...Sixty-five years old this week… Well, maybe not.
Who was the first person to use the term “Iron Curtain?”
“Churchill, of course!”-- eagerly replies one who knows what the term “Iron Curtain” means.
Who created the actual Iron Curtain?
“Stalin, of course!”--- proudly rushes to reply our Mr. Know-all, with an accompanying self-indulgent smile, signifying: “Yes, I know my history!”
Well, this is not the first nor the last time Lady History has been tortured. Without any further delay, let me alleviate her sufferings, putting certain things here in some semblance of order.
Number one. The term "Iron Curtain" had already been in use before Churchill’s historic speech on March 5, 1946, at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. That speech, under the title Sinews of Peace, is now officially known as the launching of the term, and the city of Fulton, MO, is now universally recognized as its birthplace. It is however one of those innumerable historical misconceptions that nobody bothers to correct. So, here is my starting technical correction in keeping with the stated grundthema of this section: history unknown, ignored and misunderstood.
The literal term "iron curtain" refers to such curtains used in the old days in theaters to protect their audiences against theater fires. It had also been used extensively in the figurative sense. The first time it was applied to Soviet Russia was in 1920, courtesy of the British socialist and feminist Ethel Snowden (1880-1951), in her book Through Bolshevik Russia, where it referred to the difficulties of crossing the Soviet border.
Ironically, the very first person ever to refer to it in the exact figurative sense as we know it today was… the Nazi Propaganda wizard Joseph Goebbels, in his “futuristic” piece Das Jahr 2000, published on February 25, 1945, by the German newspaper Das Reich:
“If the German people lay down their weapons, the Soviets, according to the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, would occupy all Eastern and Southeastern Europe, along with the greater part of the Reich. An Iron Curtain would fall over this enormous territory, controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered…”
Soon after Goebbels, the term iron curtain was used in its exact sense first by pre-Fulton Churchill and then by Allen Dulles, both times in 1945. It was only on March 5, 1946 (sixty-five years ago this week), that Mr. Churchill made this term historic, and here is that famous paragraph in his Fulton speech:
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia; all these famous cities, and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence, but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.”
...Well, so much for who said it first. Now we can reach beyond the word to the deed itself, and here we are in for no less of a revelation.
As I previously mentioned, in 1941 Stalin adopted a new Soviet global strategy, first formulated by General Milstein, which named the United States of America as Russia’s number one enemy in the bipolar postwar world. In the spirit of this strategy, from 1942 to 1945, Stalin was persistently trying to pour little quantities of poison into the British-American relations, which appeared to him sufficiently strained, and begging to be taken advantage of. He believed that Britain’s greatest weakness, putting her incurably at odds with the United States, was the unbridled arrogance of her imperial ambitions, and he worked really hard, but, as it turned out, in vain, to exploit it. (Generally speaking, the whole World War II was one giant clash of gross misconceptions. Stalin also had thought that France would be a formidable enemy to Hitler. Hitler had thought that Soviet Russia was a colossus with feet of clay. The Japanese had thought that the "filthy-rich" Americans would be unwilling and unable to fight, and so on, and on…)
With regard to Britain’s attitude toward the United States, Stalin honestly believed that the snobbish Brits had somehow retained a sense of superiority over their erstwhile colonial subjects, and would never accept America’s bossing over them in Europe lying down. (In hindsight, it is hard to imagine how America’s push for free-world supremacy could possibly be resisted by Great Britain, even with Soviet help!) For his part, Stalin was prepared to support British colonial claims and mandates, and whatever else they would like him to support, and offered Prime Minister Churchill, during the latter’s 1942 visit to Moscow (to attend the so-called Second Moscow Conference) a tempting secret accommodation: after this war, Britain would become (with Russia’s blessing) by far the strongest power in Europe, for as long as they would both agree to keep America where Columbus had found her.
Indeed, had it been up to Stalin, why bother to cut Europe “from Stettin to Trieste?” The “Iron Curtain” he had in mind, would have descended on the postwar world right across the Atlantic Ocean, from Greenland to Antarctica, separating the upstart United States of America from “the old world.”
Therefore, it had never been Stalin, but Churchill all along, who had insisted on dividing Europe into two spheres of influence, in this way repudiating the notion of a common European home, where America would have remained an unwelcome outsider. Churchill’s famously cryptic scribble of numbers on those dinner napkins at Yalta, in 1945, was in reality his insistence on splitting Europe, where the specific numbers were mystifying, but otherwise meaningless eccentricities, but their ultimate value (60:40=55:45!!!, etc.) was all-meaningful, indicating which way each “napkin country” would be going, and which of them should remain neutral at the end. It was this division of Europe, which opened the door to NATO, the very symbol and the most effective tool of the new world order, establishing America’s leadership role in global affairs.
...Talk about historical misconceptions! Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” signified the collapse of Stalin’s European dream, just as the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 would later signify the collapse of Khrushchev’s dream of making West Berlin part of East Germany.
No comments:
Post a Comment