Sunday 5 December 2021

[Content Warning - war, violence, hate, discrimination, social control] (the) Cold War

PS - see also 

After World War (part) Two, the political relations between the main allied powers, being the UK, the USA, and the USSR, began to change.

There had been tensions before then, as “western” nations [1] had intervened in the civil war between Bolsheviks, or “red” Russians, and “white” Russians in what was then still Russia [2] in 1917 - 1923 [3] , which killed somewhere between 7 and 12 million Russians (possibly up to around 10% of the population, four times more Russian deaths than in World War (part) One), including sending up to 200,000 troops to invade Russia from the north. The abuses in the USSR during the inter-war period of the 1920s [4] and 1930s [5] had certainly caused concern and even alarm in some people, and initially the Soviets (i.e., the USSR, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) allied itself to the nazis so it could invade and occupy part of Poland [6] (and it attempted to invade Finland [7] , without success - which, ironically, wound up allied to the nazis to get aid in their resistance against the Soviets). However, after nazi Germany invaded the USSR in 1941 [8] , the situation changed dramatically [9] , and the UK and USA found themselves in a somewhat reluctant but necessary alliances with the USSR. Indeed, the contribution winning World War (part) Two provided by the USSR was essential - and the suffering of people in the USSR was horrendous, including around 9 to 10 million dead (and around 5 million dead Germans and allies), millions more wounded or ill, and a staggering savagery and human rights abuses [10] .

Be that as it may, after World War (part) Two, the already existing tensions between the authoritarian Marxist USSR on the one hand, and the USA and UK on the other hand, became unmanageable without a common enemy, and the former Allies fell out. Churchill used the term “Iron Curtain”, which had been used previously by others (including the nazis - in reference to the USSR), in a speech titled “The Sinews of Peace”, delivered in the USA in March, 1946 [11] , and the term moved into near universal use (in the West, at any rate).

For the next four decades, until the Berlin Wall and then the USSR fell, the competition between the opposing sides of the “Iron Curtain” would become increasingly pervasive and all-consuming.

This era saw:

  • the development and mass manufacture of nuclear weapons [12] of increasing strength and expense (including more and more expensive delivery systems [57% of US spending [13] ] - and defences that were, at times, insane [14] ), with resultant widespread radiation problems [15] , security obsessions, unethical testing [16] , by-products of varying danger and length of time for the danger (up to thousands of years) [17] , and an entire world living with the constant fear and stress of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction [18] ) that came close to a nuclear holocaust several times [19] ;
  • a gradual descent from the position of US President Truman (which was to avoid implementing a right wing totalitarian country to fight against a left wing totalitarian country [20] ) to widespread insistence on ideological “purity” - the “better red than dead” extremism (“you’re with us or you’re against us”) that reached its height of stupidity, fear, & vindictiveness in McCarthyism [21] , including social disapprobation and coercive control (including by nations against smaller nations) that contributed to suppression of social progressivism and democratic dissent, and aided the rise of the evil ideological insanity of neoliberalism;
  • proxy wars of increasing severity [22] , and the occasional violent interaction between the main nations;
  • the rise of human rights movements [23] which, despite appalling oppression, demonstrated the potential for indomitability in the human spirit.

 

See:

 

[2] Imperial, sometimes called Tsarist, Russia (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_Empire&oldid=1058015562) existed from 1721 to 1917 (being the Tsardom of Russia from 1547 to 1721 - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tsardom_of_Russia&oldid=1057608814) was overthrown by the February Revolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=February_Revolution&oldid=1057842257) which established a provisional government that was overthrown by the Russian Civil War, leading to the Union of Soviet Socialist Russia (USSR - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Soviet_Union&oldid=1058300194), which included Russia and other “Soviet Socialist Republics that, after the dissolution of the USSR over the period 1988 - 1991 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union&oldid=1057760540), became the Russia Federation (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russia&oldid=1058318021) and 14 other republics (see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commonwealth_of_Independent_States&oldid=1058332271).

[20] From https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/728067-we-are-going-to-continue-to-fight-communism-now-i: “[we are] going to continue to fight communism. Now I am going to tell you how we are not going to fight communism. We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo secret police. That is what some people would like to do. We are not going to try to control what our people read and say and think. We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat.”

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