Causes and such of the Cold War

I don't think you can say that the US was to blame over the USSR, or vice versa. I think they were both equally to blame. There was obviously some tension between these two countries during WWII, especially if one believes, as I do, that a huge reason for the US to bomb Japan was so they themselves could defeat Japan and not have the Soviet Union in on it. Also so they could demonstrate their power to the Soviet Union. (However, I would say that the bombing of Japan was also a huge contributing factor to the Cold War, and thus shows how the US contributed to starting the Cold War.) The tensions over the division of Germany also contributed to the Cold War. And neither one did anything to stop it once it started; the US kept trying to take over third world countries to set up a democracy that failed and ended up causing a ton of problems in the future, while the USSR did the same thing with other third world countries only they tried to set up a communist government, which in the shortrun was more successful than democracy but at the same time caused huge problems that only fueled the Cold War and in the longrun, "true" communism has never been entirely successful anyway, so they all ended up failing. (And look who ended up failing in the end? The Russians. So I'd say that's another example of how communism doesn't really work. But that's really besides the point.) Some social causes of the Cold War were the incredible fear that existed in democratic countries that communism would spread and eventually take over the world or something. Everyone feared communism. That leads us to a more political cause - how communism's main goal was to spread, while during the Cold War the main goal of democracy was to prevent the spread of communism. That was the main cause of the Cold War.

Resistance Movements in WWII

Ok well since none of you could access my prezi I'm trying again....here we go let me know if it still doesn't work!

http://prezi.com/vbbrqi2hbgv4/edit/#13_388603

My PREZI

Resistance Movements of WW2

http://prezi.com/vbbrqi2hbgv4/resistance-movements/


Hey guys, here's my prezi...enjoy!

The Expansion of Communism

As we all know, the post-WWII years up until the late '80s were known as the Cold War, a period in which the world's two new superpowers, the United States and the USSR, had a rivalry that almost touched the brink of war several times. The United States absolutely hated communism, which was known as "the red scare," and even still today there is some bias in our country toward communists. Even before the war, countries like Britain, France, and the United States weren't exactly pro-communist, favoring democracy instead. Yet in the 1930s, the United States did several things in support of communist countries. For example, they came to the aid of communist China when Japan threatened to invade; China was also backed by the Soviet Union, which was obviously communist at this point. They'd even recognized the USSR diplomatically. I found this all to be odd; if the United States was undertaking a policy of isolationism at this time period, and they were anti-communist, why were they supporting these communist countries though it might mean making enemies of Japan and the communist hating fascists of Germany? And they didn't help China just a little bit - they provided military support, sent supplies to China, the whole nine yards. I got the impression that the textbook said that the United States' reason for helping out China against Japan was that it felt like Japan was overstepping its bounds in involving itself in another country's affairs, and that they were unprovoked, so they had no right to go after China. This then leads me to believe that the United States was using the excuse that they were aiding China because it was the right thing to do. But that still doesn't explain why they were in league with the USSR.

The US has been known to be hypocritical when it comes to communism - for example, how we'll trade with communist China, but we won't trade with Cuba because they're communist. Could it be that this hypocrisy goes all the way back to the 1930s? Did we maybe see potential in China as a trading partner, so that's why we helped them out? Did they just hate fascism so much maybe that they were willing to ally themselves with the USSR? I personally think it's very likely that there were underlying motives to the US support of communist countries in the '30s, especially taking into consideration the fact that the US was supposed to have adopted policies of isolationism. What are your thoughts on what those alterior motives might be? And what else do you think about this?

Another question....how did the rivalry between two former allies, the US and the USSR, develop into such a strong one? There's the splitting up of Germany to consider, how one wanted to use the fall of Germany to spread communism there and one was trying to prevent communism there, thus creating the split with the Berlin Wall. There was the preconcieved ill-will toward communism; there was the fact that both had emerged from WWII as a superpower, creating what would be a natural rivalry. There was also the fact that communism had already spread to China, the USSR, and even part of Germany by the end of the war, and threatened to emerge in other places, like Korea, Cuba, and third-world countries in Africa, so naturally the US would try to prevent this. Those are some ideas I had. But what is everyone else's thoughts on this?

The Roaring '20s

As Sarah said in her blog, everyone knows that the twenties were a time when everyone had fun. Everyone partied all the time, organized crime sprung up as a result of the prohibition, and at the end of the decade the stock market crashed and our country entered the Great Depression. However, what I wanted to know about the twenties was how far in advance did the people in charge of money (i.e. the government, banks, etc.) know that we were in trouble? It seems like governments often keep things on the DL until they have no choice, or until something happens; I want to know if they had some advance warning this time and tried to prevent it in secret, and if so, how far before the stock market crash did they know something was going to happen?

Book Report Thoughts

I rather enjoyed this assignment, although I probably would've enjoyed it more if I had done it sooner...but that's ok, it was still interesting. I read Night by Elie Wiesel, as I know a couple other people in the class did. The book is Wiesel's memoir about the Holocaust. I felt particularly affected by this book, and it's definitely one of those books I'll never forget reading. When we learn about the Holocaust, we learn about the statistics of it - that 6 million Jews and a total of 11 million minorities were killed during the Holocaust. We are told that the conditions of the concentration camps were terrible. We learn facts. However, Wiesel gives it from the perspective of someone who actually went through the Holocaust. And he doesn't leave anything out - he doesn't skip over those ugly details that none of us want to hear. I think he has several reasons for doing this; for one thing, I think he simply wants to tell it like it is. For another thing, I think he wants us to remember his story, so we don't forget what has happened and what could happen in the future; he doesn't want us to forget what humans are capable of doing to each other. It's those graphic, heart-wrenching, awful things he relates in the story that makes you remember the rest of it. Although infants being used for target practice is something I would rather not picture or have to think about, it's details like that that will make me remember this book forever.

Pages 124-137 in our lovely space-themed textbook

I was a little confused about the first question - "What is it about the interwar years that tell us that WWI was a terrible tragedy?" I was confused because there were a lot of things mentioned in the text book that this could be referring to, and depending on your personal viewpoint, you could say these things were either good or bad, or both - the harnessing of the power in the atom, the communication developments, the technological advancements, etc. My first thought as to the answer to this question was that this was the first war in which armies were made of millions, not thousands; the technological developements allowed a lot more people to be killed at once; and the affect of the war lasted a lot longer than previous wars. However, the text book never really said this directly; it mostly talked about individual aspects, not one specific thing that made the war a terrible tragedy. Of course the war was a tragedy; millions of people were killed, many for no reason since the majority of the war was a stalemate and therefore killing people on enemy sides wouldn't weaken them any more than it would weaken your allies. The question just makes it sound like there was one specific thing that made the war a tragedy, not a bunch of things. So my question to everyone is, what was this one specific thing?