The roots of our present malaise are in the half-century of Cold War. That’s how long the United States was on a quasi-war footing, and we Americans accepted the necessity of a global military establishment, military intervention and covert warfare as a requirement in our global duel with the Soviet Union.
Revisionist historians say that the Cold War was simply a huge mistake, like World War One, or something more sinister. But I’m old enough to remember the origins of the Cold War, and I think there was good reason in the late 1940s to regard the Soviet Union as an enemy.
At the end of World War Two, the Soviet Union was ruled by Joseph Stalin, a dictator who had carried out mass killings on the same scale as Adolph Hitler, and whose totalitarian control was even more thorough. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, you could be executed or sent to a forced labor camp for having parents who belonged to a proscribed social class, or for expressing a forbidden thought in a private conversation, or even (in at least once case) being the first to stop applauding a government spokesman’s speech.
Stalin insisted on re-creating the same totalitarian system in all the countries through which the Red Army passed during World War Two. Military bases and friendly governments were not enough. The countries of eastern Europe had to become little replicas of the USSR.
Cold War Berlin
The Red Army was the world’s most powerful military force and, but for the United States possession of the atomic bomb, could have marched from the middle of Germany to the English channel, if its generals so chose.
Stalin evidently did not have a master plan for world conquest, but, as a rational imperialist, he sought to expand Soviet power where he could. He blockaded Berlin and ordered the North Korean puppet government to attack South Korea.
Communist parties in the Stalin era were like one of today’s religious cults. The Communist parties attracted millions of goodhearted people all over the world, who thought the Communists were in the forefront of the struggle for a better world. In this they were unlike the Nazis, who had the virtue of not being hypocritical about their objectives. But in fact the Communists were servants of Stalin and the Soviet Union. The day after Stalin announced his pact with Hitler, Communists all over the world went from advocating a “popular front” against fascism to a struggle against an “imperialist war” in which all sides were equally bad. The day after Hitler’s troops invaded the Soviet Union, they switched back again. This terrifying blind obedience to Stalin made his power more threatening, and was a foretaste of what would be expected under his rule.
In 1949, the Chinese Communists came to power in China, and immediately started to transform China into another clone of the Soviet Union. Mao Zedong later broke with the Soviet Union, and China has evolved into something very different from what it was then, but during the lifetime of Stalin, Mao was a completely loyal follower of Stalin. Also in 1949, the Soviet Union tested its atomic bomb, ending the U.S. monopoly. You didn’t have to be paranoid to see this constellation of forces as a real threat.
Based on the situation at the time, President Truman was completely justified in the policy of containment of Communist expansion, including formation of NATO and other anti-Communist alliances, and (I say with a little more hesitation) authorizing CIA covert warfare to match the Soviet covert warfare. Truman also was right in what he did not do—to launch a preventive war against the USSR when the United States had enough of a lead in nuclear weapons to make that seem feasible.
Over the decades the situation changed. Communist China’s government broke with the Soviet Union. Communist parties around the world, while still mistakenly pro-Soviet, ceased to be slavishly devoted to the Moscow party line. The Soviet Union and other Communist countries, while still undemocratic, ceased to be as relentlessly totalitarian as in Stalin’s day. The potential threat did not go away, but it ceased to be monolithic.
At the same time it became apparent (or rather should have become apparent, because I didn’t see it) that U.S. foreign policy served other objectives besides containment of Soviet imperialism. Cold War liberals such as myself were anti-Communist because we believed Communism was a lie. We believed it was an ideology that promised liberation, but delivered tyranny. But American foreign policy was being conducted largely by people who were anti-Communist not because of the Communist lies, but because of the Communist promise. These were the people who engineered the overthrow of the democratically elected governments of Iran and Guatemala.
I was aware that the U.S. government did bad things, but I thought they were aberrations. I didn’t think there was anything systemically wrong with American foreign policy or with the United States itself. I thought U.S. intervention in Vietnam was justified as part of the global struggle with the Soviet Union. I soon came to think that the intervention was being bungled, and then I came to think that the intervention was a huge mistake, but it took me a long time before I came to think of it as a crime.
Memorial plaque in Lexington, Ky.
I started to see things differently after 1991. After the fall of Communism, I expected the United States to get back to what I regarded as normal. I though the huge military establishment and secret intelligence establishment would fade away, now that they were no longer needed to check the Soviet Union and its allies. Instead the U.S. government found other excuses for military intervention and covert warfare. The definition of “normal” was no longer what I thought it was.
After the 9/11 attacks, I was shocked by how easily Americans accepted basic Constitutional rights being wiped off the blackboard, and how easily we accepted a state of perpetual warfare as normal. But I put the blame on individuals, specifically Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
I once again looked forward to a return to normal with the election of Barack Obama. This didn’t happen, either.
My loyalty is still to the ideals of American freedom and democracy, as I was taught to believe in them. I still believe it is my duty as a citizen to uphold, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. If the Cold War taught us Americans to forget our ideals and ignore our Constitution, then Stalin, in a sense, really won.
Tags: Anti-Communism, Cold war, Cold War Liberal, Communism, Untold History, War on terror
Phil Ebersole's Blog 
Leave a Reply