Ideological Differences Cold War Quotes

In intellectual terms the Cold War was a competition between two ideologies, Marxism and liberalism, that had a great deal in common. Though they saw one another as mortal enemies they differed chiefly on the question of which economic system was best suited to achieve goals they shared.

In America, conservative historian Francis Fukuyama wrote that the collapse of the Soviet Union marked not just the end of the Cold War, but the end of history: liberal capitalist democracy had won, no ideology could challenge it anymore, and nothing remained but a little cleanup work around the edges while all the world got on board the train headed for the only truth. … On the other side of the planet, however, jihadists and Wahhabis were drawing very different conclusions from all these thunderous events [Iran's 1979 revolution and ouster of US presence and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan]. In Iran, it seemed to them, Islam had brought down the Shah and driven out America. In Afghanistan, Muslims had not just beaten the Red Army but toppled the Soviet Union itself. Looking at all this, Jihadists saw a pattern they thought they recognized. The First Community had defeated the two superpowers of its day, the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires, simply by having God on its side. Modern Muslims also confronted two superpowers, and they had now brought one of them down entirely. On down, one to go was how it looked to the jihadists and the Wahabbis. History coming to an end? Hardly. As these radicals saw it, history was just getting interesting.

When I first went to Rwanda, I was reading a book called Civil War, which had been receiving great critical acclaim. Writing from an immediate post-Cold War perspective, the author, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a German, observed, “The most obvious sign of the end of the bipolar world order are the thirty or forty civil wars being waged openly around the globe,” and he set out to inquire what they were all about. This seemed promising until I realized that Enzensberger wasn’t interested in the details of those wars. He treated them all as a single phenomenon and, after a few pages, announced: “What gives today’s civil wars a new and terrifying slant is the fact that they are waged without stakes on either side, that they are wars about nothing at all.” In the old days, according to Enzensberger—in Spain in the 1930s or the United States in the 1860s—people used to kill and die for ideas, but now “violence has separated itself from ideology,” and people who wage civil wars just kill and die in an anarchic scramble for power. In these wars, he asserted, there is no notion of the future; nihilism rules; “all political thought, from Aristotle and Machiavelli to Marx and Weber, is turned upside down,” and “all that remains is the Hobbesian ur-myth of the war of everyone against everyone else.” That such a view of distant civil wars offers a convenient reason to ignore them may explain its enormous popularity in our times. It would be nice, we may say, if the natives out there settled down, but if they’re just fighting for the hell of it, it’s not my problem. But it is our problem. By denying the particularity of the peoples who are making history, and the possibility that they might have politics, Enzensberger mistakes his failure to recognize what is at stake in events for the nature of those events. So he sees chaos—what is given off, not what’s giving it off—and his analysis begs the question: when, in fact, there are ideological differences between two warring parties, how are we to judge them? In the case of Rwanda, to embrace the idea that the civil war was a free-for-all—in which everyone is at once equally legitimate and equally illegitimate—is to ally oneself with Hutu Power’s ideology of genocide as self-defense.

Economic growth has thus become the crucial juncture where almost all modern religions, ideologies and movements meet. The Soviet Union, with its megalomaniac Five Year Plans, was as obsessed with growth as the most cut-throat American robber baron. Just as Christians and Muslims both believed in heaven, and disagreed only about how to get there, so during the Cold War both capitalists and communists believed in creating heaven on earth through economic growth, and wrangled only about the exact method. Today Hindu revivalists, pious Muslims, Japanese nationalists and Chinese communists may declare their adherence to very different values and goals, but they have all come to believe that economic growth is the key for realising their disparate goals.

An era was over and a new Europe was being born. This much was obvious. But with the passing of the old order many longstanding assumptions would be called into question. What had once seemed permanent and somehow inevitable would take on a more transient air. The Cold-War confrontation; the schism separating East from West; the contest between ‘Communism’ and ‘capitalism’; the separate and non-communicating stories of prosperous western Europe and the Soviet bloc satellites to its east: all these could no longer be understood as the products of ideological necessity or the iron logic of politics. They were the accidental outcomes of history—and history was thrusting them aside. Europe’s future would look very different—and so, too, would its past. In retrospect the years 1945-89 would now come to be seen not as the threshold of a new epoch but rather as an interim age: a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century. Whatever shape Europe was to take in the years to come, the familiar, tidy story of what had gone before had changed for ever. It seemed obvious to me, in that icy central-European December, that the history of post-war Europe would need to be rewritten.

irritatingly moralistic. Democratic globalism sees as the engine of history not the will to power but the will to freedom. And while it has been attacked as a dreamy, idealistic innovation, its inspiration comes from the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the Kennedy inaugural of 1961, and Reagan’s “evil empire” speech of 1983. They all sought to recast a struggle for power between two geopolitical titans into a struggle between freedom and unfreedom, and yes, good and evil. Which is why the Truman Doctrine was heavily criticized by realists like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan—and Reagan was vilified by the entire foreign policy establishment for the sin of ideologizing the Cold War by injecting a moral overlay. That was then. Today, post-9/11, we find ourselves in a similar existential struggle but with a different enemy: not Soviet communism, but Arab-Islamic totalitarianism, both secular and religious. Bush and Blair are similarly attacked for naïvely and crudely casting this struggle as one of freedom versus unfreedom, good versus evil. Now, given the way not just freedom but human decency were suppressed in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the two major battles of this new war, you would have to give Bush and Blair’s moral claims the decided advantage of being obviously true. Nonetheless, something can be true and still be dangerous. Many people are deeply uneasy with the Bush-Blair doctrine—many conservatives in particular. When Blair declares in his address to Congress: “The spread of freedom is … our last line of defense and our first line of attack,” they see a dangerously expansive, aggressively utopian foreign policy. In short, they see Woodrow Wilson. Now, to a conservative, Woodrow Wilson is fightin’ words. Yes, this vision is expansive and perhaps utopian. But it ain’t Wilsonian. Wilson envisioned the spread of democratic values through as-yet-to-be invented international institutions. He could be forgiven for that. In 1918, there was no way to know how utterly corrupt and useless those international institutions would turn out to be. Eight decades of bitter experience later—with Libya chairing the UN Commission on Human Rights—there is no way not to know. Democratic globalism is not Wilsonian. Its attractiveness is precisely that it shares realism’s insights about the centrality of power. Its attractiveness is precisely that it has appropriate contempt for the fictional legalisms of liberal internationalism. Moreover, democratic globalism is an improvement over realism. What it can teach realism is that the spread of democracy is not just an end but a means, an indispensable means for securing American interests. The reason is simple. Democracies are inherently more friendly to the United States, less belligerent to their neighbors and generally more inclined to peace. Realists are right that to protect your interests you often have to go around the world bashing bad guys over the head. But that technique, no matter how satisfying, has its limits. At some point, you have to implant something, something organic and self-developing. And that something is democracy. But where? V. DEMOCRATIC REALISM The danger of democratic globalism is its universalism, its open-ended commitment to human freedom, its temptation to plant the flag of democracy everywhere. It must learn to say no. And indeed, it does say no. But when it says no to Liberia, or Congo, or Burma, or countenances alliances with authoritarian rulers in places like Pakistan

And yet, as a Red Army officer, she was heading into a new battle. History was pivoting around her. Before the war, she had spied against fascists and anti-communists, Chinese, Japanese, and German; during the conflict, she had spied against both the Nazis and the Allies; after it, and henceforth, she would be spying against the West, the new enemies in a Cold War. A photograph of the Summertown neighborhood victory party includes a beaming Ursula, happily celebrating Hitler’s downfall. One man is wearing an army uniform. Another raises two fingers in the V for Victory sign. But behind the image of shared relief, triumph, and optimism lay a hidden ideological divergence that would soon erupt in a new conflict. “Everyone hoped for a better world,” she wrote. “But here our visions of the future differed.” — TWO MONTHS LATER, in the remote deserts of New Mexico, scientists of the Manhattan Project detonated the first nuclear device, in a test code-named “Trinity,” releasing a blast equivalent to twenty thousand tons of TNT.

The deliberate placing of the highest intellectual gifts and achievement at the service of the lowest human instincts is a phenomenon with which the twentieth century is acquainted on a scale never previously attained. And whether the instinct be fear (the main defensive one) or revenge possessed (the main offensive ones) makes little difference in the end, so readily do they pass into one another. It is no recent discovery that brain as well as brawn is esential to the efficient figher. The Trojan Horse is the perennial symbol of that truth, and it is appropriate that Shakespeare put on the lips of Ulysses an encomium on the “still and mental parts” of war. But it remained for war in our time to effect the total mobilization of those still and mental parts. The ideological warfare that precedes and precipitates the physical conflict (cold war as it has significantly come to be called); the propaganda that prepares and unifies public opinion; the conscription, in a dozen spheres, of the nation’s brains; the organization of what is revealingly known as the intelligence service; but most of all the practical absorption of science into the military effort; these things, apart from the knowledge and skill required for actual fighting, permit us to define modern war, once it is begun, as an unreserved dedication of the human intellect to death and destruction.

The deliberate placing of the highest intellectual gifs and achievement at the service of the lowest human instincts is a phenomenon with which the twentieth century is acquainted on a scale never previously attained. And whether the instinct be fear (the main defensive one) or revenge possessed (the main offensive ones) makes little difference in the end, so readily do they pass into one another. It is no recent discovery that brain as well as brawn is esential to the efficient figher. The Trojan Horse is the perennial symbol of that truth, and it is appropriate that Shakespeare put on the lips of Ulysses an encomium on the “still and mental parts” of war. But it remained for war in our time to effect the total mobilization of those still and mental parts. The ideological warfare that precedes and precipitates the physical conflict (cold war as it has significantly come to be called); the propaganda that prepares and unifies public opinion; the conscription, in a dozen spheres, of the nation’s brains; the organization of what is revealingly known as the intelligence service; but most of all the practical absorption of science into the military effort; these things, apart from the knowledge and skill required for actual fighting, permit us to define modern war, once it is begun, as an unreserved dedication of the human intellect to death and destruction.

The deliberate placing of the highest intellectual gifts and achievement at the service of the lowest human instincts is a phenomenon with which the twentieth century is acquainted on a scale never previously attained. And whether the instinct be fear (the main defensive one) or revenge possessed (the main offensive ones) makes little difference in the end, so readily do they pass into one another. It is no recent discovery that brain as well as brawn is essential to the efficient figher. The Trojan Horse is the perennial symbol of that truth, and it is appropriate that Shakespeare put on the lips of Ulysses an encomium on the “still and mental parts” of war. But it remained for war in our time to effect the total mobilization of those still and mental parts. The ideological warfare that precedes and precipitates the physical conflict (cold war as it has significantly come to be called); the propaganda that prepares and unifies public opinion; the conscription, in a dozen spheres, of the nation’s brains; the organization of what is revealingly known as the intelligence service; but most of all the practical absorption of science into the military effort; these things, apart from the knowledge and skill required for actual fighting, permit us to define modern war, once it is begun, as an unreserved dedication of the human intellect to death and destruction.

The delibarate placing of the highest intellectual gifs and achievement at the service of the lowest human instincts is a phenomenon with which the twentieth century is acquainted on a scale never previously attained. And whether the instinct be fear (the main defensive one) or revenge possessed (the main offensive ones) makes little difference in the end, so readily do they pass into one another. It is no recent discovery that brain as well as brawn is esential to the efficient figher. The Trojan Horse is the perennial symbol of that truth, and it is appropriate that Shakespeare put on the lips of Ulysses an encomium on the “still and mental parts” of war. But it remained for war in our time to effect the total mobilization of those still and mental parts. The ideological warfare that precedes and precipitates the physical conflict (cold war as it has significantly come to be called); the propaganda that prepares and unifies public opinion; the conscription, in a dozen spheres, of the nation’s brains; the organization of what is revealingly known as the intelligence service; but most of all the practical absorption of science into the military effort; these things, apart from the knowledge and skill required for actual fighting, permit us to define modern war, once it is begun, as an unreserved dedication of the human intellect to death and destruction.

Differing historical perspectives inevitably shape attitudes towards globalization and its sub-plots. The Western view of globalization has always been just that: a view based on the spread of Western values to the rest of the world. Other parts of the world, with their competing histories and mythologies, are not so immersed in Western values. And from their perspectives, Western values have, in any case, been anything but stable: the imperial attitudes of the nineteenth century, for example, are hardly aligned with the self-determination of the twentieth. During the Cold War, these competing histories and mythologies were typically repressed, thanks to a persistent ideological battle between capitalism and communism. In the twenty-first century they have re-emerged, forcing upon nation states choices that, in an increasing number of cases, end up either restraining the forces of globalization or putting them into reverse. We are returning to a world of territorial disputes, competing ideologies and unstable alliances. It’s as if we’re still coping with Columbus’s unfinished business.

Interpretations are usually tied in some way to the era in which they were written. It’s far from accidental that the generation that fought the war would come to view it in the North as a moral struggle over slavery, and in the South as a more defensible support of state’s rights. Similarly it is far from accidental that the economic interpretation gained great popularity during the 1930s, the years of the great depression. Nor is it surprising that interpretations emphasizing fanatics and incompetent politicians should arise as people in the 1930s began to see World War I as an avoidable conflict, and who were simultaneously witnessing the rise of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Nor should we be surprised that all these alternative views to slavery as the cause of the war emerged in the decades of intense racism in the United States. Nor should we be surprised by the reemergence of slavery as a moral issue, and the question of race relations in the era of civil rights and in the years since World War II and the full revelation of Nazi racial atrocities. .... The emphasis of psychological interpretations in this same time period should not surprise us either. ... Nor should the emphasis on ideology that developed in the years of the cold war, which was an ideological conflict [be a surprise].... . It is important to realize that if one accepts the ideological approach then all the previous interpretations retain their validity. For even if there were no conspiracies in reality, no truly irreconcilable differences in economies and cultures, no basic disagreement over the nature of the Union, and no chance of slavery establishing itself in the territories; Americans North and South believed otherwise because of their ideology, and they acted on the basis of those beliefs. Furthermore, ideology and perceptions are themselves products of all the general factors previously cited as causes of the war--Economics, culture, politics, political theory, moral values. And the common denominator linking all of these previously sited causes is SLAVERY. It was the base of the southern economy, southern culture, the conspiracy theories north and south, the fanaticism, politics, moral arguments, racism, conflicting definitions north and south of rights, and ensuing ideological conflicts. It is therefore the basic cause of the war.

the Communists when taking power in Russia of course became successors to an old expansionist empire, in much the same way as the American revolutionaries developed out of the British empire. In both cases the ideologies that justified intervention had developed from concerns that were formed in earlier centuries, under different regimes.

Like Wilson during World War I, Franklin Roosevelt believed in “positive nationalisms” as the best guard against authoritarian ideologies, but with the crucial difference that America this time could and should assist in finessing the content of these nationalisms and the reforms they envisaged for their countries when liberated from the enemy menace.

What do we do in a hot cold war, when perhaps our reality was so detonated that we sense the surreal nature of this timeline, because it is, in fact, entirely different, and what has transpired here to create so absurdly alien a landscape as the alien city-change of atomized clouds, of the ideological equivalent of a nuclear bomb? But the weapon is crafted to meet the kind of warfare, and this decade’s weapon will not strike in one explosion, because mind is not like that, but slow and persistent and with a face we know, a face that is ourselves, and the most terrifying part is that we deeply suspect and not wrongly so and in no way explained by a foreign intent that, it is, in fact, ourselves we see? And does this opening-tool of a window, this channel and central stage of culture and freedom and self and things that is this internet through which I speak these words, necessarily succumb to one party’s control? Just as body and the things we touch are no longer separate, will self and weapon ever be?