…What exactly was the cold war? When and where did it begin? why? Who started it and could it have been avoided? These are fascinating questions that have been posed and answered by all manner of experts for the past half century. …
In 1951 Joseph M. Jones, a State Department officer who worked on the “Acheson team”- the basic brain trusters on the American side of the Cold War- published The Fifteen Weeks. It told the story of the Truman Doctrine, which created a new American role of intervention in the world. Jones, who later became a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, is the spokesman for the school of historians that views Truman as the hero, the Galahad of the “free world,” and Stalin as the villain, the Lucifer of the “slave bloc.” This school has argued that the Russians, the Communists, started the Cold War as part of their drive to conquer the world. Even as recently as the Nixon administration, this view prevailed in the United States.
—Illustration by Fons Van Woerkom.—click image for source…
But at the height of the war in Vietnam, dissident critics, in the media and universities, began to re-examine the premises of American views on the Cold War. The most vigorous and able historian of the revisionist school was Gar Alperovitz of Harvard, whose research and writings at the John F. Kennedy Center influenced a new generation of students and scholars. Alperovitz maintained that Russia emerged from World War II in a state of complete exhaustion. Its cities had been ravaged and twenty million of its people killed, wounded, or crippled.
The triumphant Red Army was of course, intact, and the most powerful land force in Europe, but the Soviet Union lacked he resources, the infrastructure, to support any expansionist drive. This school argues that the Soviets’ main concern was to prevent a new “cordon sanitaire” from strangling the U.S.S.R., and thus that the Soviet position was basically a defensive position, not offensive.
—The Berlin Wall was a barrier separating West Berlin from East Berlin and the rest of East Germany. The longer inner German border marked the remainder of the East-West German border between the two states. Both borders were part of the Iron Curtain.
The wall separated East Berlin and West Berlin for 28 years, from the day its had begun construction on August 13, 1961 until it was destroyed in 1989. During this period about 133 people were confirmed killed trying to cross the Wall into West Berlin according to official figures. However an angered victims group claims that more than 200 people had been killed trying to flee over the wall. The Soviet government gave specific orders to shoot and kill attempted runners.—click image for more…
There is enough truth in these contradictory schools of thought to give credence to each of them. But each is highly selective of the truth, choosing only the evidence that supports its thesis. We are approaching twenty-five years since the fall of Communism and the time is overdue for an overview, for an effort to perceive the whole truth about the struggle that has become known as the Cold War. ( to be continued)…
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