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Cold War

What We Can Learn From The Cold War History Of The AFL-CIO

August 30, 2024 Isabela Escalona, Workday Magazine. , , , ,
Labor journalist and historian Jeff Schuhrke’s first book, Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade, dives into American labor unions’ role in Cold War-era interventions across Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and their lasting impacts today. Out September 24 from Verso Books, Blue-Collar Empire examines this history, and draws lessons for the present day. One of the main operations Schuhrke explores is the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), a partnership between the AFL-CIO and the CIA, intended to promote free trade unionism abroad. Under the guise of education, officials with AIFLD worked with the State Department and other Washington officials to surveil and squash radical worker movements abroad that they suspected to be communist—at times resulting in violence, repression of workers’ rights, and strengthening of right-wing dictatorships.

West Papua: The Torture Mode Of Governance

March 28, 2024 Julie Wark, Orinoco Tribune. , , , , , , , ,
Budi Hernawan said it ten years ago: “torture in Papua … has become a mode of governance.” It hasn’t stopped. It’s got worse. It’s got worse precisely because it’s a mode of governance accepted and blessed by the international “community” whose neoliberal politics of extraction means extermination of anything and anyone getting in its way. It’s got worse just now because Israel’s genocide, ecocide, starvation, and torture in Palestine isn’t only distracting attention from these practices in smaller and more remote places but also showing that it’s okay, it’s part of our system, you can do it with impunity because it’s all part of a bigger plan.

The End Of US Nuclear Superiority

November 29, 2023 Scott Ritter, Consortium News. , , , , ,
On November 1, the U.S. Air Force was forced to explosively “terminate” the flight test of a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). This meant blowing it up in the air after it exhibited unspecified in-flight anomalies to engineers monitoring its progress. The test launch, carried out by the U.S. Air Force’s Global Strike Command, is, according to the Air Force, “part of routine and periodic activities intended to demonstrate that the United States’ nuclear deterrent is safe, secure, reliable, and effective to deter 21st century threats and reassure our allies.” The U.S. Air Force maintains some 400 Minuteman III, stored in silos and ostensibly on 24-hour alert to respond to any potential strategic threat targeting the United States and/or its allies.

No ‘End Of History’ In Ukraine

October 3, 2023 Scott Ritter, Consortium News. , , , , ,
“What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” These words, written by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who in 1989 published “The End of History,” an article that turned the academic world upside down. “Liberal democracy,” Fukuyama wrote, “replaces the irrational desire to be recognized as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognized as equal.”

50 Years Later, Families Demand Justice For The Disappeared In Uruguay

June 25, 2023 Jeff Abbott, Waging Nonviolence. , , , , ,
Excavations by forensic anthropologists at a notorious military base in Toledo, Uruguay have unearthed human remains. It is likely that the remains are those of one the many victims of the campaign of forced disappearance carried out by the state during the military dictatorship that began five decades ago. The remains are the first to be discovered in over a decade, and a painful reminder of the lengths the military went to permanently disappear dissidents and leftists in a campaign that lasted 12 years. For families of the missing, the news has brought a mix of emotions. This is only the seventh person recovered of the 204 victims who were forcibly disappeared from that brutal period during the Cold War.

Farewell To The Welfare State? Not Just Yet

May 19, 2023 Patrick Lawrence, Scheer Post. , , , ,
Maybe you recall all the post–Cold War talk of a “peace dividend” and maybe you don’t: It depends on when you took up residence on this mortal coil. The term arose as the Soviet Union disintegrated and was commonly mentioned during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, 1989–1993. A dramatic reduction in defense spending, and a corresponding increase in expenditures on education, health care, and so on, was put around as one of Bush I’s outstanding achievements. That was the peace dividend. The thing you need to know about all the talk of a peace dividend back then is that it was all talk. And the thing you need to know now, with Cold War II in more or less full swing and the proxy war against Russia raging in Ukraine, is that there is no longer any need to know anything about the peace dividend.

Uranium Water Contamination In US Far More Prevalent Than Believed

January 8, 2023 Lee Camp, Mintpress News. , , , ,
Maybe it’s the good kind of uranium that turns you into Spider-Man or the Incredible Hulk and not the bad kind of uranium that turns you into Thyroid Cancer Man – one of the lesser-known Marvel superheroes. ProPublica has come out with an investigation entitled “The Cold War Legacy Lurking in U.S. Groundwater.” After World War II, the Cold War started between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. because the rich needed to stop the damn Communists from pushing their furry hats on everyone! There was a feverish need to build loads of nuclear weapons. To do that, the U.S. needed uranium, and its ruling class didn’t care how they got it. More than 50 uranium mines popped up across the Western U.S. But they didn’t just turn our weapons radioactive.

Imran Khan: Pakistan Should Be Non-Aligned In Cold War

January 1, 2023 Ben Norton, Multipolarista. , , , , , ,
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan was overthrown in April 2022 in a soft coup supported by the United States. Khan argued that he was targeted due to his independent foreign policy, comparing his ouster to the CIA coup in Iran in 1953. Since leaving office, Khan has held massive protests across the country, blasting the unelected coup regime for surrendering its sovereignty to Washington. “The US has made Pakistan a slave without having to invade it,” Khan fumed. “The people of Pakistan will never accept the imported government.” Khan has also become a leading voice on the international stage calling for the rebirth of the Non-Aligned Movement. He argues that Pakistan should have been non-aligned in the first cold war. And he insists his country must be independent today in the new, second cold war between the US on one side and China and Russia on the other.

Decades After Berlin Wall Fell, Victors Still Trashing East Germany

November 26, 2022 John Wojcik, Orinoco Tribune. , , , ,
Germany - A few years ago, there were events in Germany commemorating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the pages of the press, prominent persons—from former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker to then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the now-deceased former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev—all weighed in with their commentaries on the significance of Nov. 9, 1989, all celebrating to a greater or lesser degree the demise of the former socialist state in the east. This year, there will again be speeches condemning the memory of that lost country. As someone who traveled frequently to the German Democratic Republic when it existed and spent years involved in the movement for friendship and solidarity with that country, I offer here some thoughts that I hope will put such celebrations in balance.

OHCHR Report On Xinjiang Is A Patchwork Of Disinformation

September 4, 2022 Global Times, Friends of Socialist China. , , ,
China on Thursday denounced a so-called UN human rights report on China’s Xinjiang region as completely invalid and a political tool serving the US and some Western forces to contain China, and said that it proved the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has descended into the accomplice of the US and some Western forces against developing countries.  In response to the so-called “assessment of human rights concerns” in China’s Xinjiang released by the OHCHR on Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin told a press conference on Thursday that the so-called assessment is a patchwork of disinformation and a political tool serving the US and some Western forces to contain China by using the Xinjiang topic.  

The MADness Of The Resurgent US Cold War On Russia

March 29, 2022 Nicolas J. S. Davies, Popular Resistance. , , ,
The war in Ukraine has placed U.S. and NATO policy toward Russia under a spotlight, highlighting how the United States and its allies have expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders, backed a coup and now a proxy war in Ukraine, imposed waves of economic sanctions, and launched a debilitating trillion-dollar arms race. The explicit goal is to pressure, weaken and ultimately eliminate Russia, or a Russia-China partnership, as a strategic competitor to U.S. imperial power. The United States and NATO have used similar forms of force and coercion against many countries. In every case they have been catastrophic for the people directly impacted, whether they achieved their political aims or not.  Wars and violent regime changes in Kosovo, Iraq, Haiti and Libya have left them mired in endless corruption, poverty and chaos.

Waltzing Toward Armageddon With The Merchants Of Death

March 15, 2022 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , , , , ,
The Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, was a wild Bacchanalia for arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, the CIA, the diplomats who played one country off another on the world’s chess board, and the global corporations able to loot and pillage by equating predatory capitalism with freedom. In the name of national security, the Cold Warriors, many of them self-identified liberals, demonized labor, independent media, human rights organizations, and those who opposed the permanent war economy and the militarization of American society as soft on communism. That is why they have resurrected it. The decision to spurn the possibility of peaceful coexistence with Russia at the end of the Cold War is one of the most egregious crimes of the late 20th century.

Chronicle Of A War Foretold

February 25, 2022 Chris Hedges, Scheer Post. , , , ,
I was in Eastern Europe in 1989, reporting on the revolutions that overthrew the ossified communist dictatorships that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a time of hope. NATO, with the breakup of the Soviet empire, became obsolete. President Mikhail Gorbachev reached out to Washington and Europe to build a new security pact that would include Russia. Secretary of State James Baker in the Reagan administration, along with the West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, assured the Soviet leader that if Germany was unified NATO would not be extended beyond the new borders. The commitment not to expand NATO, also made by Great Britain and France, appeared to herald a new global order.

The Empire’s Last Stand

September 22, 2021 Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News. , , ,
In the early months of 1947, President Harry Truman and Dean Acheson, his secretary of state, made up their minds to prop up Greece’s openly fascist monarchy against a popular revolt they had cast as a Soviet threat. After much hand-wringing, Truman went to Congress on March 12 to ask for $400 million in aid, not quite $5 billion today when adjusted for inflation. Truman and Acheson knew the Greek intervention would be a hard sell: Congress was in no mood to spend that kind of money, and the war-weary public harbored hope for FDR’s vision of a postwar order built on the principle of peaceful coexistence. As the speech went through its multiple drafts, Arthur Vandenberg, Republican senator from Michigan and a presence in the planning of America’s postwar posture, offered advice that must be counted elegantly forthright, if diabolic in its cynicism.

Who Was Dag Hammarskjöld?

September 20, 2021 Joe Lauria, Consortium News. , , ,
Dag Hammarskjöld set the standard for integrity and independence that all United Nations secretaries-general are judged against. He pioneered direct diplomacy by a secretary-general to defuse crises, and created U.N. peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld forged an independence between the Cold War powers that upset both and may have led to his death 60 years ago on Saturday. The son of a Swedish prime minister, Hammarskjöld came from a privileged background, unlike the Socialist Trygve Lie, the first secretary-general. Hammarskjöld became a lawyer, an economist, Sweden’s finance minister and was a delegate to the Paris Marshall Plan conference. Hammarskjöld was surprised to be chosen as Lie’s replacement. He was acceptable to both blocs, as he was seen as an apolitical technocrat.
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