TV series: The Untold History of the United States

I did not have sexual relations with this woman.

Paying tribute to Gorbachev's remarkable efforts, the Soviet Americanist expert warned his American negotiators: "We will do a terrible thing to you - we will leave you without an enemy." Unfortunately, he was wrong.

The American army attacked Grenada, a small island in the Caribbean with a population of 100,000 people. Reagan said that this Soviet-Cuban colony had become an important stronghold for terrorists and opponents of democracy. He sent 7,000 Americans into battle as if it were something out of one of his old Westerns. Journalists, under the pretext of concern for their safety, were not allowed into the conflict zone. Instead, the media provided the official chronicle. This operation was a failure from the very beginning. Nineteen soldiers were killed and more than a hundred were wounded in the confrontation with a small and poorly armed band of Cuban workers. The Americans lost nine helicopters. From a military point of view, the invasion was a farce.

Events developed in a similar way in neighboring El Salvador. In late 1981, US-trained soldiers stabbed, beheaded, raped and shot 767 civilians in the village of El Mazote. Among the dead were 358 children.

Reagan justified the armed struggle in Nicaragua. “The people of Nicaragua are captives of a totalitarian regime. He poses a serious threat, given the presence in the country of a large number of Cuban, pro-Soviet and radical Arab volunteers." He went so far as to call the Contras “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers of the United States.” The people he described so flatteringly are responsible for the deaths of thirty thousand Nicaraguan civilians.

Why did Americans fight against the poor? Against those who are easiest to kill? Deprive yourself of the essentials? We've already asked ourselves... Was this a fight against communism? Or were the politicians' motives veiled? Or misunderstood? George Cannan, a leading strategist of the early Cold War, got to the point in a 1948 National Security Council memorandum: “The United States owns half of the world's wealth. We inevitably provoke envy and resentment. Our main task is to build relationships with other countries that will allow us to maintain this imbalance. To achieve this, we will have to give up dreams and sentiments. We will have to stop talking about such vague and unrealistic things as human rights, improving living standards and democratization. We will have to deal with clear concepts of power. And the less we cling to idealistic slogans, the better.”

Attitudes towards the Vietnam War divide the country to this day. Americans deny a lot, remember little, regret nothing, and seem to learn nothing.

In November 1969, freelance journalist Seymour Hersh reported how, a year and a half earlier, US troops had killed about five hundred civilians in the village of My Lai. They were suspected of sympathizing with the Viet Cong. Before the execution, many residents were tortured and women were gang-raped. The soldiers spared neither children nor the elderly. During all this time, not a single bullet was fired in their direction. This monstrous cruelty of American soldiers was reminiscent of their attitude towards the Japanese during World War II. 65% of Americans said they were not concerned about the My Lai massacre. The only officer found guilty was pardoned by Nixon three years later. Public opinion was on his side.

However, Kennedy opposed sending troops to Vietnam. He told Schlesinger: “Soldiers will come there, bands will thunder, the crowd will scream with delight. And in four days everyone will forget about it. It's like drinking. The intoxication passes and you pour a new glass.

The Americans began to bomb the dam near Pyongyang. This caused severe flooding that destroyed the rice crop. Earlier, the Nuremberg Tribunal condemned similar actions of the Nazis in Holland in 1944.

The well-armed American army was unable to withstand the ill-equipped Chinese peasants.

The Korean police operation has been going on for two and a half years and has escalated into a full-scale war. The United States fought fierce battles for useless hills and suffered heavy losses. This is very similar to what will happen in Vietnam fifteen years later. Troops under the command of General MacArthur fought the North Koreans, armed with the participation of the USSR. The Americans moved closer and closer to the border of China. Despite regular warnings from Beijing, MacArthur assured Truman that China would never go to war. In the late fall of 1950, hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers poured south across the Yalu River. The Americans and their allies had to retreat in disorder. The Marines did not take this threat seriously at first. "No retreat," their commander reported, "we're just advancing in the other direction." TIME magazine called it the worst defeat in US history. Truman wrote in his diary: "World War III is on the verge."

Truman accepted Oppenheimer only in October 1945. He asked the scientist when, in his opinion, the Russians will be able to develop their own atomic bomb? Oppenheimer hesitated to answer. Then Truman himself answered his own question: "Never." Struck by the incompetence of the president in such an important matter and realizing what it threatens, Oppenheimer squeezed out of himself: "Mr. President, I feel that there is blood on my hands" ... Truman got angry. I told him there was blood on my hands and not to worry about it. After the meeting, Truman told Dean Acheson, "I don't want to see that son of a bitch in my office anymore." Oppenheimer was later attacked by conservatives who considered him an agent of the Soviet Union. He was repeatedly summoned to the FBI for questioning. And in 1954, they were deprived of access to secret work. His crime in the eyes of the American authorities was that he opposed the creation of a new hydrogen bomb, which he considered a weapon of genocide.

In February 1942, President Roosevelt signed an executive order deporting 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans from California, Oregon, and Washington on the pretext that they were a threat to national security. Seventy percent of these people were American citizens.