This link has been bookmarked by 7 people . It was first bookmarked on 21 Mar 2007, by Mr Maher.
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04 Oct 17
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John LeMasney"The victors [of World War II] were the Soviet Union and the United States (also England, France and Nationalist China, but they were weak). Both these countries now went to work--without swastikas, goose-stepping, or officially declared racism, but…
"It was an old lesson learned by governments: that war solves problems of control. Charles E. Wilson, the president of General Electric Corporation, was so happy about the wartime situation that he suggested a continuing alliance between business an… -
02 Feb 10
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Excerpt from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States
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covering the period 1945-1960
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The victors [of World War II] were the Soviet Union and the United States
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"socialism"
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"democracy"
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"The war rejuvenated American capitalism."
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"a permanent war economy."
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The Truman administration, however, presented the Soviet Union as not just a rival but an immediate threat.
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a hysteria about Communism
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the Truman Doctrine,
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In 1950, there came an event that speeded the formation of the liberal-conservative consensus--Truman's undeclared war in Korea.
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the American army became the U.N. army.
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Perhaps 2 million Koreans, North and South, were killed in the Korean war, all in the name of opposing "the rule of force."
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Truman issued, on March 22, 1947, Executive Order 9835
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search out any "infiltration of disloyal persons" in the U.S. government.
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Between the launching of his security program in March 1947 and December 1952, some 6.6 million persons were investigated. Not a single case of espionage was uncovered, though about 500 persons were dismissed in dubious cases of "questionable loyalty.
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the official Red hunt
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These were all portrayed to the public as signs of a world Communist conspiracy.
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Joseph McCarthy
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In the spring of 1954 he began hearings to investigate supposed subversives in the military.
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At the very time the Senate was censuring McCarthy, Congress was putting through a whole series of anti-Communist bills
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the setting up of detention centers (really, concentration camps) for suspected subversive
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By 1954, there were hundreds of groups on this list, including, besides the Communist party and the Ku Klux Klan, the Chopin Cultural Center, the Cervantes Fraternal Society, the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, the Committee for the Protection of the Bill of Rights, the League of American Writers, the Nature Friends of America, People's Drama, the Washington Bookshop Association, and the Yugoslav Seaman's Club.
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The most important of these was the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the summer of 1950.
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Gold was the only witness at the trial to connect Julius Rosenberg and David Greenglass to the Russians.
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He sentenced them both to die in the electric chair.
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Morton Sobell
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Undoubtedly, there was success in the attempt to make the general public fearful of Communists and ready to take drastic actions against them--imprisonment at home, military action abroad
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At the start of 1950, the total U.S. budget was about $40 billion, and the military part of it was about $12 billion. But by 1955, the military part alone was $40 billion out of a total of $62 billion.
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1,500 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs
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The Soviet Union was obviously behind
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By 1970, the U.S. military budget was $80 billion
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The Marshall Plan of 1948
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The Good Neighbor Policy
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n the spring of 1960, President Eisenhower secretly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to arm and train anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Guatemala for a future invasion of Cuba.
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And then, in the 1960s, came a series of explosive rebellions in every area of American life, which showed that all the system's estimates of security and success were wrong.
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05 Jul 09
jordan gossExcerpt from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States covering the period of 1945-1960
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The victors [of World War II] were the Soviet Union and the United States (also England, France and Nationalist China, but they were weak). Both these countries now went to work--without swastikas, goose-stepping, or officially declared racism, but under the cover of "socialism" on one side, and "democracy" on the other, to carve out their own empires of influence. They proceeded to share and contest with one another the domination of the world, to build military machines far greater than the Fascist countries had built, to control the destinies of more countries than Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan had been able to do. They also acted to control their own populations, each country with its own techniques-crude in the Soviet Union, sophisticated in the United States--to make their rule secure.
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It was an old lesson learned by governments: that war solves problems of control. Charles E. Wilson, the president of General Electric Corporation, was so happy about the wartime situation that he suggested a continuing alliance between business and the military for "a permanent war economy."
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right after the war, the American public, war-weary, seemed to favor demobilization and disarmament, the Truman administration (Roosevelt had died in April 1945) worked to create an atmosphere of crisis and cold war. True, the rivalry with the Soviet Union was real--that country had come out of the war with its economy wrecked and 20 million people dead, but was making an astounding comeback, rebuilding its industry, regaining military strength. The Truman administration, however, presented the Soviet Union as not just a rival but an immediate threat.
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In Greece, which had been a right-wing monarchy and dictatorship before the war, a popular left-wing National Liberation Front (the EAM) was put down by a British army of intervention immediately after the war. A right-wing dictatorship was restored. When opponents of the regime were jailed, and trade union leaders removed, a left-wing guerrilla movement began to grow against the regime, soon consisting of 17,000 fighters, 50,000 active supporters, and perhaps 250,000 sympathizers, in a country of 7 million.
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In the last five months of 1947, 74,000 tons of military equipment were sent by the United States to the right-wing government in Athens, including artillery, dive bombers, and stocks of napalm. Two hundred and fifty army officers, headed by General James Van Fleet, advised the Greek army in the field
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Perhaps 2 million Koreans, North and South, were killed in the Korean war, all in the name of opposing "the rule of force."
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McCarthy became bolder. In the spring of 1954 he began hearings to investigate supposed subversives in the military. When he began attacking generals for not being hard enough on suspected Communists, he antagonized Republicans as well as Democrats, and in December 1954, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to censure him for "conduct . . .unbecoming a Member of the United States Senate." The censure resolution avoided criticizing McCarthy's anti-Communist lies and exaggerations; it concentrated on minor matters - on his refusal to appear before a Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, and his abuse of an army general at his hearings.
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At the very time the Senate was censuring McCarthy, Congress was putting through a whole series of anti-Communist bills. Liberal Hubert Humphrey introduced an amendment to one of them to make the Communist party illegal, saying: "I do not intend to be a half patriot. . . . Either Senators are for recognizing the Communist Party for what it is, or they will continue to trip over the niceties of legal technicalities and details."
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John F. Kennedy was cautious on the issue, didn't speak out against McCarthy (he was absent when the censure vote was taken and never said how he would have voted). McCarthy's insistence that Communism had won in China because of softness on Communism in the American government was close to Kennedy's own view, expressed in the House of Representatives, January 1949, when the Chinese Communists took over Peking. Kennedy said:
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It was not McCarthy and the Republicans, but the liberal Democratic Truman administration, whose Justice Department initiated a series of prosecutions that intensified the nation's anti-Communist mood. The most important of these was the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the summer of 1950.
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The government that the United States overthrew was the most democratic Guatemala had ever had. The President, Jacobo Arbenz, was a left-of-center Socialist; four of the fifty-six seats in the Congress were held by Communists. What was most unsettling to American business interests was that Arbenz had expropriated 234,000 acres of land owned by United Fruit, offering compensation that United Fruit called "unacceptable.
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In power, Castro moved to set up a nationwide system of education, of housing, of land distribution to landless peasants. The government confiscated over a million acres of land from three American companies, including United Fruit.
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21 Mar 07
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