[Fairly well-edited notes:
November 24, 2019]
THE COLD WAR
The totalitarian powers promised their peoples world
dominance, telling them that the democracies of the world were
too weak to prevail against them. During both World War II
and the following Cold War period (1945-1991), it often looked
like they might be right, though, in the end, the "good guys"
triumphed--sort of.
World War
II is an excellent example of the "sort of" victory of the
democracies in the war with totalitarianism. World War II
stopped the Fascists, the Nazis, and the military dictatorship
of Japan. But it left another totalitarian system,
Communism, stronger than ever.
Prior to WW II, there was only one communist nation on the face
of the earth, the Soviet Union. And that was simply not
the Marxist dream. Marxists wanted to see the
"dictatorship of the proletariat" spread world wide, and while
Comintern had succeeded in destabilizing democratic governments
in places like Germany and Italy, the Communists had nowhere
been able to take control themselves.
During the opening days of WW II, the Communists got their
chance to expand. The Soviets took over the Baltic states,
Eastern Poland, and (temporarily) Finland. During the last
days of WW II, they were able to extend their reach much
further, pushing into countries like Hungary and Poland.
The big question was, what would happen when the war was
over? Would the Soviets go home and leave these countries
independent? Perhaps not....
In February of 1945, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt met at Yalta
to try to reach some agreement on what was going to happen in
Europe once the war was actually over. Churchill and
Roosevelt wanted Stalin out of Eastern Europe, but Roosevelt
wanted other things as well. He hoped for Soviet help in
the war against Japan and for Russian participation in a new
organization, the United Nations. Stalin agreed to the
last two, and Churchill and Roosevelt dropped their demands that
he leave Eastern Europe--perhaps thinking they (or the United
Nations) could do something after Hitler and the Japanese were
defeated.
Roosevelt wasn't a well man--he'd be dead within a few
months. Also, he seems to have been a bit
naive. In 1942, he had said, "I think that if I give
him (Stalin) everything I possibly can and ask nothing in return
he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world
of democracy and peace."
But within a few months of Yalta, Roosevelt at last saw his
mistake. "We can't do business with Stalin. He has
broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta." And
then there's my all-time favorite Roosevelt quotes, "Stalin is
not a man of his word."
But Stalin did keep his promise to enter the war against
Japan. Two days after the atomic bomb was dropped and just
a few days before the Japanese surrender, Stalin's troops poured
into Manchuria, and, in return for this token effort, Stalin and
the Russians were rewarded with substantial chunks of Japanese
territory. And soon, the democracies were bargaining with
Stalin again.
In July and August 1945, the victorious allies met at Potsdam to
try to work out a settlement. At Potsdam, it was also agreed
that Germany would be divided into four occupied zones and
punished in other ways. Later, the Soviet-occupied zone
would be East Germany while the three zones occupied by France,
Britain and the U.S. would later (1949) unite into West Germany.
Unfortunately, for the most part, the Potsdam conference
agreement strengthened the Soviet Union. The Soviets were
given all sorts of concessions to compensate them for their
sacrifices during the war--concessions that came at the expense
of other eastern European countries, particularly Poland.
One good thing came out of the Potsdam conference. It was
decided that Nazis who had committed atrocities during the war
would be put on trial. This led to the famous Nuremberg
trials where Nazi war criminals were told over and over again
that following orders was no excuse for crimes against
humanity. A good principle, but--ironically--sitting among
the judges were Soviet officials--officials from a nation that
committed crimes as bad or worse than those of the Nazis. Poland
was a good example of problem. Remember that the Soviets had
invaded Eastern Poland during the first days of WWII.
Among other atrocities, they took 22,000 Polish officers
that they had captured, marched them into Katyn
forest, and massacred them all. But that was not
nearly as bad as what was to come.
In the last days of World War II, the Soviets could have come to
the aid of the Polish resistance forces. Instead, they let
Hitler do much of their dirty work for them, allowing the
resistance forces to be wiped out before moving in
themselves. And when Soviet troops finally march in, the
treated Polish civilians with the utmost brutality, raping
women, stealing everything of value, and killing anyone who
tried to resistance.
When the Soviet troops got to German territory, there treatment
of civilians was even worse. Soviet soldiers raped tens of
thousands of women and young girls--probably committing at least
two million rapes.
[See this review
of
Antony's Beever's book on the fall of Berlin or another
review
of Beever's book.]
Stalin didn't mind at all--he *wanted* such behavior.
Why? To create tremendous fear of the Soviet army.
And it worked. Fear of the Soviets was powerful tool of local
communists in securing support, and eventually communist
governments working hand in glove with the Soviet Union
controlled most of the countries of eastern Europe.
Winston Churchill now warned of a new menace, telling us that an
iron curtain had descended on Europe.
But it wasn't just Europe. In 1949, Communists took over
in China too. Here's another instance where a nation that
might have gone in a very different direction succumbs to
totalitarianism. It the early years of the 20th century,
China had begun to move toward democracy under the leadership of
Dr. Sun-Yat-Sen. Sun-Yat Sen was a Christian convert who, using
the slogan "Nationalism, Democracy, Livelihood" created a
movement strong enough to establish what's called the Chinese
Republic. After Sun Yet-Sen's death, leadership of the
Republic fell to his brother-in-law, Chiang Kai Shek.
Ultimately, however, it was not democratic ideas that dominated
China, but a different set of European ideas, the ideas of the
German writer Karl Marx. The leader of the Communist
movement in China was Mao Tse-Tung. Mao managed to take
over China in 1949, and he set about to remake the country along
Marxist lines.
In 1959, Mao launched the "Great Leap Forward," an attempt to
change the Chinese economy. This involved the construction
of everything from roads to hydro-electric dams. It also
involved the collectivization of agriculture. The
result? Too much change, too quickly--and probably
25,000,000 dead.
Mao worked to transform China in other ways--not just the
economy. From 1966-1969 he backed the "Cultural
Revolution," a movement aimed at getting rid of the "four
olds," old ideology, old thought, old habits, old
customs. Millions of young people joined the Red
Guard--and dedicated themselves to wanton destruction of
anything even vaguely associated with old Chinese
traditions. More than 1,000,000 leaders (including
especially teachers) were jailed, beaten, and (usually) killed.
Obviously, a tremendously costly transformation! But
the China that emerged was going to be a major player in world
affairs, and, with both the Soviet Union and China pushing for
further Communist expansion,
it looked like the Marxist dream of world-wide
communism might become a reality.
In the 1950's, Stalin's successor Nikita Kruschev could
confidently tell the democracies, "We will bury you." And
for more than 40 years it looked as if there was a chance they
would. This period (from roughly 1945-1991) is what we call the
period of the Cold War, the period in which advocates of
Communism (led by the Soviet Union and China) worked to expand
that particularly flavor of totalitarianism, while advocates of
democracy (led by the United States) worked to contain
Communism.
The countries of the Free World had some advantages.
Liberal democracy, with its free markets and free men,
invariably works out better in economic terms. Note the
contrast between free West Germany and communist East
Germany. Further, citizens of a democracy enjoy freedoms
those living under totalitarianism can't even dream of.
But this very freedom was, to a certain extent, a
disadvantage. Communist agents and communist sympathizers
[see Mona Charon's book
Useful
Idiots.]
could take advantage of fundamental western freedoms like
freedom of the speech and freedom of the press to advocate for a
system where there would be no freedom of speech of freedom of
the press. By the late 1960's, anti-Communism had become
unfashionable among the Western elites. President John
Kennedy had promised that the United States would, "Pay
any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any
friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the
success of liberty." But after the Vietnam war debacle, it
didn't look as if even the United States found the struggle
against communist expansion too difficult.
But in the 1980's, leaders like Maggie Thatcher in
Britain, Helmut Kohl in Germany, and Ronald Reagan in the United
States led a free-world resurgence. Partly, this came
about through aggressive foreign policy decisions and an
aggressive arms build-up the Soviets couldn't match. But,
perhaps more important, Thatcher and Reagan especially moved
toward laissez-faire economic and free trade. This led to
an era of unprecedented prosperity in the West. Seeing the
wealth of the West and their own poverty, one by one the nations
of Eastern Europe threw out their communist leaders and embraced
democracy. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself fell
apart with many of its constituent units trying to create free
and democratic societies.
Writer Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that we had reached the end
of history: not with the dictatorship of the Proletariat, but
with liberal democracy as the form of government prevailing
everywhere and forever. The Jeffersonian political philosophy of
the American founders can be summarized in a single phrase,
"That government is best which governs least." By 1991, it
looked like at last mankind had learned that lesson. Now the
question is will the lesson stay learned? Or will we once
again succumb to the totalitarian temptation and welcome the
guiding and controlling hand of Big Brother?