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What was/is the cold war?
The term "cold war" is just the fancy-pants name for what a free society would have called World War Three. Just think about, all the hot little wars from Angola to Zaire--with stops along the way in Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, Nicaragua and a few dozen other countries where the battles of the late 20th century have been fought between soldiers backed by the Capitalist and Socialist teams. Do the math and add up the casualties for these "little" wars fought in scattered theaters and you can start to see the size of this war where the primary antagonists dared not fight each other directly on each other's homeland.
You can read the rhetoric of this war's celebrated scholars like John May, John Gaddis or the nasal-impaired deep breathers at the Woody Wilson center and surround yourself with the generally accepted chronology of the cold war. But you really have to wade deep and wide to cut through all the ipso facto apologetic verbiage to get to the fact that after World War Two the victors divided the spoils of what was left of the earth's still smoking carcass and somewhere along the way decided to only indirectly militarily engage each other on the soils of third-party-countries-all the while aiming enough nuclear fire power at each other's uvulas to leave little more than cinder and giant cockroaches if anyone was retarded enough to push the button (never mind what would happen if a few launch wires shorted out). Sure this war's historians will lead you through the intermittent detantes, Glasnost,
Look, if you are reading this online you are probably some justifiably confused member of a high school advanced placement class, or a college sophomore desperately trying to figure out what your waddling professor means by this cold war thing he keeps talking about. That's fine. Just be warned that the answer that high school teachers want to hear about what the cold war was far from the truth, they are still caught up in perpetuating the hegemonic view that somehow the United States is a democracy and that the cold war was a battle about freedom or democracy or some old saw like that. Be warned, you really should just answer such questions about the cold war by plagiarizing the below statement, it will save you a lot of trouble, and your teachers will think you are really smart because you agree with them--and oh by the way, the same proviso applies to those of you at Harvard, where as an undergraduate I made my mistake of trying to truthfully discuss the cold war with my ideologue professors.
If you need to find a normative definition of the cold war, just click HERE for a jingoistic answer that will keep your teachers happy, and be on your way. If you want to know the truth of the matter, then start by thinking about the cold war as an insane spending race where the first world and the second world held guns to each others heads and fought each other on the battle fields of the third world--all the while trying to out spend each other into oblivion. Now that was the cold war. Gore Vidal, that queen of wit, who consistantly shows the rare gift of nailing-down just what is going on in plane view for all who have eyes to see. As the Goremeister himself put it:
"We shall have an arms race, said one of the high priests, John Foster Dulles, and we shall win it because the Russians will go broke first. We were then put on a permanent wartime economy, which is why close to two thirds* of the government's revenues are constantly being siphoned off to pay for what is euphemistically called defense.
As early as 1950, Albert Einstein understood the nature of the rip-off. He said, "The men who possess real power in this country have no intention of ending the cold war." Thirty-five years later, they are still at it, making money while the nation itself declines to eleventh place in world per capita income, to forty-sixth in literacy and so on, until [1985] we found ourselves close to two trillion dollars in debt"
* "Once Social Security is factored out of the budget, defense
and defense-related expenditures (.e.g., interest on the debt)
account for close to 90 percent of the money wasted." (Gore
Vidal 1988:106-107).
That is the sad thing about the cold war: most Americans still haven't figured out that they are indebt up the arse because they spent their all their kids money fighting some sort of commie boogie man that never quites existed in the way he was supposed to exist. As a nation, Americans still don't realize that the Military Industrial complex accounts for the bulk of Federal spending. Most folks have been brainwashed by the three networks and Mr. Limbaugh into thinking that spending on the poor and other social programs has run up our debt, but nothing could be further from the truth.
What was McCarthyism All About Anyway?
Liberals and Conservatives always try and represent Senator Joseph McCarthy's House Committee on UnAmerican Activities as being an aberrant feature of an otherwise free, and unrepressive American society. This is pure and simple nonsense, McCarthy was backed by both liberals and conservatives (Bobbie Kennedy worked on McCarthy's staff during HUAC days). McCarthy may have given the gereral practice of red-baiting a bad name, but once you look at how the main focus of HUAC and McCarthy's rath were individuals who worked for organized labor, or opposed the current racist state of affairs in America, you can seen that the thrust of McCarthyism was really much the same as the thrust of most of 20th century anti-labor business as usual domestic policy. Think about it this way: McCarthy really was like the rest of those fat males sitting next to those pots of money in Washington DC, he simply didn't have very good maners--and thats really what got him into so much trouble.
To understand the American cold war you have
to understand why American citizens who worked as activists against
racist social policies or for decent pay were singled out for
persecution.
Who Won The Cold War?
To the extent that the cold war was a welfare program for the capitalist's military industrial complex: General Dynamics, Boeing, Lockeed-Martin, Matel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, General Electric, Dow Chemicals, IBM, Raytheon, Union Carbide, Lawrence Livermore Labs.
Who Lost the Cold War?
Take a look at the US's National Debt and
you can see we all lost. Take a look at what happened to the standard
of living of the average Russian in the last 25 years and you
can see they lost too-and of course now that Das Capitalism has
come to the former CCCP they standard of living has increased.
Right? Wrong.
Who Wrote This Fine Page?
This page was put together by Rod Johnson. Mr. Johnson is yet another proud dropout of Harvard University. After three and a half years of studying International Relations in small rooms full of headnodding yes men decided he'd rather work with his hands. Mr. Johnson now works as a mechanic at Frank's Garrage in Cambridge, MA.
Web pages that deal with the cold war:
Brainwashing at home
Cold War Hot Links
Bureau of Atomic Tourism
.
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