[Modern History] Guns Condoms and Electricity

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Oglethorpe: Aug 8, 2005

vyelkin posted:

I want a miniseries about the Russian Revolution starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Lenin

will you accept patrick stewart?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Eagles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkY88kvkdvU

# ? Oct 25, 2022 22:02

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# ? May 23, 2024 05:24

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Suplex Liberace posted:

ok thats good to know i found a cheap copy of his book on china restless empire i will check it out

oh I haven't read that one so idk if it specifically is good but I like both The Cold War and The Global Cold War

# ? Oct 25, 2022 22:54

Weka: May 5, 2019; Can't post for 22 hours!

What's the source for CIA involvement in the 1956 Hungarian revolution? I'm pretty sure it's come up in this thread before.

# ? Oct 25, 2022 23:33

Teriyaki Hairpiece: Dec 29, 2006; I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

Oglethorpe posted:

will you accept patrick stewart?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Eagles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkY88kvkdvU

Fall of Eagles is primo TV for an afternoon where you have a really bad wine hangover and it's cold and gray outside

# ? Oct 26, 2022 01:24

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

Nice little article in the NLR blog marking the 100th anniversary of the March on Rome by noting how fascism was never socialist, it was always an illiberal way to preserve and advance liberal economics.

quote:

The Nightwatchman�s Bludgeon
ALBERTO TOSCANO
29 OCTOBER 2022

On 29 October 1922, Benito Mussolini was propelled to power by the March on Rome, inaugurating L�Era fascista. The date was subsequently declared the first day of Year One of the Fascist calendar. Like any founding event, the March was also the staging of a spectacle and the forging of a myth. An early and opportunistic reader of Georges Sorel�s Reflections on Violence (1908), Mussolini was persuaded that politics was inseparable from mythmaking, that it was a kind of mythopoiesis. In his Naples speech a few days before the March, he announced that

We have created our myth. Myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary that it be a reality. It is a reality to the extent that it is a goad, a hope, faith, courage. Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the greatness of the Nation. And to this myth, to this greatness � which we want to translate into a fulfilled reality � we subordinate everything else. For the Nation is above all Spirit and not just territory.

The myth of the Nation, of its lost and future greatness, continues to animate the resurgent far right across the globe. As in the speech delivered this week by the new Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, this myth is now often accompanied by paeans to �freedom� which are meant to serve as antidotes to lingering suspicions of authoritarianism. This is not freedom as emancipation or liberation, but market freedom � yoked to what Meloni, quoting Pope John Paul II, described as �the right to do what one must�. Without rushing to shaky historical analogies, it may help to revisit fascism�s origins, one hundred years since its emergence, in order to understand its particular relationship with the market, and complicate the widespread perception of it as liberalism�s antithesis.

The March as myth � as the daring, virile show of strength that spawned the fascist state � was not just hammered home in Fascist hagiography or in the retroactive mise-en-sc�ne of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, first held in 1932. It also served as a model � a consequential myth � for Mussolini�s allies, above all for the Nazis. Hitler�s 1941 �table-talk� records the following assertion about the �heroic epic� of National Socialism�s �sister revolution�:

The brown shirt would probably not have existed without the black shirt. The march on Rome, in 1922, was one of the turning points of history. The mere fact that anything of the sort could be attempted, and could succeed, gave us an impetus�If Mussolini had been outdistanced by Marxism, I don�t know whether we could have succeeded in holding out. At that period National Socialism was a very fragile growth.

So fragile, in fact, that when Hitler attempted his own putsch in 1923, it could be dismissed in the Italian press as a �ridiculous caricature� of its Fascist paradigm.

In contrast to this mythology, historical accounts of the March tend to minimize its momentousness. Robert Paxton, in his lucid and synthetic The Anatomy of Fascism (2004), attributes its success to the debilities and ineptitudes of the Italian political classes. It �was not Fascism�s force that decided the issue�, he writes, �but the conservatives� unwillingness to risk their force� against that of Il Duce. �The �March on Rome� was a gigantic bluff that worked, and still works in the general public�s perception of Mussolini�s �seizure of power��. Salvatore Lupo, in his study of Italian Fascism�s political history, likewise notes that, with the March, �the provincial Italy of squadrismo wished to force the hand of that vast swathe of the liberal-conservative [liberal-moderato], monarchist, military and capitalist [confindustriale] establishment which looked upon the Black Shirts with sympathy but which needed to feel some menacing pressure in order to abandon the option of a centre-right government.� Seen in this light, the March on Rome was not such a heroic epic, but the achievement of �a maximum result with minimal risk�, in Emilio Gentile�s formulation.

But while it is useful to undermine fascism�s self-regarding myths, we should be wary of magnifying its parasitism on the weakness of its enemies and the complicity of its beneficiaries. In so doing, we risk presenting it as an insubstantial, almost inexplicable phenomenon. Bending the stick somewhat in the other direction, it is instructive to turn to the treatment of the March by that brilliant and ambiguous chronicler of his age, Curzio Malaparte. In his 1931 Technique of the Coup d��tat, which Mussolini banned so as not to displease Hitler (who was ridiculed in unflattering comparisons to Il Duce), Malaparte, an early participant in squadrismo and �left� Fascist, irreverently comments that Mussolini could only have commanded the �Fascist insurrectional machine� as he did because of his �Marxism�. By this Malaparte perversely meant Mussolini�s recognition of the strategic importance of defeating the working class � a victory that he claimed would also sap any other force of resistance within the state.

What Malaparte ends up describing is something like a tactics of the void. As he observes:

It was a matter not just of preventing the general strike, but also the united front of Government, Parliament and the proletariat. Fascism faced the necessity of making a void around itself, of making a tabula rasa of every organized force, whether political or synodical, proletarian or bourgeois, trade-unions, cooperatives, workers� circles, Labour Exchanges (Camere del lavoro), newspapers, political parties.

The Fascist insurrectional machine was a formidable apparatus for the organization of disorganization, the hyperpolitical imposition of a deadening depoliticization � something that it carried out on the parallel tracks of direct violence and corridor conspiracies. Malaparte signals the logistical intelligence that went into the tactics of what The Guardian described at the time as a �bloodless revolution�. It was not so much the streets or the most visible centres of power, but various material and institutional nodes � key points in Italy�s network of political energy � which were the focus of the squadristi in the preparatory stages of the March. As Malaparte recounts:

The black shirts had occupied by surprise all the strategic points of city and country, namely the organs of technical organization, gasworks, electricity plants, central post offices, telephone and telegraph exchanges, bridges, railway stations. The political and military authorities were caught unprepared by this sudden attack.

Hence the melancholy insight in the avowal of Giovanni Giolitti, the long-serving Prime Minister of Italy during the first two decades of the twentieth century: �I am indebted to Mussolini for having learned that it is not against the programme of a revolution that a state must defend itself, but against its tactics.�

But what programme accompanied these tactics? The Gramsci scholar Fabio Frosini has recently compiled an excellent critical anthology of Mussolini�s speeches and writings from 1921 to 1932 under the title The Construction of the New State. The pronouncements leading up to the March largely resonate with Malaparte�s conception. Squadrismo�s violent methods were underpinned by a pseudo-Nietzschean aristocratism that contrasted the transformative power of warrior elites with the pacifist tendencies of the proletariat. In his inaugural speech at the Chamber of Deputies, Mussolini declaimed that

it is obvious [pacifico], by now, that on the terrain of violence the working masses will be defeated � the working masses are naturally, I would dare say blessedly [santamente], peace-mongering [pacifondaie], because they always represent the static reserves of human societies, while risk, danger, the taste for adventure have always been the task and privilege of small aristocracies.

This �anthropological� dismissal of the masses� capacity for struggle was accompanied by a repudiation of Marxism, understood as an amalgam of �state socialism� and the theory of class struggle qua historical motor: �We deny that there exist two classes because there exist many more, we deny that the whole of human history can be explained by economic determinism.� In Fascism�s �synthesis of the antitheses� � class and nation � internationalism was to be vigorously repelled. For Mussolini, in a formula that finds myriad echoes in the contemporary rhetoric of reaction, internationalism was a �luxury commodity, which can only be practiced by the upper classes, while the people is desperately tied to its native land.�

But fascism�s modus operandi before the March on Rome was not just a class war against class war. Jettisoning its prior republicanism for opportunistic encomia to Army and King, it crystallized into a project of public violence for private capital. While the construction of the fascist state entailed significant movement towards administrative centralization and involvement in the economic sphere, the Mussolini of 1921�22 was emphatic about the fundamentally liberal economic philosophy of Fascism. In his inaugural parliamentary speech, Mussolini told his left-wing opponents that revisionist socialist literature had imbued him with the conviction that �only now is the true history of capitalism beginning, because capitalism is not only a system of oppression, but also a selection of values, a coordination of hierarchies, a more amply developed sense of individual responsibility.�

A belief in capitalism�s vitality supported the programmatic retraction of the state demanded by Mussolini. Saving the state, he argued, called for a �surgical operation�. If the state had a hundred arms, 95 required amputation, given �the need to reduce the state to its purely juridical and political expression�. Reading passages like the following, it is hardly mysterious why the likes of Ludwig von Mises greeted fascism�s triumph as liberalism�s salvation:

Let the State give us a police force, to save gentlemen from scoundrels, an army ready for any eventuality, a foreign policy attuned to national necessities. Everything else, and I am not even excluding secondary education, belongs to the private activity of the individual. If you wish to save the State, you have to abolish the collectivist State�and return to the Manchester state.

At the Third National Fascist Congress on 8 November 1921, Mussolini would reiterate that when it came to economic matters, fascists were �declaredly antisocialist�, which is to say �liberal�.

The �ethical State� was understood as the enemy of the monopolist and bureaucratic State, as a State which reduced its functions to the bare necessities. Mussolini even stressed the need to �restore the railways and telegraphs to private businesses; because the current apparatus is monstrous and vulnerable in all of its parts.� In Udine, a month before the March, he declared:

All the trappings of the State collapse like an old operetta stage set when the intimate conviction is lacking that one is carrying out a duty, or better a mission. That is why we want to strip the State of all its economic attributes. Enough with the railwayman State, the postman State, the insurer State. Enough with the State operating at the expenses of all Italian taxpayers and aggravating Italy�s exhausted finances.

The justification for this shrinking of the State to its repressive and ideological apparatuses was not just pragmatic but idealist: �Let it not be said that thus emptied out the State remains small. No! It remains a very great thing, because it retains the entire dominion of souls [spiriti], while it abdicated the entire dominion of matter.�

Today, as we struggle with fascism�s afterlives and repetitions, it helps to remember that it emerged one hundred years ago not as a form of �totalitarianism� fusing the political and the economic, but as a particularly virulent variant of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has termed the anti-state state. And it was welcomed as such by many liberals, from Luigi Einaudi to Benedetto Croce. What Mussolini presented as the moral, liberating, problem-solving character of Fascism�s �surgical� violence, was explicitly articulated, in 1921�22, as an anti-democratic violence for the redemption of a Nation and State grounded in private accumulation. As he stated at the National Fascist Congress: �We will absorb liberals and liberalism, because with the method of violence we have buried all preceding methods.�

This promise of liberalism by illiberal means was why Fascism came to power (in 1922 as in 1933) not as an insurrection, but as an invitation to form a government issued by sovereign constitutional authorities (King Vittorio Emanuele III, President Paul von Hindenburg). As Daniel Gu�rin observed in Fascism and Big Business (1936), here lay the �vital difference� between socialism and fascism when it came to the seizure of power: the former is the class enemy of the bourgeois state, whereas �fascism is in the service of the class represented by the state� � or at the very least it is initially welcomed and financially supported as such. Contemplating the ravages of neoliberalism-as-civil-war in the early twenty-first century, we should not forget that fascism first came to power in a civil war for economic liberalism.

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-nightwatchmans-bludgeon

# ? Oct 30, 2022 17:56

Punkin Spunkin: Jan 1, 2010

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

What is your historical movie/tv show dream? I want a 13 episode miniseries about the Solomons campaign that alternates between an American perspective, a Japanese perspective, and a Guadalcanal islander perspective.

This isn't modern but I've always thought the diadochi saga is just waiting for somebody. You want game of thrones????

# ? Nov 4, 2022 07:28

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

Punkin Spunkin posted:

This isn't modern but I've always thought the diadochi saga is just waiting for somebody. You want game of thrones????

Sean Bean is too old to play Alexander in the first season. Alas.

# ? Nov 4, 2022 12:40

HootTheOwl: May 13, 2012; Hootin and shootin

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

What is your historical movie/tv show dream? I want a 13 episode miniseries about the Solomons campaign that alternates between an American perspective, a Japanese perspective, and a Guadalcanal islander perspective.

The Falkland islands from the POV of the penguins.

# ? Nov 4, 2022 12:51

Grevling: Dec 18, 2016

Orange Devil posted:

Sean Bean is too old to play Alexander in the first season. Alas.

Alexander could just be played by some hot Bulgarian model, just show him dying, possibly include the "to the strongest/to Craterus" final words. Or omit them because it's the TRUE story behind the legend.

# ? Nov 4, 2022 18:27

i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

Grevling posted:

Alexander could just be played by some hot Bulgarian model, just show him dying, possibly include the "to the strongest/to Craterus" final words. Or omit them because it's the TRUE story behind the legend.

cast someone specifically from north macedonia just to watch the fireworks

# ? Nov 4, 2022 18:43

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

i say swears online posted:

cast someone specifically from north macedonia just to watch the fireworks

An ethnic Greek from North Macedonia.

# ? Nov 4, 2022 21:14

Teriyaki Hairpiece: Dec 29, 2006; I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

One of the most fun parts about the early American Revolution was how the soldiers of the Continental Army all signed up for specific periods of service and when their enlistments expired, they mostly just peaced the gently caress out.

John Glover was a general from Massachusetts, great commander, did all this hero poo poo, but he signed up for 18 months of war. The second the clock ran out on that 18 months he was like "Bye! I've got better things to do."

And the Continental Army was at like their lowest point when he and his whole regiment left. He came back eventually but Washington had to beg him like a dog first.

# ? Nov 6, 2022 01:41

Teriyaki Hairpiece: Dec 29, 2006; I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

All I'm saying is that no one questioned John Glover's patriotism then and he's still considered an American hero. Just a completely alien mindset to today.

# ? Nov 6, 2022 01:42

Some Guy TT: Aug 30, 2011

can anyone recommend a book possibly in epub form about how kennedy was way less bellicose during the cuban missile crisis than the media was implying im positive that i read about this somewhere in particular the part about how adlai stevensons position was the one kennedy effectively ended up taking despite stevenson being widely mocked as a giant pussy at the time compared to kennedys incredibly sized penis but i cant for the life of me remember where

# ? Nov 6, 2022 14:15

Weka: May 5, 2019; Can't post for 22 hours!

Orange Devil posted:

Sean Bean is too old to play Alexander in the first season. Alas.

Don't see why Alexander would be in it at all really.

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

All I'm saying is that no one questioned John Glover's patriotism then and he's still considered an American hero. Just a completely alien mindset to today.

Troops are considered heroes when they never left the green zone. Nobody disparages them for leaving at the end of their term of service.

# ? Nov 7, 2022 13:44

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

Weka posted:

Don't see why Alexander would be in it at all really.

Troops are considered heroes when they never left the green zone. Nobody disparages them for leaving at the end of their term of service.

You gotta show them all being on the same side before it becomes a free for all imo. Get that pathos in there.

# ? Nov 7, 2022 15:49

Penisaurus Sex: Feb 3, 2009; asdfghjklpoiuyt

Some Guy TT posted:

can anyone recommend a book possibly in epub form about how kennedy was way less bellicose during the cuban missile crisis than the media was implying im positive that i read about this somewhere in particular the part about how adlai stevensons position was the one kennedy effectively ended up taking despite stevenson being widely mocked as a giant pussy at the time compared to kennedys incredibly sized penis but i cant for the life of me remember where

JFK & The Unspeakable but I hope you have a lot of patience for Christian metaphors.

# ? Nov 7, 2022 15:58

Some Guy TT: Aug 30, 2011

does anyone have any sources discussing the william hearst media empire making up stories about constant famines in the soviet union in the thirties i know this was something they did because i saw a communist comic strip make reference to it in a year where famines didnt happen but im struggling to find a source thats not like literal communist propaganda

just an onlinearchive of the old hearst newspapers would probably turn something up real fast but i dont know where to find anything like that if its not literally inside a library supposedly the feb eighth 1935 issue of the chicago american had six million dying in soviet famine as its big headline with articles continuing on that subject for quite some time thereafter i dont think these can be referring to the holodomor in the past tense because surely holodomor boosters would bring it up all the time if it was but id still like to look at some myself to be sure or at least read something written by someone who has

# ? Nov 9, 2022 07:28

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Some Guy TT posted:

can anyone recommend a book possibly in epub form about how kennedy was way less bellicose during the cuban missile crisis than the media was implying im positive that i read about this somewhere in particular the part about how adlai stevensons position was the one kennedy effectively ended up taking despite stevenson being widely mocked as a giant pussy at the time compared to kennedys incredibly sized penis but i cant for the life of me remember where

the following is from "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years", by David Talbot

quote:

The Kennedys were aware that the calls for an all-out U.S. military invasion of Cuba would grow louder as the November elections drew closer. As Admiral Burke prepared to leave the Navy in summer 1961, eased out by the administration he had come to revile, JFK had called him into the Oval Office to debrief him about Cuba. The president surely realized that Burke was soon to become a political thorn in his side and he wanted to hear what his line of attack on Cuba would be. �He asked me if I thought we would have to go into Cuba,� Burke later recalled. �I said yes. He asked whether we could take Cuba easily. I said yes, but it was getting more and more difficult. He asked what did I think would happen if we attacked. I said all hell would break loose but that some day we would have to do it.� By the following year, Goldwater was declaring that �something must be done about Cuba�if it takes our military, I wouldn�t hesitate to use it.�

President Kennedy had no intention of invading Cuba. But he and his brother knew that to do nothing in the fevered climate of the day would be political suicide. So they settled on the middle option, Operation Mongoose, as the safest. Picking an ad man like Lansdale to run it made perfect sense. The operation was �mostly for show,� griped the CIA�s point man on Cuba, Bill Harvey. As the more savvy CIA officials undoubtedly realized, that was the point. Lansdale�s Cuba show, starbursts and all, was supposed to dazzle the American people. It would reassure them that something was being done. Polls showed that the public�poked and prodded by a media whose belligerence rivaled that of the Hearst press in the �Remember the Maine!� era�did indeed want something done. But, fortunately for the Kennedys, Americans stopped short of demanding war. So the Kennedys kept the Pentagon and CIA in check, while assuaging the public�s vague anxieties about Cuba by fruitlessly harassing the Castro regime.

CIA and Pentagon officials were not fooled or assuaged. They knew that Operation Mongoose had no chance of succeeding and that a military invasion was the only way to remove the �humiliating� Communist outpost in the Caribbean, as Goldwater called it. For the rest of the Kennedy administration, military leaders and intelligence officials would strain and conspire to force the president to take this drastic step, as they had during the Bay of Pigs debacle. And their anger and frustration steadily grew as the Kennedys kept deflecting their bellicose pressures.

On July 18, 1962 CIA director John McCone dined with Bobby, using the occasion to urge tough action on Cuba. McCone had already advised RFK that �Cuba was our most serious problem. I also added, in my opinion, Cuba was the key to all of Latin America; if Cuba succeeds, we can expect most of Latin America to fall.� Over dinner, the CIA chief drove home these points. But Kennedy was not buying McCone�s argument. Bobby acknowledged that the Mongoose effort was �disappointing� so far, but he could not be persuaded that the United States should unleash its full military might against Havana. �He urged intensified effort but seemed inclined to let the situation �worsen� before recommending drastic action,� a discouraged McCone later wrote in his notes on the dinner.

In the ideological war to define the Kennedy administration, which broke out soon after the president was laid to rest in Arlington and continues to this day, national security officials insisted that the Kennedy brothers were �out of control� on Cuba, pushing them to take absurd measures against Castro like the Mongoose folly. This would become the standard version of the Kennedys� Cuba policy in countless books, TV news shows, and documentaries�it was rash, obsessive, treacherous, even murderous. But this is not an accurate picture of Kennedy policy. What in truth bothered national security hard-liners was not how �out of control� the brothers were on Cuba�it was how in control they were. They were enraged by the way that Bobby Kennedy, and eccentric lieutenants like Lansdale, were installed over them. And they were infuriated by the restrictions imposed on their military ambitions. Frustrated in their campaign to declare war on Cuba, intelligence officials declared war instead on the Kennedys, particularly the insufferable kid brother who was put in charge of supervising them. And without telling either the president or the attorney general, they took another ominous step. They renewed their sinister contract with the Mafia to eliminate Fidel Castro.

___

quote:

IT WAS 9:45 ON the morning of Friday, October 19, 1962, four days after a U-2 spy plane had spotted several medium-range ballistic missile sites under construction in a remote area in the west of Cuba. The United States and Soviet Union were locked in the first week of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a thirteen-day dance of death that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would later declare �the most dangerous moment in human history.� President Kennedy was straining to pick just the right steps in this tremulous choreography, so the world did not go stumbling over the nuclear edge. He and the two men who had emerged as his wisest advisors, his brother Bobby and Robert McNamara, were trying to steer the decision-making process toward the idea of a naval blockade of Cuba, to stop the flow of nuclear shipments to the island and to pressure the Soviets into a peaceful resolution of the crisis. But virtually his entire national security apparatus was pushing the president to take military action against Cuba. Leading the charge for an aggressive response were the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were urging the president to launch surprise air strikes on the island and then invade. On the morning of October 19, the nation�s top military commanders filed into the Cabinet Room to convince Kennedy to adopt their position. No meeting between a leader and his national security advisors has ever been so laden with consequence. And no meeting during the Kennedy presidency so dramatically illustrates the divisions between the head of state and his military chiefs.

Attending the meeting with the president were Joint Chiefs Chairman Maxwell Taylor, Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay, Chief of Naval Operations George Anderson, Army Chief of Staff Earle Wheeler, and Marine Corps Commandant David Shoup, as well as McNamara. Taylor was ostensibly a Kennedy man, inserted into his position by the president to inject some intellectual sophistication into the Pentagon. Shoup lacked Taylor�s intellectual gifts but also tried to position himself as a New Frontiersman, spreading the word that he had supported JFK�s election and clashing with Senator Strom Thurmond over the far right�s attempts to indoctrinate the Marine Corps. (�I didn�t feel that we needed to have Strom Thurmond and his henchmen determine for me what I taught the Marines about communism,� Shoup later remarked. �I thought it was rather ridiculous.�) But Kennedy expected trouble from crusty, cigar-chomping Curtis LeMay�who had been advocating a preemptive nuclear strike on Russia since the early 1950s, after taking over the Strategic Air Command. LeMay dismissed Cuba as a �sideshow,� and bluntly recommended that the United States �fry it.� The president also knew he could not count on support from George Anderson, the tall, handsome, straight-arrow naval chief known for lecturing his sailors to follow a morally clean path. Anderson, whose good looks earned him the nickname �Gorgeous George,� had proven to be as abrasive as his predecessor, Arleigh Burke, openly challenging the Kennedy-McNamara attempts to take control of defense spending and the weapons procurement process. And Wheeler, a by-the-numbers general, was still stinging from JFK�s furious scolding following the Army�s sluggish performance at Ole Miss.

LeMay was in the habit of taking bullying command of Joint Chiefs meetings. With his sagging jowls and chronic scowl, he came across as a bulldog marking his territory. He blew cigar smoke in the faces of anyone who disagreed with him and communicated his boredom and contempt by leaving ajar the door to the bathroom that was located off the Joint Chiefs conference room while he relieved himself with raucous abandon. The Air Force chief reverted to the same confrontational style with Kennedy in the Cabinet Room that morning. The loathing between the two men was mutual and complete. They had already clashed over the developing crisis, at a White House meeting held the day before. Kennedy had asked LeMay to predict how the Russians would respond if the United States bombed Cuba. �They�ll do nothing,� LeMay blandly replied. �Are you trying to tell me that they�ll let us bomb their missiles, and kill a lot of Russians and then do nothing?� an incredulous Kennedy shot back. �If they don�t do anything in Cuba, then they�ll certainly do something in Berlin.� JFK was always sensitive to how a move on one square of the Cold War chessboard might trigger a countermove somewhere else.

After the meeting, the president was still shaking his head over the general�s blithe prediction. �Can you imagine LeMay saying a thing like that?� Kennedy wondered aloud to O�Donnell when he got back to his office. �These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them, and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.�

...

With each passing day of the missile crisis, Kennedy knew that the pressures on him were growing to resolve it militarily. As he came out of the Cabinet Room that morning, he bumped into Sorensen, whom he had wisely kept out of the meeting to avoid provoking the Pentagon chiefs. �He burst out of the meeting, hot under the collar, and he said, �You and Bobby have to get a consensus on this [blockade] thing.� And he pointed at the meeting and he said, �They all want war.� He just felt that with the kind of pressure rising in that quarter, he knew time was going to run out.�

...

�There isn�t any learning period with nuclear weapons,� McNamara remarked during the Havana conference. �You make one mistake and you destroy nations.�

This is what McNamara tried to impress upon his military chiefs as the crisis was unfolding. After initiating the blockade, Kennedy ordered his defense secretary to keep close watch over the Navy to make sure U.S. vessels didn�t do anything that would trigger World War III. There was to be no shooting at Soviet ships without McNamara�s approval. But Admiral Anderson bridled under the defense secretary�s hands-on control, clashing with McNamara in the Navy�s Flag Plot room, the Pentagon command center where the blockade was being monitored. In a choleric outburst that would be dramatized in the 2000 film Thirteen Days, the admiral told his civilian boss that he didn�t need his advice on how to manage a blockade, the Navy had been carrying out such operations since the days of the Revolution. �I don�t give a drat what John Paul Jones would have done,� McNamara angrily replied. �I want to know what you are going to do�now.� Anderson suggested that McNamara leave the room: �Mr. Secretary, you go back to your office and I�ll go to mine and we�ll take care of things.�

...

The Joint Chiefs were not alone in trying to maneuver the United States into war over the Cuban missile installations. The CIA also played a dangerous game during the crisis. CIA director John McCone, who was the first administration official to charge the Soviets were inserting missiles into Cuba, made no secret of his desire for a shooting war over the new threat. In the weeks before the crisis exploded, the agency began leaking information about the missiles to friendly reporters like Hal Hendrix of the Miami News�who later won a Pulitzer for his �scoops��as well as to Republican Senator Kenneth Keating of New York, who used the intelligence tips to politically embarrass the Kennedy administration.

During the height of the crisis, President Kennedy instructed the CIA to immediately stop all raids against Cuba, to make sure that no flying sparks from the agency�s secret operations set off a nuclear conflagration. But, once again, the agency asserted its right to determine its own Cuba policy, independent of the president�s will. In defiance of Kennedy�s order, Bill Harvey mobilized sixty commandos��every single team and asset that we could scrape together��and dropped them into Cuba, in anticipation of the U.S. invasion that the CIA hoped was soon to follow. When somebody in the JM/WAVE station tipped off Robert Kennedy to Harvey�s reckless act, the attorney general hit the roof, ripping into the CIA official at a Mongoose meeting for risking World War III. An unrepentant Harvey shot back that if the Kennedys had taken care of the Cuba problem at the Bay of Pigs, the country would not be stuck in the current mess. The attorney general stormed out of the room. Years later, at his appearance before the Church Committee, the CIA man was still dismissive of Kennedy�s concerns, shrugging them off as �persnickety.�

But for the Kennedys, it was one more demonstration of the intelligence agency�s cowboy nature. �Of course, I was furious,� Bobby later said, recalling Harvey�s wildly provocative act. He was astounded that a CIA official would risk nuclear doomsday �with a half-assed operation like this.�

...

President Kennedy�s isolation within his own government was never so glaringly apparent as it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. During the ExComm meetings (Executive Committee of the National Security Council) where Kennedy thrashed out his strategy, he could count on only his brother and McNamara for support. Bobby, who matured from a kneejerk hawk to a wise and restrained diplomat during the nerve-punishing crucible, played an especially critical role. �Thank God for Bobby,� Dave Powers heard the president remark one morning as his brother strode into another tension-filled ExComm meeting. The humanity-threatening crisis forced the younger Kennedy to confront a fundamental question about the use of power in the nuclear age. �What, if any, circumstance or justification gives�any government the moral right to bring its people and possibly all people under the shadow of nuclear destruction?� he asked himself. As Schlesinger later observed, it was a question few statesmen ever raised and few philosophers answered.

Robert Kennedy was the key courier for his brother in the delicate back-channel negotiations that finally brought an end to the crisis, secretly meeting with Georgi Bolshakov until the Kennedys realized that their old Soviet chum had been used by Moscow to deceive them, and later Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. In his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev offered a startling account of RFK�s emotional conversations with Dobrynin, in which Kennedy stressed how fragile his brother�s rule was becoming as the crisis dragged on. It was not the first time in the Kennedy presidency that Bobby had communicated this alarming message to the Russians. But in this high-stakes moment, Kennedy�s plea struck Khrushchev as especially urgent.

After the attorney general paid an unofficial visit to the Soviet embassy one evening, Dobrynin reported to Moscow that �Robert Kennedy looked exhausted. One could see from his eyes that he had not slept for days. He himself said that he had not been home for six days and nights. �The president is in a grave situation,� Robert Kennedy said, �and he does not know how to get out of it. We are under very severe stress. In fact we are under pressure from our military to use force against Cuba�. President Kennedy implores Chairman Khrushchev to accept his offer and to take into consideration the peculiarities of the American system. Even though the president himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will�. If the situation continues much longer, the president is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.�

On another occasion, Khrushchev wrote, Bobby Kennedy �was almost crying� when he phoned Dobrynin. �I haven�t seen my children for days now,� he told the Soviet ambassador, �and the president hasn�t seen his either. We�re spending all day and night at the White House; I don�t know how much longer we can hold out against our generals.�

Kennedy loyalists like Schlesinger�who prefer to see the brothers� management of the crisis as certain and masterful, which in many respects it was�suggest that Bobby Kennedy�s emotional pleas to the Soviets were a tactic to win leverage in the negotiations. President Kennedy was never afflicted by doubts when it came to standing up to the Pentagon, Schlesinger observed recently: �JFK had a great capacity to resist pressures from the military. He simply thought he was right. Lack of self-confidence was never one of Jack Kennedy�s problems. We would�ve had nuclear war if Nixon had been president during the missile crisis. But Kennedy�s war hero status allowed him to defy the Joint Chiefs. He dismissed them as a bunch of old men.�

Still, as Schlesinger has acknowledged, Kennedy was not firmly in control of his own military. And the repeated references to coups and Seven Days in May scenarios that pop up in presidential transcripts and recollections about the administration make it plain that JFK himself, and his closest advisors, worried about the stability of the government.

So did Khrushchev. �For some time we had felt there was a danger that the president would lose control of his military,� he later wrote, �and now he was admitting this to us himself.� Moscow�s fear that Kennedy might be toppled in a coup, Khrushchev suggested in his memoirs, led the Soviets to reach a settlement of the missile crisis with the president. �We could sense from the tone of the message that tension in the United States was indeed reaching a critical point.�

Thirteen days after the crisis began, Khrushchev announced that he would withdraw the missiles from Cuba. The Soviet decision was heralded as a major U.S. victory, a dramatic demonstration of the power of American resolve. The Kennedys encouraged this media spin, though they had secretly made their own concessions to end the showdown, agreeing to quietly withdraw aging Jupiter missiles from U.S bases in Turkey and pledging not to invade Cuba. This latter concession was particularly critical from the Soviet point of view, since it was the military threat hanging over Cuba that had prompted Khrushchev to install the missiles. Washington officials would later insist this pledge was not binding because Castro refused to allow U.S. weapons inspections of Cuba to make sure the missiles were gone. But Kennedy and future presidents would nonetheless honor the no-invasion pledge. It essentially ensured the survival of the Cuban revolution, and though Castro did not see it that way at the time, Khrushchev correctly called it �a great victory� for the embattled island.

While the Kennedy media offensive successfully sold the story that �the other guy blinked,� Washington hardliners saw the resolution of the crisis differently. A few days after Khrushchev�s announcement, the president summoned the Joint Chiefs to the Oval Office to thank them for their role in the crisis, a particularly gracious gesture considering the friction between the commander-in-chief and his generals. But LeMay was in no mood to celebrate. �It�s the greatest defeat in our history,� he thundered at Kennedy. �We should invade today!� The anti-Kennedy rage was widespread among the upper ranks, where it was felt the president had flinched at the perfect opportunity to dismantle Cuba�s Communist regime. �We had a chance to throw the Communists out of Cuba,� a disgusted LeMay later fumed. �But the administration was scared to death [the Russians] might shoot a missile at us.�

# ? Nov 9, 2022 08:18

The Oldest Man: Jul 28, 2003

gradenko_2000 posted:

the following is from "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years", by David Talbot

___

Now imagine Barack Obama in place of JFK

# ? Nov 9, 2022 08:48

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

Honestly it is difficult to imagine any US president post Eisenhower and Kennedy from standing up to the joint chiefs like that.

Even then LeMay was in for how many loving years? And a complete and total bloodthirsty psychopath for every single one of them. Apparently nobody had enough power to remove him.

# ? Nov 9, 2022 09:21

Teriyaki Hairpiece: Dec 29, 2006; I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

Never forget that the US Congress did hearings wondering if Hollywood was making movies that were too anti-Nazi, in 1941

# ? Nov 18, 2022 03:53

Teriyaki Hairpiece: Dec 29, 2006; I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

Orange Devil posted:

Honestly it is difficult to imagine any US president post Eisenhower and Kennedy from standing up to the joint chiefs like that.

Even then LeMay was in for how many loving years? And a complete and total bloodthirsty psychopath for every single one of them. Apparently nobody had enough power to remove him.

Lemay was an insane war criminal and the fact that nothing happened to him shows that victor's justice is the only justice

# ? Nov 18, 2022 03:55

Some Guy TT: Aug 30, 2011

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Never forget that the US Congress did hearings wondering if Hollywood was making movies that were too anti-Nazi, in 1941

might you have any worthwhile articles or books to recommend on the subject

# ? Nov 18, 2022 04:26

Weembles: Apr 19, 2004

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Never forget that the US Congress did hearings wondering if Hollywood was making movies that were too anti-Nazi, in 1941

I read an account of the HUAC hearings and the red scare where one of the common accusations against people who were black listed was that they were "prematurely antifascist."

# ? Nov 18, 2022 04:50

sullat: Jan 9, 2012

Weembles posted:

I read an account of the HUAC hearings and the red scare where one of the common accusations against people who were black listed was that they were "prematurely antifascist."

American volunteers who'd fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil war were rejected from joining the US military for that reason as well.

# ? Nov 18, 2022 05:35

i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

sullat posted:

American volunteers who'd fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil war were rejected from joining the US military for that reason as well.

was it for explicitly that reason? i figure joining another country's military would be a good reason to not let people sign up

# ? Nov 18, 2022 05:39

Mandoric: Mar 15, 2003

i say swears online posted:

was it for explicitly that reason? i figure joining another country's military would be a good reason to not let people sign up

Problem: they wanted to keep the ones who had signed up with the British at a more politically-correct moment, or the nationalist Chinese at direct prompting to serve as a proxy force.

# ? Nov 18, 2022 11:48

sullat: Jan 9, 2012

i say swears online posted:

was it for explicitly that reason? i figure joining another country's military would be a good reason to not let people sign up

I read an interview of a Spanish Civil war vet who had said that's what he was told after the war when he'd started asking around. He'd tried to join up in 1942 and was rejected, but by the time 1944 rolled around he'd been let in, probably because ideological purity wasn't as important as getting more meat for the grinder.

# ? Nov 18, 2022 15:54

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

sullat posted:

American volunteers who'd fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil war were rejected from joining the US military for that reason as well.

A lot of countries made their Spanish Civil War Republican volunteers stateless.

# ? Nov 18, 2022 17:14

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

I'm reading The Making of the President 1972, and it described the Merhige decision, handed down in January of that year. This was supposedly a case about school busing in Virginia: the racial make-up of students in Richmond used to be 60% white, 40% black, and so the busing program, of shifting students around so that public schools would have a relatively even racial make-up, worked.

But then, as white folks started having their kids go to private schools, the percentages shifted to 70% black / 30% white, and so the case came up as a question of how should busing work in such conditions. Judge Merhige ruled that white students from as far as two counties away needed to be bussed into central Richmond, solely for the purpose of evening-out the racial make-up of the public schools.

This rankled lots of folks, so the book goes, as they then had to see their children have to travel as far as 25 miles one way, just to abide by the Merhige decision.

It was eventually reversed in June, but not before it had been implemented in so many other states (the book mentions that it was The main issue of the Florida democratic primary) that people remembered it and it colored their political positions even after it had gone away (and I assume busing reverted to some kind of state where they just made-do with whatever racial distribution they could manage?)

I guess I'm just a little wary of the sheer ridiculousness of the narrative - Theodore H. White seems to be adopting the position in this book that the Democrats lost because they went too far to the left, and while I started reading* about the period precisely because I wanted to know more about it, I'm just having some skepticism over the charge that busing really went as far as he claims it did where you're shipping kids across county lines because of "activist judges".

___

* I specifically sought out this book because he wrote it well before the Watergate scandal really got going, because a lot of retrospectives on 1972 tend to get lost in the mire of Nixon winning because of CREEP and Watergate, or that they hardly ever bother talking about the campaign at all.

# ? Nov 22, 2022 12:50

Remulak: Jun 8, 2001; I can't count to four.; Yams Fan

lol, fixing integration by bussing was an op designed to gently caress up, because they bussed white kids to the black schools that were made terrible intentionally.

# ? Nov 22, 2022 13:19

i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

# ? Nov 29, 2022 04:28

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

If the Germans had won the Great War would they really have stomped the Bolsheviks or would they have kept them on as a client state, because in their mind such a revolutionary chaotic regime would keep Russia weak? Maybe they would exile Rosa and the Spartacists there as a safety valve for German society. It seems rather counterproductive that in most counterfactuals they fight a whole another war/counterinsurgency policing action to reinstall the White Russians who they had been fighting against previously. And they had sent Lenin there in the first place, they'd think he owes them!

# ? Nov 30, 2022 00:49

i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

wonder if germany won the civil war the uk would have tried harder/earlier in the russian civil war, especially if germany won pretty early on

# ? Nov 30, 2022 01:01

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

I haven't read much about the western intervention on behalf of the White Russians, but weren't they pretty logistically constrained?

# ? Nov 30, 2022 01:10

i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

hey the czechoslovak legion went thousands of miles :v:

# ? Nov 30, 2022 01:17

Weka: May 5, 2019; Can't post for 22 hours!

If the Germans had won WW1 it's not clear to me that the Bolsheviks would have come out on top in the civil war. A lot of it was fought in places Russia gave up in Brest Litovsk.

# ? Nov 30, 2022 01:23

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

They could've won WWI after Brest-Litovsk (?) I guess my main question is whether or not Imperial Germany would have been interested in keeping the Bolsheviks around as a client regime, especially since the Allied powers would naturally support the White movement. It would be a pretty ironic situation. Maybe they'd send a "Bismarck legion" east to help the Soviets fight the Whites.

# ? Nov 30, 2022 01:27

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# ? May 23, 2024 05:24

ModernMajorGeneral: Jun 25, 2010

The Germans sent troops to fight the Bolsheviks in real life, so I don't think it's weird to imagine them fighting them harder if they won WW1.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Russian_Volunteer_Army

German friendly White Russian capitalists/aristocrats, of which there were plenty, would always have been a better bet than possibly temporarily German friendly bolsheviks

# ? Nov 30, 2022 01:33

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