cold war with john lewis gaddis

2006-09-24T05:19:00.000-07:00

when i googled 'john lewis gaddis' and found this article i knew i had to post it. any history student would love this. (ok. maybe just me.)

he following is an except from the COLD WAR chat on CNN conducted Sunday, September 27 with Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis. Gaddis is the author of "We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History." The discussion was moderated by CNN Interactive Senior Editor John Hashimoto.

CNN Moderator: What was the single most important factor in the outcome of the Cold War?

John Lewis Gaddis: Well in some ways you could argue that economic disparities were the single most important factor, because in the end it was largely economic capabilities that determined the outcome.

CNN Moderator: Did nuclear weapons really keep the peace?

John Lewis Gaddis: Lots of historians think that nuclear weapons really did keep the peace -- it's even been suggested the atom bomb should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize!

CNN Moderator: What single individual was most responsible for the Cold War?

John Lewis Gaddis: It's hard to pick a single individual for something as complex as this. But if I had to choose, it would be Stalin -- he made the greatest difference -- and the outcome would have been greatest if he hadn't been on the scene.

Chat Participant: What would you say is the single most interesting, important and surprising document to emerge from the communist archives -- and why?

John Lewis Gaddis: Tough question -- there are lots of documents and there have been lots of surprises. Maybe the biggest surprise is one that comes from reading many of these documents, not just a single one. It's that the Soviet leaders took their own ideological rhetoric as seriously as they did. They actually seemed to believe their own propaganda.

CNN Moderator: What single individual do you think was most responsible for ending the Cold War?

John Lewis Gaddis: No question on this one -- Gorbachev -- and history will regard him a lot more favorably than the Russian people currently do.

Chat Participant: Why did the Western powers simply do nothing during the Prague Spring?

John Lewis Gaddis: Pretty much for the same reasons they did nothing, as you'll see on the tapes, during the East Berlin uprisings of 1953, or the Budapest rebellion of 1956. There didn't seem to be any way we could use force to prevent the Russians from regaining control without setting off an all-out war.

Chat Participant: Do you believe that Stalin was mentally/emotionally unstable?

John Lewis Gaddis: Stalin's biographers have wrestled with this question. He surely wasn't "normal"! Most of them would agree that, at a minimum, he suffered from paranoia. Most paranoids, though, don't leave behind as many bodies as he did.

Chat Participant: But wasn't action in Vietnam consistent with our long-term Cold War strategy of containment; in other words, we had to go there as tragic as it was.

John Lewis Gaddis: Our policy-makers thought it was, yes. But was Ho Chi Minh the same kind of enemy Stalin had been? Was Vietnam as crucial a strategic area as Europe or Japan? Looking back on it all now, it's clear that they weren't. And that pretty quickly became clear to critics of the war at the time.

Chat Participant: To what extent did the decision to drop the bomb set the tone for the Cold War? How different would the postwar years have been had the bomb not been dropped on Hiroshima?

John Lewis Gaddis: I don't think the postwar years would have been too much different had the bomb not been dropped. Stalin was going to distrust the West in any event -- as you saw in tonight's episode when he bugs FDR at Tehran. I do think the bomb increased Stalin's suspicions, though -- and paradoxically, it probably made him less willing to negotiate, if only to show he hadn't been intimidated.

Chat Participant: Was there anything that you found that, in your opinion, could have prevented the Cold War from happening?

John Lewis Gaddis: The more I look at this, the more I think some kind of Cold War was unavoidable -- given the nature of the two ideological systems. The fact that Stalin was in charge of one of them, though, made things worse than they might have been.

Chat Participant: Mr. Gaddis, when do you think the world came closer to World War III -- during the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Yom Kippur War?

John Lewis Gaddis: Everybody would agree that the Cuban Missile Crisis was the most dangerous moment. What's interesting are the arguments about what was the second most dangerous moment. Some would say the Berlin crisis of 1961, others the Yom Kippur War of 1973. My own choice is an episode few folks have even heard about, although you'll see it treated toward the end of the series. It's the Abel-Archer NATO exercise of late 1983, when a NATO war game spooked the Russians so much that they thought the U.S. was about to launch a first strike.

Chat Participant: When was it clear the Soviets would lose?

John Lewis Gaddis: It was pretty clear that the Soviets weren't going to win by the late 1950s. But it was not at all clear that they would completely collapse until just about the time that happened -- the late 1980s.

foobar2000

2006-09-05T04:38:00.000-07:00

I downloaded this album that compilated most of the symphonies of Peter Ilyich Tachaikovsky recently but found out that all the files were in this absurb and alien file type called APE. After some googling i realised that this file type was supposed to be able to keep your music files crystal clear when transfering them into your computer. Since neither itunes nor wmp could play the file, i found this program that claims to be able to play almost any file type in the world. Its called foobar2000 and you can find it at www.foobar2000.org. its pretty useful although the interface is pretty plain.

another useful website i found was afterdawn.com which specialises in audio and video resources.

low life

cold war with john lewis gaddis

foobar2000