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mburnamfink 's review for:
The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace
by Paul Thomas Chamberlin
"Cold War? Hell, it was a hot war!"
--Robert McNamara, The Fog of War
McNamara isn't wrong. While the soldiers of the superpowers rarely engaged each other directly during the 45 year long confrontation between Communism and Capitalism, proxy wars blazed across the world. Chamberlin's book is a survey of those proxy wars, which killed 20 million people between 1945 and 1990. The My Lai Massacre is perhaps the most infamous incident, but the average death toll was 3 My Lai's a day. Some of the wars are famous; Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, but some of the bloodiest incidents are almost forgotten in the West, like the Indonesian genocide of 1965, orchestrated by Suharto with CIA assistance, or the bloody war of Bangladeshi independence.
Chamberlin organizes his book into three chronological section dominated by historical themes. The first was the rising triumph of Communist China, from their victory in the Chinese Civil War to their intervention in Korea. Maoist successes came with heavy casualties and were ultimately stemmed in Korea with UN soldiers, though the war stopped short of General McArthur's desired nuclear attack.
The second phase was "war of national liberation", of which Vietnam was the centerpiece. The widening Sino-Soviet split also ruptured into an absolute breach, with the killing fields of Cambodia representing the nadir of the Communist desire for utopia.
The third phase was one of religious and nationalistic wars. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and American funding of Islamic guerillas was key to this period of the Cold War, but the long Iran-Iraq War was a bloody version of WW1 in the Middle East with far higher casualties.
All theoretical perspectives draw boundaries, and while Chamberlin's focus on 'the Asian rimlands' brings forward overlooked events, it also means that this history of the post-colonial order ignores Africa and South America, which saw their own bloody killings and wars. And if this was your only book, you wouldn't know that there were ideologies or nuclear weapons involved, which seems important. The theoretical lens says that mass deaths in Asia have a common thread, which seems tenuous in some cases. Bangladesh and Iran-Iraq in particular don't seem to be Cold War killings. It's clear that the superpowers were absolutely willing to support almost any murderous faction that made the right noises about Marxism. Compared to Lowe's Savage Continent, Killing Fields is a chronology without much analysis.
--Robert McNamara, The Fog of War
McNamara isn't wrong. While the soldiers of the superpowers rarely engaged each other directly during the 45 year long confrontation between Communism and Capitalism, proxy wars blazed across the world. Chamberlin's book is a survey of those proxy wars, which killed 20 million people between 1945 and 1990. The My Lai Massacre is perhaps the most infamous incident, but the average death toll was 3 My Lai's a day. Some of the wars are famous; Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, but some of the bloodiest incidents are almost forgotten in the West, like the Indonesian genocide of 1965, orchestrated by Suharto with CIA assistance, or the bloody war of Bangladeshi independence.
Chamberlin organizes his book into three chronological section dominated by historical themes. The first was the rising triumph of Communist China, from their victory in the Chinese Civil War to their intervention in Korea. Maoist successes came with heavy casualties and were ultimately stemmed in Korea with UN soldiers, though the war stopped short of General McArthur's desired nuclear attack.
The second phase was "war of national liberation", of which Vietnam was the centerpiece. The widening Sino-Soviet split also ruptured into an absolute breach, with the killing fields of Cambodia representing the nadir of the Communist desire for utopia.
The third phase was one of religious and nationalistic wars. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and American funding of Islamic guerillas was key to this period of the Cold War, but the long Iran-Iraq War was a bloody version of WW1 in the Middle East with far higher casualties.
All theoretical perspectives draw boundaries, and while Chamberlin's focus on 'the Asian rimlands' brings forward overlooked events, it also means that this history of the post-colonial order ignores Africa and South America, which saw their own bloody killings and wars. And if this was your only book, you wouldn't know that there were ideologies or nuclear weapons involved, which seems important. The theoretical lens says that mass deaths in Asia have a common thread, which seems tenuous in some cases. Bangladesh and Iran-Iraq in particular don't seem to be Cold War killings. It's clear that the superpowers were absolutely willing to support almost any murderous faction that made the right noises about Marxism. Compared to Lowe's Savage Continent, Killing Fields is a chronology without much analysis.