National Review
Churchill’s prophetic warning: “An iron curtain has come down”
No speech by a foreign visitor has created more uproar than that given by Winston Churchill at an obscure Midwestern college, just a few months after the end of World War II. In the end, no speech has been more prophetic about the deadliest attack on human freedom in the history of world civilization. Many expected Churchill’s lecture at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946 – modestly titled “The Tendons of Peace” – to reflect on the defeat of fascism by the three great wartime allies, the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union. Instead, it was a bad omen. A new moment of crisis for Europe and the world had arrived: a struggle between communism and the democratic West. “A shadow fell over scenes recently lit by the victory of the Allies,” warned Churchill. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain came down across the continent.” Leftist historians blame Churchill’s speech as the catalyst for the Cold War. Eleanor Roosevelt, carrying on her dead husband’s political legacy, was horrified, fearing that Churchill’s message would jeopardize the newly created United Nations’ peacekeeping mission. The liberal press denounced the speech as “poisonous” and Churchill as a “war promoter”. A truly harmful speech, however, had been delivered by Joseph Stalin just a few weeks earlier to Communist Party apparatchiks in Moscow. Mostly forgotten today, it has done as much to expose the insurmountable divide between East and West as Churchill’s peroration. “It would be wrong to think that World War II broke out accidentally,” began Stalin. “In fact, the war broke out as the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces based on today’s monopoly capitalism.” Thus, Stalin repeated Marx’s attack on capitalism for distributing resources unevenly. He repeated Lenin’s claim that greedy capitalist states inevitably went to war with each other. Peace was possible, he suggested, but only after communism had triumphed around the world. The message was clear: the historic competition between socialism and democratic capitalism was at its height. Stalin’s speech was a fabric of lies and omissions. He portrayed the Soviet Union as the fierce opponent of fascist domination in Europe. In fact, Stalin made a secret pact with Hitler’s Germany to divide the continent between them. The deal allowed the Soviet Union to invade and occupy eastern Poland in 1939, when Hitler invaded from the west, triggering World War II. For 22 months, in fact, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies; Germany sold arms to the USSR and the USSR sold grains and oil to Germany. Stalin also assured his audience that collectivized agriculture policy was “an excessively progressive method” for modernizing the Soviet economy. In reality, the forced collectivization of private farms, which began in 1928, created a human catastrophe. Many peasants struggled to maintain their plots of land: five million were deported and never heard from them again. The government confiscated its grains and the result was a man-made famine. In 1934, more than 13 million Soviet citizens died of abnormal deaths – of mass murder and starvation – because of Stalin’s communist vision. Ironically, Stalin spoke the truth when he boasted that “no skeptic now dares to express doubts about the viability of the Soviet social system”. At least 700,000 “skeptics” – anyone even if a little critical of Marshal Stalin – were murdered during the “Great Purge” of 1936-1938. The secret police, spectacular trials, murders, torture, prison camps, ethnic cleansing: Virtually no tools of terror have been left untested to silence dissidents. All of these facts informed Churchill’s assessment of the Soviet Union. But the most alarming truth about Stalin’s Russia was the forced absorption of Eastern Europe by the communist flock. For months, Churchill watched with growing apprehension as Stalin violated the agreements he made with the Allies at the 1945 Yalta Conference, promising free and democratic elections in Eastern Europe. The fifth communist column was now functioning, totally obedient to Moscow. “Communist parties, which were very small in all of these Eastern European states, have been elevated to prominence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to gain totalitarian control,” said Churchill. “Whatever the conclusion may be drawn from these facts – and facts they are – this is certainly not the Liberated Europe that we are striving to build.” All Churchill’s descriptions of Soviet projects in Europe proved to be entirely accurate. His judgment of communism as “an increasing challenge and danger to Christian civilization” was being validated in all states that fell under its evil influence. In fact, America’s most important diplomat in Moscow had reached the same conclusions almost exactly at the same time. George F. Kennan’s “Long Telegram”, advocating a policy of “firm containment” against the Soviet Union, reached the State Department just days before Churchill arrived in Fulton. “It is clear that the United States cannot wait in the near future to enjoy political intimacy with the Soviet regime,” wrote Kennan. “You must continue to hope that Soviet policies do not reflect any abstract love for peace and stability, no real faith in the possibility of a happy and permanent coexistence of the socialist and capitalist worlds, but rather a cautious and persistent pressure for the rupture and weakening of all rival influence and rival power. ”Franklin D. Roosevelt’s delusional portrait of Stalin as” Uncle Joe “, a cheerful partner in building a global democratic community, was dead in the water. However, it is difficult, at our historical distance, to understand the sense of dread that Churchill’s words must have caused in a war-weary population. He clearly saw the enormous task he was asking the American public to embrace: to involve its economic, military and moral resources to control Soviet ambitions in Europe and beyond. “I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war,” he said. “What they want is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.” The United States, he suggested, should not make the mistake it made after the First World War, when it abandoned the League of Nations and left Europe to its fate. It should help to ensure that the United Nations becomes an effective force for peace and security, “and not just a cockpit in a Tower of Babel”. Most importantly, however, Churchill called for a “special relationship” between the United States and Britain: the sharing of military intelligence, mutual defense agreements and strategic cooperation to support and promote democracy. His common democratic ideals, he explained, were the basis for a unique partnership to thwart the despotic goals of Soviet communism: We must never stop proclaiming in bold colors the great principles of freedom and human rights that are the joint heritage of the World of English language and which, through the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, the jury trial and the English common law, find their most famous expression in the United States Declaration of Independence. . . . Here is the message from the British and American peoples to humanity. Critics denounced this language as chauvinism and cultural imperialism. Legendary columnist Walter Lippmann called the speech “an almost catastrophic blunder.” In an interview with Pravda, duly transcribed in the New York Times, Stalin compared Churchill to Hitler: “Mr. Churchill also started the task of unleashing the war with a racial theory, claiming that only English-speaking nations are. . . called upon to govern the destinies of the world. Any frank assessment of how the Cold War ended, however, would admit the decisive role played by the United States and the United Kingdom, over four decades, in resisting Soviet aggression. The Berlin air bridge, the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the defense of Western Europe, support for the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe that overthrew the Soviet empire – in each case, the “special relationship” between America and Europe. Britain tilted the scale towards freedom. In a remarkable moment of openness, Mikhail Gorbachev, who presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union, endorsed the central message of Churchill’s speech in his farewell speech on Christmas Day 1991. The Cold War, “the totalitarian system”, “the crazy militarization ”that“ paralyzed our public economy, attitude and morals ”- everything had come to an end and there was no turning back. “I consider it vitally important to preserve the democratic achievements achieved in recent years,” he said. “With all our history and tragic experience, we have paid for these democratic achievements, and they must not be abandoned, whatever the circumstances and whatever the pretexts.” Seventy-five years ago, Churchill dared to imagine such a result. But it depended on these two great democratic allies, Britain and the United States, who shared “faith in each other’s purpose, hope for each other’s future and charity for each other’s shortcomings”. And, with history as a guide, such a result would not come without a supreme effort by the national will. “If all British moral and material forces and convictions join yours in fraternal association,” he said, “the ways of the future will be clear, not just for us, but for everyone, not just for our time, but for a century to come. ”Joseph Loconte is the director of the Heritage Foundation’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies and is working on a book on Winston Churchill at the 1945 Yalta Conference. Nile Gardiner is the director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation.