That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, Lars Schoultz (1942- ), 2009, 745 pages, ISBN 9780807832608, Dewey 32That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, Lars Schoultz (1942- ), 2009, 745 pages, ISBN 9780807832608, Dewey 327.73
A litany of U.S. neocolonialism and bullying. Very readable.
"The president … lacks a sense of conviction on what is right and wrong." --Chester Bowles. p. 199.
"The U.S. had dominated us too long. The Cuban Revolution was determined to end that domination." --Fidel Castro (1926-2016)
410 BCE: "Right is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." --Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, book 5, chapter 17. http://academics.wellesley.edu/Classi... p. 4.
Unless it would cost the strong too much. p. 6.
THOSE WHO OWN THE COUNTRY, GOVERN IT
1789-present: The secretary of state's job has always been to protect and promote U.S. interests abroad. No Cuban government could make any change without affecting U.S. interests. p. 98.
PIRACY
1822-1825: U.S. Navy and Marines invaded Cuba eight times to burn pirate stations and close a pirates' resale shop for plundered U.S.-shipping cargo. pp. 13, 572.
1868-1878: U.S. citizens aided an unsuccessful rebellion of Cubans against Spain. pp. 13-14.
RACISM
1869: "We have enough of inferior races in our midst without absorbing and not assimilating the Creoles and blacks of Cuba." --a U.S. congressman. p. 14.
BIG HELP
1895-1898: U.S. helped Cuba throw off Spanish control. U.S. would now control Cuba. pp. 14-33.
"Cuban heads of state are not representatives of a free Cuban people, but /administrators/ of American financial feudalism." --/The Nation/, 1933. p. 31.
1896: Cubans elected the wrong class of representatives to their U.S.-mandated constituent assembly. p. 24.
1897: U.S. investors were hungry for Cuban sugar and mining profits. p. 20.
RACISM
1897: "Cubans are no more capable of self government than the savages of Africa." --a U.S. Army general. p. 22.
1901: "No one wants more than I a good and stable government, of and by the people here [in Cuba], but we must see that the right class are in office." --Governor-General Leonard Wood. p. 8.
1903: U.S. investors in Cuban sugar were granted preferential access to the U.S. market. p. 28.
1947: Truman administration started a second Red Scare, screening federal employees for possible association with communist or other unfavored groups. By the time of Castro's 1959 ascension, the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy had been cleansed of imagination and initiative. Elements of McCarthyism persist as of 2024. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCar... p. 90.
RACISM
1952: "Whether the new group under Batista will be any better is a question. Governments in Cuba are made up of Cubans." --a U.S. envoy. p. 49.
DICTATORS OK
[continuing through] 1952-present: Every U.S. administration supports right-wing dictators who support U.S. business interests. pp. 55-56, 58, 63, 247.
The U.S. arms, trains, and funds Latin American militaries so they can (1) keep a business-friendly tyrant in power, or, (2) overthrow their government if it becomes insufficiently friendly to U.S. business interests. pp. 60-61, 65, 67, 73.
Chile, 1973, Kissinger to Pinochet: "You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende. We want to help." p. 247.
SERFS
1953: More than half of rural dwellings had no toilet, inside or outside. Two percent of rural dwellings had running water. 80%-90% of rural children were infested with intestinal parasites. p. 53. More than half of Cuba's farmland was planted in sugar cane. More than 1/3 of Cuba's workforce was employed in sugar--most of them only for the 94-day harvest. p. 54.
CASTRO'S ACHIEVEMENTS
By 1975, Cubans were better fed, better housed, better clothed, better educated, and healthier than before the revolution and blockade. p. 268.
GUATEMALA
1954: The Eisenhower administration overthrew Guatemala's government[, beginning 40 years of terror. This taught Che Guevara that only armed force could bring justice]. p. 59.
CASTRO
1956-: Fidel Castro led a revolution against the Batista government. pp. 63-.
REWARDS
[continuing through] 1957-present: U.S. ambassadorships are rewards for financial contributions to the president's political party. p. 63.
CASTRO
1959: Fidel Castro's regime began. p. 83.
1959: Castro lowered rents and telephone rates. p. 94.
1959: Castro nationalized 3,750 square miles of cattle land, 3,000 square miles of sugarcane land, and 31 sugar mills. He offered investors tax value, which was 20% of market value, to be paid in 20-year bonds yielding 4.5% interest. He could not have paid cash, Batista having plundered Cuba's treasury. p. 95, 99. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=...
WHOSE CURTAIN?
1959: "We should not push Cuba behind an iron curtain raised by ourselves." --newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann. p. 100.
WITH US OR AGAINST US
1959: To Cold War Washington, a neutral Cuba would have the same effect on U.S. security as a communist Cuba. p. 106.
THREAT TO NEOCOLONIALISM
1959: "If Cuba gets by with actions against American property owners, our whole private enterprise approach abroad would be in serious danger." --Assistant Secretary of State R. Richard Rubottom Jr. p. 106.
CRIPPLE THEIR ECONOMY
1960: Cuba sold sugar to the USSR. The U.S. Government abandoned hope of friendly relations with Cuba. The CIA plotted overthrow. Cuba then appropriated U.S. investors' properties. The U.S. attacked Cuba's economy. The State Department told U.S. oil executives to refuse to refine Russian crude in their Cuban refineries. Cuba took over management of the refineries. The U.S. cut back sugar imports, Cuba's economic lifeblood. Cuba nationalized all U.S.-investor-owned commercial property. The U.S. closed Cuba's largest industrial plant, Nicaro nickel. Eisenhower curtailed exports to Cuba, canceled Cuba's sugar quota, and closed the U.S. embassy in Cuba. pp. 116-139.
Cuba's U.S. imports dropped 97%, 1953-1961. Cuban exports to the U.S. dropped from $490 million in 1958 to $35 million in 1961. p. 200. Eisenhower forbade U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba. p. 203. By 1963, Cuba's gross national product per capita had dropped 30%. p. 207. The Johnson administration pressured other countries not to trade with or recognize Cuba. 226-236 Nixon followed suit. (Many of Nixon's papers are still classified, as of 2009.) pp. 245-247, 254, 261.
TRADE
In the mid-1950s, the U.S. had sold Cubans 187,000 tons of rice per year. By 1975, U.S. producers wanted to sell again. p. 267-273.
HUBRIS
1961: The Bay of Pigs fiasco. No one warned President Kennedy before the invasion that denial of U.S. involvement would be impossible. Eisenhower and Kennedy both considered it politically impossible to do the 3 days of pre-invasion bombing of Castro's air force that would've been needed for the invasion to succeed. pp. 160-161. CIA Director Allen Dulles assumed that Kennedy would send U.S. combat forces rather than let the invasion fail. pp. 162-164. U.S. officials thought the Cuban people would welcome Castro's overthrow. That a small invasion force would be joined by spontaneous uprisings of Cubans against Castro. pp. 164-165. Castro's domestic popularity soared. p. 169. And he was enabled to suppress all internal opposition. p. 172.
/I/ KNOW WHAT LET'S DO!
1961: Having failed to overthrow the government of Cuba, Kennedy's team suggested he overthrow communism in Vietnam. p. 170.
THE DANGER OF A GOOD EXAMPLE
Still, Castro couldn't be tolerated: his was a positive example of a working communist revolution. p. 172. "If Cuba succeeds, we can expect most of Latin America to fall." p. 182.
WE CAN'T STAND IT
By 1962, the world's largest CIA station was in Miami: its only job was to overthrow the Cuban government. p. 186-189, 221, 239. The Pentagon proposed the chemical and bacterial contamination of Cuba's food supply. p. 189. [The CIA under Jimmy Carter would mass-murder Jamaicans by poisoning flour and rice, after their government taxed bauxite extraction. --Killing Hope, William Blum, 2014, pp. 263-267.]
USSR
1962: Cuban Missile Crisis. pp. 183-187.
SABOTAGE
/Un/authorized (but CIA-funded) sabotage by freelance Cuban exiles was stopped if possible, but not prosecuted. The unauthorized saboteurs were caught and released. pp. 190, 214-216, 220. Every president tolerated freelance attacks on Cuba until 1977. p. 221. From 1977 to 1980, Carter grew ever closer to the hard-line Cold War views of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. p. 294.
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
LBJ sent 20,000 marines to put down a rebellion against the Dominican government. p. 237.
HIJACKING
1961-1973: 159 U.S. aircraft were hijacked, 85 of them to Cuba. Some hijackers were Batistianos fleeing Cuba, beginning 1959. The U.S. and Cuba reached an agreement in 1973 to punish or return hijackers, after which hijacking mostly stopped. The "downside" of the agreement was increased calls from Americans for closer relations with Cuba. pp. 256-259.
Recommends:
/Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900/, Eric T.L. Love, 2004. p. 572.
/Cuba y los Estados Unidos, 1805-1898/, Emilio Roig de Leuchsenting, 1949. p. 572.
The Second World War, Antony Beevor (1946–), 2012, 863pp, ISBN 9780316023740, Dewey 940.54, Library-of-Congress D743 (loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco).
A concThe Second World War, Antony Beevor (1946–), 2012, 863pp, ISBN 9780316023740, Dewey 940.54, Library-of-Congress D743 (loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco).
A concise history of World War II. One strength is some glimpses into the effects of the war on ordinary soldiers and civilians.
CAUSES WWII was largely about grabbing natural resources. Hitler wanted his neighbors' coal, metals, food, "living space," slave labor, and Hungarian Black-Sea oil. Mussolini joined what he thought would be the winning side, expecting some of the losers' colonies as a reward. Japan wanted the Pacific and Asian colonies of the crumbling European empires, especially Dutch East Indies oil. pp. 7, 247, 249, 419, 429. Corporate America wanted them too. (UK & US froze Japanese assets, July 1941, for Japanese occupation of French Indochina. AND embargoed oil from entering Japan. p. 219. The oil embargo was effectively a U.S. declaration of war on Japan. p. 277.) Everybody wanted the oil of the Middle East, and control of the Suez Canal. pp. 313, 319. USSR & UK invaded neutral Iran, Aug. 1941, to get its oil & routes from USSR to Persian Gulf. p. 221.)
Hitler also wanted to reverse the humiliation of Germany's WWI defeat.
Mao wanted to seize power. War was the way. p. 53. Lenin said so.
Japan continued its war to subjugate China: Japanese officers felt about China as Germans felt about Slavs: conquer & enslave them to feed the homeland. pp. 6, 278.
The U.S. wanted to preserve its world trade, which would be in danger if Germany beat the British. p. 180.
CHANGING TECHNOLOGY Roosevelt green-lighted the nuclear-weapons program December 6, 1941, knowing that the Japanese were planning to attack. p. 247.
On being congratulated on reaching Berlin after all the USSR had suffered, Stalin replied, "Tsar Alexandr went all the way to Paris." (Potsdam, July 1945.) p. 765. After the fall of Berlin, the Red Army had 400 divisions; the US planned to leave Europe; Britain and France could not oppose the might of the USSR. Stalin planned to take France, Italy, Norway, Denmark, … . It was learning (from his spies) that the US had the bomb that caused him to cancel his plans. p. 765.
The British Navy had not yet learned the lesson that the age of the battleship was over. Attack by aircraft now decides naval battles. pp. 171, 257.
German 88mm antitank guns destroyed British armor. 1941. p. 179. British army conservatism prevented adaptation of their 3.7-inch antiaircraft gun as antitank.
German artillery was horse-drawn until they took the French motor transport—which they then used to attack Russia. p. 197.
RESOURCES Sweden supplied iron ore to Germany. p. 45
Spain's survival depended on U.S. grain & oil. p. 145.
USSR provided 26,000 tons chromium, 140,000 tons manganese, 2+ million tons oil to Germany, before Nazis invaded USSR. p. 189. Also large amounts grain, cotton, Southeast-Asian-bought rubber.
USSR dismantled factories & moved them far east out of Nazi bomber range. p. 198–199.
US bombing raids on Japan in June 1944 dwindled when airplane fuel ran short. p. 563.
Chinese Communists knew that control of food supplies would mean control of everything. Communists' slightly better treatment of peasants won the people to their cause. p. 778.
WAR ECONOMY IS GREAT! British cash payments of $4.5 billion for arms in 1940 lifted U.S. out of Great Depression. p. 181. (In Britain, scarcity continued postwar.)
MILITARIZATION Roosevelt started in 1938 building 15,000 Air Force aircraft per year. p. 180.
U.S. army grew from 200,000 to 8 million. pp. 180, 281.
The galvanization of U.S. military industry produced an overwhelming arsenal, with nearly 100 aircraft carriers at sea by the end of 1944. p. 620.
ME FIRST Most arrests by Nazis were in response to denunciations by fellow Germans. pp. 3–4.
Hitler's rearmament put Germans back to work. Nazi brutality & loss of freedom seemed a small price to most Germans. p. 4.
The Pope did not speak against persecution of Jews. p. 543.
COURAGE OR COWARDICE Death before dishonor was the Japanese commanders' creed: they preferred national suicide to loss of face. p. 248.
Unlike the French, the Red Army fought on, refusing to acknowledge that they had been defeated. p. 208.
Poland was one of the few countries where collaboration with the conqueror was virtually unknown. p. 51.
The greatest proportion of UK defeatists was in the upper classes. p. 106.
Moral courage is a rare virtue in [Germany, but, fill in the blank]; it drops to zero when a [German] puts on a uniform. —Otto von Bismarck. p. 4. Nazis wanted almost everyone in uniform—especially children.
WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND The harsher the reaction, the greater the determination to resist. p. 210.
Germans bombed Coventry. Allies returned the favor many times over on German cities. p. 510.
As Allied bombing of Germany intensified, Hitler wanted revenge & terror inflicted on UK. p. 543.
After Germany seized a U.S. freighter, U.S. began selling arms to Allies. Oct 3, 1939. p. 40. Hitler in 1940–41 refused to let U-boats prey near the U.S., to avoid provoking U.S. into war before Germans beat USSR. pp. 182, 438, 440, 443.
The appalling violence of Japanese attack led to bitter Chinese resistance. 1937. p. 7. Hitler repeated the error in USSR in 1941.
Germany's harsh treatment of the Serbs was to become dangerously counter-productive, since it led to the most savage guerrilla war and interfered with their exploitation of the country's raw materials. p. 161.
[December 1941: Germans retreating from near Moscow] Soviet revenge was fierce after German [genocidal] treatment of prisoners and civilians. German officers and soldiers began to regret their treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. pp. 244–245.
SOME HELP, HERE? Churchill was as aggressive as he could be, to persuade Roosevelt to join the Allies. pp. 123, 179. Churchill was "foxlike," pursuing multiple plans of varying merit; he was also "hedgehoglike," with the one big idea of getting the US as an ally. p. 219. (Isaiah Berlin, "fox knows many things; hedgehog knows one big thing.")
Roosevelt worked to drag his country into the war. Britain is "a man whose house is on fire asking his neighbor for the loan of his hose." Dec. 17, 1940. p. 181. U.S. demanded /all/ U.K. money and gold, and some colonies. U.S. navy convoyed British shipping as far as Iceland. p. 182.
Roosevelt's lend-lease to USSR provided steel, antiaircraft guns, aircraft, food (saved many in USSR from famine, 1942–1943 winter), jeeps, trucks. p. 222. It was U.S. lend-lease trucks that enabled the Soviet army to reach Berlin before the Americans. p. 689. (The Red Army suffered 350,000 casualties taking Berlin. p. 756.)
China would've fallen to Japan but for US fighting Japan. p. 186.
Japan wouldn't've dared attack the U.S. had Hitler not started the European war. p. 278. Hitler was joyful the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. With U.S. at war in the Pacific, Hitler felt free to fully engage U.S. in Atlantic naval war. p. 279.
The U.S. contributed to Chinese Nationalists' defeat by Mao's Communists—by forcing Chiang Kai-Shek to concentrate his best forces toward Indochina in 1945 to cut off Japanese retreat—instead of reoccupying the agricultural regions in the north to feed his troops and starving people. p. 770.
The U.S. aided and armed the Communist Vietminh, led by Ho Chi Minh, who assisted the Allies against Japan in Indochina. pp. 619, 697.
MISUNDERSTANDING Stalin wrongly assumed Churchill & Roosevelt enjoyed absolute power in their countries. p. 222.
Roosevelt's overestimate of his influence over Stalin would become a dangerous liability, especially toward the end of the war. pp. 281, 512, 638. Churchill too thought he, Churchill, had turned Stalin into a friend. p. 339, 638–639. Churchill failed to see that Stalin was even more successful than Roosevelt at manipulating people.
Roosevelt, convinced that the United Nations led by the US & USSR would be able to solve everything afterwards, had a dangerous disregard for postwar consequences. p. 562.
ESPIONAGE Stalin was amazed at the Americans' naivete in talking candidly among themselves in their quarters in the Soviet embassy in Teheran. Didn't they /know/ Stalin had them bugged? This is how Stalin found out that Roosevelt wouldn't oppose Stalin's plans for Poland (/after/ Roosevelt would secure the Polish-American vote in November 1944); no need to fear that Churchill would sway Roosevelt. pp. 512–514, 638–640. Stalin repeated the bugging in Yalta in the Crimea in Feb. 1945: he knew what Roosevelt and Churchill's teams were thinking. pp. 710–711.
Japanese spies, through prostitutes servicing US airmen, knew every detail of the US air force base at Kweilin. p. 562.
COLONIAL IMPERIALISM The British government of India declared war on Germany—without consulting any Indian. p. 28.
STRATEGY Brits repeatedly stretched insufficient resources in too many directions: failing at several, where they could've succeeded at one. Hitler ruthlessly prioritized. Churchill unwisely bit off more than he could chew. p. 174.
Stalin insisted the Allies commit to a massive invasion of France in Spring 1944 (which US also wanted). This left the Balkans & Central Europe under Red Army control (as Churchill feared). p. 512.
German & Japanese air forces both failed to use their best pilots as flight instructors. Instead they kept them sortieing to exhaustion & a fatal mistake. Despite increased aircraft production [General Motors made engines for the Luftwaffe during the war —Stiglitz, /Making Globalization Work/, p. 341], by D-day the Luftwaffe was a spent force. p. 550. By June 1944, most Japanese pilots had just 2 months' flight training. p. 564.
CRYPTOGRAPHY Though the UK navy suspected the Nazis had broken their codes, they kept using them 10 months longer, with disastrous consequences. pp. 282, 436, 453. 1,100 UK, 1,800 Allied ships were sunk in 1942.
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, Daniel Immerwahr, 2019, 516pp, ISBN 9780374172145 Dewey 973
Empire is all about grabbingHow to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, Daniel Immerwahr, 2019, 516pp, ISBN 9780374172145 Dewey 973
Empire is all about grabbing land and resources for "us," at "their" expense. Especially, militarily-strategic land and resources.
A citizen on the mainland has a constitutional right to trial by jury, but when that citizen travels to Puerto Rico, the right vanishes. p. 86. Four million territorial residents have no constitutional rights. p. 87.
U.S. armed forces have been deployed 211 times in 67 countries since 1945. p. 14.
Pre-1492, indigenous population of what became the 48 contiguous states was perhaps 5 million (estimates range from 720,000 to 15 million). p. 36. By 1800, indigenous population was down to around 500,000. The U.S. census did not count indigenous people until 1890, when there were fewer than 360,000. p. 78-79.
U.S. population was 4 million in 1790; 76 million in 1900: exploded by a factor of 19 in 110 years. p. 33-34. By 1907, there was no Indian territory left, with Oklahoma admitted as a state. p. 44. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i...
Which of these people are the savages? p. 42.
The U.S. took all of Mexico's territory it could without taking its people. p. 77.
The 1854 Gadsden Purchase completed the present 48-state boundary.
Importation of Peruvian guano began in the 1840s. p. 49. It's the government's duty to secure it at a reasonable price. --Millard Fillmore. p. 50. From 1857 to 1902, the U.S. annexed 94 Caribbean and Pacific guano islands. pp. 46, 53. These were mining companies' fiefdoms. p. 55. Speculators used Chinese, Hawaiians, and African Americans to mine 400,000 tons of guano. p. 56.
By 1914, the Haber-Bosch process was supplying ammonia fertilizer made from atmospheric nitrogen. Malthus's limits to human population growth were seemingly repealed. p. 57. Without Haber-Bosch, Earth could sustain only 2.4 billion people. World population reached 3 billion in the early 1960s and has been rising by 1 billion every 12 years since. Sixty years on, we're approaching 8 billion in the early 2020s. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i...
Fritz Haber also prolonged WWI by 2 years by providing Germany with nitrate explosives. p. 57. And invented the poison gases of WWI trench warfare and of the Nazi death chambers. p. 58.
"I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one." --Theodore Roosevelt, 1897. p. 64. "McKinley is bent on peace, I fear." --Theodore Roosevelt, 1898. p. 66. But the American people wanted war. The U.S. beat the Spaniards easily because the Cubans and Filipinos had already weakened the Spanish army. p. 70. The U.S. gained 7,000 islands holding 8.5 million people. p. 80. The Filipinos then fought their new overlords. 1899-1903, U.S. soldiers killed 775,000 Filipinos. p. 103. And the war continued until 1913. p. 107. Theodore Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906.
Cuba was to be, nominally, independent. But, North Americans owned its export agriculture, its mines, its banks, and much of its land. p 113. The U.S. was not, technically, sovereign of the Panama Canal Zone. But it had all the rights, power, and authority. p. 114. The U.S. seized control of many countries' finance and trade--"gunboat diplomacy," invading dozens of times, replacing governments.
Southerner Woodrow Wilson's writings were an inspiration for the 1915 film, /The Birth of a Nation/, which lauded and rebirthed the then-defunct Ku Klux Klan. p. 117. Wilson invaded Haiti; the U.S. occupied it until 1934. Wilson annexed Virgin Islands for a naval base. p. 120.
The World War I victors took the losers' colonies. These were the prizes they fought the war for. p. 120.
Disappointed natives of occupied countries who had hoped for, and expected, colonialism to end after WWI included Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Sayyid Qutb. p. 121.
Germany, Italy, and Japan lacked large empires, going into WWII. Everybody wanted more colonies. p. 158.
Fewer than 10% of U.S. WWII armed-service members were in combat: more than 90% were in logistics. p. 215. The U.S. built ports, assembly plants, railways, roads, airports, barracks, hospitals, warehouses, in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, and Saharan Africa to get armaments to defend British control of the Suez Canal and Iraqi oil. pp. 216-217. And a trail of air bases, Miami-Brazil-West Africa-Cairo. U.S. materiél saved Britain's access to its colonies.
The same thing happened all over the world. In WWII, the U.S. had 30,000 installations on 2,000 overseas base sites. p. 219.
G.I.s were "overpaid, over-sexed, and over here." --British complaint.
Postwar, the Stars and Stripes flew over 135 million colonized or occupied people (including almost 80 million Japanese), and 132 million residents of the 48 states. p. 226.
Only Stalin kept U.S. personnel out of his country. Soviet pilots took delivery of U.S. planes in Fairbanks. p. 218.
U.S. control waned as 8 million servicemen abroad, May 1945 reduced to 1 million, June 1947. p. 234. The (shattered) Philippines became independent July 4, 1946. p. 238.
Puerto Rico, with widespread poverty, so depended on sales to mainland U.S. that a reduction of trade (as from tariffs if independent) would destroy all hope of life and civilization. p. 245. Attacks on police were met with the threat of independence and ruinous tariffs.
Doctors used Puerto Rican women as guinea pigs to find out what birth-control pill, intrauterine device, and other contraceptive methods work. p. 250. By 1949, 18% of hospital deliveries were followed by surgical sterilization of the mother. Of mothers born in the 1920s, nearly half had been sterilized.
In 1950, a Puerto Rican nationalist very nearly shot President Truman, whose life was saved by a dying police officer who killed the would-be assassin first. pp. 254-255. In 1954, Puerto Rican nationalists shot and wounded five U.S. congressmen in the House chamber. p. 258.
Corporations paid no taxes. p. 257.
By 1955, nearly 25% of Puerto Ricans lived in mainland U.S. p. 252.
Synthetic rubber made from oil reduced the need for tropical colonies. By 1945, The U.S. was producing 800,000 tons a year. p. 269. Plastics too. Also made from oil.
Logistics were central to WWII. Aviation, radio, cryptography, dehydrated food, penicillin, DDT, laid globalization's foundation. p. 282. DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) protected against insect-borne diseases by eradicating all plant and animal life. p. 292
During WWII, "many of us realized that foreign languages have actual, objective reality, that there are areas of the earth where, strange as it may seem, English is neither spoken nor understood." p. 321. The English language conquered the globalizing fields of Aviation, science ("God couldn't get tenure: he has only one publication, and it's not in English."), and especially the Internet. p. 330. "If the Chinese rule the world some day, I suspect they will do it in English." p. 331.
The U.S. keeps lightly-populated islands as bases, where it need account to no one. p. 345....more
The Good War: An Oral History of World War II, Studs Terkel (1912-2008), 1984, 591 pages, ISBN 0345325680
Forty-year-old memories of Americans' WWII.
MThe Good War: An Oral History of World War II, Studs Terkel (1912-2008), 1984, 591 pages, ISBN 0345325680
Forty-year-old memories of Americans' WWII.
Must a society experience horror to understand horror? p. 12.
If we answer hate with hate, it will never end. --Jacques Raboud, p. 422.
We are ordinary people, who can also be weapons for evil Hitlers. --Jacques Raboud, p. 422. As long as some men want power, we're gonna have wars. --Joseph Levine, p. 443.
ATOMIC VETERANS July 1, 1946, the U.S. military tested a nuclear weapon at Bikini Atoll. 42,000 soldiers and sailors observed nuclear tests. 27,000 of them are dead. We were all used as guinea pigs. Within ten hours after the blast, we were at ground zero. I fought fire on a target ship. We drank lagoon water. Nothing was said to us about radiation or danger. Our ship was sprayed by the mushroom cloud. My legs have been amputated. They want to amputate the left arm. I have terminal cancer of the colon and liver. Diagnosed at a private hospital after two emergency surgeries. The VA hospital wouldn't admit me because I didn't have a scheduled appointment. The VA has six times refused my claim of military-service-connected illness. I draw what they call a non-service-connected disability of five dollars a month. Three doctors on my behalf say I was exposed to 1,000 to 1,800 rads. Their doctor from Stanford University said the swelling I have now isn't the same as I had in the military. I went to Japan and got the treatment that bomb survivors get. They told me I had to continue it here. The Government wouldn't allow it because that would admit their liability. The VA hospital treats you like you're either an alcoholic or a drug addict. VA doctors are overworked, underpaid, and bitter against the government. pp. 546-555. --John Smitherman (1928-1983), president, The National Association of Atomic Veterans. He died six weeks after this interview.
The president said it'd be a hundred years before anybody could go in the city. A few weeks later, we were ordered to occupy Nagasaki. About 20,000 troops occupied the town. An off-the-charts number of them got cancer. A marine mentioned in Newsweek, November 1979, spent his life savings, $30,000, on his cancer treatment. The U.S. Government refused him. When I die and I'm cremated and my ashes are scattered over some forest, that radiation is still alive. Thousands of years from now, somebody exposed to those ashes may get sick. pp. 542-546. --Victor Tolley.
I was in Hiroshima just after the bomb, for the occupation. My liver, heart, and lungs are ballooning. A Japanese I met, when I told him I was at Hiroshima, said my only chance is to stay in the water. I soak 5, 6 hours a day. It's all that keeps me going. pp. 556-559. --Joseph Staziak
My skin peeled off and was hanging from my body. p. 538. The remains were so burned we couldn't tell which might have been my mother. p. 540. By the next day, August 7, thousands of wounded people were covered head to toe by maggots on their wounds. Shortly after, they died. p. 541. You are in shock. I needed a very long time to return to some sort of normal state. Mr. Kito instituted a signature campaign to abolish nuclear weapons. He has gathered, thus far, thirty million signatures. p. 542.
The atom bomb was dropped on working people. It wasn't anywhere near the big shots of Japan who started the war in the first place. [After FDR forced Japan to fight us, by using the U.S. Navy to keep fuel from reaching Japan.--TRW.] We didn't drop it on them. Hirohito and his white horse, it never touched him. It was dropped on women and children who had nothing to say about whether their country went to war or not. pp. 109, 546. --Peggy Terry
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a warning to the USSR: We're stronger than you. p. 525. We bombed Nagasaki to speed up Japan's surrender,so the Russians wouldn't get into Japan for the occupation. p. 535. --Father George Zabelka.
Our friend at Oak Ridge, enriching uranium and plutonium, died of leukemia. p. 519. Most of the fellows who watched the test at Bikini Atoll have cancer or died of cancer. We have four children. Two have birth defects. Most of the couples who worked at Oak Ridge couldn't have children. p. 520. Most of the young women that did get pregnant miscarried. --Marnie Seymour. I had become sterile. p. 543. Warren Zink. People in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania die of cancer. There's a radium-processing plant there. They put the tailings in the creek. p. 579. --Nora Watson.
I thought after the war they'd close down all the plants at Oak Ridge. I never thought it'd go on and on. You ought to go down there now and see it. p. 520. --Marnie Seymour.
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was a hellhole. Swarming with rats. pp. 518-519. Marnie Seymour. "We're in Dogpatch." p. 523. John H. Grove.
It was physicists who demanded to make the atom bomb, to win the war. p. 507. Leo Szilard came to the U.S. to look up Enrico Fermi. Szilard and Wigner persuaded Einstein to write that letter to Roosevelt. p. 508. Fermi's group made the first chain reaction December 2, 1942, in Chicago. p. 509. The Germans were far behind. Fermi, Bethe, Neumann, Kistiakowsky, Teller were all at Los Alamos, under Oppenheimer. p. 511. July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb went off in New Mexico. From exactly ten miles away, wearing welder's glasses, it was blinding heat. The sound came a minute later, a great thunder. p. 513. Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. p. 524. We killed a hundred thousand people. Fire bombs and high explosives did the job on Dresden and Hamburg and Leipzig. pp. 514, 534. By 1951, the U.S. could do all of World War I in one day. By 1958, we could do--not a kiloton, as in WWI, not a megaton, as in WWII--a gigaton. A billion tons. A thousand million tons. --Philip Morrison.
When we beat the Nazis, we emulated them. The rocket, the cruise missile, and the ballistic missile are German inventions. It wasn't justified, but I would do it again. We follow our leaders. p. 516. --Philip Morrison.
Nothing happened in 1945 except that we changed the scale of our indifference to man. p. 506. --Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values. [Herodotus says of the new weapons technology of around 1300 BCE, "Iron has been discovered for the evil of mankind:"]
THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE Americans have never known what war really is. Because there is one feature they never appreciated: the smell. It's intolerable. The smell of death. Maybe if Americans had known that, they'd be more concerned about peace. p. 284. --Dr. Alex Shulman
The U.S. was far less damaged by WWII than any other combattant.
Americans have never had the experience of being bombed out. I don't wish it on them. But I wish they wouldn't be so keen to get into wars, because one day it will come back on your territory and God help you. p. 218. --Jean Wood.
THE SOVIET EXPERIENCE The USSR was devastated. See Svetlana Alexeivich's oral history, /The Unwomanly Face of War/: quotes from it here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
War is not a worthy occupation for a human being. Of my generation, out of a hundred who went to fight, three came back. One should not ask those of us who remained alive what war means to them. I was the only one from our class of all the boys who went to the front who remained alive after that war. --Grigori Baklanov, p. 458.
EFFECTS OF COMBAT Plastic surgery would go on for years on these burned veterans. In Pasadena in '46, nicely-dressed women standing there staring. Letters to the editor of the Pasadena paper: Why can't they be kept off the streets? What awful things for us to have to look at. p. 130. --Betty Basye Hutchinson.
Until the war my husband never drank. He never even smoked. When he came back he was an absolute drunkard. And he used to have the most awful nightmares. He'd get up in the middle of the night and start screaming. I'd just sit for hours and hold him while he just shook. We'd go to the movies, and if the film had a lot of shooting, he'd start to shake and have to leave. He started slapping me around and slapped the kids around. He became a brute. p. 108. --Peggy Terry
My brother was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. He still has nightmares. Gave up hunting. He used to be a big duck, quail hunter. He never talks about it. p. 519. --Marnie Seymour.
PROSPERITY, OPPORTUNITY: "Not for the poor souls who lost sons and daughters. But for the rest of us, the war was a hell of a good time." pp. 8, 313, 575. --Paul Edwards.
America conquered the world. We could do what we wanted. p. 586. --Steve McConnell.
With the G.I. Bill and postwar prosperity, many more Americans were middle-class. Suburbs and automobiles were everywhere. pp. 9, 134. The postwar boom lasted until 1969. If you were a nice white middle-class family, life was pretty good. p. 65. --Robert Lekachman. Veterans bought homes in the suburbs on G.I.-Bill loans. The old neighborhood got older and never really recovered. p. 134. --Mike Royko. These damn Republicans win elections now because the New Deal picked up the working man and gave him a chance. He's now conservative. --James Rowe, p. 319.
The war gave a lot of people jobs. It led them to expect more than they had before. pp. 109, 112. --Peggy Terry, Sarah Killingsworth. Women after WWII were not content to be just housewives. p. 8. The women's movement had its seeds in WWII. p. 119. --Dellie Hahne. Examinations: "Are you pregnant?" I said I wasn't when I came in. They hired me. We replaced the clerical men for combat overseas. That was the whole idea. We rejected lots of women who had syphilis and didn't know it. pp. 123-124. --Evelyn Fraser. Student nurses were running Fresno hospital. p. 127. --Betty Basye Hutchinson.
Blacks too had demanded and received war-materials-manufacturing jobs. pp. 8-9, 113. --Sarah Killingsworth. FDR signed executive order 8802, June 25, 1941, forbidding discrimination in war contract work, at A. Philip Randolph's insistence: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-do... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Ph... --Joseph L. Rauh, Jr. p. 335, 337, 366. Lockheed hired 20,000 people. No Negroes. Roosevelt wanted to go slow. I had been aggressive, trying to get companies to comply. I was removed. --Earl B. Dickerson, pp. 337-340.
"I was promoted to shop pipefitter and went from $32 a week to $125. Then I went in the military and went down to $21." --John Garcia
At Oak Ridge, enriching uranium and plutonium, GIs were paid $50 a month. Civilians doing the same work beside them got $450 plus overtime. p. 519. --Marnie Seymour.
If not for price control, prices would've doubled or tripled during the war. --John Kenneth Galbraith. p. 321.
I advanced from second lieutenant to lieutenant colonel during the war. At age 25, I was commanding a battalion in combat. p. 190. --General William Buster.
The war obliterated our culture and made us Americans. p. 140. --Paul Pisicano.
"You get rather fond of the people who pay you." --James Rowe, in 1980 a corporate lawyer, formerly a government official in several of FDR's New Deal agencies. p. 319.
POSTWAR After Japan surrendered they sent us to China to protect Chiang Kai-Shek's corrupt government. p. 174. --Roger Tuttrup.
Within a very short time after the war, the same people who had been Nazi officers terrorizing the neighborhoods were in charge again, in the Allied sectors of Germany. --Hans Massaquoi, pp. 504-505. When we started to arm Germany, I was shocked. I began distrusting my government. p. 115. --Dellie Hahne. In the war I was mad at the Japanese and supposed to love the Chinese. Now I gotta love the Japanese and hate the Chinese. That's when I decided something's wrong. p. 135. --Mike Royko. How quickly our former enemies became our friends and how quickly our former friends became our enemies. What was it all about? p. 562. --Nancy Arnot Harjan. We won the war but we lost the peace. Japan and Germany today, their technology and economy surpasses us. Even to this day, I'm bitter about Japanese and German goods. pp. 80, 353. --Peter Bezich. I don't drive a Toyota or own a Sony. p. 93. --Anton Bilek
Now, to Japanese people, America is a place of crime, violence, and unemployment. p. 227. --Yasuko Kurachi Dower
Young people who grew up ducking under desks in atomic-bomb drills don't think there'll be a future. p. 522. --Marnie Seymour.
CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS We won the rights for all ex-felons to vote. p. 170. --John H. Abbott, convicted of the felony of being a conscientious objector (refusing to murder), and plaintiff in successful Supreme Court cases restoring rights of ex-felons.
My father, a farmer and an influential man in our Canadian community during WWI, had himself put on the draft board so he could exempt anyone who didn't want to go. In spring 1918 he was disabled with a broken kneecap. Teams of horses with seeding and cultivating equipment appeared from all around. They were in the hands of people my father had exempted from service. All of our crops were planted within 48 hours. p. 206. --John Kenneth Galbraith.
MILITARISM: Roosevelt wanted to use the navy to get the Japanese out of Indonesia. The country wouldn't have allowed it. Then along came Pearl Harbor. --James Rowe, p. 319.
Since WWII, the military-industrial complex has set U.S. foreign and industrial policy. pp. 8, 187, 189, 327. We've institutionalized militarism. You can't find the term, "national security" before 1947. Now it's "defense" and "national "security," so there's no limit to the money you must give to it. pp. 187, 189. --Admiral Gene LaRocque
Americans, postwar, were eager to use military force anywhere in the world. pp. 11, 189.
The destruction of Dresden was unforgivable. It was done very late in the war, as part of a military dynamic which was out of control and had no relationship to any military needs. Japan was defeated before the atom bombs were dropped. pp. 205, 206, 353. --John Kenneth Galbraith.
The church hierarchy didn't speak against indiscriminate bombing of civilians. p. 534. I must say that there was a little difference in my feelings when I found out that Nagasaki was a Catholic city. --Father George Zabelka.
When you first come in you're a hero, but enough sailors come through these ports, and social disease, alcoholism, rape, mayhem, and they're not popular any more. p. 35. --Frank Keegan
Through the 1920s and 1930s, the army was less than 100,000. --Telford Taylor, p. 460. In 1939, the U.S. standing army was 186,000 officers and men. p. 190. --General William Buster. After Pearl Harbor, we built an eleven-million-man army. --Joe Marcus, p. 323.
When it started, it was the greatest thing since the Crusades. p. 117. --Dellie Hahne.
A "GOOD" WAR: Most Americans believe WWII was not imperialistic. p. 13. [In fact, FDR took us into the war to win from Japan the resources of the crumbling European empires in the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, for U.S. corporations. The U.S. Government refused European Jewish refugees entry into the U.S. (so they'd have to go to Palestine, as Zionists demanded).]
However just, it was war. Never a solution to anything. --Herman Kogan, p. 365.
HYSTERIA: All we had in San Francisco were Hearst newspapers. The headlines said, "Japanese Invade West Coast." We reacted like a bunch of nuts. p. 24. --Dennis Keegan
FEAR OF "THOSE" PEOPLE: The Cold War resurrected the Red scare. p. 10. I was caught helping people escape Czechoslovakia after the Communist takeover. In the McCarthy era, it came to haunt my professional life. I was marked unreliable. Russians are very fearful of us. Russia has dysfunctioning machinery, shortage of skills, inefficiency, 20 million killed in WWII. --Paul Edwards, p. 571.
In graduate school, I had signed petitions in favor of the Spanish Loyalists. I did not get a commission. I was classified a "premature anti-fascist." pp. 194, 350, 481, 488. --John Ciardi. Those of us who had fought in Spain were stigmatized as premature anti-fascists. We were harassed by the FBI, Dies committee, McCarthy committee. The Subversive Activities Control Board took a year out of my life, defending the Lincoln Battalion before those characters. --Milton Wolff, pp. 486, 491, 493, 497.
If the OSS [which became the CIA] had not intervened in 1945 with lots of U.S. money, Italy would be a socialist country. --Milton Wolff, p. 486.
1941.12 Pearl Harbor: If they had arrested all the ordinary Japanese, there'd be no work force at Pearl Harbor. There were 130,000 Japanese on the islands. p. 19 --John Garcia
Anyone who had a German background was almost a pariah. p. 25. --Ron Veenker
Even before Pearl Harbor we were scared of Orientals. p. 34. --Frank Keegan
Why'd they bomb Hirosima? 100,000 people! Why not the big naval base? "What the hell. They're just Japs." p. 524.
In the occupation, you became acquainted with the Japanese. You start seeing they're not such horrible people. p. 536. --Father George Zabelka. I realized that these people didn't want to fight us. What the military did and what the civilians did were two different things. p. 545. --Victor Tolley.
Most blacks believe Hiroshima wouldn't've been bombed had it been a /white/ city. pp. 13, 370.
If a young black fellow, 18 years old, would get together with a British girl, 16, that girl would be encouraged to say she was raped. We had a number of young black soldiers who were hanged. p. 276. --Timuel Black
American suburbs are bound by their antiblack sentiments. p. 139. --Paul Pisicano. "Where I come from"--I detected a Southern accent--"we shoot niggers like we shoot rabbits." p. 150. --Dempsey Travis. It took 33 years to get our Negro tank batallion its Presidential Unit Citation. p. 265. -- Charles A. Gates
July 17, 1944, two transport ships in California loading ammunition exploded, killing 320 people--200 of whom were black ammunition loaders. All of the munition handlers were black. They were not given the equipment nor training to load it safely. Officers ordered them to roll 500-pound bombs down ramps off rail cars until they hit the side of the ship, saying, they have no detonators, they won't explode. Everybody above petty officer was white. If my division loaded 3,000 tons of ammunition in 8 hours, the officers pushed the next shift to beat it. Officers were betting whose crew would load fastest. If you complained, you got extra duty. After the explosion, those of us who survived and refused to work were sentenced to 15 years hard labor and dishonorable discharge. I have no veterans' benefits.--Joseph Small, pp. 392-393. ...more
Making the Future: Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance, Noam Chomsky (1928- ), 2012, 319 pages, Dewey 909.831, ISBN 9780872865372
Essays Making the Future: Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance, Noam Chomsky (1928- ), 2012, 319 pages, Dewey 909.831, ISBN 9780872865372
Essays 2006-2011. U.S. Government crimes against people foreign and domestic, in service of wealth transfer from the many to the wealthy few. Bush II and Obama.
One-sixth of the Mexican agricultural workforce has been displaced, 1994-2007, due to "dumping" of U.S.-government-subsidized corn under NAFTA. Mexican wages have fallen; Mexicans are impelled to migrate to the U.S. Clinton militarized the border in 1994. 2007. p. 23.
U.S. aid flows disproportionately to governments that torture their citizens. pp. 147-148, Colombia 168, Pinochet's Chile 226, Ceausescu's Romania and others 253-256, Honduras 256, Egypt 259-260, Gadhafi's Libya 265-268, Saudi Arabia and others 266, Pakistan 292.
Workers' share of income has declined globally. pp. 199, 269-273.
States have an internal enemy: their own population, which must be controlled when state policy is opposed by the public. p. 224.
Peak U.S. power was 1945. In 1949, China declared independence. pp. 229, 285.
Thomas Ray
>
Books:
nukes
(19)
Loading...
