Winston Churchill’s Fulton address was a signal for the Iron Curtain to drop, and for nukes to almost drop as well
ByTarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/authors/tarik-cyril-amar/@tarikcyrilamartarikcyrilamar.substack.comtarikcyrilamar.com
© Legion-Media / Fremantle
[RT] Eighty years ago, on March 5, 1946, one of the most famous leaders of World War Two delivered a fairly short but stern message
which helped lock humanity into a future of open-ended and high-risk
Cold War. That was the essence of former British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill’s Fulton Speech (if we name it after the small midwestern US
college town where he gave it), also known as the Iron Curtain Speech (after its key claim).
A
massive political, ideological, and last but not least, military
barrier had come to divide post-World War Two Europe, Churchill argued,
and it was all the wicked Soviets’ fault: They had broken the Grand
Alliance with the West by taking control of “the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe,” he charged. In the face of this “Soviet sphere” and the aggressive strategies seeking to expand it even farther, Churchill warned, a Western policy of “balance of power” would be ineffective and lead to “catastrophe.” Instead, he urged, the “Western Democracies” needed to “stand together”
in order to – Churchill clearly implied – deter the Soviets, who in his
view respected only strength, especially of the military variety.
Well
lubricated with shameless flattery for American President Harry Truman,
who had travelled far to be in the audience and had a hand in setting
up the speech, as well as for the US in general – at its “pinnacle of world power”
– the Fulton Speech also pitched Churchill’s own, badly declining
Britain as a junior but special sidekick to the Americans in their “primacy.” Unfortunately, that too came to pass.
Short
and – in its recommendations – really quite generic as it was,
Churchill’s intervention, speaking in the middle of nowhere in what is
now called fly-over country, has a secure place of honor in naively
admiring accounts of the West’s Cold War. There, it is still celebrated
as an example of looking unflinchingly at harsh realities, a valiant
call to arms, and a wise policy recommendation. Even those less
sentimentally inclined still consider the speech necessary and the
strategy of containment that it was effectively selling, inevitable.
That however is lazy thinking. For more reasons than one: Most
obviously, the old Cold War was extremely costly as well as outrageously
perilous. In the end, it lasted for four decades, before it ended with a
negotiated settlement, initiated by the Soviet Union, in the late 1980s
(no, the Cold War did not end in 1991, whatever
ideology-contaminated Wikipedia says). Over almost half a century, this
Cold War of the last century could, all serious observers have long
understood, easily have ended with World War Three instead, including a
world-ending use of nuclear weapons. In that entirely possible scenario,
I would not be here to write this, and you would not be here to read
it. And everything around us would be missing as well.
Indeed, we
know about several specific moments when such an apocalyptic war was
very close or only avoided at the very last moment, sometimes by the
courageous intervention of single and anything but powerful individuals.
During the Korean War of 1950 to 1953, the American commander in chief
and egomaniac extraordinaire, General Douglas MacArthur, wanted to go
through with the use of dozens of deliberately “dirty” atom bombs
against China. If he had had his will – instead of losing his job – the
implementation of his nightmare plan would have created a vast nuclear
wasteland. It would also have risked escalation into global war.
Just over a decade later, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a single Soviet submarine officer prevented a nuclear escalation and thus full-blown World War Three. In 1983 – a true annus horribilis of the old Cold War
– an insanely risky version of the yearly NATO exercise Able Archer
came close to causing World War Three by misunderstanding. In that case,
in the end, a US officer
was reasonable enough to break protocol and thus the escalation
sequence initiated by Western recklessness. Just about two months later,
it was the turn of yet another comparatively low-ranking Soviet officer to stop the end of the world.
As
a species, how did we survive the madness of the first Cold War? My
guess: The only thing that could have made up for so much human folly,
so obstinately pursued over such a long time, must have been divine
intervention. And I am not being facetious. Yet even if humanity was
spared the very worst consequences of its leaders’ collective
irresponsibility, make no mistake: The first Cold War was bloody indeed.
Even if its ground zero was Berlin in the middle of Europe, it would go
global with a vengeance in, generally speaking, the Global South.
There,
among those who had done nothing to start it and were struggling to
free themselves from the scourge of Western imperialism and colonialism,
the Cold War resulted in hecatombs of victims,
killed in coups and civil wars, proxy wars, and political mass murder
operations. We will never have precise figures. But that is irrelevant,
because we do know, for certain, that the total body count ran in the
double-digit millions. Scholarly estimates of this dire total range, in
effect, from 20 to 40 million. In short, the Cold War was no “long peace” but a great slaughter, even while it did not escalate to World War Three as we commonly imagine it.
And finally, even Churchill – a man often treated far too kindly by
posterity, who was shaped by upper-class and racist prejudices and
capable of great brutality (ask the Welsh miners, the Palestinians or
the Bengalis, for instance) – set out a condition for his great unity of
the West with “the English-speaking people” at the top.
Curiously enough that condition is hardly ever mentioned now, although
Churchill was as explicit about it as about the “iron curtain.” What he euphemized as the “Western democracies” – really variations of class and often racism-ridden oligarchies, obviously – needed not only to “stand together” but to do so “in strict adherence to the principles of the United Nations charter.”
Yet
that, of course, has never been the case. During the old Cold War, the
West treated international law and its modern UN bedrock with a mixture
of instrumentalization (when it suited Western interests) and contempt
(when it did not). As many observers have noted, this combination of
cynicism, hubris, and shortsightedness has only become worse since then.
Now,
almost forty years have passed since the end of the old Cold War in the
late 1980s. That is, as much time as it lasted. And the West’s
treatment of international law has become truly abysmal. In view of the
West’s complicity in Israel’s horrendous and ceaseless crimes, including
the Gaza genocide, and now the war of aggression unleashed by Israel
and an obedient US leadership most likely subject to blackmail on
grounds of pedophilia, the best that can be said is that all masks have
fallen.
Germany is hosting the international war crimes fugitive Benjamin Netanyahu, brazenly defying its clear legal obligations. Leaders such as Berlin’s Friedrich Merz, Britain’s Keir Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron, or NATO-EU Europe’s Ursula von der Leyen
are not even hiding their absolute disregard for the law anymore. While
the utterly corrupt leader of the West batters Iran together with
Israel, the European vassals are explicit: If it’s between justice and
obedience, we choose obedience. Instead of condemning the obvious war of
aggression, they are perverse enough to fault Iran for exercising its
equally obvious right to self-defense. Orwell was yesterday; this must
be the Matrix.
None of the above is, of course, a surprise. But it
underlines a point that, arguably, was true in 1946 already but has
become incontrovertible and obvious by now: Whatever you think about a
Cold War and its consequences, this West of triumphant depravity, lies,
and brutality simply isn’t worth one.