Reply With QuoteWest and East didn't like each other all that much pre WW2. Allying against the Axis was a necessity. Then post WW2 events tipped it from dislike to the Cold War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_Cold_War
Where did it go wrong that started the Cold War ...
Curious question
..How did the Goverment's manage to fuk it up which we saw the creation of the Cold War .. .. Did they simply not like each other or was it down to mutal trust ? Or someone want a bigger piece of the pie .. and someone rejected ??
West and East didn't like each other all that much pre WW2. Allying against the Axis was a necessity. Then post WW2 events tipped it from dislike to the Cold War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_Cold_War
Given our ideological differences I don't see how it could have been any different.
"Young men make wars, and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men – courage and hope for the future. Then old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men – mistrust and caution. It must be so."
I'm going to say a miscomprehension of the purpose of boths sides alliances (NATO and Warsaw Pact). Each side viewed the others alliance as being designed to attack them. Throw in that NATO was arming Germany whom only a few short years ago had invaded the USSR resulting 20 million deaths and that the USSR had crushed any kind of independence for Poland and you have a mistrust of each other than managed to last for 40 years.
The problem that you're facing right now is that you're looking at it through the viewpoint of someone in the 21st century. What you need to do is drop the emotive language and loaded questions and look at it objectively and dispassionately (which admittedly is an MP.net-wide problem). It's also a pretty massive question in and of itself. You could sum it up as "mutal distrust over intentions" if you really wanted a 2second soundbyte but in reality it's much more complicated than that and it depends on which discipline you're looking at it from too.Originally Posted by timetraveller
1917, the USSR was pretty much hated from the start. They were isolated from world affairs and the world economy (which is also why Germany-USSR relations flourished in that time, two pariahs clinging to each other). Not to mention the whole support for the whites during our civil war.
All that breeds a ton of bad blood.
Hated from the start isn't totally appropriate language. They wanted the USSR to be the vanguard of a worldwide revolution. OK, fine. Which worried and made the rest of the world quite fearful. However, they pretty much excluded themselves from the world stage, that wasn't the fault of anyone else but the USSR.
(Talking late 1910s-1920s here mind).
Since the 1917 revolution, the openly stated goal of the Soviet Union was an entirely Communist planet. The Soviets wanted to start by converting all of Europe to Communist Soviet client states, then using that power base to take the rest of the world a piece at a time.
The U.S. had a vision of a planet of democratic, free nations that were, if not friendly to, at least not hostile to America. Western Europe, America and the other western industrialized nations and their allies joined to oppose the Soviet plan for Communist world domination, and thus the Cold War was born. Were it not for the presence of nuclear weapons, it very likely would have been a conventional Third World War instead.
Nowdays, Communism is nearly dead, most nations are corporatist, and we are moving slowly but surely towards global governance overlaid with a hologram of democracy to keep the natives pacified.
Qualify this without rhetoric, please?
Qualify what? It seems perfectly clear to me. Ask a more specific question, and I will try to answer it. Whether you see my response as 'rhetoric' is your problem, however. I call them as I see them, and express myself as I see fit.
The "hologram of democracy" bit, if you will.
I also think there is/was a strong element of justified Russian "paranoia". In modern times Russia was invaded from the west - first Napoleon, then Germany. In between she also got to wage war against Britain in the Crimea. Add the aborted allied support of the "Whites" and it's no wonder Stalin, aside from establishing the supremacy of the proletariat (I'm being facetious here,) wanted as much buffer as possible between him and the west.
It kinda didn't help that the Bolsheviks were basically a terrorist organisation that declared an ideological war on the capitalist world.
To be fair, it was Trotsky that had the bat-shit crazy hardon for exporting world wide workers revolution. Stalin was much more simply an opportunist who got his moment at the expense of millions of Soviet citizens.
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