Cold war

Cold War
The Cold War was a period of escalating tension between two empires that sought to exert their power and influence on the world stage. In the West was the U.S. In the East was Soviet Russia. While both promoted their own values and socio-economic and political systems, they shared a similar need to expand their rule following the end of WWII, with each developing threatening postures near to the other’s borders—the U.S. forming NATO and the Soviets planting missiles in Cuba. From the perspective of people who were not citizens of the U.S. or the Soviet Union, the economic, strategic, political and culture ambitions of the "superpowers" intersected with, and shaped the lives of people outside of those countries in numerous cases. For instance, the natives of the Marshall Islands got an up close and personal look at U.S. nuclear testing during Operation Crossroads, as shown in Robert Stone’s Radio Bikini. Then there were the people of Indonesia, who suffered the killings of 1965-66, in which an anti-communist purge took the lives of half a million or more Indonesians. In other words, the Cold War was not just a period of empty rhetoric and hostile rhetorical tones used by world leaders: there were serious activities conducted behind the scenes that affected people the world over as a result of the strained relationship between the West and the East and the need to prepare for all-out war. The arms race and proxy wars were then (as now) part of the process of doing business in the post-War, Cold War period. This paper will identify and analyze the central processes and outcomes of the Cold War from the perspective of people who were not citizens of the U.S. or the Soviet Union.
The economic, strategic, political and culture ambitions of the "superpowers” were linked with their all-out aim for dominance. The dividing line was the Berlin Wall in Europe, but the effects of these ambitions stretched well beyond Germany. Strategically, it was in both the best interests of the imperial countries—the U.S. and the Soviets—to have the best warfare technology: that is why the arms race commenced and why areas for testing bombs had to be located and used. And that is why the islanders of the Marshall Islands (Bikini Atoll) were removed from the island and sent to a smaller island with inadequate water and food supply: they were simply in the way. As Brown (2013) notes, they were not the only ones. Doctors in the U.S. were performing experiments using radiation on unwitting and uninformed (and non-consenting) patients all throughout the post-War period: indigent blacks, pregnant mothers, vulnerable children, military personnel—no one was off limits for these experiments, deemed necessary for the sake of science: “adding the accidentally exposed Marshall Islanders…and the purposely exposed American soldiers in field tests in Nevada, the toll of human subjects of radiation experiments mounts to the tens of thousands” (p. 251). The Marshall Islanders were never meant to be exposed—but since they were, American scientists went ahead and studied the effects of fallout on them too.
Operation Crossroads had begun in 1946—just one year after WWII had ended. The Cold War had not even technically begun yet—but already America was preparing for it. The strategy in Bikini Atoll was to maintain an area in the Pacific for strategic testing purposes. The UN was involved in declaring the Micronesian islands as a Strategic Trust Territory. The Bikini islanders suffered from starvation following the resettlement and in the 1960s they were told they would be allowed to return to Bikini Atoll. However, the region was still highly radioactive and life was not sustainable. Nonetheless, some islanders returned in 1972 in spite of the warnings. In 1986, the islanders were awarded nearly $100 million in damages. This was one example of how the Cold War impacted individuals who were not actually members of the Empires involved in the War. As the film Radio Bikini (1988) shows, King Juda got to watch the Americans blow up their bombs over his homeland—that was his reward for assisting in the relocation of his people to an island that could not support them.
In Indonesia, with the killings of half a million suspected communists, another example can be seen. America had increased its hostility towards the Soviet Union in the 1960s (Hunt, 2015). Kennedy had upped his rhetoric against the Soviets with his famous “I am a Berliner” speech in 1963. The war hawks were pushing for greater dominance in the Asian part of the world, where there spread of Communism could be seen most aggressively. The threat of Communist missiles in Cuba aimed at America had been real enough to alarm everyone in the U.S. and so when reports of a coup led by Communists in Indonesia surfaced, the response was instant—with the CIA at the heart of the matter and likely complicit in the extermination of five hundred thousand Indonesian leftists who represented a threat to the Western way of life in the East.
From 1958, the West had been itching to oust Indonesia’s Sukarno and deal with the rising Communist Party in Indonesia. It did not want happening in Indonesia what happened in Cuba. The U.S. wanted to retain its influence in the island chain and a Communist takeover had severely limited its influence—just as had happened in Cuba. Therefore, any threat to Western influence in Indonesia was a threat to U.S. objectives—and just as the CIA had attempted to oust Castro in Cuba with the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, it played a role in pitting the military leader Suharto against the President Sukarno. The CIA thus was kept well-informed as to the situation there and what was transpiring and when in 1965, six top military generals of the Indonesian government were murdered, the CIA laid the blame at the feet of the PKI—the Communist Party in Indonesia. Native people like Anwar took a lead role in executing suspected members of the Communist Party in reprisal (The Act of Killing, 2012). The strategic aim for the West, here, was to eliminate the Communist threat. The military’s execution of so many Indonesians and members of the PKI supporting Sukarno between 1965 and 1966 was viewed as a victory for the West—proof that the Cold War was not for nothing. However, the moral victory was only celebrated by the Cold Warriors: Robert Kennedy was not one and he refused to celebrate what he saw as inhuman slaughter. However, he himself would receive an executioner’s bullet in 1968 in the run-up to the presidential election which he had been favored to win.
Indonesia also served as an important economic resource for the West, which, as always, never stops being on the lookout for poor regions to exploit for the purposes of minerals, etc. Indonesia thus represented a strategic chess piece in the game of global dominance, and the crushing of the Communist Party there via the type of proxy war against the opposing political class was as good as dropping a bomb directly on the enemy. The U.S. may have tested these bombs in Bikini Atoll—but bombs were only one form of ammunition. Wars can be fought with proxies, for example—just as they are today in Syria, with the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army (aka ISIS aka Al-Qaeda aka the group supported by Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, etc.) fighting Assad and the Syrian forces, supported by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. The Middle East is another strategic chess piece for the same two players—Russia and China. So it can be seen that even after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Cold War continues, revived and revved up to a significant level since the U.S. invasion of the Middle East in the wake of 9/11 and today made worse by the incessant barrage of negative stories aimed at Russia and how it used Facebook to steal the election from Hillary and hand it to Trump.
The blowing up of the home of the Bikinis and the butchering of the Indonesians—all in the name of spreading democracy and making sure the ideals and values of the West were not displaced by Communism (ostensibly at least)—shows the extent to which the Cold War impacted the lives of people who were not even part of that War. Cuba was another example: its people were like pawns in the struggle between Soviet Russian power and U.S. power. Castro just so happened to prefer Communism over American capitalism. Both were essentially forms of gangsterism—two sides of the same coin, but that was the Cold War—a turf war being fought out on the world’s stage between two local powers on the block, getting smaller bit players to do much of the fighting for them.
In conclusion, the Cold War was not a War that was fought on the battlefield as WWI and WWII had been. The Vietnam War was an output of the Cold War. The arms race was another. The people of Bikini and Indonesia and Cuba and the Middle East were all players in the role—more like victims in most cases but characters in the action nonetheless. The story of how the U.S. blew up Bikini Atoll and looked happily on the butchering of hundreds of thousands in Indonesia all for the sake of political hegemony and military might is a story of how the Cold War changed the world. It is a story of inhumanity on a global scale because the global powers were in duel to see who would have mastery over the minds and hearts of the world. The problem was that their approaches were pretty similar in terms of actions, even if their words were different.
References
The Act of Killing. (2012). Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tILiqotj7Y
Brown, K. (2013). Plutopia. Oxford University Press.
Hunt, M. (2015). The world transformed: 1945 to present. Oxford University Press.
Radio Bikini. (1988). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVwzhGtzDuI