Khrushchev fabrication

[pjs]

If there were actual film of Khrushchev pounding his shoe at the United
Nations, don't you think Bill Taubman would have mentioned it? As his book
makes clear, the shoe pounding story is just one possible version of the
truth of what happened that day in the General Assembly.  Do we even know
if there was a movie camera there that was been trained on Khrushchev at
just the right moment?

My point is not that Khrushchev did or didn't pound his shoe, but where
the image that we all "remember" of Khrushchev pounding his shoe came
from.  I believe that it was nothing more than some footage of Khrushchev
delivering a vigourous speech and that we all just assumed that this was
film the shoe pounding incident. The whole commercial (PSA) was concocted
of imagery and sounds meant to arouse emotion rather than provoke thought.

Now this whole thing should be fairly easy to resolve.  If someone can
produce footage of Khrushchev pounding his shoe at the UN, I'll go away.
But if not, it should give us cause to consider the ways in which all of
us, on both sides of the iron curtain, were manipulated by cold-war
propaganda.

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