A Cold War: Recent Episodes
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My guest today is Archie Brown, emeritus professor of politics at the University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, where he served as a professor of politics and director of St Antony's Russian and East European Centre. He has written widely on Soviet and Russian politics, on communist politics more generally, on the Cold War, and on political leadership. His new book is The Human Factor, about the end of the Cold War.
Josip Broz grew up in poverty on a small farm in Croatia. He dropped out of school at 13, and apprenticed as a locksmith and mechanic. In 1913 he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army and ended up in WWI, where he was injured and captured by Russians. When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, he became a Bolshevik and fought with them against the White Army.
After The Peel Commission recommending moving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians off their land by force, the Arab Revolt re-emerged with hundreds of terrorist attacks during 1937-38 against the British and Jews - and even against Arab collaborators. The British cracked down and deported many of their leaders. Irgun, the Jewish militant group, met this threat with their own terrorism. Hitler used the situation to score propaganda points against the Jews and the British.
When the British finally captured the Middle East from the Ottomans in October 1918, under the command of General Edmund Allenby, with the support of TE Lawrence and his Sharifians, Hussein and Faisal, the British immediately tried to walk back on the Sykes-Picot agreement. They figured they did all the hard work, so fuck the French. Most British officials believed that the Arabs could be persuaded to live with Zionism. As Lawrence put it: “There would be no difficulty in reconciling Zionists and Arabs in Palestine and Syria, provided that the administration of Palestine remained in British hands.” In April 1918 Allenby established the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA), headed by Major-General Sir Arthur Money, with Brigadier G. F. Clayton as chief political officer. As you’d expect, they looked down on both Jews and Arabs. Money, for one, said the Jews of Jerusalem were “bringing up the rising generation in their schools to be dirty, idle wasters.… Their men turn out more idle wasters and their women more prostitutes than the rest of the population put together." And he regarded the Jews “as a class inferior morally and intellectually to the bulk of the Muslim and Christian inhabitants of the country.”
Today I interview Dov H. Levin Ph.D, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Hong Kong about his research on what he calls his Partisan Electoral Intervention by the Great Powers dataset (PEIG). It shows how many times the USA and USSR/Russia intervened in foreign elections in the years 1946 - 2000.
One fascinating witness of early zionism is Sir Ronald Storrs, who, in 1917 became, in his own words "the first military governor of Jerusalem since Pontius Pilate”. In 1940 he wrote a terrific little book, "Lawrence of Arabia, Zionism and Palestine." This episode explain the roles of Chaim Weizmann, Herbert Samuel and World War I on Britain's support for the zionist agenda in Palestine. The British were eager to get the Jews to help them defeat the Germans and Ottomans. They also hoped that supporting the zionist agenda would help them secure war loans from the United States - and bring the US into the war. They also hoped that putting a bunch of grateful Jews under a British protectorate in Palestine would help them secure the eastern approach to the Suez Canal, the jugular vein of British commerce.
This week Tony answers questions from new QAV Club member Angela about three point trendlines, reinvesting strategies, and challenger stocks, and we analyze gold miner Ramelius Resources.
In the early hours of June 25, 1950, North Korean forces attacked across the 38th parallel that divided the country into a pro-Western regime in the south and a pro-Soviet regime in the north.
It officially kicked off the first major conflict of the Cold War. The Korean War. According to Paul M Edwards, the founder and Executive Director of the Center for the Study of the Korean War in Missouri:
"Whether intentional or not, America’s history of misunderstandings, misjudgments, misdirections, denials, and bold-faced lies to Americans and others, has greatly weakened the memory of the Korean War , and led to the loss of many of the significant lessons it might well have taught us." According to Bruce Cumings, former chair of the history department at the University of Chicago:
"Least known to Americans is how appallingly dirty this war was, with a sordid history of civilian slaughters amid which our ostensibly democratic ally was the worst offender, contrary to the American image of the North Koreans as fiendish terrorists."
On our first episode about the Korean War we delve into the background of the guy who was hand-picked by the United States to be the first President of South Korea: Syngman Rhee.
The fault of the Berlin Blockade is often laid at the feet of Stalin. But the truth is a little more complicated.
By 1948, the situation in Germany was still complicated. The Four Powers (USA, USSR, UK, France) in control of Germany couldn't agree on a path forwards. Russia and France wanted to keep Germany weak. The USA and UK wanted to build it back up into a European economic power. And they wanted it to be firmly in the capitalism economic bloc. So the USA and UK took a dump on the principles of the Allied Control Commission and just made decisions regarding the future of the three-quarters of Germany under their control. This is what lead Stalin to stop them from entering Berlin, which was fully within the Soviet zone of occupation.