Cam & Ray's Cold War Podcast

The Rothschilds And Zionism - The Balfour Declaration took the form of a letter, dated November 2, 1917, from the foreign secretary to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a British banker and zoologist, who headed Britain’s Zionist Federation.

Things in Palestine really started to heat up in 1908 - the year of The Young Turk Revolution. It was around this time that the violence between the Jews and the Arabs started to escalate beyond what was mostly localised troubles over property rights. And it took on a nationalist feel. The Jews started to arm themselves. The governor of Jerusalem, Azmi Bey, wrote: “We are not xenophobes; we welcom...

Americans were SHOCKED to discover that Russia had interfered in their 2016 Presidential elections. How dare they interfere with the democratic process of a sovereign nation! Of course, those same Americans probably have no idea that their own country has, according to the research done by my guest today, done the same thing over 80 times since the end of WWII. Today I interview Dov H. Levin Ph. D...

Quite soon after the first Zionist emigration to Palestine, tensions between the Jews and the Muslims started to erupt in small scale violence. Zionist settler Ahad Ha’Am wrote that the other Zionist colonists “behave towards the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass without justification, beat them shamefully without sufficient cause and then boast about it.” Another early settler, Vladimir...

One fascinating witness of early zionism is Sir Ronald Storrs, who, in 1917 became, in his own words "the first military governor of Jerusalem since Pontius Pilate”. In 1940 he wrote a terrific little book, "Lawrence of Arabia, Zionism and Palestine." This episode explain the roles of Chaim Weizmann, Herbert Samuel and World War I on Britain's support for the zionist agenda in Palestine. The Briti...

By 1881, on the eve of the start of the Zionist Jewish influx, Palestine’s population was 457,000—about 400,000 of them Muslims, 13,000–20,000 Jews, and 42,000 Christians (mostly Greek Orthodox). In addition, there were several thousand more Jews who were permanent residents of Palestine but not Ottoman citizens. The overwhelming majority of the population was Arab, about 70 percent rural. Most of...

The idea of Jews returning to Palestine had been around since they were evicted by the Romans, but in a modern sense it really started to take shape in the late 19th century after the pogroms in Russia. On this podcast we talk about the vision some of the early proponents of Zionism had, including Leo Pinsker, Moses Hess, and Theodor Herzl.

Although you may not think of Israel as part of the Cold War paradigm, it’s played such a huge role in American foreign policy, and we have to cover it. It’s also played, and continues to play, a huge role in the story of oil, which is, of course, a huge part of the Cold War story. Because, as you know, the Cold War was all about economics. In this episode, we give a quick overview of anti-Semitis...

Kim's "invasion" of the South gave the US the pretext they needed to ramp up military spending via NSC-68 and to support Rhee directly and indirectly by committing one of the classic blunders: never get involved in a land war in Asia. Admiral Forrest Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations, declared later: ‘I was fully aware of the hazards involved in fighting Asiatics on the Asiatic mainland, which is...

WWII had created a strong US economy, mostly for military spending coming out of the public treasury. Lots of industrialists made a fortune during that period. And it was going away after the war. In the aftermath of World War II, US armed forces had not merely been reduced – they had been allowed to crumble to the brink of collapse. Truman’s new Defense Secretary, Louis Johnson, had cut the milit...

Americans were told that the invasion by North Korea was a total surprise. It was positioned as another Pearl Harbour. But this isn’t exactly true. They must have known it was coming and when it was coming. They just chose to ignore it. Why? Who stood to benefit from the invasion?

In 1951, the American Congregational minister James Fifield and his team of geniuses came up with a brilliant idea. To mark the 175th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, they proposed to hold a massive series of events devoted to the theme of “Freedom Under God.” The campaign was supported by everyone […]

After Father Coughlin was shut down, another anti-Communist Christian leader rose in his place – James Fifield aka “The Apostle to Millionaires”, aka “St. Paul of the Prosperous” aka “the Thirteenth Apostle of Big Business”. Unlike Father Coughlin, Fifield was happy to associate himself with rich capitalists – and to take their money to pay […]

Today we talk more about Christians who opposed the New Deal. In the 30s there was a guy called Father Charles Coughlin, a Canadian-American Roman Catholic priest based near Detroit. Commonly known as “the radio priest”, he was one of the first political leaders to use radio to reach a mass audience: first took to the airwaves in 1926, broadcasting weekly sermons over the radio. By the early 1930s...

In 1950 Harry Truman complained about a “great wave of hysteria” sweeping the nation – the Red Scare. He should know. He was really largely responsible for creating it. Between the launching of his “loyalty program” in March 1947 and it’s finish in December 1952, some 6.6 million persons were investigated to see if they […]

In his “New Deal”, FDR brought back the ideals of the “Social Gospel“, a 19th century Christian reform movement, to justify the creation of the modern welfare state. For a while, at least, some American Christian leaders were big fans of socialism. However, starting with FDR, and for the next 25 years, successive American administrations […]

Manufacturers and the media also used the Dies Committee to silence their critics. Any attempt to criticise the behaviour of industrialists was called “socialism”. Along with communist witch hunts, another tactic industrialists used to protect themselves against the New Deal was the newly invented idea of Public Relations – a fancy name for corporate propaganda. […]