The History You Aren’t Supposed to Understand: “The Iron Curtain”

[IndianaGreen]

The History You Aren’t Supposed to Understand: “The Iron Curtain”

By Norman Markowitz
8-28-07, 9:33 am

On May 12, 1945, days after the German surrender, Churchill wrote Harry Truman “I am profoundly disturbed by the European situation….An iron curtain is upon their (the Soviet front). ... All kinds of arrangements will have to be made by General Eisenhower to prevent another immense flight of the German population westward as this enormous Muscovite advance toward the center of Europe takes place.”

Churchill, as he had earlier, wanted the U.S. to treat the Soviets as a leading enemy in a future war rather than the major ally of a war that was just ending. And he wasn’t averse to using a “sanitized” version of Goebbels Iron Curtain propaganda to accomplish that goal. On June 4, he wrote to Truman again (suggesting in effect that the U.S. forces fight to hold territory in Germany in violation of tentative agreements made at Yalta rather than give up such territory to the Soviets) by warning that U.S. “withdrawal” would lead to “Soviet power in Western Europe and the descent of an iron curtain between us and everything eastward.”

The British Labor Party won a sweeping victory in June 1945 on a program to build a “Socialist Britain,” and Churchill was out of power, although he did lead the British delegation to the Potsdam Conference, where Truman, informed of the successful testing of an atomic bomb, began to quarrel with the Soviets on a wide variety of issues concerning postwar Europe and move in the direction that Churchill wished.

By December, 1945, Allen Dulles, the OSS official, brother of Republican foreign policy specialist John Foster Dulles, and later director of the CIA when Eisenhower became president and John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State, referred to Soviet occupation forces in Germany as “a bunch of thugs” and noted that “an iron curtain has descended over the fate of these people and very likely conditions are truly terrible. The promises at Yalta to the contrary, probably eight to ten million people are being enslaved.”

What was going with these people? They knew certainly what the Soviet Union and much Europe had suffered in the war, the mass murder carried on by the Fascist states. Did they care? They were not racists and imperialists of the same kind as the Nazis and their allies but they were racists and imperialists and they had fought to war not to create an international order where higher levels of peace and social justice would become possible but to keep the Fascist Axis from taking away their own imperial power and privilege. Their anti-Communism, which had been a central factor in the policies of appeasing the fascist states, now became a powerful engine to break up the Allies and launch a cold war that was initially seen by many as a prelude to WW III.

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/5787/1/280/

[rudeboy666]

1. Well

Stalin might not have been a fascist.

But he was a totalitarian (if that somehow makes it 'better').

[normandmarkowitz]

2. response to rudeboy

Actually, I am glad both that democratic underground reposted my article and that "rudeboy" made his comment, because it inspired me to write another article which I am currently writing on totalitarianism as a concept and its role in history, which I hope democratic underground does repost from Political Affairs when it is completed. As a coming attraction(and I have done from a Marxist perspective research on the concept) it began as a principle of Italian fascism, was picked up by German fascism, and then used by enemies of the majority communist parties on the left to link Communists with fascists at the time that of the majority communist parties(as against left opposition or Trotskyist parties) were calling their socialist competitors "social fascists."
It was also picked up in the U.S. by conservatives to link the New Deal government with Communism particularly and also with fascism. With the development of the cold war it became an ecumenical term used against Communists and against anyone who refused to take an anti-Communist position--written into laws like the McCarran Internal Security Act to segregate "reds" and "pinks" from the political mainstream.

As a last coming attraction, I will, as many scholars in the 1960s and 1970s contended, make the point that the concept makes it impossible to understand much of anything--Hitler was a fascist, Stalin a Communist, and besides conflating the societies and systems which they came to represent, "totalitarianism" doesn't really explain what they were about, no more than if we applied the totalitarian concept to the Roman Catholic Church, or Islam, or monotheistic religions generally or Southern segregation or any other coercive power.
Norman Markowitz

[cachukis]

3. Intrigued

Somewhat familiar. Sounds like a good read.

Cachukis