National overview
Churchill’s prophetic warning: ‘Iron curtain has fallen’
No speech by a foreign visitor has ever caused a greater uproar than Winston Churchill delivered at an obscure Midwestern college just months after the end of World War II. It turned out that no speech was more prophetic about the deadliest attack on human freedom in the history of world civilization. Many expected Churchill’s speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., on March 5, 1946 – modestly titled “The Sinews of Peace” – to reflect on the defeat of fascism by the three great allies from the war, the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Instead, it was a message of premonition. A new moment of crisis for Europe and for the world has arrived: a struggle between communism and the democratic West. “A shadow has fallen on the screens, recently illuminated by the Allied victory,” Churchill warned. “From Szczecin in the Baltic Sea to Trieste in the Adriatic Sea, an iron curtain descended over the entire continent.” Left-wing historians blame Churchill’s speech as the catalyst for the Cold War. Eleanor Roosevelt, who continued the political legacy of her late husband, was stunned and feared that Churchill’s message would jeopardize the peace mission of the newly created United Nations. The liberal press described the speech as ‘toxic’ and Churchill as a ‘warmer’. A truly damaging speech, however, Joseph Stalin delivered a few weeks earlier to the costumes of the Communist Party in Moscow. Today much forgotten, it did about as much to uncover the insurmountable gulf between East and West as Churchill’s peroration. “It would be wrong to think that World War II accidentally broke out,” Stalin began. “In fact, the war broke out as the inevitable consequence of the development of world economic and political forces based on contemporary monopolistic capitalism.” So Stalin repeats Marx’s onslaught on capitalism because he has unequally distributed resources. He paralyzed Lenin’s claim that greedy capitalist states were necessarily at war with each other. He made peace possible, but only after communism triumphed over the whole world. The message was clear: the historical struggle between socialism and democratic capitalism was high. Stalin’s address was a web of lies and omissions. He portrayed the Soviet Union as the fiercest opponent of fascist rule in Europe. In fact, Stalin made a secret agreement with Hitler’s Germany to divide the continent among themselves. The agreement enabled the Soviet Union to invade and occupy eastern Poland in 1939 when Hitler invaded from the west, causing World War II. For 22 months, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were actually allies; Germany sold arms to the USSR and the USSR sold grain and oil to Germany. Stalin also assured his audience that the policy of collective agriculture was an extraordinarily progressive method of modernizing the Soviet economy. In fact, the forced collectivization of private farms, which began in 1928, caused a human disaster. Many farmers fought to keep their plots: five million were deported and never heard from them again. The government confiscated their grain, resulting in a man-made famine. By 1934, more than 13 million Soviet citizens were dying unnaturally – due to mass murder and starvation – as a result of Stalin’s communist vision. Ironically, Stalin spoke the truth when he boasted that “no skeptic now dares to doubt the viability of the Soviet social system.” At least 700,000 “skeptics” – anyone who is even mildly critical of Marshal Stalin – were killed during the ‘Great Purge’ of 1936-38. The secret police, show hearings, assassinations, torture, prison camps, ethnic cleansing: Virtually no instrument of terror was left indefinitely to silence discord. All these facts informed Churchill’s assessment of the Soviet Union. But the most disturbing truth about Stalin’s Russia was the compelling inclusion of Eastern Europe in the communist fold. For months, Churchill saw with growing fear Stalin violating the agreements he made with the Allies during their Yalta conference in 1945 and promising free and democratic elections in Eastern Europe. Communist fifth columns were now at work, completely obedient to Moscow. “The communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern states of Europe, are much higher than their number and are everywhere looking for totalitarian control,” Churchill said. “Whatever conclusion can be drawn from these facts – and facts that they are – it is certainly not the liberated Europe we have been fighting for.” Every description Churchill offered about Soviet designs in Europe was completely accurate. His judgment on communism as a ‘growing challenge and a danger to Christian civilization’ has been confirmed in every state that falls under its malicious influence. Indeed, America’s most important diplomat in Moscow drew almost the same conclusions at the same time. George F. Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’, arguing for a policy of ‘fixed restraint’ against the Soviet Union, arrived at the State Department a few days before Churchill arrived in Fulton. “It is clear that in the foreseeable future, the United States can not expect to enjoy political intimacy with the Soviet regime,” Kennan wrote. ‘It must continue to expect that Soviet policy will not reflect an abstract love of peace and stability, no true belief in the possibility of a permanent happy coexistence of the socialist and capitalist world, but rather a cautious , persistent pressure on the disruption and weakening of all competitive influence and competitive power. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s misleading portrait of Stalin as ‘Uncle Joe’, a cheerful partner in building a global democratic community, was dead in the water. Nevertheless, from our historical distance, it is difficult to comprehend the sense of fear that Churchill’s words must have caused in a war-weary population. He clearly perceived the enormous task he had asked his American audience to undertake: to harness his economic, military, and moral resources to control the Soviet ambitions in Europe and beyond. “I do not believe that Soviet Russia wants war,” he said. “What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.” He suggested that the United States did not make the mistake it made after World War I when it surrendered the League of Nations and left Europe to its own devices. It should help ensure that the United Nations becomes an effective force for peace and security, “and not just a cabin in a tower of Babel.” Most importantly, however, Churchill called for a ‘special relationship’ between America and Britain: the sharing of military intelligence, mutual defense agreements and strategic cooperation to support and promote democracy. Their common democratic ideals, he explained, were the basis for a unique partnership to thwart the despotic goals of Soviet communism: We must never stop embracing the terrible principles of freedom and human rights, which are the common heritage of the English-speaking world and which by the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by the jury and the English common law find their most famous expression in the American Declaration of Independence. . . . Here is the message of the British and American peoples to mankind. Critics have denounced this language as rank chauvinism and cultural imperialism. Legendary columnist Walter Lippmann called the speech an “almost catastrophic mistake.” In an interview with Pravda, which was dutifully transcribed in the New York Times, Stalin Churchill compares to Hitler: ‘Mr. Churchill, too, began the task of unleashing war with a racial theory, declaring that only countries that speak the English language are. . . called to rule the destinies of the whole world. However, any honest assessment of how the Cold War ended would recognize the decisive role of the United States and the United Kingdom over the course of four decades in resisting Soviet aggression. The Berlin airlift, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the defense of Western Europe, the support for the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe that brought down the Soviet empire – at least the ‘special relationship’ between America and Britain the scales to freedom. In a remarkable moment of openness, Mikhail Gorbachev, who led the dissolution of the Soviet Union, endorses the first message of Churchill’s speech in his farewell speech on Christmas Day, 1991. The Cold War, ‘the totalitarian system’, ‘the crazy’ militarization “Which” paralyzed our economy, public attitude and morals “- it all came to an end and there was no stopping it. “I consider it extremely important to maintain the democratic achievements that have been made over the past few years,” he said. “With all our history and tragic experience, we have paid for these democratic achievements, and they must not be let down, regardless of the circumstances and whatever the pretext is.” Seventy-five years ago, Churchill dared to propose such an outcome. But it depends on these two great democratic allies, Britain and the United States, who have a ‘faith in each other’s purpose, hope for each other’s future and love for each other’s shortcomings’. And with history as a guideline, such an outcome would not come without an extreme effort of national will. “If all British moral and material forces and beliefs are united with your own in fraternal association,” he said, “the highway of the future will be clear, not only to us, but to all, not only to our time. but also for a century to come. ”Joseph Loconte is the director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at the Heritage Foundation and is working on a book about Winston Churchill at the Yalta Conference in 1945. Nile Gardiner is the director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation.