Bitesized Histories

When a Chinese village policeman in the early 2000s went to search a villager's home, the villager told him to go away and come back when he had a warrant.

(The villager had been watching American cop shows.)

Source: Evan Osmos' Age of Ambition

One of the best hotels in Beijing in the 1990s was -- according to the architect -- an exact copy of a Holiday Inn in Palo Alto, CA.

(Source: Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osmos)

When war-time shortages affected fruit supplies in the UK, store keepers took it in stride -- and placed signs outside their shops stating "yes, we have no bananas".

(Source: Keith Lowe's Savage Continent)

Vodka Politics, Mark Lawrence Schrad

Walter Ulbricht, leader of the German Democratic Republic; June 15, 1961

The Berlin Wall was erected August 13, 1961.

Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Aug. 24, 1963, speech in Yugoslavia

After a 1949 visit to Moscow, where Mao had felt snubbed by Stalin, Mao decided to get back at the USSR.

He finally got his chance in 1958.  Khrushchev was in Beijing for talks, and Mao insisted that they cool off and continue their discussions in Mao's pool.

Khrushchev couldn't swim.  He stood awkwardly at the shallow end of the pool, until Mao asked him to come to the deep end.  Aides suddenly produced a set of water wings for the Soviet leader.

Mao continued the discussions, swimming up and down the pool comfortably, while Khrushchev flailed around with his water wings.

(via Smithsonian Magazine)

Nikita Khrushchev, April 1, 1964 

Ahmad Shah Massoud was the principal leader of anti-Taliban fighters in Afghanistan in the 1990s.  He spent that decade unsuccessfully trying to get US military support.

He was killed by Al Qaeda Sept. 9, 2001.  A month later, the US invaded Afghanistan in a coalition with Massoud's forces, now armed and supported by the United States.

In 1984, the then-CIA director William Casey asked the Pakistani ISI to take him to one of the mujahideen training camps.  They balked, fearing a raid by Soviet Special Forces -- allowing the KGB to capture the director of the CIA would be less than advantageous, if Pakistan wished to continue receiving US support.  So the Pakistani ISI and the Islamabad branch of the CIA set up a fake training camp, drove Casey around for an appropriate period of time, and showed him the camp.  Casey believed it.

Let me repeat that: the Islamabad branch of the CIA joined forces with the ISI to mislead the CIA director, and the CIA director fell for it, hook, line and sinker.

Source: Steve Coll's Ghost Wars.  The information is from an interview with Howard Hart, and corroborated by the account of Mohammed Yousaf of the ISI.

The first major act of modern Islamic terrorism -- the 1979 Siege of Mecca -- was ended in part due to the cooperation of the Bin Laden Brothers for Contracting and Industry.  Osama bin Laden was 22 at the time, and has never been significantly involved in the operations of the Saudi Binladin Group.

Source: Steve Coll's Ghost Wars

Charles de Gaulle, as quoted in Tony Judt's Postwar

Hagen Koch -- the man who mapped the Berlin Wall, who drew the famous white line that would delineate the border at Checkpoint Charlie -- was also in charge of auctioning off the Wall in 1991.

From Frederick Taylor's The Berlin Wall:

"There was an odd but compelling logic to it all. A private at the time of his first brush with fame, Koch had progressed to captain in the Dzerzhinsky Regiment before leaving the service of the Stasi in 1985, just before his forty-fifth birthday...  The job Koch got after his release was with the Department of Cultural Monuments, organising the transporting and setting-up of art and museum exhibitions. It was thus that, in the spring of 1990, he was instructed to organise the shipping of the Wall segments down to the Côte d’Azur."

As of the early 2000s, he worked as a tour guide of the Berlin Wall.

Nikita Khurshchev spent a significant amount of World War II making fun of the future leader of German Democratic Republic, Walter Ulbritcht.

"Khrushchev, a member of Stalin’s inner circle, was senior commissar on the Stalingrad Front in 1942. Walter Ulbricht and other German Communist exiles were sent there to encourage members of the Wehrmacht to surrender, and if possible to join one of the Soviet prisoner-of-war organisations such as the ‘National Committee Free Germany’.

The wartime relationship was an uneasy one. The stocky commissar wasted few opportunities to make jokes at his dour German comrade’s expense. As the staff sat down to enjoy their evening rations after a day’s work in the front line, a grinning Khrushchev would frequently chide him: ‘Oh, Comrade Ulbricht, it doesn’t look as if you have earned your supper today. No Germans have surrendered!’"

(Source: Frederick Taylor's The Berlin Wall)

In the afternoon I walked into the Woods on the back fide of the houfe, and happening into a fine broad walk (which was a fledgway) I wandered till I chanc’t to fpye a fruit as I thought like a pine Apple plated with fcales, it was as big as the crown of a Woman’s hat ; I made bold to ftep unto it, with an intent to have gathered it, no fooner had I toucht it, but hundreds of Wafps were about me ; at laft I cleared my felf from them, being ftung only by one upon the upper lip, glad I was that I fcaped fo well ; But by that time I was come into the houfe my lip was fwell’d fo extreamly, that they hardly knew me but by my Garments. — “An ACCOUNT OF TWO VOYAGES TO NEW-ENGLAND, Made during the years 1638, 1663” By JOHN JOSSELYN, Gent. (1674)

The Dutch didn't buy Manhattan for 24 blue beads.  They "bought" Manhattan Island (for metal pots and other goods, as well as beads) from the tribe that had settled Brooklyn.

The tribe that actually "owned" Manhattan continued to fight the Dutch over for years afterwards.