TRABAJO PRÁCTICO CULTURA

The Cold War

After the Second World War, the USA and the USSR were so far ahead of all other
countries in power and influence that they were called the Super Powers.
Hostility between them always stopped short of actual war with each other. They
had nuclear weapons which meant total destruction.
A cold war was a war fought by every method except actual fighting.
Stalin, who was the ruler of the USSR, felt his country was always being
threatened or attacked. For example, in 1914 and in 1941 Russia had been
invaded by Germany and after the revolution, several countries had sent armies
to help the whites try to crush the new Communist state. So his main aims were
to make the USSR safe from invasion and to rebuild his shattered country.
The three leaders, Roosevelt (USA), Churchill (Britain) and Stalin (USSR) met at
Yalta and Stalin joined the UN. They agreed to divide Germany temporarily into
four occupation zones: Soviet, American, British and French.
In mid-1945 the Allies met again at Potsdam, after the defeat of Germany.
Roosevelt had died and Churchill had been defeated in the general election, so
Stalin met with Truman (USA) and Attlee (Britain). They made arrangements
for the trial at Nuremberg of captured Nazis. Some were sentenced to death,
others to terms of imprisonment and others were also punished, some of them
were kept on while and others were shot.
Stalin was told about the atom bomb, which increased his suspicions of the West
and the Allies were worried about his take-over of Eastern Europe. The Polish-
Russian boundary had been moved westwards, so the USSR gained territory. It
took land from another countries and expanded 480 km westwards taking over
22 million people who had not been in the USSR in 1939. Truman and Attlee
were criticised for allowing that.
But the Soviet advance did not stop there. Over the next three years, most of
Eastern Europe came under Soviet control and Communist governments took
over. The only countries where Stalin did not get his own way were Yugoslavia
and Greece.
Stalin turned the countries of Eastern Europe into satellites of the USSR.
‘Cominform’ made sure that the Communist parties were controlled from Moscow
and ‘Comecon’ controlled the economy for the benefit of the USSR.
Eastern European forces were united in the Warsaw Pact of 1955 which was a
collective defense treaty. Its aim was to counteract the threat of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO), and in particular the rearmament of Germany, to
which the Paris agreements allowed to reorganize German armed forces.
To Westerners, The Soviet advance exceeded their worst fears. Churchill and
Truman were worried about the strong communism, so Truman set up the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to work secretly to support pro-Americans and
undermine anti-Americans anywhere in the world.
Truman had a doctrine which was the beginning of US policy for the cold war.
This policy was called containment; the USA would help any country threatened
by Communism so that Communism could not advance further.
The USA would be the world’s policeman.
Truman felt that Communism did well when people were poor and suffering, so
his secretary of state, Marshall, put forward a plan to give billions of dollars of aid
to Europe. One aid was to build up strong anti-Communist countries.
The Marshall plan rescued and restored prosperity in the Western Europe. It also
helped US industry and gave American companies much power in Western
Europe.

Why did Berlin become a flashpoint?

The main problem thrown up by the bad relations between the USSR and USA
was Germany. The four-power occupation set up at Yalta (considered the Cold
War beginning) which main aim was avoiding a new Nazi movement, would work
only if the four co-operated. Within a few months of peace, however, the Russians
had refused to allow anyone else into their zone. In the Soviet zone, factories were
being dismantled and shipped to the USSR. Soon the people in the three western
zones were starving. The German population was swollen by some 16 million
refugees who had moved in from Eastern Europe and countries which were
expelling their German minorities. Britain and France, in great difficulties
themselves, were reluctant to give food and money to Germany. The only
situation seemed to be allowing some economic revival in the three Allied zones.
Stalin was furious: his hatred of Germany was immense. The problem of its
defeated population did not move him, and he accused the West of re-erecting the
Nazi state.
The flashpoint was bound to be Berlin, a four-zone island-city inside the Soviet
zone. In 1948, the Allies proposed to help revive their zones by setting up a new
currency, and by consequence, putting end to the Potsdam agreements, referred
to the quadripartite control of Germany. This was really damaging to Eastern
Berlin economy, because all devaluated Deutsche Marks flew there, and East and
West Berlin could not trade again, which was vital to Eastern Berlin at that time.
So Stalin closed all access to Berlin for “techniques reasons”. He hoped to force
an Allied retreat, but Truman was firm: “We are going to stay, period,” he said.
Anybody wanted to leave such a strategic zone. The Americans
thought of using their army or even the atom bomb, but decided to ferry supplies
into West Berlin by air through the three established air corridors, that until now
have worked almost symbolically. Stalin stopped just short of violence and did
not shoot down the planes, since this meant breaching the terms of the same
agreement that legitimized them to maintain the blockade.
Despite the fears, the Berlin Aircraft succeeded. Plane after plane brought in
supplies – 27.00 trips.
Then, after 318 days, from June 1948 to May 1949, the Soviets backed down and
opened up the route to the city, as the population of West Berlin now showed
more adherence than ever to the USA and its allies, and the main reason was the
fact that the Americans and British had successfully sustained supply for so
many months, a triumph of ‘pro-Western’ propaganda. Meanwhile the USSR and
its regime became very unpopular, especially in East Berlin.
 Air corridors

NATO
German unity was now impossible. The Soviet zone became East Germany, under
Communist rule. The three Allied zones became West Germany, which included
West Berlin. In 1949, the western European countries formed the North Atlantic
Treaty Organisation (NATO). This alliance was based on the USA, which always
provided its Supreme Commander. By the terms of NATO, the USA took on the
lion’s share of defending Western Europe against attack.

Containment Around The Globe

In spite of Berlin Airlift, Marshall Aid and NATO, the feeling in the USA in 1950
was that they were losing the Cold War. In 1949, the USSR had exploded its first
atom bomb, so the US monopoly was broken. In 1949, too, China had become
Communist. This was seen as another Communist take-over by Moscow. Spies
were caught in the USA and Britain, and Joseph McCarthy was leading a “witch
hunt” against suspected Communist sympathizers in the USA. In 1950, Truman
received the NSC 68: a paper from his National Security Council which
recommended that the USA make a great effort to oppose Communism anywhere
in the world. Truman had to consider this policy within a year because of events
in Korea.

Why did Korea become a flashpoint?

In 1937, Japan resumed its expansion by China, initiating the Second Sino-
Japanese War. After some years, as United Kingdom, the United States and other
nations had interests in the region, a war started between them.
On October 1943 the heads of State of the United States and the USSR met in
Moscow and agreed that the USSR would declare war on Japan once the war in
Germany had ended. This decision was supported by the belief that the Japanese
Empire was more vulnerable to the north than in the south, where it was winning
the battles.
In 1945, the Japanese in North Korea had surrendered to the USSR, those in
South Korea to the USA. Elections were to be held for a united Korea, but in the
meantime separate governments were set up. Both were dictatorships,
Communist in the north, Capitalist in the south. In 1950, North Korean troops
invaded South Korea very nearly taking the whole country. It is still uncertain
whether it was Stalin’s idea. Truman acted fast: he sent troops to nearby Japan
and battleships to wait off the coast. He also asked the UN to condemn the
invasion. He and his advisers saw it as an exact repeat of the Manchurian or
Ethiopian incidents of the 1930s when the League of Nations had failed to stop
dictators. Normally the USSR had a veto at the UN, but they had withdrawn in
protest at the UN’s refusal to admit Communist China. The UN was therefore able
to order its forces to drive back the North Koreans.
Although the Korean War was a UN action, the USA provided 50% of the army,
86% of the navy and 93% of the air force. The American, General MacArthur, who
was in charge, took orders from Truman, not the UN. MacArthur landed behind
North Korean lines and soon defeated them. At this point, however, Truman could
not resist the attempt to push back the Communists. North Korea was invaded.
As the armies reached the Chinese border, Chinese leader Mao Zedong warned
them to stop. They did not, and a large Chinese army attacked MacArthur.
Truman and MacArthur now disagreed over the war. Truman did not want to get
entangled in a war in Asia. He thought Europe was more important, so looked for
peace in Korea. MacArthur felt the battle against Communism should be fought
in Asia first. He wanted to carry on fighting, and even talked of atom-bombing
China.
As President of the USA, Truman was Supreme Commander. MacArthur was
sacked in 1951 and a compromise cease-fire worked out in Korea in 1953.

The Dulles Years

From 1953 to 1959, Josh Foster Dulles was American Secretary of State to
President Eisenhower. He was a determined Cold War fighter. He wanted to go
further than just “containing”. He spoke of “liberating” certain areas from
Communism. This would be done by using propaganda to stir up rebellions in the
satellites. The arms race continued. Both the USSR and the USA built up stocks
of nuclear weapons and tested bigger and bigger bombs. The launching of the
Russian ‘sputnik’, a small satellite, into orbit round the earth in 1957 shocked
the Americans. They felt that if the USSR could put a satellite into space, they
would soon be able to bomb US cities with nuclear missiles.
Dulles built up the ring of containment around the USSR by a series of alliances.
In 1951, he had negotiated an alliance with Japan, an amazing turn-round only
ten years after Pearl Harbour. An alliance was made with Australia and New
Zealand. The South-East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) linked the USA with
Thailand, the Philippines and Pakistan in 1954. In 1955, the Baghdad Pact joined
the USA with Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan. To Dulles, these alliances were
defensive, part of containment. To the USSR, they appeared offensive, designed to
hem in the Communist countries.
From 1955, the USSR was ruled by Nikita Khrushchev. He announced that he
intended to live in ‘peaceful co-existence’ with the West and that he wanted to
settle disputes through ‘discussion, not through war’. In 1955, Soviet troops
withdrew from their zone in Austria. Khrushchev met Western leaders personally
in “summit” meetings. Little was done at these summits, but perhaps they did
lead to a slightly easier relationship.

The Berlin Wall

Khrushchev could also cause trouble, however. In 1959, he demanded that Allied
soldiers leave West Berlin. At that time, the contrast between drab East Germany
and prosperous West Germany was so great that some two million East Germans
had crossed over to the West. This was disastrous for East Germany and, in
1961, a wall was built across the city to make escape harder.

Cuba
Khrushchev’s greatest threat to peace came in 1952, in Cuba. One of the worst
sides of the US Cold War policy was that they supported some corrupt right-wing
governments as long as they were anti-Communist. One of these was the brutal
dictatorship of Batista in Cuba. In 1959 it was overthrown by Fidel Castro. Castro
only wanted to be free from US control, but for the USA, his only choice was to
become an ally or an enemy. When pressure was put on Castro by the USA, he
turned to the USSR for help. In 1961, the USA backed an attempted invasion of
Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Then, in 1962, US spy planes took photographs of
Russian missile bases in Cuba. This was a threat to the USA.
Earlier that year, the USSR had tested even bigger nuclear bombs. Soviet missiles
in Cuba would tip the balance of power in their favour. The new President, John
Kennedy, dared not appear weak in the face of this threat. He told his armed
forces to prepare for a nuclear attack on the USSR, and sent the US navy to stop
any more missiles getting through to Cuba. As Soviet ships with missiles on
board steamed towards Cuba, the world waited for a nuclear holocaust.
“If assurances were given that the President of the United States would not
participate in an attack on Cuba and the blockade was lifted, the question of the
missile sites in Cuba would be an entirely different question. [...]” –Letter from
Khrushchev to Kennedy.
Kennedy agreed to Khrushchev’s offer. The blockade was lifted, the missiles
crated up and sent back to the USSR. It was the closest to nuclear war that the
world had ever come until that time. Out of the crisis came a closer relationship
between USSR and the USA. The ‘Hot Line’ was set up: a direct telephone link
from the White House to the Kremlin in Moscow, in 1963. In the same year, the
USSR and the USA signed a Test Ban Treaty to stop further testing of nuclear
weapons. Soon, however, the USA was involved in another war in Asia.

Vietnam
In 1954 the French were driven from their former colony of Indo-China. The
rebels who had driven them out were mainly Communists, led by Ho Chi Minh.
Indo-China was divided into four states, Laos, Cambodia, North Vietnam and
South Vietnam. It was hoped that the two Vietnams could later be united.
Meanwhile North Vietnam became a Communist country under Ho Chi Minh.
South Vietnam power was in hands of a small group, usually from the Roman
Catholic landlord class and often corrupt.
By the late 1950s rebellion had broken out. The rebels called themselves the
Vietcong and received help from North Vietnam. The USA began to help the South
Vietnamese government. During Kennedy’s presidency, American
advisers in Vietnam were increased from 500 to 10.000. By 1968, there were
500.000 Americans in Vietnam, with 300 dying per week at a cost of 30 billion
dollars a year.
The Vietcong used guerrilla tactics, they had become experts in these methods in
years of war against the French. By day they mingled with peasants in the rice-
fields of South Vietnam. By night mined roads and passed on information. The
jungle gave cover to their soldiers. They knew every track and ambush. Supplies
were carried from the north on bicycles down jungle trucks. From 1965, there
were massive bombing raid on North Vietnam to try to stop supplies to the south.
Helicopter gunships, gas and napalm were all used. The jungle was even sprayed
with defoliant to destroy the vegetation which gave cover. By 1968, the cost of the
war in deaths and money was becoming too great for the American people.
Putting into practice the policies of Truman and Dulles now proved too expensive.
An anti-war movement gained strength and President Nixon proposed
‘Vietnamisation’ handing over the war to the South Vietnamese. A peace was
negotiated in Paris in 1973. By 1975, South Vietnam had fallen to the
Communists and its capital, Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Ming City. Communists
also took over in Laos and Cambodia. This was mainly as a result of Nixon’s
decision to bomb these countries, which had turned the people there against the
USA and towards the Communists.

Detente in the 1970s

Detente means an easing of tension, in this case between the East and West. It
was many confrontations of the Dulles era. The USA built closer relations with
the USSR and China. Some agreement was reached on limiting the arms race.
Crises did not reach he brink of nuclear war as they seemed to in the 1950s and
1960s. There were several reasons for this. A major one was the split between the
USSR and China in 1960. For the USA, it meant that they could no longer regard
Communism as a simple enemy. For the USSR and Chinese there was the danger
of being isolated. Both tried to come to terms with the USA. The Vietnam War was
an important lesson for the USA. It was a huge blow to US self-confidence.
The USA was willing to look hard at the cost of the arms race. Diverting billions of
dollars to be spent on weapons weakened the US foreign aid programme. The
problems of poverty at home remained unsolved. The USSR too wanted to use its
resources to raise the standard of living for its people. Most important of all, was
the fear that nuclear war could break out, with the prospect of total destruction
of most of the human race. Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were held from
1969 between the USSR and the USA.
This resulted in an agreement in 1972, ‘SALT 1’, limiting nuclear weapons.
Relations between the USA and USSR were good at this point.
The spirit detente brought about the Helsinki Conference of 1975. The 35 states
which attended agreed to guarantee all frontiers and respect human rights. To
the USA it meant complaining about suppression of the rights individuals in the
USSR. To the USSR it meant being allowed to get on with running their own
country in their own way without interference. Relation began to deteriorate in
the late 1970s. ‘SALT 2’, due for renewal in 1977, was not completed until 1979.
Then in December 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan and the USA refused
to sign the Treaty.
The 1980s saw a return to Cold War attitudes on the part of the USA, led by
President Reagan.
He called the USSR 'an evil Empire'. A Second Cold War began.
New Cruise and Pershing missile systems were invented and deployed among the
USA's NATO allies. This led the USSR to develop new SS-20 missiles. In response,
Reagan developed a massively expensive and complicated nuclear defense system
called 'Star Wars'.
Hostility between the two sides in the Cold War in the mid-1980s was as bad as
ever, when along came Gorbachev. He wanted to carry out radical changes in the
USSR.
In two meetings between Gorbachev and Reagan, at Reykjavik in Iceland in 1986
and at Washington in 1987, the Cold War came to an end.
In autumn of 1989 Communist governments in East Germany, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria all fell. The Bering Wall was
torn down. This time, unlike in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, no
Soviet tanks rolled in to stop them.
The West was taken by surprise. Nuclear weapons systems remained in place.
There was talk of a 'New World Order’, of peace for all. There was talk of the
'Peace Dividend'. Western countries were uncertain how to react to these rapid
changes.

President Harry Truman (1945-1952)

When Roosevelt died in 1945, his vice-president, Harry Truman, took over. The
presidents in the 1920s had believed in letting the business world take care of its
own affairs. Franklin D.Roosevelt had reversed this policy and brought the US
government into economic affairs in a big way. Truman was a ‘New Dealer’ and
continued this involvement. Government contracts continued to go out to
American business in peacetime, this kept up employment.
All through the 1950s and 1960s, prosperity increased. America made 45% of the
world’s steel, 74% of the world’s cars and 86% of the world’s nylon. A boom in
consumer goods, things for the ordinary American family, took place. Buying
more meant more jobs and so more money to spend. It became important to keep
America spending: a huge advertising business grew up to persuade people to
buy more.
The Fair Deal
The new deal had tried to bring a return to prosperity. It had also tried to help the
less fortunate Americans: the poor, the old and the ill. Truman also had plans of
this kind, he called them the ‘Fair Deal’, the two main problems he wanted to
tackle were poverty and civil rights. But Truman had to deal with a Republican
Congress, they blocked much of the Fair Deal, even when Democrats regained
control of Congress in 1948 he did not have things all his own way. A housing act
in 1949 encouraged the building of good, cheap houses, however, Democrats
from the south blocked Truman’s hopes for civil rights. His only major
achievement was a law to stop segregation (racial separation) in the US armed
forces.

McCarthyism
The growing Cold War began to have an effect on events inside the USA. By 1950,
American Cold War policy had suffered setbacks: China had become Communist,
the Korean War had broken out, and the USSR had learned how to make atom
bombs. How could this happened? A clue for some people was given was given by
spy scares. A British scientist admitted giving atomic secrets to the Russians,
then an American was accused of spying for USSR, so Senator Joseph McCarthy
claimed that the USA was riddled with spies, Communists and their friends. And
very few people dared to oppose Senator McCarthy, to do so made one look like a
friend of America’s main enemy. Not one of the hundreds of people accused by
McCarthy was ever actually convicted of spying, but again, no one dared speak
out against his bullying and his lies. Politicians were careful: young Richard
Nixon supported him, John Kennedy was neutral, and President Eisenhower
‘refused to get in the gutter with the guy’. Eventually, McCarthyism burned itself
out. By 1955 the Korean War was over. When the proceedings of the Un-
American Activities Committee were televised, people were shocked at McCarthy’s
rudeness and bullying, so he lost the public’s support. However, McCarthyism
was a nasty episode in American history.

President Eisenhower (1952-1960)

As a successful Second World War general, Eisenhower won the elections of 1952
and 1956 easily. He was a popular President, and brought businessmen into his
government, their main aim was to keep the economy booming, and they
succeeded. Throughout the 1950s cracks had begun to appear in this great
American prosperity, and the standard of living in average American rose. Wages
kept rising, and hours of work fell.
In 1960, many Americans were still poor. This was partly of the American way of
life. The old-fashioned American belief was that anyone could do well if they
worked hard; if they were poor it was their own fault. There was therefore no
health service, no dole, and no social security. They thought that such ‘welfare’
systems just encouraged people to be lazy. There was no sickness benefit system
and very little old-age pension.
In 1960, John F. Kennedy, a young vigorous Democrat won the presidential
election and took office in 1961. He appointed the first black ambassador, the
first black naval commander and the first black Federal Judge. He announced
plans for health care, care of the elderly and help to unions, calling these plans
the ‘New Frontier’. However, his proposals were blocked by Congress. Democrats
from the South opposed change, opposed welfare and opposed racial equality,
voting with Republicans against him.

Blacks In America
After the abolition of slavery in 1856, most blacks stayed in the South, where
they made up nearly half the population. The whites ruled the South, passing
laws to make separate white and black facilities legal, as separate schools and
even public bathrooms. On average, the southern states spent 45 dollars on each
white child’s education and 13 dollars on each black child per year.
Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower had all tried to use Federal power to break
this inequality; however, the local, state governments under white control had
been largely successful in resisting this pressure.
During and after the Second World War, many blacks moved north to the cities
and to California. There was no segregation in the North, but they still often met
prejudice. They were discriminated against in jobs and forced to take cheap, bad
housing in the black ghettos, which they couldn’t leave because of their bad jobs.
Bad housing and family stress turned many to drugs and to crime, and by 1960,
the crime rate in American cities had reached enormous proportions. Add to
these difficulties the problems of pollution in the cities became obvious. Yet the
cities do not have the money to deal with these problems, as their more
prosperous citizens move out to suburbs, leaving the poor behind.