Because he's a product of the cold war, Zbigniew Brzezinski isn't capable of some simple 'can't we call get along' vision that would mean scaling back the rapacious greed and violence of the United States.
Other than that he's a bully, but he's by no means the worst and along with Brent Scowcroft and Heinz Kissinger is a good indication of the eminence grise view of US imperialism. A stable view not a neocon ultraviolent Zionist view of world geopolitics is needed. Thank God.
A truly epic series which if not perfect at least tries to be even handed and gets very close. Ted Turner's initiative in producing this series is unequalled. It has frequent access to commentary from top of the food chain creatures such as Gorbachev and Bush but actually makes much more sense when listening to the mid layer bureaucrats such as second in charge of the State Department or KGB. My guess from watching the entire 24 part series is that George HW Bush had no idea the USSR was about to collapse and given a choice (as part of the divisive warmongering power elite) would have kept it this way. The entire series is brilliant and taught me a lot including my underestimation of the paranoia that drove a lot of good men to kill. On both sides.
Cold War is a twenty-four episode television documentary series about the Cold War that aired in 1998. It features interviews and footage of the events that shaped the tense relationships between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Episode 24: Conclusions (1989--1991)
Gorbachev and Bush meet at Malta in December 1989 to consider the recent dramatic events. Only the previous week the Communist government resigned in Czechoslovakia; and shortly Nicolae Ceaușescu would be deposed and executed in the bloody Romanian Revolution. Gorbachev permits German reunification and removes Soviet troops from Europe, but fails to secure financial support from the West. As the Soviet economy collapses, Gorbachev faces opposition from both reformers and handliners. Sharing their abhorence of Soviet disintegration, Gorbachev brings in hardliners to his government and cracks down on the Lithuanian independence movement. However they later turn on Gorbachev and stage a coup. Boris Yeltsin is instrumental in rallying the public and military to defeat the coup. Sidelining Gorbachev, Yeltsin sets the course for Russia to leave the Soviet Union by establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States. The Soviet Union ends on 25 December 1991, and in his Christmas Day address Bush announces the Cold War is over. The cost of the Cold War is considered in retrospect. Interviewees include Mircea Dinescu, Alexander Rutskoy and Condoleezza Rice. The pre-credits scene features Bush and Gorbachev explaining how uncertain the world had suddenly become.
A great example of the power elite's ability to smash presidents and shape opinion is the downfall of Nixon for a relatively trivial misdemeanour. For sure one can't ignore his crimes against humanity in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam but these took no part in the legal effort to impeach Nixon and are no greater than the crimes of Truman, Eisenhower or LBJ in South East Asia. Instead the clear thinking observer can see the ability of the power elite to remove those it feels are getting in the way with relatively little fuss. The Russian adviser to Brezhnev GeorgyArbatov confirms my research that Nixon was removed for among other crimes his rapprochement work with Russia. Anyone who thinks Nixon's Wategate crimes were greater than Bush/Reagan's Iran Contra needs their head examining. Episode 16: Détente (1969--1975)
Nixon builds closer relations with China and the USSR, hoping to leverage an honourable US exit from Indochina. The Soviet Union is fearful of a US-Chinese alliance, but summits between Nixon and Brezhnev lead to a relaxation of tensions and concrete arms control agreements. Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik strategy also normalises West German relations with East Germany, the USSR and Poland. Although deeply unpopular domestically, US bombing of Cambodia and Hanoi succeeds in bringing North Vietnam to the negotiating table, leading to the Paris Peace Accords in 1972. Deeply resented by South Vietnam, the Accords ultimately fail to prevent Saigon's fall three years later. In 1975 reapproachment continued with the Helsinki Accords, which enshrined human rights and territorial integrity, and the symbolic Apollo--Soyuz Test Project. Interviewees include Melvin Laird, Valeri Kubasov, Winston Lord, John Ehrlichman and Gerald Ford. The pre-credits scene shows a Soviet cartoon demonstrating the futility of the arms race.
The body being kicked in the photo above is probably one of the Hungarian secret police who assisted the Soviets and were strung up during the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Prior to this I was not aware that the Suez crisis took place at the same time and diverted attention from the Hungarian uprising. For a while the Hungarians succeeded in revolting against the USSR but the West failed to intervene and Russian tanks soon rolled in and took charge again. This was a point of bitterness for the Hungarians who had been assured through Radio Free Europe that all they had to do was hang in there and the West would come to the rescue. We never did.
The Angolan Civil War was a major civil conflict in the Southern African state of Angola, beginning in 1975 and continuing, with some interludes, until 2002. The war began immediately after Angola became independent from Portugal in November 1975. Prior to this, a decolonisation conflict had taken place in 1974--75, following the Angolan War of Independence. The Civil War was primarily a struggle for power between two former liberation movements, the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). At the same time, it served as a surrogate battleground for the Cold War, due to heavy intervention by major opposing powers such as the Soviet Union and the United States.
Each organisation had different roots in the Angolan social fabric and mutually incompatible leaderships, despite their sharing the aim of ending colonial occupation. Although both the MPLA and UNITA had socialist leanings, for the purpose of mobilising international support they posed as "Marxist-Leninist" and "anti-communist", respectively. A third movement, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), having fought the MPLA alongside UNITA during the war for independence and the decolonization conflict, played almost no role in the Civil War. Additionally, the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC), an association of separatist militant groups, fought for the independence of the province of Cabinda from Angola.
The 27-year war can be divided roughly into three periods of major fighting -- between 1975 and 1991, 1992 and 1994, and 1998 and 2002 -- broken up by fragile periods of peace. By the time the MPLA finally achieved victory in 2002, an estimated 500,000 people had been killed and over one million internally displaced. The war devastated Angola's infrastructure, and dealt severe damage to the nation's public administration, economic enterprises, and religious institutions.
The Angolan Civil War reached such dimensions due to the combination of Angola's violent internal dynamics and massive foreign intervention. Both the Soviet Union and the United States considered the conflict critical to the global balance of power and to the outcome of the Cold War, and they and their allies put significant effort into making it a proxy war between their two power blocs. The Angolan Civil War ultimately became one of the bloodiest, longest, and most prominent armed conflicts of the Cold War. Moreover, the Angolan conflict became entangled with the Second Congo War in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as with the Namibian War of Independence.
President of the United States Gerald Ford approved covert aid to UNITA and the FNLA through Operation IA Feature on July 18, 1975, despite strong opposition from officials in the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Ford told William Colby, the Director of Central Intelligence, to establish the operation, providing an initial US$6 million. He granted an additional $8 million on July 27 and another $25 million in August.
Two days before the program's approval, Nathaniel Davis, the Assistant Secretary of State, told Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State, that he believed maintaining the secrecy of IA Feature would be impossible. Davis correctly predicted the Soviet Union would respond by increasing involvement in the Angolan conflict, leading to more violence and negative publicity for the United States. When Ford approved the program, Davis resigned. John Stockwell, the CIA's station chief in Angola, echoed Davis' criticism saying the success required the expansion of the program, but its size already exceeded what could be hidden from the public eye. Davis' deputy, former U.S. ambassador to Chile Edward Mulcahy, also opposed direct involvement. Mulcahy presented three options for U.S. policy towards Angola on May 13, 1975. Mulcahy believed the Ford administration could use diplomacy to campaign against foreign aid to the communist MPLA, refuse to take sides in factional fighting, or increase support for the FNLA and UNITA. He warned however that supporting UNITA would not sit well with Mobutu Sese Seko, the president of Zaire.
All these years and I didn't actually know that the Marshall Plan was made by a civilian who used to be General Marshall in the military. Great series although a little biased against Joe Stalin's viewpoint of the world. Joe Stalin the United States ally in WWII. Yeah that one.
These are very good. I learn the occasional useful piece of information from this series on the cold war. They interview quality characters from history like John Kenneth Galbraith and General Jaruzelski in this episode. Mostly I find it useful to test my own theories and narratives. Do they stand up? Am I right about Winston. Have I misunderstood where the power lay. Do I underestimate the Soviet threat? In this way I'm constantly reformulating or tweaking the narrative of history but the overall direction still stands. 20th century wars were unnecessary and stimulated by parties other than nations or their leaders. The bankers and the financiers. The Rothschilds and the Rockefellers and so forth.
This point still stands but the complexity of the characters adds dimensions that are a little more complex, less binary and more human. In this way I'm getting value out of this series.
The more I think it about it the more obvious it becomes to me that the reason the West won the cold war is because we paid better bribes. A better class of massacre if you will. Both ideologies are top down lizard hierarchy structures which just don't pan out for us humans but we'll learn that lesson in due course.
I started watching this series while researching cold war espionage documentaries and the first one is quite good so I'm posting it. I didn't learn too much but it did go into the formation of the United Nations in San Francisco and geopolitical manoeuvring between Stalin, Churchill and FDR.
It ends on that ugly fact. The USSR sacrificed 40 times more of its people than the UK and the U.S. combined in WWII. It's a staggering statistic and one we forget all too quickly.
I've been asked this time and again by a bunch of folk ranging from London planning honchos who don't have enough time to explore web 2.0 or friends who fired off a volley of concerned emails during a patch when I'd seemingly gone underground. I will however first off make a rough and ready psychographic division because not everybody is the same when I make this case.
A narrator or writer I came across (I'm struggling to remember where) asserted that there are roughly speaking two types of people plodding around the planet at present. Cold war survivors and the ones after, lets call them Post-Coldies. This has only a little to do with age as its a mindset that can easily be absorbed from say parents and different environments. Cold war people have been bombed by mainstream media (MSM) into believing that the world is divided into good and bad, and have trouble dealing with shades of grey or the texture and subtlety between. Go easy on them because its pretty close to a brain washing experience, but in principle a generation of Soviet 'evil empire' rhetoric, contrasted with Western neoliberal capitalist propaganda as saviour of the world leaves them with a sharply divided mindset that is wholly binary and extends to extraordinary statements like communism has failed and only capitalism works. Or "isn't it great the polar caps are melting, let's consume some more refrigerated ice cream".
Cold war survivors are a guarded bunch. MSM and their parents taught them to be that way. They manage their online identity with Stalinist control, feel uncomfortable with online pictures of themselves, default to using very spy-like online monikers, never use 'include message in reply' in their emails and compartmentalize their offline lives with a strict policy of not mixing say work friends, then family, and life friends. They also tend to tell default fibs if different groups happen to enquire about each other, but they are not being malicious.
I guess they're just trying to shore up their separate offline identities that they manage in this increasingly complex and connected world. This was necessary to hold the whole cold war mentality together. People who aren't paranoid or under fear of invasion make for lousy misguided patriots so it's in the interests of the State to make sure a climate of them and us prevails. It's not completely impossible to envisage the current attempt to exchange reds-under-the bed, with the now ubiquitous terrorists of today. But that's probably another post about propaganda's resemblance to heaps of contemporary advertising that I'm saving for later.
Anyway, the point of all this social(ist) media immersion is, in my view, to drive all that online activity offline. The most rewarding experience of virtual friendships is to meet those same people in real life. I started to be convinced of this through hooking up with big chunks of the London plannersphere. But take the argument even further, and the MMORPG or video gaming community is a good example. Its not hard to see that the apex of their digital community experiences are the championships and tournaments they hold in conventions centres from Seoul to South Dakota.
Another good potential example of this might be for Last.FM to create Last.FM bars. These would be bars where the community can have a say over the music, ranging from discovery mode, to play-me-the-classics-I-love. This used to be called a Juke Box but it was quite limited.
I can think of lots more examples.
So all that anthropological primate grooming with pokes, vampire bites, blogging and twitters pretty much self actualises when we get to have something like a cup of coffee or a beer with people of a likemind. Simple isn't it?
I got thinking about this again earlier because I see that PicnicMobare trying to get a large group of people together in one city and have an online picnic. By working out what your interests are they will seat you next to someone similar. Personally I quite like meeting people who are into stuff I haven't come across but I'm sure you see my point.The irony is that the Post Coldies are pretty much trying to create, with all this social(ist) media, what the Coldies have already being doing all their lives; albeit with global reach, greater transparency, less small talk and networking at the speed of light.
