Consequences of World War II

Consequences of World War II

Introduction

In 1945, Nazi totalitarianism was destroyed by the military might of the wartime allies. But within a few months of victory, our comrade-in-arms, "Uncle Joe" Stalin (as he was affectionately to by President Franklin Roosevelt), was making it clear that the postwar period would not be an era of global peace and international harmony.

Within months of the German surrender, Stalin was tightening his grip on the Eastern European countries that had been "liberated" by the Red Army. There would be no free elections, no democratic pluralism, no market economies in the nations now in Moscow's orbit (Collier, 1969). By 1948, with the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, every one of the Eastern European countries had been turned into a socialist "People's Republic."

We now know that this was Stalin's intention from the beginning, despite the promises he gave to President Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. In early April 1945, less than two months after the signing of the Yalta agreements, a Yugoslav communist delegation led by Tito was in Moscow. At a late-night banquet in their honor, Stalin reflected on the postwar era. In his book Conversations with Stalin, Milovan Djilas recounts that Stalin at one point explained, "This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system."

In Asia, the corrupt Nationalist (Kuomintang) government of China was soon in a fatal civil war with Mao Tse-tung's ruthless communist armies. The Soviets, after "liberating" Manchuria from the Japanese in the final days of the war, had given safe haven to Mao's forces and supplied them with military hardware captured from the Japanese. And in the United States, a vocal segment of the intellectual community tried to assure the American public that Mao and his followers were simple and honest agrarian reformers. When China fell completely into communist hands at the end of 1949, the Chinese people soon experienced the truth, as Marxist terrorism and economic planning turned them into a nation of slaves.

Discussion

The communist guerrilla movement in French Indo-China under Ho Chi Minh, the communist insurgency in Greece, the Berlin blockade of 1948, and the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950 all served to convince a growing number of Americans that an international threat was confronting the United States and that it required a determined and unique response on the part of the nation. Thus, America assumed the mantle of global policeman and protector of the world.

The communist threat under Soviet leadership in the postwar era was, without a doubt, unique in modern history. Here was an ideology that claimed to transcend all national boundaries and insisted that there could be no lasting peace in the world until socialism was victorious on every continent on the globe. And the carriers of this Marxist message had no moral scruples about the means and methods they used. Human life had no value to them other than as tools for the achievement of ...