Please note that everything I am about to
say is historically and factually accurate,
just told from another perspective.
The point of this isn’t to defend the Soviet
Union, or to side with it, the point is to
get you to think about biases we encounter
when hearing about history.
More about that in the conclusion.
The cold war started right after the second
world war so to discuss it we must start there.
In 1939 the fascist armies of Germany invaded
most of Europe.
At the same time the fascist army of Japan
was invading china as well as other nations
and colonies in the far east.
In 1941 the German fascists started a surprise
attack against the Soviet Union in an attempt
to destroy the socialist revolution and the
Bolshevik government.
Only through the sacrifice of the soviet soldiers
the German advance was halted.
The balance of power slowly shifted as the
centrally planned economy of the USSR was
adapted towards wartime production.
At this time the capitalist countries finally
decided to join on the side of the USSR.
Though it would take 2 more years and millions
of soviet dead before they actually joined
the fight on the ground.
By the time D-Day had happened the German
army was in full retreat already and almost
pushed out of the soviet lands.
Within one more year the war in Europe was
over and only japan was still fighting.
The soviet army was advancing in Manchuria
and Korea just as the united states used two
nuclear bombs on civilian targets in Japan
both to fight the fascists and to send a threat
towards the soviets.
Japan was to be occupied by the united states
exclusively, the US and USSR could not agree
what to do with Korea, most importantly what
economic system it should follow so they decided
to split it up to figure it out later.
In Europe the capitalist nations and the Soviet
Union met in order to discuss how to prevent
another European war and how to rebuild the
destroyed continent.
They couldn’t agree on anything most importantly
what economic system the continent should
follow so they decided to split the continent
up and figure it out later.
The eastern countries were to be rebuild by
the Soviet Union and the western ones by the
US, UK and France.
Germany right in the middle was split up between
the USSR and the capitalist nations with berlin
being split up again.
The Soviet Union was not able to support the
eastern nations as it had to rebuilt itself
first.
In the western nations the free market was
instituted and quickly did … absolutely
nothing.
The US government did what it always did and
does when capitalism isn’t working and gave
away free money to stimulate the economy.
This was called the Marshall plan.
To be more specific, capitalist nations were
given US dollars which had to be used on imports.
I wonder what kind of country had an export
oriented economy which wasn’t damaged in
the war and which accepted US dollars.
So essentially the US government was giving
money to their friends which they then had
to spend on US goods.
In addition to this much of the industry of
western capitalist nations was bought up or
indebted to American capitalists and banks
who loaned money to the rebuilding continent.
On top of that the USA used the political
leverage they got from the Marshall plan to
influence the elections of the nations they
occupied towards liberal free market economies.
Essentially the western European nations were
turned into economic colonies or puppet states
of the US.
When Germany was split up the four powers
agreed on some conditions and rules they would
follow in this joint occupation.
Among them they decided to use the same currency
in Germany in order to make the reunification
easier.
This German currency was plagued by hyperinflation
which made the occupied territories illegible
for the Marshall plan.
The obvious solution by the capitalist nations
was to introduce a new currency.
They did not discuss this at the four power
meetings, they did not even inform the general
secretary of the soviet union.
They just did it.
This was seen as a breach of international
law by the USSR which then left the four power
meetings all together.
The general secretary was not happy with the
partition of Germany in general, as pretty
much all natural resources and industry of
Germany are located here, outside of the soviet
zone.
This was seen as an injustice as the USSR
had lost the most blood in defeating fascism
and it felt like it deserved a richer area
to pay reparations.
The only industrial region of the soviet occupation
zone was Berlin and Stalin demanded all of
it so they may pay reparations so Stalin demanded
that the allies stop their occupation of berlin.
When the allies refused, he blockaded it,
the berlin blockade is where the cold war
officially starts.
The allies used planes to fly the supplies
in by the way and Stalin stopped the blockade
after about a year.
And shortly later the capitalist powers gave
up any pretence of allowing Germany to unify
as they set up their own capitalist puppet
state in their zones of occupation.
A short time later Stalin decided that he
could no longer occupy Germany and gave them
a state of their own.
The German democratic republic.
Germany was now split.
Stalin made a suggestion to the capitalist
nations.
He wanted to create a unified, democratic
Germany with international supervision.
The western nations declined this offer because
they were afraid that the large socialist
population in Germany may democratically vote
to become socialist and we all know that the
problem with democracy is that sometimes people
vote differently from how you want them to.
And the adult way to react to that is to simply
not allow them to vote at all.
On a strategic level Europe was now divided
and the capitalists were gearing for war.
The British prime minister Winston Churchill
outright prepared a plan for the invasion
of the Soviet union called “Operation unthinkable”
and the US army was stationing bombers with
nuclear bombs around the world in order to
threatened and eventually destroy the soviet
union and the socialist revolution therein.
Luckily there were people in the united states
who were on the side of the people and who
decided to send plans of the nuclear bombs
to the Soviet Union.
By 1949 the USSR had tested it’s first nuclear
warhead.
The US and USSR would continuously develop
new and stronger nuclear weapons for the entire
cold war in order to keep the advantage on
their side for when the inevitable war between
capitalism and socialism would start.
Meanwhile in the united states everyone who
was a communist or a suspected communist was
fired, arrested and worse in what’s known
as the McCarthy Era.
Throughout this the united states still claimed
to support Freedom of expression.
Then in order to totally not escalate the
cold war the capitalist nations banded together
and form NATO, an aggressive military alliance
designed to threaten the soviet union and
contain the revolution.
Let’s have a look at china.
It was in a civil war.
The main factions were the communist people’s
liberation army under the leadership of Mao
Zedong and the practically fascist Chinese
Nationalist Party under the leadership of
some fascist guy idk, you won’t remember
the name anyway.
They had been fighting since before World
war 2, then stopped when the Japanese showed
up and started doing genocide, and right after
the Japanese had surrendered, they were at
each other’s throats again.
Long story short the communists win, and the
nationalists have to go to this island.
They pretend to be the real china until this
day though nobody takes them seriously.
In Korea both the USA and the USSR had installed
temporary local leaders which acted as placeholders
until the peninsular would be united again.
But after the capitalist nations had made
it clear that a united Germany would not happen
unless the Soviet Union agree that it would
be a capitalist state the government in north
Korea became a bit anxious.
It was a socialist government backed by the
USSR.
The south was seen as occupied territory by
the north, especially as the fascist capitalist
government there was close friends with, and
funded by, the American government.
The southern government committed many war
crimes against suspected communists, often
under the direction of US troops.
By 1950 the north Korean government under
Kim Il Sung decided to put an end to the fascists
and started a liberation war against the dictatorship.
When almost the entire peninsular was liberated
many capitalist nations came to support the
fascists dictatorship.
The effort of half of the world was not in
vein and the north Korean army was pushed
back, fearing that the capitalists might just
keep going and invade Manchuria after they
were done with Korea Chairman Mao Zedong decided
to send support to Korea.
That support came in the form of half a million
soldiers.
The US general wanted to use nuclear weapons
on the Chinese people’s liberation army,
but the president refused because of the fear
that the soviet government might intervene
and use their own nuclear weapons as well.
After 3 years the fronts were back to where
they were before, and the Korean governments
agreed on an armistice which is in power until
today.
The south Korean people suffered under a series
of Us backed fascist dictatorships until 1987
when they moved to a neoliberal democracy.
Let’s have a look at Germany again, correction,
germanies, plural.
In the 50s they were brought up under drastically
different economic systems, west Germany was
organized in a capitalist free market economy
and at first it wasn’t doing well.
After being included in the Marshall plan
however it quickly started going pretty well.
Remember, the Marshall plan was basically
the US giving free money to capitalists to
help them found businesses and such.
Meanwhile east Germany had a centralized socialist
economy which had a harder time growing since
they didn’t have access to the same amount
of free money.
Also, the soviets had taken loads of money
and industrial machinery as reparations since
Germany kind of destroyed all of Russia like
5 years earlier.
On top of that the east German economy was
smaller at the beginning of the separation
as I’ve mentioned before.
So economically west Germany was doing better,
but east Germany had it’s perks, among others
a 0% unemployment rate, free healthcare, free
higher education and so on.
West Germany had none of those at this time.
So, the east had many highly educated people
who were educated by the state and expected
to help improve the country in exchange.
So, it kind of sucked for the east German
government to see the west Germans handing
out free money to everyone with higher education
who would move from east Germany to west Germany.
The west German government also made sure
to spread lots of propaganda about how anyone
could become rich in capitalism.
So, young people who were educated for free
by the east German state and who where expected
to return this value to the state via working
there decided to leave to a capitalist country
in hopes of making themselves rich off their
stolen east-german education.
This was seen as a betrayal by the east german
state and some went as far as to denounce
those who left for western germany as traitors
to their nation.
And there were more problems originating in
west berlin.
The cold war was a really good time for spies.
The west was spying on the east and the east
was spying on the west.
Remember the nuclear bombs from the US?
They where brought to the USSR by spies.
There where many spies moving from east to
west and the other way around.
And a key path they used was Berlin.
The reason for that is that there was no border
there, you could just walk down the streets
and you’d be out of the country you are
spying on and inside the country you are spying
for.
And at one point the Politbüro decided to
handle these problems originating in berlin
accordingly.
In order to stop traitors and spies the decision
was made to impose the border in berlin the
same way the outside borders of the country
where imposed.
This meant border guards, checkpoints, barbed
wire and no crossing without reason.
The capitalist countries were quick to complain
about the berlin wall as it became known.
They said the east German government had torn
berlin apart.
A brave statement considering it was the western
powers that continued to occupy half of the
capital city of another country.
Like, can you imagine Saudi Arabia occupying
half of Washington DC and then complaining
that the US is tearing Washington apart when
they begin to guard that border?
Okay, while I am outside of the monologue
I’d like to address some serious misinformation
about the berlin wall.
It’s often said that it was locking people
in or out and that’s not quite true.
If you were west german and wanted to go to
west berlin or the other way around you could
just use the east german highways to do so.
West berlin was not trapped, they could leave
at any time.
And it is often said that the wall was tearing
families apart by preventing travel, that
is a very biased way of telling the story.
East Germans were allowed to visit west Germany,
provided they had a reason.
And a marriage, a funeral, or even just visiting
a sick relative were enough.
And west Germans could visit east Germany
just as well.
Saying that the wall separated families is
technically true but by that logic you’d
have to agree that all borders do so and that
thus all borders should be considered as bad
as the berlin wall, which is a road you could
go down but it isn’t usually thought to
it’s conclusion like that.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh yea.
The berlin wall was built and enforced as
a regular border.
This stayed up for a bit and we’ll return
to Germany once something happens there.
Meanwhile in the USSR Stalin died and Khrushchev
was telling everyone that he was bad.
This started a tradition of soviet leaders
being shittalked once they died.
Something that did not help the Soviet Union
with stability.
In order to counter NATO the Soviet Union
founded the Warsaw pact, a military alliance
with the expressed goal of countering NATO,
not threatening the USA, just creating a counterweight
to capitalist aggression.
Also, the nations have now figured out how
to make even more deadly bombs and how to
use rockets to deliver them without them being
intercepted.
These rockets could also be used differently.
In 1957 some soviet scientists got very excited
to use those missiles to learn stuff about
space and after a bit of development they
managed to put the first ever artificial satellite
in space.
Sputnik.
It was just a silver ball going beep-beep
in space, but it was a tremendous achievement
for humanity.
I say for humanity and in the socialist nations
it was definitely seen as such, but in the
capitalist nations the public reacted differently.
They were scared of sputnik because now suddenly
they saw that the socialist nations were technologically
superior.
This was known as the sputnik crisis.
The USA then decided to do the same, and put
an artificial satellite in orbit.
Their first rocket promptly blew up on the
launch pad in front of the media from the
whole world.
Then the soviet union sent a dog to space,
her name was Laika and she was the first living
animal ever to reach space.
Then the USSR sent a man to space, then took
the first picture of the dark side of the
moon, the first automated landing on the moon,
the first woman in space, the first landing
on another planet.
All with the US lagging behind the Soviet
Union.
So, in an effort to not look totally inferior
anymore the US president announced that they
would land on the moon.
Long story short, after enlisting literal
genocidal nazis in their space flight programme
they managed it.
Then they stuck their flag into the moon presumably
in an attempt to make it theirs and declared
that they had now won the space race.
Before that the soviet government put out
a statement declaring moon landings too dangerous
to attempt.
The landing was seen live on TV by billions
of people including in the Soviet union.
The government of the USSR then suggested
a joint moon landing as sign of friendship.
While the USSR never landed on the moon there
was a join mission between American astronauts
and soviet cosmonauts in in 1975 where they
docked their spaceships and said hi or something
like that.
Let’s now have a look at Cuba.
Cuba belonged to the US for a long time, then
these handsome men came along and made it
not so.
They did a socialism so the US tried to invade
but failed.
Quick look at turkey, they joined NATO and
the USA had set up nuclear missiles there
which could directly attack Moscow and kill
millions of people.
After the Cuban revolution, the soviet general
secretary called and asked if they wanted
to help do the same to the Us.
Cuba agreed and the USSR was about to place
nuclear missiles there when the Americans
noticed.
The US president did not want to allow the
USSR to do the same they had done so he forbid
Cuba to place soviet missiles there.
Then they enforced a blockade on Cuba which
they enforced by throwing depth charges at
soviet submarines….
Which were armed with nuclear weapons.
Please note that this is an act of war.
Both the blockade and the throwing depth charges
at a nuclear submarine.
But hey what could go wrong?
It’s not like the crew on the submarine
could have assumed that war had broken out
and that they should fire their nuclear torpedo
at the American fleet, right?
Oh, wait yea that’s exactly what happened.
The world came within one decision of nuclear
war because the capitalist country didn’t
want to allow other countries to do the same
thing they did and because it decided that
ATTACKING A NUCLEAR SUBMARINE was somehow
okay.
It turned out well in the end.
The USA agreed to remove nuclear missiles
from turkey and the USSR agreed not to put
nuclear missiles on Cuba.
In case you were wondering, no, the international
community did not take action against the
USA for attacking the ships of a country they
were at peace with, or for enforcing a blockade
in peace times.
Let’s have a look at Vietnam, shall we.
So basically, in the before time, that means
before 1900, France came along and took this
land.
That’s imperialism.
Skipping over a lot of history the people
here did not like being a colony of France
anymore and after WW2 France was not able
to kill all of them anymore so in 1954 at
the Geneva conference they decided what to
do with this area.
They decided to split it up into these 3 countries.
These two became monarchies but wait, Vietnam
has lots of communists in it and they want
to rule the country.
But the capitalist countries did not want
that.
The US and USSR could not agree what to do
with Vietnam, most importantly what economic
system it should follow so they decided to
split it up to figure it out later.
But unlike with Germany and Korea this time
they agreed on how to figure it out.
This part would be communist, this part would
be capitalist and in 2 years they would unify
and hold one national election under international
supervision to decide what economic system
all of Vietnam should use.
What a great solution!
Unfortunately, it was predicted that the North
would win because it had a higher population.
So, the USA decided that rather than risking
this small country doing what the people want
they should launch a full scale invasion.
Essentially the Vietnam war boiled down to
the capitalists thinking they’d win because
of their technological superiority but then
getting rekt by a few farmers armed with AK-47s.
By 1974, the US president decided to retreat
and give up while pretending that they totally
won.
The capitalist southern government fell within
one year and all of Vietnam was now socialist.
Let’s now look at Afghanistan.
To sum it up painfully quickly, the government
was overthrown by a new socialist government
known as the Democratic republic of Afghanistan.
This government was quickly attacked by reactionary
insurgencies and then asked the soviets to
help and as you do among comrades in 1979
the USSR intervened.
The USA then gave a lot of money to the people
fighting the USSR, that being Al Qaida among
others.
After about 10 years the soviet government
decided it could no longer deal with this
and left again.
The democratic republic of Afghanistan then
quickly fell to the reactionary armies.
Those armies then later blew up two towers
in new York but that’s a different story.
At this time the cold war was warming up.
This is known as détente.
The USA and USSR were still pointing nuclear
weapons at each other but now at least they
weren’t throwing live bombs at nuclear submarines
anymore.
They signed the SALT treaty which stands for
the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty - Treaty
which limited the number of nuclear bombs
and missiles they could make.
As is tradition I completely neglected Latin
America in this video.
Basically, it’s always the same story.
A country elects a socialist government and
the CIA stages a coup and kills all suspected
communists and props up a fascist puppet regime
there.
There is a Wikipedia article about it.
If I mentioned all of those the video would
be twice as long.
In the late 80s the German people were demonstrating
against the berlin wall.
To oversimplify they had been talking about
letting people travel over the inter-German
border without visa for some time, then this
man misread something in a press briefing
and as a result half of the population of
east berlin wanted to have a look at the west.
They thought they had the right to cross the
border now.
The border guards still had orders not to
let them pass though.
Eventually they could not hold the people
anymore and just let everyone go to west berlin.
The wall was gone now.
Please note that most people in east Germany
did not want to live under capitalism or to
unite with the capitalist west Germans.
What they wanted was a new and more democratic
east German republic with good relations with-
and free movement to west Germany.
71% of east Germans opposed the unification
of Germany.
Unfortunately, the councillor of west Germany
wanted to get re-elected so he united the
two countries against the will of the people.
There is a video to be made on this since
30 years later the old east German states
still suffer immensely from this and they
likely will for the next 50 years.
Things like these were happening all over
the socialist world and many countries reformed
their way into- or were forced into free market
capitalism.
Then Горбачёв came into power in the
USSR and he implemented perestroika and glasnost
which were policies that had to do with..
well actually the collapse of the USSR is
definitely gonna be it’s own video … so
subscribe.
Essentially he did some reform, screwed it
up and collapsed the socialist revolution
in the process.
And this is where the cold war ends.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And this was my biased telling of the story
of the cold war.
Please know, everything I said was correct,
it’s all true.
So why does it sound like I am an evil soviet
spy sent to indoctrinate everyone into thinking
that the capitalist nations were the aggressors
in the cold war?
Because we aren’t used to hearing that part
of the story.
When talking about the cold war we hear about
the berlin wall tearing apart families all
the time, but we never talk about the fact
that the US invaded a sovereign country because
they were afraid that an election might go
differently from how they want it to go.
We are used to thinking that the soviets were
aggressors in the Cuba crisis, placing missiles
and such, but we barely even mention that
the US has been doing the same thing in turkey,
or that the US literally breached international
law by imposing a blockade on Cuba during
peace time and attacking soviet submarines.
And we are used to thinking about the soviet
nations in the east as the soviet block, but
we barely even think about the fact that the
entirety of western Europe was practically
controlled by the US.
Do you think it’s a coincidence that no
nation occupied by the Americans turned socialist?
The Americans made sure to only support the
correct parties.
The same way the soviets did it.
So, now you know the soviet version of the
story.
Do I think that we should write this version
in the history books?
Not really.
It’s just as biased as the story we already
hear and it’s based on some shaky facts
just as well.
I’d like to hear a story without bias for
once.
Not one where the evil Stalin tried to starve
berlin into submission, or one were the evil
capitalist nations refused to vacate the capital
of a sovereign state.
I want a story with both sides, not just the
one we like better.
Ultimately it might be impossible to tell
a story without bias, but at least now, after
having watched this, you might be a bit better
at detecting subtle biases.
Always ask yourself what the other side of
the story may look like.
Because maybe the soviet side of the Cuban
missile crisis might seem a lot more reasonable
than the American one.
Thanks for watching.
I hope you enjoyed this video of mine.
If you did please leave a like and so on.
I’d like to thank my patreons for motivating
me to make videos and I’d like to say an
extra special thanks to Aaron J Peton and
Jenarchist 77 for your generous donations.
