Catherine Owens Only

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HIST2200-2018Fall-Lecture6.ppt
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HIST 2200 – Lecture 6

The Cold War Begins

The Cold War Begins

  • Introduction: The Deadliest War
  • Part I: The Last Shots and the First
  • Part 2: Postwar Europe Divided
  • Part 3: The Crisis in the Pacific
  • Part 4: From Korea to Vietnam
  • Conclusion: The Bipolar World

The Deadliest War Ever?

  • “Ranking” wars by their death toll can be a misleading venture, but it is nevertheless true that no conflict has ever engulfed so much of humanity with such deadly consequences as the Second World War
  • Unlike the First, its battles were not confined to the European theatre, and it claimed the lives of some 60-80 million people (approx 3% of humanity at the time)

The Deadliest War Ever?

  • Over 26 million people were killed in the Soviet Union, some 20 million in China, 10 million in Eastern Europe
  • Incalculable physical destruction also left the majority of Germans and Japanese people without homes, and many cities were wiped off the map entirely (1500 in the USSR alone)

The Deadliest War Ever?

  • The war also left cropland devastated, leading to massive food shortages
  • 3 million Indians died of starvation in Bengal when Britain diverted food back to the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOxXZ3rNISc
  • By wars end, hundreds of millions of people were living on less than 1500 calories a day

The Holocaust

  • The systematic murder of Nazi ‘enemies,’ most notably Jews, was among its many horrific elements

Echoes of History

  • In a chilling reminder of the pervasive nature of anti-Semitism, on Monday a left-wing synagogue was attacked, 11 Jews were murdered

Valuing Lives

  • The Jews killed in the synagogue in Pittsburgh were specifically targeted for actively supporting migrants from Central America; the killer saw Jewish ‘outsiders’ supporting other ‘outsiders’ and claiming that their lives mattered as much as anyone else

Valuing Lives

  • How do we value lives? Are some lives more valuable than others?
  • Black people have been asking this question for decades, as they have battled slavery, segregation, lynch mobs, poverty, and disproportionate police violence

Valuing Lives

  • The right believes that people exist in hierarchies with some lives more valuable than others; the left believes that all lives are equally valuable
  • The consequence of this difference is massive
  • The colonialism, capitalism, and slavery that shaped the modern world are premised on the idea that some lives are worth more than others

Valuing Lives

  • Thus, the entire modern world was built upon the right wing notion that White lives are most valuable, and everyone else exists on a hierarchy below them
  • This is why the left is always the revolutionary force trying to get rid of that hierarchy, and events this week show us why this is not just an abstract debate: it affects people’s lives directly

Valuing Lives

  • Today, the power of the Right is growing; Jair Bolsonaro is now the openly fascist President of Brazil; already university professors and students are being attacked for teaching principles like equality
  • LGBT people have already been attacked in the streets over the last week, including this woman who was beaten and her body was ‘branded’ with a swastika

Valuing Lives

  • Wondering what the centre thinks of all this?
  • It thinks the arrival of fascism offers “fresh opportunities” for Canadian investment
  • Indeed, the market has rewarded Bolsonaro, as Brazilian stocks have gone up in value since his victory

Back to the Future

  • Again, it is hard to escape the conclusion that many of the dynamics that culminated in the Second World War are present today
  • Then, as now, the market and the centre celebrated the rise of the right (fascism) and it was the left that maintained a consistent opposition to that fascism
  • The result of the rise of fascism was one of the deadliest wars in human history
  • How will we prevent this history from repeating? I don’t have an answer for you, except to say that we need to think hard about how we value one another

Part 1: The Last Shots and the First

At The Gates of Moscow

  • Germany initially had the upper hand, defeating France quickly (1940) and turning its attention to the Soviet Union
  • Hitler’s army then swept eastward, breaking the non-aggression pact and plunging deep into Russia, laying brutal siege to Leningrad and pushing close to Moscow
  • But in December 1941, the tide would turn
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbhwCm_Fhhw 27:18 - 34:20

Japanese Expansion

  • In the Pacific, Japan had gradually expanded its territory, colonizing Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, and later launching a vicious assault on the Chinese heartland (1937)
  • The U.S. initially stayed out of the war and sought only to contain Japan’s dominance of China (because the U.S. wanted to maintain its access to Chinese markets) through economic embargo

Pearl Harbor

  • Strained by the embargo, Japan concluded that the only hope for Japanese dominance of the Pacific was to knock the U.S. out quickly
  • Hence the attack on Pearl Harbor (1941) which was successful in the short term, but which brought the U.S. into the war with a full mobilization of its massive industrial capacity

An Economic War

  • When it became clear that WWII was a total war – a war that could only end with the total destruction of one side or the other – it became fundamentally an economic war
  • The winning side was that which could produce and mobilize more war materials
  • As such, it was only a matter of time before the United States and Soviet Union emerged victorious

An Ideological War

  • But, WWII was also a battle of ideology
  • Would the future be fascist? Socialist?
  • The old European order, shaken but not destroyed by WWI, was burning and bringing the world with it
  • What would the new world look like?

Ideology and Economics

  • The great ideological rivals (the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.) fundamental opposition was economic
  • Though neither country lived up to its ideal, the U.S. became the representative of individual liberty and capitalism, and the U.S.S.R. came to stand for social justice, equality, and socialism

War’s End

  • Between 1941-1945, the U.S. vastly outproduced Japan in naval war materials and consequently gained the upper hand in the Pacific
  • Meanwhile, the Soviet Union pushed westward against the full strength of Hitler’s army, gradually pushing Germany back
  • Within the occupied countries, resistance movements undermined fascist governments from within

War’s End

  • In 1944, the U.S. landed a small force in France, finally opening up the second front that the U.S.S.R. had been demanding for years
  • With Hitler’s army now divided, it fell back quickly, and the wartime Allies converged on Berlin from either side

War’s End

  • The defeat of Nazi Germany was largely a product of the success of the Soviet Union
  • The outcome of WWII was determined not by military strategy or “courage,” but by industrial capacity – ie. who could produce more tanks and guns and get them to the battlefield quicker

War’s End

  • The Soviet Union was able to develop a massive industrial base during the 1930s, while capitalism was in crisis, and thus when it mobilized for war with Germany it was the stronger power
  • The defeat of Germany in the U.S.S.R. turned the tide in the war, and cost 26 million Soviet lives, and it was the Soviet Union that marched into Berlin in 1945

War’s End

  • But although the Anglo powers had happily allowed the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany, they remained ideologically committed to its destruction after the war
  • Thus, as the dust settled on WWII, the Anglo “Allies” were already plotting to eliminate the Soviet Union; this set the stage for the Cold War, more than 40 years of struggle between the competing ideological systems

War’s End

  • Hitler committed suicide in April 1945 and Germany surrendered, quickly to be divided up into sectors of occupation by the Allied forces
  • Indeed, all of Europe would quickly fall into either the U.S. or Soviet “sphere of influence,” as the wartime Allies would quickly become peacetime enemies

The Division of Berlin

  • Berlin itself was divided up into four zones of occupation

The Division of Germany

The Division of Europe

The Division of the World

The Last Shot and the First

  • The final shots of the Second World War were fired by the United States, in the form of two atomic detonations over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
  • Though there were many competing motivations for U.S. President Harry Truman, his primary motivation was to defeat Japan before the Soviet Army could get there, so that the U.S. would be able to occupy the country unilaterally

The Last Shot and the First

  • As such, the bombs that killed some 250,000 civilians were also the first shots of the Cold War, as the United States demonstrated its horrifying new weapon to its new rival, the Soviet Union
  • As Henry Stimson (then Secretary of War) put it: “the bomb was a psychological weapon”

The Cold War

  • Thus, even as the Second World War was ending, the stage was being set for the long Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
  • It would last until 1989, and although the two rival superpowers never fought an open war with one another, they were consistently at war through local proxies in various parts of the world

The Cold War

  • The rest of this lesson will be about the establishment of the battle lines of the Cold War
  • The world was to be divided between the two powers – informally, rather than by direct colonization – but unlike the earlier era of imperialism these were competing systems and hundreds of millions of people would be pulled to one side or another on the basis of their principles, rather than the accident of nationality

The Cold War

  • In particular, the Cold War would be marked by repeated cases of people rising up against capitalism and colonialism (which continued even after the war)
  • Those risings would regularly prompt the United States to intervene, blocking the prospect of socialist revolution in other countries, even when those movements didn’t have much/any connection to the Soviet Union

The Cold War

  • What is often misunderstood about the Cold War is that the U.S.S.R. was not the aggressor
  • Quite the contrary – and to the frustration of many on the left after the war – the Soviet Union tried to avoid conflict as much as possible
  • The U.S. often assumed Soviet complicity when people in the world struggled to build communism, but the Soviet Union rarely played any significant role and was never “mastermind”

The Cold War

  • “The enemy is the communist system itself – implacable, insatiable, unceasing in its drive for world domination… This is not a struggle for supremacy of arms alone. It is also a struggle between two conflicting ideologies: freedom under God versus ruthless, godless tyranny.” – John F. Kennedy (1960)

The Cold War

  • “Peaceful coexistence is the only way which is in keeping with the interests of all nations.” – Nikita Khrushchev, 1959

The Cold War

  • Thus, again, a careful understanding of the Soviet Union illustrates a complicated truth:
  • In theory, it claimed to represent the aspiration of anti-capitalist revolution
  • In US propaganda, it was portrayed as an evil empire which sought total global domination
  • In truth, it largely abandoned the idea of world revolution seeking only to preserve its own existence against a capitalist bloc bent on its destruction

The Cold War

  • Meanwhile, on the US side, world capitalism had needed the alliance with the Soviets to win the war, but their focus turned now to rebuilding the capitalist world that the war had destroyed
  • It wasn’t going to be easy: yet again, people were desperate to find an alternative and socialism was popular
  • Just like WWI, the conflict had shaken up the old order and people outside of Europe were no longer willing to put up with colonial rule

“Politics Let Loose”

  • After WWII, there was widespread concern among the surviving elite that their position was compromised by the fact that they had been sympathetic and/or collaborated with fascism (eg. Canada refused to provide war materials for Spanish resistance to fascism, but did provide weapons to Japanese fascists)

“Politics Let Loose”

  • Resistance to fascism, by contrast, had been led by networks of working people, the poor, and by socialist and communist parties (think of the Canadians in the MacKenzie-Papineau Brigades who fought against fascism in Spain against the wishes of the Canadian gov’t)

“Politics Let Loose”

  • “With politics let loose among these peoples, we might have a wave of disorder and wholesale communism.” –Jan Christiaan Smuts, PM of South Africa, 1943
  • Indeed people in South Africa were forming militant opposition to the Apartheid government…
  • “If we take the people whose views influence developments, they are now in the democracies all socialists. Scarcely anybody doubts that we must move towards socialism.” – Friedrich von Hayek, 1944

Destroying the Anti-Fascist Alliances

  • The alliances that had defeated fascism had learned first-hand why a new politics had to be forged: people emerged from WWII with a new sense of possibility and purpose for a better world
  • This threatened the interests of the U.S., which sought to maintain a capitalist world order not so different from before…
  • And so the U.S. took on a central role in crushing the alliances that had defeated fascism (in Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Indochina, Japan, Greece, Italy, France, Germany, etc)

Nazis in the National Service

Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Strangelove

  • “At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet ‘assets,’ declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called ‘moral lapses’ in their service to the Third Reich. The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of ‘minor war crimes.’” – New York Times, 2014

Part 2: Postwar Europe Divided

Nazis in America

  • Shocking as it may be to learn that thousands of Nazis were brought to America to work for the US government, it is only the tip of the iceberg
  • The postwar administration of the west made much spectacle of the Nuremburg Trials against the Nazis, but quietly rehabilitated many of them to run Western Europe after the war
  • Remember, they never had a problem with fascism, they only feared a rival German Empire

Postwar Germany

The Division of Germany

  • After the Nazi surrender, the U.S. quickly consolidated control of the British and French sectors of Germany
  • But the Soviet zone posed a serious political threat – as American officials acknowledged, ordinary Germans were trying to construct democratic institutions at the level of communities and workplaces, and the Soviets allowed much space for this, while actively purging the Nazis from power

Postwar Germany

  • “After the war, German workers began to form works councils and trade unions, and to develop co-determination in industry and democratic grassroots control of unions. The [US] State Department and its Labor associates were appalled by these moves towards democracy… with all the problems these developments would pose for the plan to restore the corporate-controlled economic order (‘democracy’).” - Noam Chomsky

The Western Zone

  • As such, it was the Western powers that insisted on the construction of a separate “West Germany,” where former-Nazi capitalists would not fear worker resistance
  • The U.S. sought to “wall off” West Germany from Soviet influence, while it cracked down on labour and other popular sectors looking to radically reform Germany after Nazi horrors

Welcome to the ‘Free World’

  • As such, the widely-publicized U.S. aid money for reconstruction came with the condition that the state would impose fiscal policies that would drain the resources of German workers
  • Meanwhile, the West German state was established on a foundation of police crackdowns against popular demonstrations and worker strikes

The Return of the Nazis

  • The U.S. facilitated the rise of Konrad Adenauer as Chancellor of West Germany, an anti-communist who had semi-collaborated with the Nazis
  • “Four years after the war, those responsible for the day-to-day management of postwar [West] Germany were remarkably similar to the management during the days of Hitler.” – Tom Bower
  • Bankers, business owners, and even soldiers and police who had worked closely with the Nazis were released from prisons and restored to their old positions

Franz Six (1909-1975)

  • Joined the Nazis in 1930, and during the war he was an SS officer to led several Einsatzgruppen (death squad) units
  • Tried as a Nazi war criminal, his sentence was commuted by a U.S. official, and he was sent to work for a CIA-affiliated West German police/spy agency
  • In the 1960s, he retired into a comfortable life as a marketing advisor for the Porsche company, dying peacefully in 1975

Reinhard Gehlen (1902-1979)

  • Gehlen had been in charge of Nazi intelligence in Eastern Europe
  • During his interrogation in 1945, U.S. officers decided they could use him to spy on the Soviet Union, so they quietly brought him and his units to the United States
  • He was transferred to West Germany to become the head of West German intelligence in 1946
  • He retired with a CIA pension in 1968 and died peacefully in 1979

Postwar Italy

Postwar Italy

  • Exhausted by the war and the failed promises of capitalism and fascism, Italians turned overwhelmingly to the left, as the communists and socialists had been the only groups to refuse to collaborate with Mussolini’s fascism
  • In 1946 elections, the Italian Communist Party and the Socialist Party combined for a majority of votes; in advance of 1948 elections, they combined to form the Popular Democratic Front (FDP)

Bella Ciao!

U.S. Intervention

  • The Partisans were almost all communists and socialists, and if Italy had been allowed to have free and fair elections, they would easily win
  • In 1947-48, the US State Dept and related agencies spent much money and energy to campaign in Italy against the communists
  • The centerpiece of US intervention was the refusal to continue advancing loans for reconstruction unless the FDP were literally purged from political life, with the help of the new CIA Office of Policy Coordination

“The Brink of Catastrophe”

  • Time Magazine described the seemingly quite certain victory of the FDP as “the brink of catastrophe,” which is odd, given that Italy had just lived through two decades of fascism
  • “It was primarily this fear that led to the formation of the Office of Policy Coordination, which gave the CIA the capability to undertake covert political, propaganda, and paramilitary operations.” – William Colby, CIA Director
  • This is a remarkable kind of freedom, no?

Letters from America

  • Some 10 million postcards with form messages were sent from Americans to Italian relatives
  • “A communist victory would ruin Italy. The United States would withdraw aid and a world war would probably result… if the forces of true democracy should lose in the Italian election, the American government will not send any more money to Italy and we won’t send any more money to you, our relatives.” – Samples of form letters provided to Italian-Americans to send to their relatives

The Propaganda Machine

  • Along with the letters, the US government made sure to repeat the threats widely, in addition to anti-communist radio broadcasts (“vote communist and you’ll get sent to a work camp in Russia!”) distribution of leaflets, screenings of anti-communist films (“Ninotchka”), direct promises of gold, looted from the Nazis, etc etc.

Manufacturing Consent

  • The sheer volume of American propaganda, reflecting the much higher resources/wealth at the Americans’ disposal, outweighed any effort to balance out the propaganda
  • Many Americans tried: “As Americans we repudiate our government’s threat to cut off food from Italy unless the election results please us. Hungry children must not go unfed because their parents do not vote as ordered from abroad.” –Progressive Party (USA)
  • Notably, the U.S.S.R. was almost entirely uninvolved

Greece

The Liberation of Greece

  • It was not the Allies who saved Greece from Nazism, but the Greek Communists (ELAS)
  • ELAS and EAM were a coalition of the Greek left, and while they were ruthless with Nazi collaborators, they promoted local leadership in communities, education for all citizens, and gender equality (women’s battalions were prominent)

The British Are Coming!

  • “At first some of us thought it must be a lie… an invention of Nazi propaganda… a trick to raise the morale of the German people… but we soon had to face up to the evidence. There was no doubt about it: British troops really were crushing the Greek Resistance. In Athens, battle was raging, British troops were re-taking the city from the ELAS forces, district by district. It was an unequal fight, ELAS had neither tanks nor planes.” – Jorge Semprun, inmate at Buchenwald concentration camp, 1944.

Winston Churchill’s Legacy

The Same Old Story

  • As elsewhere, the liberating Allies were just as keen to destroy the left as they were to destroy the right, and in Greece they again employed hundreds of ex-Nazis in this effort
  • Winston Churchill’s occupation of Greece sought to reinstate the old rulers (especially the Greek monarchy) in order to maintain Greek society as it was, but restore it as essentially a British (not German) colony

Civil War

  • Not surprisingly, the Greeks who had fought off the Nazis did not approve, and what began as self-defense against a new invader quickly became a full-fledged civil war

Civil War

  • The Brits were unable to maintain authority, so the Americans stepped in, installed friendly leadership, supplied them with arms and eventually took command of the Greek army
  • Thus, the US was effectively an invasion force propping up the former-fascists in Greece, immediately after WWII

The Americans Victorious

  • By 1949, ELAS could no longer hold out, after tens of thousands of their members had been killed: Greece was now totally under US control and would remain so for decades
  • No government was formed in the 1940s and 1950s without the support of the United States, whose ambassador was the most powerful man in the country
  • http://www.criterion.com/films/1400-z

“Fuck Your Parliament”

  • “Then listen to me, Mr. Ambassador. Fuck your Parliament and fuck your Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea… we pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his Parliament, and his Constitution may not last very long.” – US President Lyndon Johnson, 1964.

Elsewhere in Europe…

  • Spain and Portugal remained under the grip of fascist dictators Franco and Salazar
  • French citizens came close to electing socialist leadership, but were ultimately bought out by promises of American reconstruction aid
  • In the capitalist world, the only way capitalism could be sustained was by giving a bigger piece to the working class… this was the birth of the “welfare state” to try to soften the edges of capitalism and buy working class support

Captain America, Commie Smasher

  • U.S. policy towards post-war Europe, was characterized primarily by the establishment of anti-communist governments that would be more or less subservient to Washington
  • That pattern would repeat in the other major zone of post-war reconstruction, East Asia
  • In fact, it dominated US policy throughout the Cold War

Part 3: The Crisis in the Pacific

Japanese Asia

Japanese Asia

The Rise of the Japanese Empire

  • Imperial Japan is an anomaly in the Age of Empire
  • It was the only non-European nation to mimic European colonialism effectively enough to be a colonial power itself
  • Ironically, it applied the logic of White Supremacy to itself, claiming that Japanese culture was advanced and more civilized than its neighbours, who therefore needed to be conquered
  • But like the European conquerors, its true goal was to expand its capitalist Empire

The Rise of the Japanese Empire

  • Japan’s expansion was gradual but steady:
  • 1895: Japan seizes Taiwan and South Manchuria
  • 1910: Japan conquers Korea
  • 1931: Japan occupies Manchuria
  • 1937: Japan invades central China
  • 1940-41: Japan occupies Indochina
  • 1941-42: Japan seizes Hong Kong, Burma, Thailand, Hawaii, Philippines, other Pacific islands
  • Until 1941, the west did not particularly care and even offered some support (eg. Canada sold arms)

The Rise of the Japanese Empire

  • Why did the west support a growing fascist empire in Asia?
  • As usual, it came down to a preference for fascism over communism: while fascism might have been ‘messy,’ it protected the basic order of society that kept the rich at the top and everyone else in line
  • Capitalist Japan was seen as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and the growing communist presence in China

The Rise of the Japanese Empire

  • Thus, the West held Imperial Japan in grudging respect, but nevertheless viewed it as racially and culturally ‘lesser’
  • At the League of Nations in 1919, Japan was given some of Germany’s former possessions in Asia, but was denied its demand for “racial equality” in the League
  • Imperial Japan was learning a lesson than comprador elites would learn over and over again: no matter how much it ‘Europeanized,’ it was never really part of the club

The Japanese Invasion of China

  • Though they were all deadly, the two major invasions of China were gruesome; the first killed 20,000 people in the seizure of Manchuria
  • Then, in 1937, Japan launched the horrific massacre at Nanjing, using organized rape as a war tactic, killing up to 300,000

Chinese Resistance

  • The struggle in China against Japanese occupation was led by a temporary coalition of Chinese Nationalists and Communists, with the latter infinitely more popular and significant to the struggle
  • In fact, it was the defense of China by the Communists that solidified their popularity after Japan was defeated

Chinese Resistance

  • Initially, the Communists were fighting against the Chinese government, but when Japan attacked, they formed a coalition to defeat fascism
  • Mao Zedong’s Communist partisans were the only organization able to successfully resist the Japanese, but they always understood that once the war was over, the Nationalists would turn against them
  • Clip from the film Bethune, about a Canadian doctor who travelled to China to support the anti-fascist resistance: (40:51) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zUrbrTb5J0

What Changed?

  • What changed in Europe? Why did the west turn against its friend Adolf Hitler?
  • The logic was similar in the Pacific
  • Japanese expansion was beginning to threaten the areas considered by the United States to be part of its informal empire
  • Thus, the US placed an embargo on Japan that forced it to either attack the Americans or abandon their expansionary project

Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima

  • Once the US was pulled into the war by the Pearl Harbor attack, it had deeper industrial capacity and would ultimately win the war

Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima

  • Suddenly, the latent anti-Japanese racism was brought to the forefront, helped justify especially the use of nuclear weapons and even worker discipline in the US

Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima

  • As noted earlier, the dropping of nuclear weapons served several purposes, but the primary goal for the United States was to intimidate the Soviet Union and gain full control over postwar Japan
  • Vaporizing 250,000 Japanese people, mostly civilians, in an instant, was the cost that US President Truman was prepared to pay for Cold War advantage… they were neither the first nor the last people the US sacrificed in the Cold War
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwkyPvlWPM0

Postwar Japan

  • As a result of Truman’s atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. ran a complete occupation of Japan without meddling from its wartime allies, under U.S. General Douglas MacArthur

Postwar Japan

  • It was well-understood that a re-constituted Japan would eventually seek an empire in Asia along the lines of what the fascists had attempted but by less direct means (the Japanese military was disbanded)
  • The U.S. wanted the Japan-centered Asian economy to be subservient to Washington and democratic in the American style (regular elections, but no threat to ruling capitalist class)

U.S. Occupation

  • Thus, worker-controlled companies, which had emerged in the aftermath of the fight against fascism, were banned
  • The U.S. authorities used police violence to force working people to accept elimination of the right to strike and to collective bargaining
  • Meanwhile, it allied with fascist collaborators in the labour movement and placed them in charge of the unions

The Zaibatsu

  • Meanwhile, the massive industrial monopolies (Zaibatsu) that had been at the centre of the fascist order were re-established and allowed to carry on much as they had under fascism
  • By 1952, the Japanese capitalist class was more powerful and concentrated than it had been under fascism, and the U.S. had established the apparatus of violence necessary to crush Japanese resistance

The Return of the Fascists

  • Just as in Germany, most of the former-fascists were brought back by the United States to run postwar Japan
  • Only a handful of Japanese fascists faced tribunals: hundreds of high-ranking officials went free
  • One of them became Japan’s Prime Minister in 1957: Kishi Nobusuke

Kishi Nobusuke

  • Kishi was in charge of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, which he ran as a slave-camp, working Chinese and Korean prisoners so hard that some 25,000 died each year in just one camp
  • He was nicknamed ‘the Monster,’ and treated Manchuria as his playground, availing himself of drugs, sex and wealth alongside Ayukawa Yoshisuke (founder of Nissan)
  • He spent a short time in prison, but was released without trial and became Prime Minister in 1957; both his brother and grandson would also become Prime Ministers

Part 4: From Korea to Vietnam

The Cold War in East Asia

  • As the last section noted, Japanese fascism was relatively popular in the west as a bulwark against communism
  • When Japan grew too ambitious, the western powers knocked it down, but that didn’t change the central goal of the capitalist powers, which was to defeat the Left
  • So Japan was quickly re-organized as the base of operations for anti-communism in East Asia

The Cold War in East Asia

  • From the standpoint of the Right, this was necessary because communism was on the rise
  • Indeed, the miseries of colonial rule, capitalist exploitation, and Japanese occupation combined to drive millions of people in Asia to reject the European capitalist system entirely
  • Left revolutionary movements were popular almost everywhere, and most immediately in China, where Mao Zedong’s movement had the political high ground

China in the War

  • “It was perfectly clear to us that if we told the Japanese to lay down their arms immediately and march to the seaboard, the entire country would be taken over by the Communists. We therefore had to take the unusual step of using the enemy as a garrison until we could airlift [Nationalist] troops to South China and send marines to guard the seaports.” – U.S. President Harry Truman
  • Huh? Didn’t the US just defeat Japan to liberate China? Why are they using Japanese troops to fight against Chinese?

Who is the Enemy?

  • “[The American soldiers] ask me too, why I’m here. As an officer I am supposed to tell them, but you can’t tell a man that he’s here to disarm Japanese when he’s guarding the same railway with [armed] Japanese.” – U.S. Marine Lieutenant, 1945
  • No doubt American soldiers were confused, given the deluge of racist war propaganda…

Who is the Enemy?

Who is the Enemy?

  • Nevertheless, the U.S. actually played the fascist Japanese occupier against the most popular organization in the country, the communists, who had been leading the struggle against fascism for over a decade
  • This is a remarkable kind of “liberation” isn’t it? It should remind you of what happened in Greece

Undermining Chinese Democracy

  • The U.S. did everything it could to defeat the communists in China, from arming the Nationalists, to airlifting in soldiers trained and armed in Burma, to actually sending U.S. pilots into China
  • And yet, the communists could not be defeated, because they had such massive support throughout the country – there was almost nowhere that the Nationalists could go

Taiwan

  • So the Nationalists fled to Taiwan, having killed tens of thousands of people to establish their rule, and established their base there
  • The U.S. continued to support that dictatorship and tried to help the Nationalists raise a new army to invade China
  • Chinese Communist leader Chou Enlai asked for US aid in rebuilding after the war…

So, naturally…

  • They tried to have him assassinated!

1951, Time Magazine

“The U.S.’s Enemy is Also China’s Enemy”

The Division of Korea

  • The division of Korea into North and South was never chosen by Koreans – it was a product of the Cold War
  • In fact, many Koreans have worked very hard to end the division ever since (while, of course, some have worked to maintain it)

The Division of Korea

  • Korea had been occupied by the Japanese fascists during the war
  • Many Koreans, especially (but not exclusively) communists and socialists, resisted fascist occupation
  • When the US and USSR officially liberated Korea from Japan, they divided their zones of occupation along the 38th parallel

The Korean People’s Republic

  • In what became South Korea, postwar reconstruction was being led by an alliance of left and centre partisans who had fought against the Japanese occupation

Syngman Rhee

  • But the United States instead brought back Syngman Rhee from exile in the U.S. (where he had fled from the Japanese) and installed him in place of the KPR, despite the fact that the KPR was popular

Rhee and the Collaborators

  • The U.S.-occupied South, having ousted the KPR leadership (which was distributing food and rebuilding infrastructure), gave positions of authority to first the former Japanese occupiers and then the Korean collaborators
  • Understandably, Koreans in the south hated Rhee and his authority was only maintained by force; American soldiers helped to arrest people en masse and use violence to block protests of the Rhee gov’t
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT2rQ4eoU0w (5:00-11:40)

Cold War

  • As the Cold War set in, the border between the Soviet and American spheres became a battleground, with each side arming “its” Koreans and encouraging skirmishes along the border, both sides wanting to defeat the other
  • Dozens of battles were fought along the 38th parallel between 1948-1950, so it was very clear that neither one side or the other was “the aggressor” per se

The “United Nations”

  • Canada was among the United Nations that endorsed a military action, to be led by the United States, against North Korea, labeled “the aggressor” of an “unprovoked” attack
  • The United Nations, however, was controlled by the U.S. (the Soviets were boycotting because the U.N. was treating Taiwan as the true representatives of China) and refused to allow North Korea to present its side

The Korean War

  • The U.S. led a war of Koreans against Koreans, in support of the despised dictator Syngman Rhee, against a government in the North that had kicked out the fascists and re-distributed land amongst the peasantry

The Korean War

  • Koreans on both sides of the border found their loyalty lying in the North; Rhee’s government killed over 100,000 people in the South for communist sympathies

The Korean War

  • The United States bombed Korea to rubble in a “scorched earth policy” designed to destroy buildings, crops, homes, and people; use of napalm gas was widespread and ugly
  • Even many American soldiers couldn’t support their own mission, and joined up with forces in the North (U.S. officials claimed that the communists used “irresistible, unfathomable, magical mind control techniques”)

The Korean War

  • But while some western soldiers were appalled by the war, many accepted the racist, colonial narratives and assumed Koreans were beneath them
  • There were thousands of incidents of North American soldiers committing acts of violence, sexual violence, and murder against Korean civilians
  • Canadian John Steeves murdered Korean farmer Shin Yong-Dok in a drunken rage, spent just 6 months in prison
  • Journalist Bill Boss tried to report on the violence but his stories were silenced, he was called a ‘subversive’

A Final Note on Syngman Rhee

So, naturally…

1953, Time Magazine

Syngman Rhee

“Deep Are The Roots

Of Freedom”

From Korea to Vietnam

  • While the Korean War has been largely forgotten, many of its dynamics were repeated in the more prominent Vietnam War
  • As in Korea, the country ended up being divided between a communist North and a capitalist South, and in similar fashion the South was effectively run by a US-sponsored dictatorship, a hated puppet government

French Conquest

  • France had conquered and took control of Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) in the mid-1800s, and established a small French ruling class who worked with local landlords to exploit local labourers
  • Resistance to the French began as mostly nationalist rebellions, and matured in the 1920s, especially under the leadership of the Communist Party, leading a major rebellion in 1931-32

WWII

  • The Indochina Communist Party created a united front to fight the French and Japanese occupations, called the Vietminh
  • In September 1945, when Japan surrendered, Ho Chi Minh declared an independent Vietnam
  • But the French wanted it back, and with British and U.S. support, tried to regain control of the country

Dien Bien Phu

  • However, the Vietminh was well-organized and extremely popular, and they defeated the French in 1954 at the battle of Dien Bien Phu

Dien Bien Phu

  • “[Canadians], while lamenting the tragic ending of the legendary conflict at Dien Bien Phu, salute with pride and honour the heroic defenders of the fortress.” – Canadian PM Louis St. Laurent
  • Yes, this guy actually thought the French colonizers were the heroes in this situation

American Intervention

  • Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were declared independent states at the Geneva Convention in 1954, but nevertheless, the United States invaded Vietnam and successfully took control of the southern half of the country
  • Thus, Vietnam was divided in a manner similar to Korea just before it, but war did not break out immediately

North and South

  • In the Communist North, land was seized from landlords and re-distributed to the peasantry (small farming families) while education was rapidly modernized and factories were built
  • In the South, the United States established a puppet government under Ngo Dinh Diem, whose dictatorship was similar to that of Syngman Rhee in Korea
  • Diem rejected land reform, and relied on U.S. aid money to crack down on communists and other opponents

The Vietnam War

  • By the early 1960s, the Diem regime was unable to maintain control of widespread discontent in South Vietnam; Diem was killed in 1963 and the U.S. assumed absolute control of South Vietnam
  • As rebellion grew in the South, under attack from U.S. forces, North Vietnam eventually moved into the South to try to liberate the country from U.S. occupation

The Vietnam War

  • Ultimately, they failed, as the Communists had the full support of most of the country and could use guerrilla tactics to outlast the U.S.

The Vietnam War

  • Even at home in the United States, the injustice of the war was obvious; it was clear that Vietnamese people didn’t want them there, and Americans openly asked how it could claim to giving freedom to Vietnamese when it couldn’t give freedom to African-Americans

The Vietnam War

  • If you haven’t already watched it, the Netflix documentary on the Vietnam War is good, and the first episode gives an overview of this history, with interviews and video footage
  • We will return to Vietnam later in the course; for now, the point is that the west tried to refuse Vietnamese freedom, because it didn’t like what they would do with that freedom (communism)
  • Thus, Vietnamese people were forced to fight multiple wars against multiple enemies (Japan, France, the United States) to achieve its independence

Conclusion: The Bipolar World

  • These cases illustrate what the Cold War was all about: a world torn between two poles, the capitalist United States and the communist USSR
  • In an all-out ideological battle for the future of humanity, and with communism the more popular choice overall, the west had to go on the offensive to try to maintain a mostly capitalist world

The Bipolar World

  • But this often exposed the fact that the ‘freedom’ the west was offering was hardly the ‘freedom’ people wanted… it shouldn’t require mass murder to convince people to be free
  • And yet, the USSR failed to seize the moral high ground: it shrunk into the background as people around the world fought for their freedom, and its prestige diminished as people looked to China, Vietnam, Cuba for hope