The real history of the cold war is not what we thought - nor are current events

“Propaganda is that branch of the art of lying which consists in nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.” Francis Cornford, the classicist

Last night I reread John Lewis Gaddis's very good history of the Cold War - I highly recommend it – but it repeated the received version of the Tiananmen Square massacre (I must find time to research this but the received story is wrong) and it did not mention this, posted on X by Sony Thăng whose tagline on X is: "Born in Vietnam. Grew Up in Europe. Live in Asia."

'In 1954, President Eisenhower said something at a public press conference that almost nobody remembers. Speaking to 197 journalists about Southeast Asia, he described the region's significance in terms of tin, tungsten, and rubber. Of access to raw materials. Of what would happen to Japanese and European economies, American allies, if those resources came under the control of governments not aligned with Washington. Not democracy. Not freedom. Not the domino theory of ideological contagion. Tin. Tungsten. Rubber. On the record. In public. Forgotten. Because in the same press conference, Eisenhower also introduced the falling domino. And the domino was the story that traveled. The domino fit on a textbook page. The domino gave the war the shape of principle rather than the shape of plunder. The resource rationale did not need to be classified. It just needed to be stood next to something more useful. The textbooks took the domino and left the tin and tungsten on the floor. This is not unique to Eisenhower. This is the standard operating architecture of American foreign policy across every administration from Truman to the present. Two maps. One that names the resources, the access, the economic logic that empire actually runs on. One that names the ideology, the freedom, the dominoes. The population is handed the second map. The people who die for it never know the first one existed. They are handed the second map, told it is the truth, and sent to a country they cannot find on it.'