Truman and the Cold War
* What: The Cold War, a mix of declared and undeclared, official and unofficial wars and conflicts that lasted 40 years.
* The Body Count: The list below is limited to the wars with the highest death tolls directly caused by the Cold War between Communist and anti-Communist forces. Left out are conflicts which were largely anti-colonial struggles or between nations which, though partly proxy wars, had primarily other causes.
* The Greek Civil War 1946-49 killed at least 150,000.
* The Korean War killed at least 2.5 million.
* The massacre of Indonesian dissidents in 1965-66 killed 500,000 to 1 million.
* The US-Vietnamese War killed 1-3 million.
* The two genocides against Cambodians killed 1.7 million to 2.2 million.
* Two Central American civil wars and genocide in Guatemala killed at least 325,000.
* Not included are deaths caused by Communist governments and movements against their own populations. Obviously such deaths deserved to be blamed solely on Communism.
* One estimate from Joshua Goldstein of Foreign Policy for the entire Cold War is 180,000 average deaths per year from 1950 to 1989, or a total of 7,020,000 deaths altogether. The Association for Responsible Dissent, mostly former CIA agents, estimates 6 million deaths from CIA actions. However, not all those deaths were related to the Cold War, and obviously deaths caused by other sides in the Cold War are not included.
* Who Else Gets the Blame:
* Vladimir Lenin as the founder of the Soviet Union and the first successful Communist revolution, is often blamed for all subsequent conflicts over Communism.
* Joseph Stalin is often blamed as the one who perverted “true” Communism from its original course. However, repression under Communism began under Lenin, and Lenin directly ordered the deaths of many.
* Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and all Communist movements are often collectively blamed for the Cold War.
* “Appeasers” or “fellow travelers” were the favorite target during the most extreme years of the Cold War, those presumed to not be taking a strong enough stand against the enemy. Among those most often blamed as weak on Communism are Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter. Not too surprisingly, advocates of this argument tend to be Republicans. At times they include Richard Nixon among those who appeased Communists.
* Reinhard Gehlen and his fascist intelligence network, recruited through Operation Paperclip, prolonged the Cold War by greatly exaggerated estimates of Soviet nuclear weapons and other military capabilities.
* Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism are obvious examples of the worst Cold War hysteria. But while McCarthy was an extremist who ruined hundreds of lives, the Cold War predated his campaign by half a decade. He was a symptom of the worst of the Cold War, but not in any way its cause.
* Other hardliners on Communism, including Kennedy and Reagan, prolonged the Cold War, notably argued by George Kennan, the analyst and architect of US Containment policy.
* George Marshall and the Marshall Plan are often criticized for deepening the Cold War, bringing greater mistrust between the Soviets and the west.
* How does the Cold War start and who is most to blame for it and its continuation? There are three main theories among historians.
* 1. The US as the International Good Guy view. This sees a Soviet worldwide conspiracy as entirely to blame. Believers in this theory are divided in their view of the Soviets though. While most see Communism as inherently aggressive and evil, some argue Communism is unstable. Some argue Communism is dangerous because it is powerful, while others argue it is dangerous precisely because their system is weak.
* The big strength of this theory is that it sees Communism as what it truly was, an incredibly brutal and evil system that killed tens of millions, imprisoning and torturing many more. Only the most incredibly blind or ideological could deny this. Communism was every bit as horrific as the systems it was intended to replace or fight. Communism, fascism, and capitalism are all equally immoral, inhumane, and failed ideologies, each causing roughly equal amounts of great human suffering, with body counts in the many tens of millions.
* The big problem with this theory is that it is a conspiracy theory, and as delusional as most conspiracy theories tend to be. (See Section Eleven.) The idea that a small group of men in the Kremlin, the old Soviet center of power, could control every Communist everywhere is just not the slightest bit credible.
* In just the old Soviet Union alone, Communists were divided into Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Kronstadters, Leninists, Trotskyists, and Stalinists. The different factions hated each other, fought each other, and finally killed each other in large numbers. In different parts of the world one could find
Maoist Communists, Titoist Communists, the Viet Minh, the Khmer Rouge, the Pathet Lao, and Castroist Communists.
* Even in the US where the Communist movement was always tiny, never numbering over 50,000, there were at least four main Communist parties, the Communist Party USA, the American Communist Party, the Communist Workers Party, and the Communist Labor Party. Again, each party hated each other, fought each other, and sometimes assassinated each other.
* Not only that, Communist nations often invaded each other. The Soviets invaded Hungary and China, China invaded Vietnam, and Vietnam invaded Cambodia. Communist nations turned out to be every bit as nationalist as capitalist countries. There was rarely much cooperation between Communist nations, except when done so by force.
* Obviously, many conservatives love this theory, even while they ignore the huge problems with it and its obvious falsehoods. The theory allows their movement to look good and seem to always be in the right, excuse the unintended pun. But it just does not have even the most cursory bit of evidence to back it up, and only the most ideologically blind still believe in it. Extremely few historians support this. Most conservative commentators who still push this theory are relying on their followers either not knowing history, or being too fanatic to care.
* 2. The second theory blames American hegemony, US elites, especially Truman as primarily but not exclusively to blame for the Cold War. Anti Communism is seen as just a flimsy excuse for US economic and military domination of the world. Hegemony is another way of describing domination. But it argues domination does not just come from sheer brute force. Hegemony means the dominated group also takes part in its own oppression by agreeing to it. This theory has the most evidence for it, and is accepted by the largest number of historians. I will go into more detail on it after first putting aside the final theory.
* 3. The third and final theory is called Post Revisionist. The Cold War is blamed on mutual ignorance, miscalculation, and a self reinforcing paranoia that becomes self fulfilling prophecy. This theory has the strength of pointing out just how little most Americans understood about Russia, especially back in the 1940s and 50s. Russia had long been an isolated society, including under the Tsars prior to Communist takeover.
* But this theory is ultimately a cop out. No one is responsible for anything. Things just happen and it is all one big misunderstanding. It also does not explain much about later conflicts in the Cold War, as the second theory does.
* “America is today the worldwide leader of an ANTI revolutionary movement in defense of vested interests…supporting the rich against the poor.” So said noted historian Arthur Toynbee, best known for his Christian moralist view of history. What Toynbee and other historians often point out is that frequently the US went to war against supposed Communists in struggles that were not, in fact, mostly Communists.
* The best known and most obvious example of a war claimed to be about Communism that was not is the US-Vietnamese War. Most Vietnamese fought for nationalist reasons, to drive out the foreign invaders and their puppets. The so called Viet Cong were actually called the National Liberation Front, a coalition group including far more Buddhists and peasants than Communists. Cong means Communist in Vietnamese, but it is a propaganda term used by their enemies. Most “VC” were not Communists.
* The same was true as well in Central America. (See Section One.) In much of the world after World War II, the true struggle was between local peoples wanting independence and fading empires trying to hold onto their colonies, or demand economic domination even after independence. But a few people merely speaking to Communist nations or accepting arms or training from them was enough for anti-Communists to label them all “Communist.”
* Communist, commie, pinko, and socialist all became labels that often simply meant whatever the ignorant hated, feared, distrusted, or most often did not understand. The list of those falsely accused of being Communist include:
* Socialists; liberals; moderates; some conservatives; the US Army command; the State Department; Presidents Eisenhower, Truman, Carter, and Obama; the Civil Rights Movement including Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez (both devout Christians); labor unions; Catholic priests, nuns, monks, bishops, and even Pope Francis; Rock music (including Elvis); drug dealers and hippies; Sandinistas (who were a coalition with only a small minority of Marxists); Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress; the ACLU; “race mixing” and desegregation; German and Russian immigrants; Jews (yes, all of them); gays; pacifists (though most were devout Christians); anti-war movements; feminists; sex researchers; and even librarians and the Girl Scouts.
* Even fluoridated water was accused of being a Communist conspiracy. In American academia, over 3,000 professors were fired. In Hollywood, up to 500 actors, writers, and directors were blacklisted. The list of accused Communists even included the future Nancy Reagan, plus Lucille Ball, Charlie Chaplin, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, and Gregory Peck. Today one can still hear anti Communist hysteria with ludicrous claims that Obama or Obama care are Commie or socialist. Obama care was originally written, almost word for word, by conservative Republicans, the Heritage Foundation.
* One can find obvious damning evidence of American government leaders knowing what they were fighting was not Communism by reading their own documents. National Security Council Memo 68 became the US Cold War blueprint.
* The document describes any peace movement as “a device to divide and immobilize the non-Communist world.” The authors went on to admit, “Even if there were no Soviet Union we would face the great problem...in a shrinking world the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable...A policy which we would probably pursue even if there were no Soviet threat...is to create...the Inter-American system.”
* The memo goes onto describe in what institutions they expected to find Communists, “labor unions, civic enterprises, schools, churches, and all media.” The memo continued to describe how they would fight the Cold War, with “overt psychological warfare....economic warfare and political and psychological warfare...internal security and civilian defense programs.”
* Who can this anti-Communist hysteria, paranoia, and persecution of anything even vaguely suspicious be ascribed to? The architect of this fear mongering was at the very top. Truman himself, for example, required loyalty oaths within the federal government in 1947, three years before McCarthy began his campaign of hysteria and witch hunts. McCarthy was really only carrying out in a more reckless way what Truman had already begun.
* For Truman had to use fear to win Americans to his side. He became president almost by accident, as the least objectionable choice for vice president. Franklin Roosevelt, by contrast, was the most popular president the US ever had, getting elected four times. He was enormously charismatic, a magnetic public speaker, and the most admired man in America. Many Americans felt they knew Roosevelt personally through his famous fireside chats on radio.
* Truman had none of Roosevelt's abilities or popularity. He was a small, homely, nerdy looking man with a high annoying voice. In recent years, some have pushed a more favorable view of him because he seems like an average guy, plain spoken, therefore sympathetic. But what people forget is that he was insistent at propagating fear. He was a poor administrator and strategist, but worked hard at being a propagandist. For example, Truman repeatedly lied about why he dropped the atomic bomb and its necessity. (See Section Three.)
* Overseas, Truman formulated what has often been called the Truman Doctrine. Though there were confrontations before, this is generally considered to be the start of the Cold War. In Greece, there was a civil war between leftists and Communists on one side and royalists and militarists on the other side, fighting since World War II. The leftists had won two thirds control of the country until Truman intervened.
* With his new doctrine, Truman promised that the US would always "support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities.” What this ignored was obvious: Greece was not free before. It was a monarchy, and would not be free once the royalists won. The side the US government supported was not truly democratic, and the other side was certainly not a minority and was only partly Communist. But this mattered little to Truman. In his own words, he wanted to “scare the hell out” of Congress and the American people.
* He followed up his doctrine with the Marshall Plan. $13 billion in US aid (easily five times that amount in today's money) went to Western Europe. Today the plan is often taught as generous aid to the starving. But its central purpose was to strengthen Europe enough to resist any appeal of Communism for workers and anti-fascists. The plan also had more cynical and mercenary aims. Rebuild Europe’s economies and you provide markets for US goods. The plan also required that it would be US goods going to aid Europe, not local goods. Germany also was to be reoriented away from both fascism and Communism, to insure another Hitler could not arise.
* Another aim was to offer its aid to Eastern Europe, to newly Communist states from Poland to Bulgaria. Not only was this intended to undermine the Soviet Union, the plan insisted aid would be only through capitalist markets, never through state run enterprises. Soviet elites deeply feared what the plan would bring, turmoil in Eastern Europe and especially a rearmed Germany. For Stalin, who had just led a war against Germany that killed 20 million Russians, the nightmare was a rebuilt Germany allied with the US.
* The effects of the Marshall Plan were exactly what Stalin feared. Germany rearmed, this time as a US ally, with over 200,000 US troops in over 200 permanent bases across Germany. Soviet elites were more paranoid than ever. If there was ever a plan designed to guarantee peace would not be possible, this was it.
* The legacy of the Cold War was 40 years of conflict around the world, wars on almost every continent, and an arms race that built 70,000 nuclear weapons at a cost of over $4 trillion. Lost to US bases, ranges, and nuclear testing were traditional homelands like Koho'alawe in Hawaii, Aeta tribal lands in the Philippines, Bikini Island, Vieques in Puerto Rico, Diego Garcia, much of the Okinawa Islands, and Thule in Greenland. These were entirely blameless indigenous peoples caught in the middle of the Cold War, including deaths from nuclear contamination. (See Section Seven.)
* For 40 years, the world lurched from one nuclear war crisis to another. The first was in 1946, when the US threatened USSR over control of Iran and Azerbaijan. There was a second nuclear crisis the same year, when the US issued threats to Yugoslavia over US planes shot down. There were fifteen more nuclear standoffs before the Cold War finally ended, in Berlin 1948-49; North Korea in 1953; threatening Vietnam in 1954; threatening China and the USSR over disputed Chinese islands; the USSR and US threatening the UK and France over the invasion of Egypt in 1954; threatening China and the USSR over Chinese attacks on Taiwan in 1958; two crises over Berlin in 1959 and 1961; the Cuban missile crisis in 1962; the US threatening Vietnam in 1969; then Jordan in 1970; threatening the Soviets over Israel in 1973; and in 1980 the US threatening Iran.
* The final crisis was in the mid-1980s over the silliest of reasons. Reagan made a joke over an open microphone, that we “will outlaw Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes.” Unsure if he was serious, Soviet nuclear forces went on alert. As one can see from the list above, most of the nuclear threats came from the US government, not the Soviets.
* The Soviet system was enormously evil, but its leaders were not suicidal. The Soviets knew they were far less powerful than the west, and they practiced it by being less aggressive, comparatively, than the US was. The number of nations invaded by the US during the Cold War far outnumbered those invaded by Soviets. Soviet invasions were almost all neighboring countries such as Afghanistan, while most US invasions took place far from the US, such as Vietnam.
* In the end the Soviets were far less a threat than many Americans thought. When the first Communist regimes began falling in Eastern Europe and then the Soviets, the end was far quicker and easier than many expected. The Soviet system, its economy falling apart, had actually been dying since the late 1960s. As evil as Communism undoubtedly was, it remained primarily a threat to people within the nations under its control.
* Communist systems also surprised many by being willing to reform. It was Gorbachev's reforms that made the fall of Soviet Communism possible. China proved extremely willing to change its economic system to the point where it is a mix of capitalism combined with socialist safety nets. Even its political system is now more open.
* Cuba as well is far more open than its critics admit. Its economy is mixed. There is a thriving and quite free artistic, literary, film, and music tradition. In the past decade the party even lifted its monopoly on elections, and the number of political prisoners dropped dramatically to almost none. The only true totalitarian Communist state remaining in the world is North Korea, and its system is as much influenced by fascist xenophobia as Communism.
* Truman, by his bumbling and fear mongering, initiated a Cold War that did not need to happen. Even George Kennan, one of the original architects of Containment, admitted his error. "Cold War extremism delayed rather than hastened the end of the Soviet Union.”
* Truman's fault in this instance is not that of an evil man. It is that of an incompetent one, and one so blinded by his own anti Communist ideology that he failed to understand the enemy, believing the earlier Red Scares that had consumed America. There were other options and men who realized how best to achieve them. Two other better choices as president, Henry Wallace or Adlai Stevenson, could have prevented the Cold War entirely or greatly shortened it. (See Section Nine.)
* Truman's failure led to millions of unnecessary deaths and the most dangerously militarized the world has ever been. In a very real sense, it is just blind luck we are still here. For all it would have taken is one nuclear panic, one side or even a few people on one side miscalculating, and most of the world would now be a radioactive wasteland.