The Cold War

Social causes: I think that the Cold War was caused a lot by fear. People were afraid of the spread of Communism because they basically tweaked out and yelled "Conspiracy!". They thought everyone who was Communist was anti-Democracy and anti-United States. Coming off of two World Wars, this fear was at least partly founded in logic. In the past it had seemed like countries of similar ideologies were more likey to become allies. This fear led to conflicts and interference in situations taht probably otherwise would not have merited very much attention.
Economic: Economics were definitely a contributor to the Cold War because economics is primarily what defined a country as Democratic or Communist. Impoverished countries mostly became communist, as ideas of equality appealed to the general population. Democratic countries were usually those for which the free trade and capitalist systems were working and needed little interference from a Communist dictator.
Political: In my opinion, political causes were the most significant of the causes of the Cold War. Communist countries set up the Warsaw Pact to unite Communist powers and defend themselves, and opposingly, the Democratic powers set up NATO. As seen previously in World War 1 and 2, establishing alliances served to increase paranoia and tension. These alliances also led to more competition over the undecided countries in Asia and South America. Because of the competitition between the two factions, political leaders became more and more dedicated to besting each other in all areas. The invention of the atomic bomb at the end of World War 2, the Space Race, these things are examples of how dedicated Stalin and Truman, as well as consecutive U.S. presidents were, to topping each other.
I don't think the blame can be assigned to either the United States or the Soviet Union exclusively. In certain instances, such as the Bay of Pigs, I think the United States seems like a bit more of an antagonist. However, Stalin did point missiles at us. So that wasn't cool either. Both countries just got a little too carried away in that trite old "world domination" bit and let their paranoia get the best of them.

Hitler's Errors

http://prezi.com/e6i2eiebkfql/hitlers-errors/

Hitler's Rise to Power

Okay, so in one of my comments last week I was essentially blaming the German people for going along with Hitler's rise to power, even in its early stages. So, to be fair, I thought I would talk about some of the evidence that lines up more in defense of the German people. First of all, Hitler gained his original public attention by joining the German Worker's Party. At the time of his joining it, it was disorganized and had little focus, it was anti-communism, but it was certainly not a anti-Semitic force at this time. Hitler used this party as a vehicle to his own success, he implemented anti-Semitic points into party speeches, and his charismatic and powerful speech giving skills allowed him to force his way to the head of the party. It is understandable that party members would be glad to give Hitler more leadership in their party because it was his speeches that were attracting new members to the still-growing party and bringing in huge monetary donations to the party's cause. Hitler became chairman of the party, and with the help of his staff, he assembled a party program made up of 25 points. He presented these ideas at a public meeting in 1920. This is where the point I made last week about those initial audiences being willing to listen comes into dispute. There were 2,000 people at this speech, eager to hear about Hitler's anti-Semitic ideas. However, there were also hundreds of protesters that were forcibly removed by party members armed with truncheons and whips. Hitler's speech focused not only on criticism of the Jewish population, but also very valid-sounding ideas on how to recover from the Versailles Treaty, on ways to get around some of its conditions and on solutions to the economic crisis. So, in this situation, I can see how some people may have been misled. A leader who came along with all of the answers, it would certainly seem like an okay deal that he had a prejudice towards Jews. Nobody knew what he really had in mind for them, and there was a lot of pre-existing animosity towards the Jewish population. The thing that bothered me here, that is really evidence to my original statement  that Hitler's rise to power was the fault of the German population, is that Hitler spoke openly of plans to limit the civil rights of the Jewish population. This seems to be like one step too far for the average German citizens to wave off as a nasty idiosyncrasy. This same year the party was renamed the National Socialist German Worker's Party, or the Nazi Party. In 1923, Hitler led the Munich Putsch, a rebellion against the Bavarian government, declaring that he would rid the government of communists and Jews. He was tried for  treason and went to prison. Following his internment, he pursued an electoral rise to power rather than a militaristic rise. In January 1933 he became Chancellor of Germany. It seems to me that Hitler's rise to power reached the point of no return as soon as he renamed the Worker's Party. Obviously, when he had to be elected to further his power to the point of Chancellor, but I think that the German public was too far gone by this point to back out. These original speeches that promised recovery from the war, recovery of territories, recovery of pride are what did it, what got him started on a constantly accelerating rise to power. And at the time, there was no precedent. Nobody would assume that a leader who promised these things was merely power hungry and driving his own agenda. Everyone believed the government wanted to help them, had their best interests in mind.  So, now that there's some evidence for both sides, I guess the question is still, what do you think? Was the naivete and selfishness of the German people to blame for Hitler's rise, or was the master manipulation of this political genius just too much to expect an everyday citizen to understand?

Podcasts

From the podcasts, one thing in particular that I hadn't really thought about before was how the economic problems in the U.S. affected the economy in Germany. It's pretty common knowledge that Germany had significant economic problems after World War 1, but I guess I never considered how a depression in America could add to this problem. In the Post-War Economic problems podcast, Evan or Rem, I don't remember which, mentioned that a major concern was that the U.S. was going to have to pull funds from the rebuilding of Germany. So, indirectly, you could even say that the Depression was somewhat of a factor in causing World War 2, as Germany was left in a greater state of despair than they would have been if the United States had been capable of helping them.

Book Report

The book I read was Flyboys by James Bradley, about the mistreatment and murder of 8 prisoners of war taken at Chichi Jima during World War 2, just 25 miles away from Iwo Jima. This book was really interesting to me because it was about the perspective of both the United States and Japan. The story of these 8 prisoners was a focus, becaue it had been classified for so long, but the bigger picture was looking at all of the little factors and cultural trends that led to the way that Japan and the United States were at the time of World War 2. I thought this was really cool because the event that the author was talking about was something that the Japanese did that was really horrific, but he still managed to tell both sides relatively without bias. I learned a lot about Japanese culture that I didn't know, including that the suicidal kamikazes and samurai and stuff, was not originally part of their military culture, it was mostly the government twisting tradition to control people. I also learned that the U.S. wasn't as innocent as they pretended when it came to Imperialism and their policies in colonized nations. This book was very interesting due to the fact that it gave me such a new perspective on things that I already thought  I had a pretty good understanding of.

124-137 Goff Reading

This totalitarian government business is confusing to me. World War I was the downful of a lot of the old monarchies because people began to see how ineffective it was to have one person ruling. So why, right after realizing this, would they allow a dictator to take power? I guess I understand that they wanted security after the uncertainty of the war, but it seems like this is not really the way to go. Totalitarian governments ended up being a huge cause of World War II, and this really shouldn't have come as a huge surprise. When you give one, power-hungry, unbalanced person and in most cases, former military leader, all of the power, you really shouldn't expect that ehy're going to do their best to stay out of a war, or that they even have the diplomatic capabilities to avoid war. Obviously it's easier to say this in hindsight, people at the time were pretty scared, but seriously, crazy dictator doesn't scream "security" to me.

Gilbert pg. 80-98

 The part of the reading that I was kind of confused by was the part about Romania and Bulgaria. I had never really learned anything prior to this about Romania or Bulgaria having a significant effect on the war, so I really had no idea they were even involved to such extent. The book calls the declaration of war against Romania by Bulgaria Germany's "trump card". Why is this such a big deal? I've never even heard of this before. So either the public education system has failed me or I'm just really bad at retaining information. Neither Romania or Bulgaria was obligated to join in the war by treaty or alliance, neither one had anything significant to gain, neither one was big enough to come in as some kind of superpower and end the war. So why did this happen? And why was is it so important?
So I "Googled" it! Yay! And apparently, Bulgarians were still angry about the Balkan wars, as Romania controlled land in the Balkans that was previously Bulgaria's. So when Germany promised to restore their territories, they joined the war. Germany benefited because Romania  was a Russian ally, but I still don't see why it was so important.