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I find it hard to reason about what Nixon would have done about Cuba, a crisis that I think would have come up during his hypothetical presidency. Nixon was even more of an anti-Communist than JFK, so he may not have flinched at sending American air support into the Bay of Pigs. Maybe Nixon would have just invaded openly with U.S. Marines instead of playing plausible deniability games with Cuban exiles. But it's also not hard to imagine that Nixon would have resisted the influence of the DoD, CIA types urging him to crush Castro and give all the land back to the inherited wealth east coast elite types that he resented so profoundly. But it's a counterfactual so you have to make some guesses -- I think Nixon's hatred of communists would prevail, and he could find a way to attack the Cuban Revolution such that he could believe that he had done it himself and he wasn't just dancing to Allen Dulles' tune. One way or another, I think a Cuban Missile Crisis (-style event, not necessarily in Cuba, which could be under American military occupation in this timeline) takes place if anything even sooner under Nixon, and now the question is whether he can ignore the war hawks (he wouldn't have had McNamara or RFK in his inner circle, but bloodthirsty loons like Curtis LeMay would still be in the mix), talk it out with Khrushchev and avoid Armageddon. Again, really hard to say. The drunk, paranoid Nixon of 1974 might have ended the world. But the calculating Nixon who triangulated Mao against the Soviets might have been able to do it. I also wonder whether Henry Kissinger would have been Nixon's NSA or secretary of state that early. Maybe Kissinger has written about what he would have advised in those situations.
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Jan 30, 2022 20:35
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HashtagGirlboss posted:I don’t know that we get to a missile crisis with Nixon because my gut tells me we would have used the Bay of Pigs as cover for a large scale invasion and there would be open hostilities before the soviets could start moving the missiles in I agree. My guess is that America succeeds in invading Cuba and defeating the conventional Cuban forces, but then the occupying US army would be mired for years in a counterinsurgency against Castro-led guerrillas (maybe for this reason America doesn’t get as heavily involved in Vietnam!). The Soviets might deploy missiles elsewhere in the world in order to pressure the Americans to end their occupation of Cuba and as a response to the American missile bases in Turkey (a provocation that the Soviets may have wanted to answer independently of defending Cuba). But maybe without a real existing communist Cuban state, the Soviets don’t feel justified in deploying nuclear weapons and so the crisis never escalates to the level it did historically.
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Jan 30, 2022 23:21
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vyelkin posted:He was personally signing death lists with his big old grease pencil, and personally signing off on quotas for arrests and executions in different regions. That's how arbitrary the purges were - the guys at the top in Moscow figured "this percentage of people in this province must be counterrevolutionary, kill them" based on nothing. They weren't responding to actual plots or evidence, they were just making up numbers and telling their subordinates to get to work. This is fascinating and I can't help but think of the abstract war of numbers that McNamara would later fight in Vietnam. Despite obviously having different views on more than a few matters, American war planners and Community Party elites make a similar mistake of trying to manage a political and social dynamic by first plotting a line on a graph and then trying to torture reality into fitting the curve.
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Jun 27, 2023 17:27
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V. Illych L. posted:estimating the number of counterrevolutionaries based on some kind of statistical inference is par for the course; misunderstanding the incentives of the junior officers involved is less forgivable Yeah, again, a parallel to the American war in Vietnam: officers in the field want promos, they get promos from stacking bodies, so they produce bodies (or scraps of bodies so they can count a single slain civilian as multiple enemy KIA; James William Gibson's Technowar has lots of good stuff on this)
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Jun 27, 2023 18:04
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I'm interested in learning more about the Irish Republican Army and its post-civil war history, particularly later in the 20th century. I'm particularly interested in books or works that discuss: - A history of the IRA's activities, the Troubles, the peace process, etc. that isn't pro-UK or otherwise mired in in "b-b-b-b-but they're terrorists" pearl clutching - Marxism and left wing politics in the various IRA groups (and I guess the IRA's relationship to Sinn Féin) - The IRA's tactics, operations, organization (the IRA sorta-kinda won their struggle, so I'm interested in contrasting the IRA against other 20th century insurgencies like the USA's Black Panthers) I'm thinking about reading some of Gerry Adams' books, but I worry he won't be able to talk too much about the IRA side of things since he hasn't officially acknowledged his involvement in the paramilitary activities. Additionally, there was a Radio War Nerd episode on the War of Independence and the Civil War with guest Dr. Brian Hanley so I'm going to see if he has written anything for the layperson. Very grateful for any leads! edit: since I mentioned the War Nerd, here's that very nerd contrasting the IRA and Al Qaeda back in 2011: http://exiledonline.com/wn-38-ira-vs-al-qaeda-i-was-wrong/ zero knowledge has issued a correction as of 19:13 on Feb 22, 2024 |
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Feb 22, 2024 17:20
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gradenko_2000 posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl7lOundk4Y i haven't seen this doc and so don't know if it's full of poo poo, but please note that the CBC is the English language network run primarily out of Toronto, funded by the federal Canadian government. i'm not saying it's impossible for the doc to be good and fair but just consider the source. like if you watched a BBC doc about scottish or even Irish independence, you'd have to bear that context in mind.
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Apr 12, 2024 14:33
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you already have a Kinzer in there but I think his bibliography is the place to start. specifically Overthrow which covers over a century of American foreign intervention and thus makes a great jumping off point into deeper investigations. All the Shah’s Men is also excellent plus Kinzer is a great author to hand to people pre-crack-ping because he’s credible for normies. a consistent and coherent critic of American empire but also has a byline in the Boston Globe and iirc teaches or taught at a respectable university
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May 20, 2024 03:10
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