part0031

James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications—that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbors.

(George Orwell) [221] , [222]

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Germany was divided into two nations: the capitalist West and the communist East. Berlin was split right down the middle, and traveling between the two fiercely nationalistic sides was very dangerous. Much of Eastern Europe remained under the growing influence of the Soviet Union, East Germany included, while the western nations looked toward the United States as an emerging superpower. Though they had been allies in both wars, the US and the USSR developed a deep distrust of one another that turned into a multi-decade feud known as the Cold War. Both nations funded nuclear testing and began storing the kind of weapons that had devastated Japan in 1945.

Many Eastern European nations that had received help from Soviet forces during both wars were easily convinced to convert to Russia’s style of communism and join the USSR. Within the first few years of peace, East Germany was joined in its alliance with the Soviet Union by Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. These, combined with Ukraine, Estonia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Latvia, and nearby Asian countries, formed the so-called Iron Curtain. [223]

The Iron Curtain, a term used to refer to the wall of European socialist countries between Russia and Western Europe, was first used by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1946. [224] The term didn’t only refer to the political separation between capitalist, democratic nations and communist nations, but it also referred to the idealism that they represented. On the eastern side of the curtain, citizens were subjected to communist propaganda via the radio waves; on the western side, they were fed anti-communist propaganda. Radio Free Europe attempted to provide its eastern listeners with western news broadcasts, but they were continuously interrupted by radio jammers in the east. [225]

The political reorganization of Europe and its colonial holdings in the Middle East and Africa inspired the people of Ireland to demand their own independence from Great Britain. In 1948, the Republic of Ireland Act removed the bulk of the Irish island from Commonwealth control. [226] By Easter Monday of the next year, the deed was complete. A small northeastern corner remained within the Great British kingdom, known as Northern Ireland. Within that small piece of mainland Ireland, a majority of Protestants and pro-UK unionists preferred to stay linked to the Church of England and the unified state.

Northern Ireland was still home to nationalists, however, and these became active in the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The IRA was responsible for hundreds of terrorist attacks within Northern Ireland and England in the hopes that it would convince both entities to remove Northern Ireland from the Commonwealth. As Great Britain and Ireland waged their own small-scale warfare, so too did the Western world against the Soviet Union. There were no formal battles between the USSR and Western Europe or, the USSR’s main perceived enemy, the United States of America, but the two ideologically divided sides managed to draw battle lines in an astonishing number of proxy wars between 1945 and 1990.

The first of these wars took place in China and Greece, with each country suffering a civil war between communist groups and non-socialist republicans. In the first case, the communist forces—supported by the Soviet Union in terms of political organization, military expertise, and weapons—were victorious in setting up the People’s Republic of China. [227] The United States, having offered similar support to the Republic of China, failed in its efforts there. In Greece, however, the US and anti-communist Greek parties won the war, culminating in a loss for Soviet-backed parties. The two countries pitted themselves strategically against one another in this manner more than 70 times during the Cold War. The majority of the fighting took place outside North America and Europe, in countries such as Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

The struggle for ideological supremacy didn’t only manifest itself on the battlegrounds of foreign nations. It also changed the way the Soviet Union and the United States prioritized national projects, like the development of space-age technology. The Space Race was the name given to the unofficial competition between American and Soviet governments to fund the most advanced and successful outer space exploration team. The results were quite exciting, despite the underlying tension found in citizens, media outlets, and military engagements.

Much of the technology used at the start of the Space Race had been developed for use in rockets during WWII, and both sides had a great deal of information to build a foundation for the burgeoning science. Espionage between Soviets and Americans also had a hand in the exchange of this information, in part thanks to the British spies of the secretly Soviet-aligned Cambridge Five. On October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched the first satellite—Sputnik—into space. [228] The next year, following a failed satellite launch in 1957, the United States placed Explorer 1 in orbit. [229] It had a rudimentary communications system attached to it where data could be gathered and retrieved. That same year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration organization was founded, better known as NASA. Via NASA, the United States ran ahead of its rival and began planning a manned mission to outer space while simultaneously launching a spy satellite. The Soviet Union pushed back and launched the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin, on April 12, 1961. Back in the German capital, the Berlin Wall was constructed, further solidifying the demarcation between West and East. [230] United States President John Fitzgerald Kennedy visited West Berlin in 1963 and made an impassioned speech to crowds there, declaring Berlin (ostensibly West Berlin in particular) to be a city of all free men.

By 1966, the Soviets had built a craft that orbited the moon and landed there. The ultimate goal—landing humans safely on the moon—was first achieved by NASA in 1969 when the Apollo 11 mission touched down and returned home with all three astronauts intact. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, more countries joined in on the efforts to develop space technology and make their own marks on the industry. Canada, France, Great Britain, China, and Japan were the first to do so, and in 1975, the European Space Agency was formed. [232]

Cold War tensions cooled somewhat during the 1970s and were reignited in the 1980s until the administration of a new Soviet leader changed everything: Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev made concerted efforts to restructure the Soviet Union into a fairer system of government, and he gracefully let go of European member states whose own political systems were under intense pressure to change. The Iron Curtain metaphorically fell, and under extreme pressure from defecting East Germans who refused to cross back into East Germany, Gorbachev allowed the network of communism around his country to fall apart. On the 9th of November, 1989, new regulations were announced in Berlin that allowed for travel through the wall, to and from both sides. [233]

The announcement was on the news multiple times that very night in both East and West Germany. People on both sides began to climb the Brandenburg Gate within hours of learning the new regulations. [234] Overwhelming guards on both sides, the waves of unified Germans flooded over the wall and began chipping it apart. Soon, bulldozers came to destroy the dividing line and start the journey back to unification. At midnight on October 3, 1990, East Germany was formally dissolved, and its citizens were welcomed back into the unified Federal Republic of Germany. [235] After the dissolution of the Soviet Union a little over a year later in 1991, the Cold War was finally over.