U2

About the spy plane, not the rock band this time, a topic on the Quaker-P list recently. Here's a [re-edited] post from awhile back:

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Hard to blame the American people for being confused in the wake of WWII, with such a fast turnaround, Japan and Germany the mortal fascist enemies, now friends, Russian allies on the wrong side of history etc. How to keep up?

Centralia Massacre (see Wikipedia) communicates some of the confusion, as there's a memorial to fallen soldiers, but when you read the fine print you see it's right there in Centralia, because of left versus right tensions, as personified by IWW and the American Legion (this was after WWI).

Qs, in their rush to study war no more, may overlook many readings on the cold war, don't pause to ask what that even means, whether there's an AVP tie in, in terms of not using outward (hot) weapons, relying more on weirdo intelligence networks, new under Truman and suddenly in vogue, giving Hoover some competition.

For example, do other Qs read Col. Fletcher Prouty, an Air Force guy charged with flying diplomats around, knows a lot about JFK era?

Eisenhower, flush with victory, was about to lay down the law to a devastated Russian people, maybe deal them into the Marshall Plan on capitalism's terms, time to kill that subversive utopian dream they'd been harboring, nip it in the bud.

That's is one way of spinning it anyway, then Gary Powers shows up on Soviet TV having bailed out of a plane hit by missiles (a miracle of first person physics if you really think about it). Eisenhower changes his plans.

Of course Prouty has his debunkers (not saying we need to go into that deeply here on Quaker-P, as these are long ago events).

I'm just saying it's pretty confusing, how all those alliances could change around so quickly, making "left versus right" really twisted. The OSS didn't really hate Ho Chi Minh that much either, truth be told, which makes Vietnam hard to follow also. **

BTW, those U2s are still very much in play these days (kinda funny after all these years), if you were following along in Georgia.

They've got one in McMinnville, wrote it up in me blog [no, that's a Blackbird silly].

Back to Simpsons,

Kirby

** fun to find Julia Child was one of their cooks