Communism\'s Effect on the Cold War

¶ … Communism Affact World During the Cold War

There is much controversy with regard to the effects of communism on the Cold War, as with the Iron Curtain falling in the early nineties across Eastern Europe people have come to have a somewhat distorted understanding of the concept. To paraphrased Winston Churchill, the reality is that the victors are responsible for writing history while the masses have a limited understanding of events that actually happened in the past. With the general public having a one-sided understanding of what happened during the Cold War, many are inclined to blame communism for much of the suffering occurring throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

Many fail to comprehend that communism as an ideology is very different from how diverse dictators throughout history have interpreted it. Similarly, numerous democratic countries are not necessarily as praiseworthy as some might be inclined to believe. Furthermore, concepts like democracy and communism should not be considered individually, as ideas from both schools of thought can come together in forming a political system that would effectively run matters and that would not persecute the masses in the process. Gorbachev's ideas of reform, the glasnost and the perestroika, stand as a perfect example concerning how someone can see communism standing together with democratic principles. In spite of the fact that change was especially difficult in the last few years of the Soviet Union, it is intriguing to consider how people accustomed with communism could actually see the two ideologies working together. "At the same time, we see that changes for the better are taking place slowly, that the task of restructuring has turned out to be more difficult than it had seemed to us earlier, and that the causes of the problems that have accumulated in society are more deep-rooted than we had thought." (Gorbachev outlines Glasnost and Perestroika 288-289)

In order to be able to see matters from an objective point-of-view, one actually needs to employ a subjective viewpoint first. "At twelve-forty-five that day four men dressed in civvies entered the factory with pistols in their hands and immediately started roughing me up." This phrase makes it possible for readers to understand how the authorities wanted to discourage anyone who seemed willing to protest, regardless of their involvement in the large-scale protest that took place in Mexico in 1968.

The last years of the Soviet Union perfectly exemplify society's understanding of communism -- it was apparently a movement that would never succeed and that eventually came to fall under its own weight. Even with this, when regarding the Cold War and the way that the two superpowers tried every trick in the book to gain the upper-hand, it would seem ignorant to blame communism or democracy for what happened. The truth is that here were two powers that were determined to do everything in their power with the purpose of defeating the other. This meant that they were willing to use a wide range of strategies that cannot simply be defined by using a political ideology.