We believed the propaganda telling us Cold War ended
Vladimir Putin's brutal, barbaric, relentless attack on innocent, defenseless Ukrainian civilians makes him a war criminal.
He is not alone. He operates in consort with a largely hidden power elite inside the Kremlin, while he functions as their front man.
I hope that one day they will all stand trial, though at the moment it is hard to see how this could actually happen. Maybe the world will one day create the equivalent of the Nuremburg trials that tried and condemned many top Nazis for their war crimes after World War II.
It seems that most of the world was shocked with disbelief and did not see today's war coming. Why not? In my opinion, it was missed because millions on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean came to believe that the Cold War was over.
For years many American and European journalists, as well as politicians, have spoken glibly of the “end of the Cold War” as if it were an established fact.
The Cold War never really ended. Only a huge myth of propaganda led us to believe that it had. Yes, the Soviet Union was formally dismantled in 1991, giving us a specific date to latch on to. This piece of evidence was used to ease our minds, to lull ourselves, to blunt our pain and fear from having already lived in the nuclear age for 45 years.
By 1991, we were tired of the Cold War. We called it a “war of nerves” and readily acknowledged that it exhausted us though not quite as much as a shooting war. I hope we are ready today to face some hard, cold facts and view the Cold War quite differently. Here are a few of those facts.
After World War I, the combatant nations of the world disarmed themselves and returned to a peacetime economy. This did not happen after World War II. Instead, an arms race began and took a most dangerous turn with the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, primarily by the U.S. and Russia. These huge stockpiles are haunting us today more than ever.
In the past 30 years America has relentlessly pursued a policy of expanding NATO, right up to Russia's doorstep. George Kennan, scholarly historian and America's former ambassador to Russia, warned that this was a “most fateful error.”
Today we see that Kennan was right. NATO expansion happened in spite of Russia's pleading with America not to expand. Kennan understood that it is not good policy to keep kicking one's adversary when he is already down.
Also, the American military industrial complex grew with each passing year, as more and more Americans earned their living by working in the weapons industry. The Russians created their own equivalent military industrial complex.
When former President George W. Bush left the White House, the Pentagon budget stood at $660 billion per year. When Barack Obama left, it was still at $660 billion. When Donald Trump left it was at $700 billion. When President Joe Biden recently asked for $740 billion, Congress allotted him $768 billion.
This does not indicate the end of a war. It is an escalation.
The repeated cyber attacks on American companies are another piece of Cold War evidence. When American information technology experts claimed that Russian hackers are perpetrating the attacks, they got nothing but denials from Putin and no cooperation whatsoever to work together to find the perpetrators.
Recently, a discouraging new refrain of propaganda has appeared in America's mainstream press calling the war in Afghanistan “America's longest war.” No, the Cold War is America's longest war, having lasted more than 76 years, and counting. It is time to face the cold facts about the Cold War.
Yes, the Soviet Union was formally dismantled in 1991, giving us a specific date to latch on to. This piece of evidence was used to ease our minds, to lull ourselves, to blunt our pain and fear from having already lived in the nuclear age for 45 years.