July 12, 2019
There is a final examination set for July 26, 16:00 in room 716. To prepare for this test, review all the notes below and choose one of the topics that we covered during the classes. Summarize the topic and write your own comments about it. You can practice writing your test answer before the test, but you must write it again during the last class on July 26. This does not have to be a long report because it has to be finished during the class. You can bring notes to the test, but it is important to study and plan what you want to write before the test. The purpose of this test is primarily for the teacher to read some student reactions to what he has tried to teach.
June 28, 2019
The 1980s and role of religious beliefs in the the Cold War
Ronald
Reagan's "Evil Empire" Speech, March 1983
We watched this famous speech from the
20-minute mark to understand how President Reagan interpreted, in a very
distorted way, Soviet communism as a force of evil in the world--not
only a threat to lives but to Christian souls that would fall from God's
grace if communism prevailed. In this speech, Reagan alleged that
Marxism-Leninism placed the goals of the revolution above morality, but
a few minutes later he suggested it would be better for a child to die
in God's good graces than to survive under communism. In saying so he
expressed a notion very similar to that of the genocidaires in
Indonesia. They too imagined that their communist victims were in
heaven, grateful that they had not survived and lived long lives as
communists. This way of thinking places the religious goal of saving
souls above morality--above the religious precept thou shalt not
kill. This was exactly what Reagan accused communists of doing in
their own way, and this accusation was based on an exaggerated, biased
interpretation of communist ideology. By endorsing this idea that a
Christian child should die rather than live under communism, Reagan
showed that it was his belief system that actually sanctioned killing if
it could be rationalized by pursuing an ideological goal. His Christian
audience cheered and didn't seem to notice the contradiction involved in
sanctioning murder this way.
This is why many Americans, citizens of
the world, and Soviet citizens, were shocked by this "evil empire"
speech and found President Reagan to be a "dinosaur" from an age that
had long passed into history. In 1983, the Soviet leadership was
primarily concerned with solving serious domestic problems, not with
exporting the revolution throughout the world. The Soviet leaders were
shocked by Reagan's apparent ignorance of all the progress that had been
made during the years of detente with previous American presidents. Most
citizens of the world were worrying about humanity's ability to control
science and technology and avoid nuclear war, but here was the leader of
the most powerful country in the world apparently preoccupied with
getting the souls of children into heaven and fighting a conception of
Marxism-Leninism that no longer applied during the nuclear age.
See this link for an outline of important
events in the 1980s.
The television film The Day After had
a large impact on culture and politics when it was aired to an audience
of 100 million people in November 1983. President Reagan was affected by
the film and began to change his approach to the Soviet Union and
nuclear disarmament. A few years later, after having met Gorbachev and
established personal ties with Soviet leadership, he said he no longer
believed the Soviet Union was an evil empire. It was as if he was
admitting he never really believed it. It was just something to say to
appeal to Christians within the United States. You can watch The Day After from
the 50-minute mark to see the shocking images of a fictional full-scale
nuclear war between the USSR and the USA. The film is evidence of the
high level of support that existed for nuclear disarmament within the
United States. While millions of people supported Reagan, millions of
other people wanted the nuclear freeze, and a large mass media
corporation was also opposed to the government's policy. It provided a
large budget for The Day After and put it on television during
prime time. It was really a shocking disruption in the normal flow of
information that audiences were accustomed to.
What is Marxism,
anyway, and why did it terrify the United States? These two short videos
below explain briefly Marx's critiques of capitalism. The lie of
omission in Reagan's speech was that he avoided discussion of economics
and tried to frame anti-communism as a war against atheism. For Marx and
Lenin, the fundamental issue was economic. Who will control a society's
surplus value, how will it be spent, and who will benefit from it?
Richard Wolff (31 minutes) Chris Hedges (18 minutes)
June 21, 2019
This course has existed for many years, and each year the students
are asked to choose one region, one aspect or one event of the Cold War
as a subject for their independent research projects. Although we are in
Japan, not one student has ever chosen make his or her research project
about Japan's role during the Cold War. This year we had some extra
time, so I chose to spend a couple of weeks talking about the role of
Okinawa and Japan in the Cold War and the post-Cold War period.
We viewed an interview with
historian Peter Kuznick that covers WWII, the Japanese empire, the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the long presence of US
military bases on Okinawa. You can also read the
transcript of the interview.
We viewed segments of the documentary film Okinawa: the
Afterburn (you can review the content of the film by reading the
website created by the producers of the film). The film covers
Okinawa's early history and the annexation of Okinawa by Japan in 1879,
but most of the film is devoted to the period from 1945 to the present.
The chapters of the film cover:
1. The Battle of Okinawa in the spring of 1945. This
short video (seven minutes) gives a summary of the battle. The
girl who appears at the 7:00 minute point later recognized herself (from
her kimono's pattern) when she was much older.
2. The period of occupation (1945-1972) when Okinawa was a US territory
where Okinawans had no democratic rights.
3. The period of rising opposition to occupation when there was a hope
that a reversion to Japan would lead to Okinawans being allowed to
democratically choose to have the bases eliminated.
4. The period after reversion when Okinawans realized that the Japanese
government would ignore Okinawans' desire to get rid of the US bases.
5. The legacy of sexual violence, from the time when the Japanese
military used "comfort women" to serve Japanese soldiers to the period
after the war when many sexual crimes have been committed by US military
personnel.
6. The continuing political struggles to stop base construction, and
reduce or eliminate the militarization of Okinawa, the potential for
full independence of Okinawa, the potential of Okinawa to have an
economy that is not based on jobs provided by the US military.
Okinawan history is not just a story about Okinawa. It stands as a potent symbol of the struggles of small nations against the imperial powers of history. It first lost its independence to one imperial power, then was occupied by another, then it was returned to original occupier. Japan de-nationalized Okinawa by erasing its sovereignty, culture and language. While Okinawans were treated as Japanese citizens who were not fully Japanese, they were also forced to pay the heaviest price in defending the nation that had colonized them and treated them as second-rate citizens. In the present time, their opposition to military occupation raises questions for the whole world to pay attention to. Even when there is no war, the preparation for war--involving the enormous amounts of money spent on defense--has a negative impact on the environment and human lives. A consideration of Okinawan history forces people throughout the world to question their assumptions about military preparedness. Does Japan really have to worry about China or Russia attacking and occupying Japanese territory? That kind of war hasn't occurred since the 1940s, and it is not likely to happen again. We could consider an alternative approach to national security in which the empire of military bases is replaced by networks of cooperation between the most powerful nations which, at the present time, are viewed as "adversaries" and "authoritarian" threats to the hegemony of the global economic order that is backed by NATO, the United States, and various allies such as Japan and South Korea.
These questions were faced by the Japanese prime minister Yukio
Hatoyama, the leader of Minshuto (Democratic Party), when he was
elected in 2009. He tried to make drastic changes to the status quo
of the defense agreements between the United States and Japan, but he
faced a strong reaction from the United States, and from within Japan,
and this counter-revolt became a soft coup d'etat leading to the return
of Jiminto (Liberal Democratic Party) and the status quo.
This issue is covered in the reading
assignment that I gave to students at the end of the class.
Other sources with articles on Okinawa, in both Japanese and English:
June 14, 2019
We continued our discussion of the mass violence in Indonesia by viewing a segment of The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer’s sequel to The Act of Killing. The subject of the sequel was one brave relative of a victim of the violence who dared to peacefully confront the perpetrators who killed his brother during the eruption of mass violence in 1965-66. The filmmaker managed to capture several startling scenes in which the perpetrators and their families are forced to face what was done to the victims and their families. The fear, shame and remorse register on their faces and in their body language, but in their words they blame Americans for “making us hate communists” and they threaten that more violence will occur if anyone tries to “dig up the past.”
To understand more about how the Indonesian mass killings were ignored for so long, we viewed a segment of the film Manufacturing Consent (1992) (from 1:07-1:37) which analyzed American media coverage of Cambodia and East Timor in the mid-1970s. Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor (1975-2002), the newly independent former Portuguese colony, was another atrocity that was ignored because of Indonesia’s strategic importance to the United States. Noam Chomsky does not deny the mass killing in Cambodia, but he points out that the country was de-stabilized by the intensive bombing of the country by the United States in the years before the Pol Pot regime committed genocide. He showed that the atrocities in East Timor were equal to those in Cambodia (relative to the size of the populations) but they received very different amounts of media coverage because one was done by “people we like” and the other was done by “people we don’t like.”
If you wish to review the film, Manufacturing Consent can be found on Youtube with Japanese subtitles. You can find the chapter we viewed in class under this title: ノー ム・チョムスキー メディアコントロール 9.
About The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste (East Timor), which recovered its independence in May 2002 thanks to the actions of citizens in many countries who learned about East Timor from Manufacturing Consent and from other sources that began to report on the problem in the 1990s.
We also viewed a short segment of an American news report about Indonesia made in 1967. This report was remarkable for its neutral and objective interviews with perpetrators of mass killings and its reporting on genocide as if it were an acceptable but only mildly regrettable thing. The lead reporter asks no challenging questions to his interview subjects and never reacts with alarm to the United States government’s support of the brutal “new order” in Indonesia that killed an estimated one million unarmed ethnic Chinese and members of a political party. The report also depicts an American company in Indonesia using political prisoners as slave labor, and this too passes without critical commentary.
A longer commentary on the NBC news report is here: Indonesia: The Troubled Victory
May 31, 2019
Indonesia
in the Cold War
Next film: The Act of Killing.
Some materials to view and read before the next class:
Interview with the film's director Joshua Oppenheimer (Part 1) (Part 2) on The Dailyshow (from August 2013).
日本語: For information in Japanese,
watch this movie trailer and
read this
article.
Background:
The basic understanding that existed throughout the Cold War was that war along the major front line in Europe was impossible because it would escalate into a nuclear war. The battlefield shifted to the de-colonizing world and the “developing” world, to countries that wanted to develop independently but could not do so because of the interference of the superpowers.
America fought a fierce and costly war in Vietnam to stop it from being independent and choosing a socialist system because it feared a domino effect—that if Vietnam was lost then socialism would spread throughout Southeast Asia. Thus America permitted and enabled a military overthrow of democracy in Indonesia in order to stop the domino effect.
The coup led to a genocide that killed an estimated one million people. The American public was unaware of the atrocity happening in Indonesia, yet for the government leaders, who were aware of it, it was seen as a victory for the American side because it made American involvement in a war there unnecessary.
In one sense, America looked at Vietnam as a victory, even though there was no military victory. According to this view, the war there stopped communism from spreading farther, and it demonstrated to the world that the US was willing to drop bombs on any nation that wanted to follow alternative routs to development.
Indonesia followed a long road from independence in 1945 to the overthrow of democracy and installation of a dictatorship in 1966. The Bandung Conference of 1955 (held in Bandung, Indonesia) was an attempt by de-colonizing countries to find a non-aligned path of independence, not in either the American, Chinese or Soviet sphere of dominance. The non-aligned movement was unavoidably seen as socialist and closer to the Soviet side because independence and local development were not compatible with global capitalism (extraction of national wealth by private, foreign corporations).
Sukarno emerged as the leader of Indonesian independence after WWII. He was not a communist, but there was a strong communist party in Indonesia which he had to accommodate. Increasing levels of American interference pushed the population and Sukarno to an increasingly anti-American position. He had been a trusted American ally in the 1950s, but by the mid-1960s he was considered by America to be unreliable.
General Suharto’s rise to power was a slow and complicated process, but many believe he arranged a coup, with American help, which was diabolically conceived as a two-stage coup that would make a group of communists, and thus the entire Communist Party, take the blame as the conspirators. Some scholars believe Suharto actually manipulated them into carrying out the coup, then made sure their coup would fail. He took power as if he had been the one to protect Sukarno and punish those who had tried to kill him and take over the country. Sukarno's power depended on the fragile balance between the military, political Islam, communists, and nationalists. The coup removed the communist party as a legitimate influence, and this allowed Suharto to seize power in 1966.
Indonesia had a large Chinese minority population, many of whom owned businesses and property. Chinese were also associated with the Chinese communist party. For these two reasons, Chinese were targeted in particular during the genocide because money could be extorted from them, in which case their lives might be spared. If they had no money, they could be killed as suspected communists.
The CIA and the US State Department cooperated in the genocide by giving the government lists of communist party members—knowing well that they would be killed. The American government was also in a position to stop the genocide by threatening to stop economic and military aid.
The army made efforts to shield itself from responsibility for killing. They gave the dirtiest work to paramilitary gangs and organized crime. Gangsters were highly motivated to do this work because their business interests were threatened by the policies of the communist party.
Forty years after the genocide Joshua Oppenheimer went to Indonesia to interview genocide survivors and family members of victims, but they were still too scared to speak. Oppenheimer had lived in Indonesia in his youth and was able to communicate with them in their language. Instead of giving interviews, the survivors asked, “Why don’t you go speak to the killers. They live just over there.”
Oppenheimer followed up on this strange suggestion and found that the killers were surprisingly open and eager to talk. They had never been punished, and did not fear future punishment, so they spoke openly. They regarded themselves as patriots and heroes, no more guilty than soldiers who kill during wartime. It was, in their view, a war against communism, so they were right to kill, and this attitude was and still is widely held in Indonesia. But it must be stressed that this was not a civil war. They killed unarmed members of a political party, not armed soldiers opposing them in battle.
Oppenheimer suggested that the killers become the actors and directors in their own film, which they could make in any way they wanted, to tell their story. He filmed hundreds of hours of video and edited all of it to a 2.5 hour film entitled The Act of Killing. The process of making the film had a profound effect on the killers, or perhaps it didn’t. The viewers can never be sure if they were just performing when they cried and expressed sorrow.
The dictatorship ended in 1999, and Indonesia held elections in 2004. It was then supposedly democratic, but the army was still powerful, history books have never been revised, and the victims are still afraid to speak out.
Oppenheimer's film opened up the subject of the genocide for the first time and had a profound effect on society. Still, after so many years, Indonesian people didn’t know if it was safe or wise to examine the past.
The Act of Killing won critical acclaim and awards after its release in 2012. Its impact on Indonesia revealed that the Cold War is far from being a closed chapter there and elsewhere in the world.
Oppenheimer followed up on The Act of Killing with The Look of Silence (2015), a film in which the families of victims finally confront the killers.
To introduce the film, we will first watch this interview with filmmakers Werner Herzog and Erroll Morris in which they discussed their opinions of the film.
A longer interview with Joshua
Oppenheimer is at the link below. The interview begins at the 13:20, and
the transcript is on the web page below the video:
May 24, 2019
This week two
students were absent, so they should catch up by reading the materials
posted here and by watching the first 45 minutes of the video Cuba
An African Odyssey Part 2. On this video posted on Youtube, there
are no subtitles for the narration and the English speakers. If you want
to understand what they are saying better, download the transcript
as a pdf file. Be sure to read the first five pages of these
notes before the next class.
May 17, 2019
This week we
discussed the Cuban Missile Crisis. We viewed the documentary film
The
Man Who Saved the World (2012)
At this website there is a bilingual
English and Japanese transcript of the subtitles of The Man Who
Saved the World.
Note that there is another film called The Man Who Saved the World (2014)
which tells a similar story about a Soviet officer who disobeyed the
rules and decided, during a moment of uncertainty in 1983, not to launch
the nuclear weapon under his command when it seemed as if American
missiles were on the way to the Soviet Union. It turned out to be a
false alarm caused by reflections of light on the horizon.
May 10, 2019
We spent some time in the class
discussing the Soviet and American leaders during the Cold War, and what
their years in power represented in terms of ideology, world events, and
either heightened or lowered tensions between the two superpowers. You
can study a list of these leaders by reading the Wikipedia pages: List of Leaders of the Soviet Union, List of Presidents of Russia, List of Presidents of the United States (learn the
names of presidents from 1933 to the present).
During the class we watched a short
video about French nuclear testing in Polynesia. If you want to review
it and read the transcript, you can find it at this link. The transcript of the video is in Part 4
at the bottom of the page which the link goes to.
Suggested topic for a student's
presentation: Japan during the Cold War. Study the film Okinawa: the Afterburn, or look at the blog Peace Philosophy Center for sources in both
English and Japanese. See also, for example, this article, which is
available in both English and Japanese versions: The World is Beginning to Know Okinawa, or other
articles published by the Asia Pacific Journal.
Next week we will discuss the Cuban
Missile Crisis of October 1962. We will watch the documentary The Man Who Saved the World.
April 30, 2019
We previewed some sources and topics that are going to be covered during the rest of the term. I suggested some subjects that individual students could consider focusing on for their final projects.
Last year, many students took a
strong interest in fictional films that were set in the Cold War (first
semester) or that illustrated some aspect of independence struggles
(second semester). There were a lot of terrible movies made during the
Cold War, but also some very good ones. Ask the teacher for a
recommendation if this topic interests you.
We discussed the iconography and
imagery of the Cold War by looking slowly at the montage of art and
photos that are packed into the
opening of the television drama The Americans. Then we
viewed the images at the speed at which they are presented in the
opening. The rapid sequence of images is perhaps an example of
subliminal triggering of memories and feelings of people who lived
through the Cold War.
We viewed a short video that
illustrates the
timing and location of all the nuclear tests that occurred between
1945 and 2009. Next, we began to listen to an interview with Kate Brown
about her book Plutopia about the places in the USSR and the USA
where nuclear bombs were manufactured. The homework for this week is to
finish viewing this video. You can read the transcript or watch the
subtitled video at this link: Plutopia: Interview with Kate Brown on Talkingstick TV.
Learn the names of the leaders of the
Soviet Union, the presidents of Russian since 1991, and the American
presidents between 1945 and 2019. You should also know the approximate
dates of their times in power.
We viewed a segment of The Untold
History of the United States that covered the early Cold War
period. If you need to review this topic, you can borrow the DVD to make
notes on it. I am not going to summarize it in detail here. The short
version of the lesson is that at the end of WWII the conservative wing
of the Democratic Party prepared to break the wartime alliance with the
Soviet Union and wage a counter-revolution against Roosevelt's New Deal.
These conservatives saw that President Roosevelt was very ill and likely
to die during his next term as president, so they plotted to remove the
left-leaning Henry Wallace as a vice presidential candidate for the 1944
election. The inexperienced, conservative Harry Truman became the vice
presidential nominee through a very undemocratic process controlled by
party bosses. After the war, when Truman was president, he was
manipulated by this conservative faction to break Roosevelt's agreements
with Stalin and to antagonize the Soviet Union. The creation of the
nuclear arms race and the CIA had tragic consequences, as we will learn
in future lessons.
April 19, 2019
We viewed the documentary Hiroshima:
Why the Bomb was Dropped. The notes are the same as what was
posted on April 12.
April 12, 2019
Next week begin our study of the Cold War in 1945 to see how it began. You can preview the main source material here: Hiroshima: Why the Bomb was Dropped. You can read the notes about this documentary and get a transcript of it here.