Americans’ view of history skewed by Cold War obsessions
Re: “Remember when ‘Red China’ was the West’s bogeyman”, Have Your Say, yesterday.
Eric Bahrt’s Cold War angst, shared admittedly by many, is seemingly exacerbated by a teacher – of all people – advocating the use of extreme nuclear violence against a non-nuclear country with which the US had an ideological disagreement. No wonder Eric laboured under psychological baggage, with a supposed history “educator” like that. We should also think about what the response to such violence might have been by China’s contemporaneous political allies in Moscow.
So, this teacher obviously didn’t know want he was talking about, as the real threat came from elsewhere; China didn’t test a nuclear weapon until 1964, some 15 years after the other “enemy” Russia detonated its first device. Nor was it a declared nuclear-capable state when the then USSR launched Sputnik in 1957, a vehicle that could theoretically deliver a warhead to the continental United States at that time, thus rendering US ocean-sized borders irrelevant. That rather concentrated the mind, methinks.
Eric goes on to say: “It seems to me that even the experts don’t know what to do about North Korea. But here’s my humble suggestion: the situation we have with North Korea might not be all that different from the situation we once had with China.” That may be true, but only to an extent, as many factors are completely different. Let us hope however that any solution precludes the advice offered by Eric’s old addle-brained tutor.
To finish with a small footnote: Pyongyang now compares Trump to Hitler. Make of that what you will.
Dr Frank
Bangkok
