Eric Zuesse, originally posted at Strategic Culture
This will be the first-ever credible, or “historical,” but brief, account of how the Cold War actually began, and of why it started, and of why it continues today (even though it started on the basis of lies which have long-since become exposed but — for reasons which will become obvious — the exposing of which deceits remains hidden from the public, so that ‘history’ can be preserved, and the public thus remains fooled to believe the myths).
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INTRODUCTION
To understand today’s world, an introduction is needed first that summarizes what World War II (the Cold War’s predecessor) was actually all about, in geostrategic terms:
The key decision-makers who coordinated together, in order to defeat the three fascist powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy, in WW II, were America’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), Britain’s Winston Churchill, and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin. If any one of those three would abandon the Allied side, or as FDR anticipatorily named it the “United Nations,” then the Axis would win the war, and then a war between the three Axis leaders — Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini — would follow afterward, in which Hitler was generally considered to be the likeliest to achieve his “Thousand Year Reich”: global control. If so, the result would have been a Nazi-controlled planet. But each of the three Allied leaders had different political views and priorities, which affect us today.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an intense anti-imperialist: he believed that the Second World War had been started by the fascist, or “Axis,” powers because each one of them wanted to increase the percentage of the planet’s surface that it controlled.
Winston Churchill was an intense imperialist: he believed, exactly as did the founder of modern British imperialism, Cecil Rhodes, starting in 1877, that the larger the percentage of this planet’s surface that is controlled by the English “race,” the better. The only difference between Rhodesist imperialism and prior British imperialism is that Rhodes’s plan was based upon the geostrategic belief that the only way in which Britain could continue its empire and expand it would be by retaking the United States via subversion (as he planned), in which the leaders of America would be deceived to believe that, in the U.S.-and-UK “Special Relationship” which Rhodes had in mind, Britain would be following America’s lead, when actually those American leaders would be following Britain’s lead and not be aware of that subterranean UK supremacy. (Rhodes championed subversive aristocratic rule. Subversion is basic to his plan.) Churchill himself was a Rhodesist and he was also very close with Rhodes’s business partner and political successor, Abe Bailey. The 1911 book Cecil Rhodes: His Private Life, says of Rhodes (p.256), “He was very much entertained by Mr. Churchill’s ready wit and clever conversation, and he listened intently to his views on the political questions of the day. He admired his intellectual powers, which, in conjunction with his dash and ‘go,’ he said must inevitably bring him to the front.”
Joseph Stalin was an intense anti-imperialist like FDR was, especially because Stalin’s chief competitor for leadership of the Soviet Union was Leon Trotsky, the most passionate supporter of a Soviet imperialism, “Trotskyism.” Wikipedia contains a reasonably accurate thumbnail description of this:
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky identified as an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik–Leninist. He supported founding a vanguard party of the proletariat, proletarian internationalism and a dictatorship of the proletariat based on working class self-emancipation and mass democracy. Trotskyists are critical of Stalinism as they oppose Joseph Stalin‘s theory of socialism in one country in favor of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Trotskyists also criticize the bureaucracy that developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
Perhaps because of Wikipedia’s being not only edited by the CIA, but also, to some extent, written by the CIA, that passage focused on “Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution” instead of on Trotsky’s advocacy of Soviet imperialism, which was the opposite of not only Stalin’s view (“socialism in one country”) but of Marx’s intention (though Marx didn’t think that imperialism in any form could even exist outside of a capitalistic context: he didn’t think that a communist country being imperialistic would be possible). As Prabhat Patnaik pointed out in his superb essay “Marx on Imperialism”, “Marx does not see the process of primitive accumulation of capital as belonging only to the pre-history of capitalism; he sees it as something which continues throughout the history of that mode of production.” Imperialism, in other words, is antithetical to Marxism. This is the reason why Stalin’s view of his country’s future was for its economy to blossom so that it would serve as the apocryphal City-on-the-Hill, or model that all other lands would emulate, and never for the Soviet Union to become the head of any empire. Trotsky was advocating something that was alien to Marx’s intentions. Whatever other failings Marx had (and there were many), acceptance of empire was not among them. Trotsky was the anomalous ‘Marxist’; Stalin wasn’t. And this, not “Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution,” is what the Stalin-Trotsky conflict centered on, and was actually all about. (Even Wikipedia’s own article on “Permanent revolution” mentions — though only in passing and without linking to any source — that “Trotsky’s version of the theory represents both a development and to some observers a contradiction of the expressed opinions of Marx and Engels.” But their failure to so much as mention this in their article on “Trotskyism,” while that article focuses on “Permanent revolution,” causes it to misrepresent “Trotskyism.” Trotskyism was advocacy for Soviet imperialism, not advocacy of permanent revolution — which idea he only supported but did not create. Trotsky created the idea of ‘Marxist’ imperialism.)
In order for Stalin to support Soviet imperialism, he would have had to reject his own “socialism in one country” (which was actually implicit in “Classical Marxism”) and accept Trotskyism, which he refused to do. At Yalta (February 1945), FDR and Stalin agreed together that though every major power has a right to intervene in the internal affairs of other nations in its “neighborhood” insofar as is necessary in order to block such a nearby nation’s alliance with any hostile major power (an example is the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, in which Kennedy had a right to block Cuba from receiving Soviet missiles), no such right to intervene in a foreign country’s purely internal or domestic affairs exists: i.e., the right to intervene exists ONLY to protect that given major power’s own national security, but not to intervene into that nearby nation’s internal affairs for any other reason. This was FDR’s view and Stalin’s view. They both agreed to disagree together against Churchill’s view that a major power should be allowed to intervene outside of its own neighborhood or to “have an empire.” (In today’s billionaires’ updated and far more hypocritical version of the pro-imperialistic argument, such as George Soros’s argument, the case for imperialism is “R2P” or “the rulers of a sovereign state have a responsibility to protect [‘R2P’] the state’s citizens. When they fail to do so, the responsibility is transferred to the international community,” which is then allowed to invade. This is the ‘democratic’ argument to invade foreign countries that one wants to conquer and turn into a vassal-nation. The world’s billionaires started pushing for this argument internationally in 1994 because the ‘anti-communist’ excuse for invading had just recently ended, in 1991. Soros stated the argument this way in 2009, which was already well after George W. Bush’s having done, to such disastrous effect, such an invasion against Iraq in 2003. But Bush’s lies to ‘justify’ invading had been mainly of the ‘national security’ variety. He was conservative, not liberal; so, his lies were ‘national security’ instead of ‘human rights’. But the liberal Soros was instead presenting a liberal argument which would have ‘justified’ invading Iraq simply to oust its existing tyrant. Either way, it’s based on lies.)
FDR rejected dictatorship as an internal-policy matter and therefore he disapproved of communism (because it is internally dictatorial), but he had no trouble negotiating with Stalin, because that relationship concerned only international and never domestic-policy matters (since Stalin was not a Trotskyist). FDR championed democracy on both a domestic-policy and an international-policy level, and his relations with both Stalin and Churchill concerned ONLY the latter. (Although this was the case, the standard conservative arguments against him are based upon ignoring that crucial distinction.)
Consequently, amongst the Allies, only Churchill — the British imperialist who, in accord with Cecil Rhodes’s scheme, was seeking America’s help so as to conquer other imperialisms in order to ‘preserve’ The British Empire — endorsed imperialism. His actual aim was ultimately to extend that Empire and to use American might so as to assist this, as being U.S. rule or “hegemony” over the entire planet, which would be controlled behind the scenes by Britain’s aristocracy. When Churchill came to power within the United Kingdom, the change in leadership represented a supreme victory of Rhodes’s branch of the British Conservative Party, pushing aside the pre-Rhodes Tories (such as Neville Chamberlain). Under Labour Party leader Tony Blair starting on 2 May 1997, both of Britain’s major Parties were Rhodesist, and (after Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat) they still are in Rhodes’s mold.
There was a severe split within Britain’s aristocracy over whether to ally with Hitler or instead with FDR and Stalin. (FDR himself wasn’t able to avoid having lots of pro-Nazis even in his own Administration: for example, the U.S. intelligence official Allen Dulles secretly said in late 1942, “We’re fighting the wrong enemy,” and General George Patton said at the war’s end, in May 1945, “We have fought the wrong enemy.” America’s billionaires have profited enormously from invasions and therefore sponsor the careers of many high policy officials, and did so even when FDR was in power.) Churchill’s immediate predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, represented England’s pro-Hitler aristocrats. They were not followers of Rhodes’s plan. They were instead pure anti-socialists. (They were more concerned to protect the aristocracy than to extend their empire.) There were actually two varieties of socialism: one, dictatorial, which was Marxism, the other democratic, which was the main type and the one that prevailed in much of Europe. By contrast, there was only a dictatorial form of fascism, because fascism was (and is) dictatorial capitalism, and any form of democratic capitalism was called simply “democracy.” Thus, there was “social democracy” versus “democracy” versus “fascism” versus “communism.” The Axis powers all were fascist. (Hitler labelled his German fascism Nazism as “National Socialism” in order to be able to win support from workers, but his “Volkisch” ’socialism’ was actually very different: pro-racist, instead of anti-classist or anti-aristocratic like almost all of the actually “socialist” parties in Europe were.)
These facts (including the internal ideological conflicts within the United Kingdom, and also within the Soviet Union) are basic, in order to be able to understand recent world history, and current events.
So, we now get to the Cold War:
How the Cold War Started
FDR died on 12 April 1945, and his naive V.P., Harry Truman, became President. Promptly, Truman was surrounded by Rhodesists and he didn’t understand what was going on. Churchill advised him against accepting the Soviet Union. However, the key person who also did was U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, who seems to have clinched the case on 26 July 1945 by confirming Churchill’s view and telling the President that either the U.S. would conquer the Soviet Union or else the Soviet Union would conquer the U.S. (In other words: Ike was telling Truman that Stalin was a Trotskyist, and Truman believed it even if he had no idea of what Stalinism versus Trotskyism were — Truman was tragically naive.)
Here, providing a favorable (pro-Rhodesist-regime, anti-Soviet-regime) slant upon the same ugly reality that has just been documented about Rhodesism, is from the Rhodesist CIA’s own retired Miles Copeland’s 1969 book, The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics, the opening of Chapter 2:
On a cold and rainy February afternoon in 1947 [21 February 1947], one year before the Games Center was established, First Secretary H. M. Sichel of the British Embassy in Washington telephoned Loy Henderson, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and African Affairs. He had two messages from the Foreign Office which were “rather important.” They were of a sort that normally should be delivered by the British Ambassador direct to the Secretary of State, George Marshall, but since General Marshall had already left the office for the weekend perhaps, Sichel suggested he could drop off the notes, have a “brief” chat about them, and allow Mr. Henderson a weekend of reflection on them before briefing the Secretary prior to meeting the British Ambassador on Monday morning.
Sichel arrived as State Department employees, after a comparatively dull week, were donning their raincoats and galoshes to take off for an indoor weekend. Loy Henderson, who habitually worked until eight or nine o’clock even on Fridays, had sent off all his secretaries and was alone in the office. The scene was the one of utter calm that skillful dramatists often establish to provide the psychological setting for a shattering announcement.
The announcement, which Mr. Sichel delivered in the course of his “brief chat,” was certainly shattering. The two messages were official notification that the Pax Britannica, which had kept order in much of the world for over a century, was at an end. Specifically, His Majesty’s Government could no longer afford the $50,000,000 or so that was required to support the resistance of the Greek and Turkish Governments to Communist aggression either, as in the first case, by guerrilla warfare or, in the second, by direct military action of the Soviet Union. Either the United States Government would fill the gap, or it would go unfilled — or it would be left to the Russians. Mr. Henderson, whose considerable diplomatic experience included assignments in Moscow and other capitals in the Soviet orbit, didn’t need a weekend of reflection to realize that more than Greece and Turkey was at stake. The vacuum of which these two countries were a part extended throughout all of southern Europe that was not already behind the Iron Curtain, and through North Africa and the Middle East. With the British announcement, delivered so calmly by Mr. Sichel, the United States was given the choice of becoming an active world power — an “on-the-ground” world power, as a lecturer at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute was later to put it — or seeing the Soviets become a more menacing feature of world politics than Nazi Germany could ever have been.
THEN P. 38:
there was the necessary discrepancy between the publicly stated attitude of our Government toward world questions and the attitudes held in the inner sanctums of the State Department and the Pentagon. Early in 1946, George Kennan, during the last few weeks in his assignment as deputy chief of mission in Moscow, wrote a letter to the State Department which correctly outlined the shape of the oncoming Cold War and which was immediately accepted as the definitive analysis of Soviet intentions, outlook and behavior. At the same time, Mr. Kennan argued convincingly that if Europe was to be divided the blame should be placed on the Russians and not on ourselves. Winston Churchill, in a speech delivered at Fulton, Missouri, referred to the “Iron Curtain,” and the presence of President Truman at his side implied official U.S. Government endorsement of such an attitude. Apart from this one lapse, however, official policy was still to pretend that the “spirit of Yalta” guided our actions.
P. 42:
Our aboveboard response to the British diplomatic notes of February 21, 1947, was the Truman Doctrine, which was announced, after three weeks of hectic State Department and White House staff work, on March 12. Announcement of the Marshall Plan followed shortly; in July and from then on a flood of editorial, semiofficial and official comment (the latter mainly in the form of college commencement addresses delivered by top government officials) began to deal openly with the Cold War and our policy of “containing” Soviet expansion.
And here is about the Marshall Plan, which was an extremely effective Cold War tactic. It cannot be understood in a truthful manner outside of the crucial imperialistic plan of which it was a key part.
And, then, there was the American double-crossing of Mikhail Gorbachev when he ended communism in 1991 and the U.S. secretly continued the Cold War nonetheless, and of post-1991 U.S. coups such as against neutralist Ukraine on Russia’s border in February 2014.
A typical coup under Truman was the Miles-Copeland-engineered coup against Syria in 1949, which Copeland discussed here. Between the lines there he described it as a Deep State operation which carried out what was being kept secret from the President but which was tacitly approved by the State Department. He, of course, never revealed who actually controlled the CIA and the State Department. But he probably knew. He was no “babe in the woods.” And it began with Cecil Rhodes. He was the seed from which sprung the tree that today is called “the Deep State,” and which represents UK-U.S.-and allied billionaires who fund the careers of successful candidates for national political offices within the empire.
And, as they say: “The rest is history.” And this is the “history” that we’ve actually been living through and are experiencing — not the myth that the ‘news’-media merely presume, which is fundamentally different from this reality.
Investigative history is historianship that investigates and solidly documents what caused what and how and why, and not merely who did what. In the present instance, Rhodes created the tree — the Deep State — that produced, as a major branch, the Cold War, which continues (instead of being immediately amputated) even long after the Cold War’s excuse, Soviet communism, ended in 1991. Whereas traditional historianship is part of the humanities, investigative historianship is the most fundamental of the social sciences, not at all in the humanities. Like any science, its purpose is to identify cause and effect, not merely events. And if it’s not scientific (100% based on empirical evidence), it fails. And political science cannot become a science unless it becomes based on investigative historianship. Understanding historical causality is the essence of any authentic political science.
For further information on related matters, click onto the links in this article. By means of those links (and what’s linked to in those online sources), this article is at least one full book, and it’s all right here, and without any paper. No paper or broadcast medium (TV or otherwise) can do that for its audience. Only this type of medium — online text that includes links — can (and this online article does). That’s a crucial advantage of this medium, which you’re now reading.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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