Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World

by Hajimu Masuda

What was the Cold War? A simple definition might a 20th century international confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, which involved, first, Europe, and then Asia, Africa, and Latin America, eventually dividing the world into two camps. The key players in this global conflict are generally identified as a number of high-ranking policymakers, including Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. We know this story. However, the full story is not so simple. It is time to change our ways of thinking about the Cold War.

Masuda Hajimu 's Cold War Crucible is an inquiry into this peculiar nature of the Cold War. It examines not only centers of policymaking, but seeming aftereffects of Cold War politics during the Korean Suppression of counterrevolutionaries in China, the White Terror in Taiwan, the Red Purge in Japan, and McCarthyism in the United States. Such purges were not merely end results of the Cold War, Masuda argues, but forces that brought the Cold War into being, as ordinary people throughout the world strove to silence disagreements and restore social order in the chaotic post-WWII era under the mantle of an imagined global confrontation. Revealing social functions and popular participation, Cold War Crucible highlights ordinary people's roles in making and maintaining the "reality" of the Cold War, raising the question of what the Cold War really was.

Genres: History, School, China, Nonfiction

400 pages, Hardcover

First published November 17, 2014

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant, thoroughly researched historiographical paradigm shift. By analyzing the rise of an imagined Cold War mentality as a series of simultaneous post-war regional political movements (challenges to the pre-war status quo and conservative backlash in the US, UK, and Japan, solidification of the CCP regime, or decolonization as colonization in Taiwan and the Philippines), Masuda skillfully illustrates how closely interrelated society and politics really are, and how the Cold War was, in its formative stages, centered around the Korean War, a means to an end rather than the end itself. Eschewing Great Man theory and constructivism, Masuda's self-proclaimed "biological" interpretation of historical evolution is particularly useful in understanding political history and current international affairs. A must-read for anyone interested in the "irreconcilable" History and IR fields.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was fascinating and I liked much of the argument but for me, it suffered from an over emphasis on the people on the ground who ultimately had no power to go to war or conduct policy. Additionally, the Soviets are the villain of this constructed narrative but there’s no attention paid to what was happening on the ground in the Soviet Union. Were they experiencing similar pressures? Still a really good look eat the post WW2 society and world order.

[Greg Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely based

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Rebecca Crunden]

⤑ research tag: in an effort to organise my shelves, I’m going to be labelling the books I’m using for study purposes as I tend to dip in and out of these.

[Benemint · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this. You won't regret it. It's a provocative, meticulous, page-turner. It breaks so many conventional boundaries, including those of social and diplomatic histories, propaganda and public sentiment, democratic and authoritarian regimes, WWII and the cold war. I am personally totally in the same camp with him in the research of state-society relationship, so I might be biased. At points Masuda weaves pieces of evidence a little forcefully but the width of research is impressive. I hope this will be the new standard of diplomatic histories.