Blog 5

After finishing this book, the cold war makes a lot more sense to me. I was never really taught in depth about the cold war and what it actually involved. This short intro by McMahon does a great job in pointing out the things that the general consensus does not know. How Stalin did what he did because he thought it was the best thing for his country, how the U.S. supplied weapons to the middle east to fight communism, how the U.S. did not want China to become an ally of the Soviet and further increase the communist movement; theses are all things that consensus America does not know enough about. After reading this, I realize that McMahon has a lot of information about the cold war, but I start to wonder how accurate it all is. I mean I am sure it is accurate, but to what extent. No matter who you talk to about it, everyone has a different idea, or different facts they present about the war, but you can never really get the true effect of what really happened. All of this talk about the doxa and implementing what we have learned about it in this book has enlightened me so much. It has helped me be able to think more outside the box when it comes to myths that society has established and I can use this knowledge to help me in my future.