the cold war: a plague on both your houses

What was the Cold War, who started it? and could it have been avoided?…

…In the last days of 1946, the prime minister of Greece, Constantine Tsaldaris, had come to Washington with an urgent request for financial and military aid. Truman consulted officials of the Export-Import Bank who explained that the laws permitted loans only if repayment as assured. The foundering Greek Government could make no such assurances. All Truman could do was create an American economic mission to investigate the situation in Greece and report back to him.

—Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-Jen has produced what might be called “post-photographic” representations of humanity’s indelible and intrinsic inhumanity by computer manipulating images of colonialism and war from Chinese photographic archives. His 1990-98 series of such images was given the generic title Revolt in the Soul and Body. Apinan Poshyananda reports that Chieh-Jen was inspired by “ancient Buddhist and Taoist drawings of purgatory and hell” . Then in 1997 he produced the series Lost Voice digitally manipulating photographs of mounds of mutilated corpses taken during the 1945-49 civil war in China .—click image for source…

Secretary Byrnes, aging and ailing, unable to cope with all the multipying crises, offered his resignation to Truman. The president promptly chose as his new secretary of state the man he most admired, General George C. Marshall. Marshall was in China then attempting to reconcile the Communists and Nationalists. On leaving Nanking to return to Washington for his new post, Marshall denounced both Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang clique and the Communists of Mao Tse-tung. A plague on both your houses, he said in effect, and so ended his mission. One of the most portentious events of this century, as fraught with consequences as any event in history, would explode within three months: the Chinese civil war, with the eventual victory, at the end of 1949, of the Communists.

Of all the tantalizing ìfs” of history, one cannot but wonder what would have happened if the United States had decided at that moment in January, 1947, to play a decisive role in China…( to be continued)…