Cuban Missile Crisis

The past few days in class, we've been investigating specific aspects of the Cuban missile crisis.  We've each read individual letters from people like Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro.  My letter was from Castro to Khrushchev explaining Castro's thoughts on a possible US invasion on the island.  It was thanking the USSR for their past help and asking for more assistance as the situation played out.  It was really cool to ask around to different people in the classroom and talk about the connections between your two articles.  First, we would look at the date and how far apart they were -- usually under a week.  Next, who it was to and from -- most of them had at least one person in common (Castro, Kennedy, or Khrushchev).

Today, we made a timeline so that it was easier to visualize the events as they happened instead of just talking to people.  It was so cool to look, chronologically, and see which events triggered which other events and how they were all intertwined.  Which letters were sent to whom and when they were responded to.  In addition, each of the little summaries told a small part of the story which, when combined, gave a pretty good outline of the whole situation.  I think it is important to get every major event, and there are some that are not covered by the letters read in class -- so I think that we should, as a class, go over the timeline to see if anything appears to be "missing".  If we do spot something, Mr. Moran could let us know if there was actually an important event there or not.

I really like activities like this that we do in class.  It provides us with a lot of knowledge while making it fun at the same time.  Keep it up!

Class Discussion on Fidel Castro

Today, we had a very interesting class discussion on Fidel Castro's rise to power.  We discussed every aspect of it - his motives, his potential, and what he did versus his intention.  We came into class prepared with a list of "reasons the rebels were fighting".  Many people had the same things, but we ended up not really using them.  The conversation went on pretty well on its own.  As we were discussing the lists, we realized that a lot of them were things that Castro used to appear a better candidate for a Batista replacement.  Things that he might have used as reasons that he was the best person for the position.  My favorite thing that we talked about was how we viewed Castro - politician or army leader?  He seemed to have an agenda when he was overthrowing Batista which made him appear as more of a politician, but he also organized the entire rebel forces to overthrow Batista.  We also talked about how it seemed to be OK for politicians to make promises for what they're going to do but completely ignore them once in office.  Fidel made a lot of promises that he didn't keep - about half of the things he said he was going to do in the reading.  When we were talking, I'm sure that you noticed that Max and I were talking on our own for a section of it. We were actually having a serious discussion comparing Castro to Obama.  And every time a new element was brought up, we would discuss its connection to our current day government.  It all started with the things that Castro said that he was going to do and did, then what he said he was going to do but didn't, then what he didn't say he was going to do but did anyway.  We discussed the possibility of our own country's government going askew, and how it might come about.  I really enjoyed this discussion as well as the group discussion.

WHY WE FIGHT

Come to class with a list of the reasons the rebels are fighting, according to Castro. WRITE IT DOWN, BRING IT TO CLASS. You will NOT be allowed to participate in the discussion if you do not have this list.

Dictatorship

Ignorance

Military Rule

Police Oppression

Lack of Liberty

Batista's Imprisonment of Soldiers

Limited Information and Communication Media

Dysfunctional Government Officials (Cheating, Stealing)

Lack of Political Stability

Misunderstanding from the US Government?

Unemployment Rates (1/6)

Voice of America

Its mission is "to promote freedom and democracy and to enhance understanding through multimedia communication of accurate, objective, and balanced news, information and other programming about America and the world to audiences overseas."  VOA will "serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news."

These are just a few quotes stating what the VOA's missions are.

After reading up on exactly what the VOA is and what it does, it blows my mind that I've never heard of it before.  It's a WORLDWIDE broadcast through satellite, cable, FM, AM, shortwave radio, the internet, phones, and on TV.  It's accessible by every means people use to get information from.  And obviously, this news is intended for the rest of the world so that they know what is going on in America.  But why have I never listened to it?  Wouldn't it be a viable news source for those of us inside the country as well?
And it's been around for so long, one would think I'd have heard my parents mention it - or even my grandparents mention it.  But no, nothing.  I even asked my mom and dad if they knew anything about it. Nope.  And apparently, it goes by different names in different countries, but they're all under the umbrella of the VOA.  Also, in America, it's called VOA so there's no excuse.

In addition to being broadcasted all over the world in tons of languages, it also sounds incredibly reliable. Everything they broadcast must be backed up by two independent sources before it is aired.  So basically, it has almost no bias at all.  Obviously, everything has a little bit of bias - but the intention of the VOA is not to impose its political view on anybody, to make anybody thing that the US is better than it is, or to push down any other country.

I think that this will be a REALLY interesting thing to talk about in class and I hope to write another blog post about it once I get more details.

Neo-Colonialism

Today in class, we talked about a lot of different topics, but one that came up a lot was the idea of neo-colonialism, or current day colonialism.  Basically, colonialism is when one country is in control of another country.  NEO-COLONIALISM however is very different.  Neo-colonialism is based on the idea that "we're not colonizing you, you just completely depend on us for your economy".

So basically, a country can be completely in control of another country without "technically" being in control of them.  This avoids the hypocriticalness that our country would have had when taking over Cuba after the Spanish American War.  Because we hadn't "colonized" them, we weren't going against our own morals, since we were a colony of Britain for quite a while before we gained our independence.

Pull up your socks and get going

I really like "All the Shah's Men" for a few reasons.  First off,  it's not just about the Shah and his men.  It has a bunch of other stuff in it too.  Second, it gives real stories, told in story form whereas most books would just give a very historical standpoint with no feel.  It also does a good job of giving the book feel without implementing a huge bias into the stories.

Anyway, about the reading.  I thought that this was a really interesting reading because it provided not only the facts, but also the opinions of many of the people involved in the reading.  For example, I loved the part where it talks about Eisenhower's opinions on replacing the leader of Iran and how his view is shaped and molded.  (Not only by the Iranians and the British, but also by his fellow advisors.  It's amusing to me that the Eisenhower administration was all for one thing while Eisenhower himself thought exactly the opposite.  But eventually, and only through lots of people's gentle inputs, subtle words, and small lies, he changed his mind and allowed the CIA to replace Mossadegh.  Also, a bunch of people kind of spoke on Eisenhower's behalf, twisting and bending his words to sound more... more like what the other person wanted to hear.  I think its funny how the president really didn't have much control over even his own people, let alone what the rest of the world was doing.

Honestly, I really enjoyed the reading but didn't think that the questions were all that interesting.  I was more fascinated by what was actually going on in the story than how it related to what we were doing in class.  Kinda unusual.

Unseen Enemies Everywhere

Feel free to address these questions in your blog post(s).

1. Describe the relationship between the United States and Iran during the years between 1945 and 1950. They had kind of a love-hate relationship but instead of hate, it was just ignorance. America, at least from a governmental standpoint, was completely uninterested in what was happening in Iran at the time (the appointment of a new prime minister). While Iran's issues don't appear to have been quite as serious as those of the United States, they were still pertinent to the Iranian people. The book takes an interesting stand on this, saying that it was wrong of the United States to be blind to all of Iran's issues. And maybe it was. But from my own interpretation of the reading, it didn't seem unreasonable that the United States wanted to pay more attention to THE WAR THAT THEY WERE FIGHTING (indirectly, i guess. but still). The US had much bigger issues to pay attention to than the new prime minister of Iran, a country that wasn't even on their radar until much later in history.
On the other hand, the Iranian people had a different view of America. According to the book, they were completely obsessed. They loved not only America, but the American people. There had been individual americans that had gone over to Iran to help out their economic situation and many of them were very grateful. The iranians were also very grateful that the US helped them out with their oil issue with GB. Basically, when GB stopped splitting the profits with Iran on the oil, Iran could've revolted and gone communist so america stepped in to help them. 2. What were the attitudes of the United States and Britain not only towards Iran, but towards each other during this time period? 3. What circumstances caused Averell Harriman to be called into the situation in Iran?