Walter C Uhler » American History
Is the United States of America Addicted to War?
Mikhail Gorbachev is not a frivolous man. He was the Soviet leader who introduced the conceptual breakthrough of “mutual security” to Soviet-American relations, as well as the man who did more than any other individual to bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion. (See http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011231/uhler/single) In my opinion, he ranks as the greatest statesman of the twentieth century (something I was able to tell him personally, when we talked in St. Petersburg, Russia in May 2006). So, when Mr. Gorbachev says, “Every US president has to have a war,” and “I sometimes have the feeling that the United States is going to wage war against the entire world,” – as was reported by the Telegraph.co.uk on May … Read entire article »
Filed under: American History, Bush Administration, Foreign Policy, Politics
Iraq, Iran and the Moral Rot Infecting the Soul of America
The more I read history, the more I’m convinced that the United States, far from being God’s appointed beacon for all mankind, was always a big-talking, poor-performing country in which the massive and willful stupidity of the majority engendered a moral rot incapable of withstanding manipulation and seduction by self-serving business/political interests. Thus, columnist Richard Cohen was merely acknowledging the latest example of such rot among the majority, when he asserted the Iraq War “was no mere failure of intelligence. This was a failure of character.” “Character” implies steadfast adherence to a moral code. But, as Walter Lippmann so cogently expressed it: “No moral code, as such, will enable [a person] to know whether he is exercising his … Read entire article »
Filed under: American History, Bush Administration, Cultural Criticism
Hiroshima, Nagasaki and America’s Immoral Addiction to Nuclear Weapons
Americans “were free to say what they think, because they did not think what they were not free to say.” ~Leo Szilard “Had Germany used atomic bombs on two allied cities [during World War II], those responsible would have been ‘sentenced…to death at Nuremberg and hanged…’” ~Leo Szilard America’s immoral addiction to nuclear weapons was on display last week after Barack Obama demonstrated that rare ability to think and to say what most American politicians are not free to say, namely that he would not use nuclear weapons “in any circumstance” to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Almost immediately Senator Hillary Clinton put the use of nuclear weapons back on the table, when she asserted: “I don’t believe that any president should make any blanket statements with … Read entire article »
Filed under: American History
George Kennan vs. Bush, Cheney, Rove, Kristol, Limbaugh, O’Reilly and Coulter
George Kennan’s 15 May 1953 speech at the University of Notre Dame was delivered at a time, when the right-wing anti-communist hysteria, inflamed by Senator Joseph McCarthy, was at its peak. Yet, it courageously exposed the demagogic McCarthyites for the ignorant, self-righteous, fear-mongering extremists they were. Thus, one can hardly avoid the conclusion that John Lukacs appended the speech to his new book about George Kennan, because it has much to teach us about courage during the current campaign of fear orchestrated by today’s American equally self-righteous right-wing extremists. Kennan excoriated McCarthyism’s “alarmed and exercized anti-communism,” as “an anti-communism of a quite special variety, bearing an air of excited discovery and proprietorship, as though no one had ever known … Read entire article »
Filed under: American History, Bush Administration, Media
John Lukacs on George Kennan: The Conscience of America
Yale University Press has published a small gem of a book, John Lukacs’s George Kennan: A Study in Character. Reading it was both a delight and surprise. First, the book was delightful, because Mr. Kennan (whom I’ve long admired) represented the United States at its best. As Mr. Lukacs concludes: “He was an extraordinary man, who not only represented but incarnated some of the best and finest traits of American character.” [p. 1] Kennan was not only a justly famous diplomat, learned scholar, uniquely gifted writer and renowned Russia expert, who mastered German, Russian and French, he also was dutiful, patriotic, honest, self-effacing, decent, judicious, religious, practical and wise — a singularly polished diamond in the American rough. Second, the book was … Read entire article »
Filed under: American History, Book Reviews
Big Talking, Poor Performing America
You can’t fool the precious few Americans who really know their country’s history. They know that America’s big talk (dating from Puritan times) about God’s plan for America to redeem the world is largely the product of religiously inspired self-delusion or outright propaganda. They also know that, far too often, the big talk has been belied by extremely low-class performance. Now it’s happening once again in the events surrounding hurricane-ravaged New Orleans. “Third world” TV images beamed from the Crescent City—where the rich and white escaped Hurricane Katrina, while the poor and black suffered and died in apartheid—have exposed years of banana republic-like neglect by America’s political elite, from President George W. Bush on down. Thus, … Read entire article »
Filed under: American History, Cultural Criticism
The 60th Anniversary of VE Day, Bush’s Visit to Russia and America’s Hypocrisy about “Spheres of Influence”
As President Bush prepares to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the May 8–9, 1945 surrender of Nazi Germany to American, British and Soviet forces, Americans might well use the occasion to finally acknowledge the preponderant role played by the Soviet Union’s Red Army in ensuring Germany’s defeat. It may have saved Western civilization. As historian Robert Service acknowledges in his recent biography of Joseph Stalin, were it not for the Soviet victory in World War II, “perhaps Germany would permanently have bestridden the back of the European continent.”1 True, Stalin’s overtures to Hitler and the consequent signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact on 24 August 1939 facilitated Hitler’s invasion of Poland, which … Read entire article »
Filed under: American History, Military History, Russian History
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