U Thant: The Diplomat Who Defined the 1960s
Shownotes
In this Conflicted Conversation, Thant Myint-U talks about his new book Peacemaker: U Thant, the United Nations and the Untold Story of the 1960s. It tells the story of his grandfather U Thant, the Burmese schoolteacher turned UN Secretary-General who guided the United Nations through some of the most dangerous crises of the 1960s, yet is now woefully forgotten or badly misremembered.
Thant explains:
- U Thant’s forgotten role as UN Secretary-General during the great crises of the 1960s
- His sociability, humour, directness, and moral imagination
- How Buddhism shaped U Thant’s approach to crisis
- How newly independent post-colonial states tried to remake the world order
- Burma/Myanmar after empire: colonial destruction, weak institutions, and postcolonial state-building
- The Non-Aligned Movement: Afro-Asian internationalism beyond the US–Soviet Cold War
- Congo, Katanga and sovereignty: U Thant’s defence of postcolonial borders against neo-imperial fragmentation
- The Cuban Missile Crisis: U Thant’s overlooked role in helping Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro de-escalate
- Vietnam and the lost peace channel: U Thant’s ignored 1964 attempt to open talks with Ho Chi Minh
- The Six-Day War and the UN-Israel rupture: UNEF, Nasser, Israel, and the myth that the UN abandoned Israel
- U Thant’s late one-world vision, the decline of Bandung idealism, and the lost promise of postcolonial internationalism
Join the Conflicted Community here: https://conflicted.supportingcast.fm/
Visit Thant’s website: thantmyintu.com
Find us on X: https://x.com/MHconflicted
And Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MHconflicted
And Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conflictedpod
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Conflicted is a Message Heard production.
Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.
Produced and edited by Thomas Small.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices