestic politics.
* Truman wanted to look tough on the Soviet issue to disarm any criticism of him or the Democrats so they could maintain their majority in Congress after the 1946 midterm elections.
* But there was another reason.
* In September, just as Stimson was pleading for cooperation and as Byrnes and Molotov were meeting in London, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover informed Truman that a massive spy ring operating out of Ottawa had infiltrated the Manhattan Project with Canadian and American spies working for Moscow.
* Washington officials had known of this network since 1942, but new revelations from the Canadian government indicated that the scale of the espionage was much greater than had been previously suspected.
* Truman was incensed!
* How DARE Stalin put spies inside the Manhattan Project?!
* It’s almost like he didn’t trust the Americans to share the knowledge with him, their ally!
* Oh wait, that’s right, they didn’t.
* But STILL.
* He didn’t know that at the time!
* So all of a sudden, Truman better understood why Stalin was giving them the middle finger in negotiations.
* Maybe he knew he could build his own bomb.
* But a third reason Truman went tough on Stalin was that if the news got out that the Soviets had infiltrated the Manhattan Project on the Democrats watch, it was going to look VERY bad.
* Especially as many of its spies were American citizens, and – as Hoover would later make abundantly clear to Truman – that many of these individuals had connections to leading Democratic Party figures in the State Department and elsewhere, the damage to his party and to his own political stature could be devastating.
* if such revelations were made public at the same time that Truman was proposing to give away America’s atomic bombs to an international agency, the ensuing political assault on the White House would have been incalculable.
* The espionage revelations made serious international control a political impossibility for the president, and further inclined him to regard the Soviet Union with suspicion and hostility.
* None of this was yet public knowledge.
* As far as the American people were aware, the Soviet Union was still an ally, and the administration’s plans for the postwar world were still wholly undetermined.
* Truman faced an array of foreign policy criticism on this question in the first weeks of 1946.
* There was still a lingering suspicion of American internationalism throughout parts of both the Democratic and Republican parties, especially among politicians wary of Great Britain and those keen to reduce the power of the federal government now that the war had ended.
* Many liberals in the Democratic Party – led by Henry Wallace, vice president under Roosevelt during much of the war and now Truman’s secretary of commerce – Roosevelt appointed Wallace to be Secretary of Commerce in January 1945, shortly before Roosevelt’s death, as a sort of consolation prize for losing the vice presidency – were unhappy with the increasingly frosty nature of the Soviet-American relationship and demanded that Truman honor Roosevelt’s call for a perpetuation of the Grand Alliance to keep the postwar peace.
* Conversely, many influential Republicans, sensing a political opening, argued that the administration was dangerously slow to respond to the Soviet threat and pressed for a more resolute policy.
* Fortunately, the American public didn’t know about the Soviet spy ring.
* That all changed in February 1946, when the syndicated columnist Drew Pearson gave a radio address where he said a source inside the government leaked him secret details on an extensive Soviet atomic espionage network operating out of Canada.
* That source?
* Probably J Edgar Hoover.
* When the Canadians confirmed the story a couple of weeks later, there was “near-hysteria” in many newspapers and throughout Washington during the second half of February.
* Not only had America’s wartime ally run a major-and apparently quite effective-espionage operation during the war; the operation evidently had been conducted largely by American citizens, secretly working for Moscow while they went about their treacherous business in Los Alamos or Washington.
* The public effect of the Pearson revelations did not come to full fruition until the heyday of McCarthyism in 1950-1953, but the political impact on Truman’s foreign policy was immediate.
* Of course, after this revelation, an international atomic deal, especially with the Russians, was totally off the cards.
* In fact, Truman was so shaken by the Pearson scandal that he canceled an atomic cooperation deal with Great Britain, reneging on a promise Roosevelt had made to Churchill in 1944.
* Then, on cue, In a public speech on February 9, Stalin announced that his government would maintain its wartime (and prewar) policies of state control over the economy and would continue to divert maximum resources toward heavy industry and military production.
* Stalin did not attribute the policies he was announcing to American behavior as such but rather to the need for the USSR to maintain its military strength in a world of continuing imperialism.
* He endorsed Lenin’s line that the nations of the West were impelled by the logic of late capitalism toward unending conflict and war.
* The Soviet Union would not be caught up in this logic, but it could find itself-as it did in 1941-in a capitalist war not of its own making.
* Until the global triumph of communism, Stalin maintained, the world would be dangerous and the threat to the Soviet Union imminent.
* The aspirations of the long-suffering Soviet citizenry for prosperity and domestic reform would have to wait.

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* The military had long declared that radiation dissipated quickly in the atomic cities and posed little threat to the soldiers.
* A 1980 Defense Nuclear Agency report concluded, “Medical science believes multiple myeloma has a borderline relationship with exposure to ionizing radiation. That is, there are some indications that exposure to radiation may increase the risk of this disease, but science cannot yet be sure.”
* In the years that followed, thousands of other “atomic vets,” among the legion who participated in hundreds of U.S. bomb tests in Nevada and in the Pacific, would raise similar issues about exposure to radiation and the medical after-effects.
* The Japanese government repeatedly asked the U.S. for the full footage of what was known in that country as “the film of illusion,” to no avail.
* A rare article about what it called this “sensitive” dispute appeared in the New York Times on May 18, 1967, declaring right in its headline that the film had been “Suppressed by U.S. for 22 Years.”
* Surprisingly, it revealed that while some of the footage was already in Japan (likely a reference to the film hidden in the ceiling), the U.S. had put a “hold” on the Japanese using it — even though the American control of that country had ceased many years earlier.
* Then, one morning in the summer of 1968, Erik Barnouw, author of landmark histories of film and broadcasting, opened his mail to discover a clipping from a Tokyo newspaper sent by a friend.
* It indicated that the U.S. had finally shipped to Japan a copy of black and white newsreel footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
* The Japanese had negotiated with the State Department for its return.
* From the Pentagon, Barnouw learned in 1968 that the original nitrate film had been quietly turned over to the National Archives, so he went to take a look.
* So he got his hands on it and made a short 16 film, “Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945”.
* He arranged a screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and invited the press.
* He approached the three TV networks that existed back then and offered them the film, but none expressed interest in airing it.
* Despite this exposure, not a single story had yet appeared in an American newspaper about the shooting of the footage, its suppression or release.
* When that footage finally emerged, journalist Greg Mitchell spoke with the man at the center of the drama: Lt. Col. Daniel A. McGovern, who directed the U.S. military film-makers in 1945-1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades.
* McGovern told him: “I always had the sense, that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force — it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn’t want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child….They didn’t want the general public to know what their weapons had done — at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn’t want the material out because…we were sorry for our sins. But the AEC, they were the ones that stopped it from coming out. They had power of God over everybody. If it had anything to do with nukes, they had to see it. They were the ones who destroyed a lot of film and pictures of the first U.S. nuclear tests after the war.
* He later said: “The main reason it was classified was…because of the horror, the devastation.”
* Because the footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was hidden for so long, the atomic bombings quickly sank, unconfronted and unresolved, into the deeper recesses of American awareness, as a costly nuclear arms race, and nuclear proliferation, accelerated.
* Four days after Wilfred Burchett’s story – remember him from the last episode? Aussie journalist, first into Hiroshima? – splashed across front pages around the world, Major General Leslie Groves, director of the atomic bomb project, invited a select group of thirty reporters to New Mexico.
* Foremost among this group was William L. Laurence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for The New York Times.
* Groves took the reporters to the site of the first atomic test.
* His intent was to demonstrate that no atomic radiation lingered at the site.
* Groves trusted Laurence to convey the military’s line; the general was not disappointed.
* Laurence’s front-page story, U.S. ATOM BOMB SITE BELIES TOKYO TALES: TESTS ON NEW MEXICO RANGE CONFIRM THAT BLAST, AND NOT RADIATION, TOOK TOLL, ran on September 12, 1945, following a three-day delay to clear military censors.
* “This historic ground in New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion on earth and cradle of a new era in civilization, gave the most effective answer today to Japanese propaganda that radiations [sic] were responsible for deaths even after the day of the explosion, Aug. 6, and that persons entering Hiroshima had contracted mysterious maladies due to persistent radioactivity,” the article began.
* Laurence said unapologetically that the Army tour was intended “to give the lie to these claims.”
* Laurence quoted General Groves: “The Japanese claim that people died from radiation. If this is true, the number was very small.”
* Laurence then went on to offer his own remarkable editorial on what happened: “The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms. Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described ‘symptoms’ that did not ring true.”
* Laurence went on to write a series of ten articles for the Times that served as a glowing tribute to the ingenuity and technical achievements of the nuclear program.
* Throughout these and other reports, he downplayed and denied the human impact of the bombing.
* Laurence won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.
* He was wrong about the Trinity site.
* Today the radiation levels at the site are 10 times greater than the region’s natural background radiation.
* Of course that’s probably one of the main reasons the U.S. wanted to discredit the connection between atomic bombs and dangerous radiation.
* THEY HAD BLOWN ONE UP IN NEW MEXICO.
* Imagine what the locals would do if they thought they were eating irradiated food and breathing in irradiated air?
* Which, of course, they were.
* For years, many of the residents of Tularosa, a small town roughly 35 miles from the Trinity site, have experienced unusually high rates of cancer.
* They are known as “downwinders”.
* For the past several years, a bill to list residents near the Trinity site under the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act has been rejected repeatedly by Congress.
* Of course, the U.S. didn’t stop testing nuclear weapons after Trinity.
* United States has conducted 1,054 nuclear weapons tests to date, involving at least 1,151 nuclear devices, most of which occurred at Nevada Test Site and the Pacific Proving Grounds in the Marshall Islands, with ten other tests taking place at various locations in the United States, including Alaska, Colorado, Mississippi, and New Mexico.
* Lots of downwinders in Arizona, Nevada and Utah but also in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.
* Chrissy’s hometown in Utah as well.
* Several severe adverse health effects, such as an increased incidence of cancers, thyroid diseases, CNS neoplasms, and possibly female reproductive cancers that could lead to congenital malformations have been observed in “downwind” communities exposed to nuclear fallout and radioactive contamination.
* From 1951 to 1962 the AEC detonated more than 100 bombs, sending huge pinkish plumes of radioactive dust across the stony valleys and canyons of southern Utah and northern Arizona.
* It gave each “shot” names like Annie, Eddie, Humboldt and Badger.
* The official advice: enjoy the show.
* “Your best action is not to be worried about fallout,” said an AEC booklet.
* Families and lovers would drive to vantage points for the spectacle, then drive home as ash wafted down on their communities.
* It was a cheap date.
* At first the local press cheered the chance to beat the Russians and be part of history.
* “Spectacular Atomic Explosions Mean Progress in Defense, No Cause For Panic,” said an editorial in the The Deseret News.
* Eleven bombs were detonated in 1953, including several between March and June that coated St George, Utah, a small town about half an hour away from Chrissy’s hometown, and other towns in grey dust.
* A year later St George hosted the filming of The Conqueror, a big budget blockbuster about Genghis Khan, starring John Wayne.
* Of course.
* Who else?
* A People magazine article in 1980 reported that of 220 cast and crew, 91 had contracted cancer, with 46 of them dying.
* Including The Duke, plus leading lady Susan Hayward, director Dick Powell and dozens of other cast and crew members.
* Wayne’s two sons, Patrick and Michael, who were on location, also got cancer.
* Back to journalist William L. Laurence, the guy who wrote there was no radiation from Trinity.
* Apparenlty he was not only receiving a salary from The New York Times.
* He was also on the payroll of the War Department.
* In March 1945, General Leslie Groves had held a secret meeting at The New York Times with Laurence to offer him a job writing press releases for the Manhattan Project, the U.S. program to develop atomic weapons.
* The intent, according to the Times, was “to explain the intricacies of the atomic bomb’s operating principles in laymen’s language.”
* Laurence also helped write statements on the bomb for President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.
* A curious twist to this story concerns another New York Times journalist who reported on Hiroshima; his name, believe it or not, was William Lawrence (his byline was W.H. Lawrence).
* He has long been confused with William L. Laurence.
* Unlike the War Department’s Pulitzer Prize winner, W.H. Lawrence visited and reported on Hiroshima on the same day as Burchett.
* W.H. Lawrence’s original dispatch from Hiroshima was published on September 5, 1945.
* He reported matter-of-factly about the deadly effects of radiation, and wrote that Japanese doctors worried that “all who had been in Hiroshima that day would die as a result of the bomb’s lingering effects.”
* He described how “persons who had been only slightly injured on the day of the blast lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles, developed temperatures of 104 degrees Fahrenheit, their hair began to drop out, they lost their appetites, vomited blood and finally died.”
* Oddly enough, W.H. Lawrence contradicted himself one week later in an article headlined NO RADIOACTIVITY IN HIROSHIMA RUIN.
* For this article, the Pentagon’s spin machine had swung into high gear in response to Burchett’s horrifying account of “atomic plague.”
* W.H. Lawrence reported that Brigadier General T. F. Farrell, chief of the War Department’s atomic bomb mission to Hiroshima, “denied categorically that [the bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.”
* Lawrence’s dispatch quotes only Farrell; the reporter never mentions his eyewitness account of people dying from radiation sickness that he wrote the previous week.
* I even found an article from 09 August1945 where Robert Oppenheimer was quoted as saying he didn’t think there would be any residual radiation in Hiroshima.
* And in case you’re thinking they didn’t know any better – from the same article, Dr Harold Jacobsen from Columbia University, who specialised in atomic research, said he thought the radiation at Hiroshima could linger for 70 years.
* As it turns out, the radiation levels at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki today are neglible.
* Why?
* A bomb which detonates near or on the ground has a greater chance of producing radioactive fallout than one which is detonated high in the air.
* If a bomb was detonated in the air, the hot, radioactive ball of fire travels up high into the stratosphere.
* It does this quickly, usually within minutes.
* The cloud then cools down and begins to look like a regular (albeit irregular shaped) cloud.
* But don’t let this fool you, it is still hot and radioactive.
* Prevailing winds will blow this cloud over a huge area.
* The residual heat and lightness of the particles will keep it in the atmosphere for a few weeks, after which, the particles begin to “fall out” and come back down to earth.
* By this time, the radioactive particles have been dispersed and diluted over a thousands of square miles with the most dangerous radioactive elements already rendered inert by decay.
* The bombs dropped on Japan were detonated high up in the air so the radioactive fireball did not touch the ground.
* This dramatically reduced the radioactive fallout.
* However, the U.S. didn’t do this out of consideration, rather, it just happened to be the ideal height to maximize the destruction of the structures within the city.
* Also – during the re-building of the cities, radioactive materials, like rubble, would be cleared away.
* Rain and snow would wash more of it away, below ground and into rivers where it would be dispersed.
* Since then, approximately 1,900 people in Hiroshima, or about 0.5% of the post-bombing population, are believed to have died from cancers attributable to Little Boy’s radiation release.
* No data on subsequent cancer deaths attributable to radiation exposure from Fat Man, the Nagasaki bomb, is readily available.

* In 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. President to visit Hiroshima – 71 years after the bomb was dropped.
* He said: We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner.
* Some day, the voices of the hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, must never fade.
* It was a good speech.
* But he didn’t apologise on behalf of his country.
* Should he have?
* Whenever I read Americans discussing the question of an apology to Japan, I normally read a few common arguments for it.
* The first is “They started it.”
* Well no, they didn’t start it.
* As I’ve pointed out before, America was already engaged in an economic war with Japan, they had put economic sanctions on them before Pearl Harbour.
* And the U.S. had moved their fleet to Hawaii which was obviously signalling their intention to attack Japanese troops in China.
* When you’re acting aggressive towards another country, and they decide to retaliate, are they striking first?
* The other argument I hear is DRESDEN.
* People say “more civilians died in Dresdan than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined and we didn’t apologise to them”.
* Both of which are true.
* But that’s not a great argument either.
* I didn’t apologise to THIS guy so why should I apologse to THAT guy?
* Do the Japanese want an apology?
* It seems that some don’t.
* A secret 2009 state department cable published by Wikileaks in 2011 indicated Japan was cool to the idea and worried that it would only serve to energize anti-nuclear activists in the country.
* In 2007, during Shinzo Abe’s first term as prime minister, Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma referred to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “something that couldn’t be helped.”
* While opposition leaders took issue with that position, the government’s official stance was that it would be more meaningful for the U.S. and Japan to “aim for a peaceful and safe world without nuclear weapons.”
* One of their concerns might be that if the U.S. apologises to Japan, then the Japanese will face pressure to apologise to China and Australia and the Phillipines for their own war crimes during WWII and other conflicts.
* But is that a bad thing?
* Why is it such a bad thing to apologise for things we, as nations, have done?
* “It’s in the past” some people say.
* Well duh doy.
* Everything we ever apologise for is in the past, you dumbass.
* Is that how you handle your personal relationships?
* Do you say to your spouse, “I’m not going to apologise, it’s in the past”??
* Good luck with that if you do.
* Why do we ever apologise for things we’ve done?
* Because it’s a sign of humility.
* It’s a sign of maturity.
* It’s a sign of sincerity.
* It’s a sign that we care about others and want to mend their hurt in order that we might have a healthy relationship with the moving forward.
* I think the real reason people, especially politicians don’t want to apologise, is that they are afraid it’s an admission of guilt, which could lead to lawsuits.
* But that’s a legal matter.
* From a moral perspective, I say, let’s apologise, often and sincerely.
* Even if we don’t think we are totally in the wrong.
* If I say something that hurts Chrissy’s feelings, even if I think it was innocent, or if I think she was mean first, I can either dig my heels in, in which case we’re going to have a bad couple of days, or I can just say “I’m sorry” and we can move on.
* Why is it different between nations?
* And let’s be clear.
* Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, collective punishment is a war crime.
* ARTICLE 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states:
* No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
* Now, you will say, “but that wasn’t written until 1949”.
* True.
* But the fact that it *was* written a mere four years after WWII, implies that people living in that day KNEW that collective punishment was immoral.
* Is there any sensible argument that the nuclear attacks on Japan, and the fire bombings of Dresden, Tokyo and other cities, weren’t a form of collective punishment as defined by the Geneva Convention?
* I can’t think of one.
* And if they are wrong, wrong now, wrong then, shouldn’t the countries who committed them, apologise for them?
* I asked the question on Facebook and my old mate Rod Adams gave the best reply:
* As I understand “collective punishment” it’s about holding innocent people accountable for offenses committed by others. Large scale strategic bombing wasn’t, in the minds of most decision makers, aimed at punishing anyone. It was ostensibly a tactic design to contribute to achieving victory. By the time those actions were taken, the generally accepted definition for victory in WWII was “unconditional surrender.”
* But I don’t think the justification for attacking civilians makes much of a difference as to whether or not it’s classified as collective punishment.
* Today a fundamental principle of international humanitarian law is that parties to a conflict must distinguish between combatants and civilians, and may not deliberately target civilians or civilian objects.
* Article 33 of the 4th GC states “No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed.”
* I think the bombing of a civilian population to try to force politicians to surrender would today be considered ‘Measures of intimidation or of terrorism’.

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