The Cuban Missle Crisis

The Cuban crisis was when Soviet missiles were placed in Cuba. This was very startling because Cuba is only ninety miles away from Florida, and plus the technology that the Soviets had, it would be so much easier to attack the USA from there. Since they were at war, this was assumed to be a very bad threat. At first it was just news, but then, as it was happening, JFK ordered ships and airplanes to try to see what was happening. The Soviets sent battleships of their own, violence almost seemed inevitable. It was so bad that, JFK had to send special planes to spy on Cuba, to see if they were still building bombs or if they had launched one already.It was a really intense moment because, just in case that they aimed Nukes at our cities, we did the same to theirs, we knew that they wouldn't blow it us up because then they would lose their land and so would we. All the countries were in fear of war because of World War one and two, this time it was a nuclear war. This scared every nation, even the United States and the Soviet Union, because the United states had the range for the nuclear missiles and plus, the United States had tried to take over Cuba in a failed attempt. It was an a stale mate for about eight days, but then the president made an agreement to the Soviet Union, saying that if the Soviets pulled back, then the United States would no longer try to invade Cuba, however th Soviets wanted the Americans to get their missiles out of Turkey.

NATO and The Warsaw Pact

NATO is the organization of countries to defend each other, just in case that anything should happen to another country do to the Soviet Union. This didn't go good with the Soviet Union, they saw this as a threat because some many countries against one country, so Russia made the Warsaw pact. This allied Russia with Poland and other countries. America formed these pact because they were afraid of the Russia, so they wanted allies to help them, just in case anything happened. The whole reason behind this Cold war was because of the fact that they had two different economics systems. With these pacts, they hoped to scare and intimidate the others from actually trying to attack them, they didn't want to fight because, if they did, the whole world would probably destroyed or affected by these Nuclear weapons. This was the main reason why they didn't just set off a war by nuking each other, because it would affect the whole world and would destroy these two nations.

Film Lesson - "The Right Stuff"

In the movie, the right stuff, they were competing against the Soviets because of the fact that they wanted to be in space and wanted to be in control. When the Soviets put the first satellites up, the Americans were kind of scared because they put it up before the Americans did. The soviets were winning because every time that the Americans got a little bit further then the Russians, they would do something even better, like when Americans put the first animal in space. Thats when the Russians put the first man into space. When the Americans actually reached Mach one, they were so protective of this because they didn't want the Soviets to know that they had the technology to fly at such a fast rate. The Soviets were ahead of them in the space race for a long time despite the fact that we had the best German minds developing the spaceships. A couple of scenes that will help me is when, one airplane had gotten to Mach one, and then when the spaceships kept crashing because they weren't good enough to travel into space.

Film Lesson: "Schindler's List"

This movie illustrated the version that had less of an impact on me because it wasn't as cruel as the real thing was. It was more of a movie in which the Jews weren't treated as badly and not only that, but at the end of the war, the people looked nothing like the documentary. Something that is powerful to me in the movie is how a German Nazi went from hating the Jews, to trying to save them from getting killed by working for him. They would make weapons and be feed well, unlike the Labor camps and the eventual death camps. There still were some powerful scenes in this movie, such as Auschwitz was first made, and when the little girl died and you saw her body being thrown into the giant fire. There was also when the Germans were taking the Jews out of Krakow Ghettos, the mass exterminations and sending them to the labor camps. Examples of images that will stay in my head from this movie is the little girl wondering around while everybody was getting killed. The fear and the look on her face was so dramatic and when the children were hiding, and they went as low as to go to the bathrooms and try to hide there. This scared me alot and made me realize how badly they really had it. Words could never describe how bad they had it, so the best thing to do was the movie because it inspired me to think differently about the what the Nazi's did.

Film Lesson: "Night and Fog"

Night and fog was one of the best documentaries in terms of information, despite the fact of its gruesomeness. The film was very powerful, it has changed my perspective on the holocaust. It was kind of similar to Schindlers list because of some of the scenes in some of the movies. Such scenes as the when the Jews were working in the death camps. I think that the documentary explains it more because of the fact that it is more powerful by showing the cruel images of the holocaust. The documentary also shows what the free people would do, unlike the movie, where alot of people seemed to survive. The documentary shows the severity of how they lived and how they were forced to live for such a long time.