The most urgent political task for the progressive and working class movement, for all of the oppressed peoples in this country and beyond, is to fight the massive imperialist propaganda that the Cold War is over. It is said that a process of demilitarization is going on, most particularly in the U.S., and that the dominant imperialist monopolies are softening their approach with respect to squeezing out superprofits both at home and on a global scale.
Let us not forget that the Cold War is in essence a class war against the socialist countries and the oppressed peoples. To assume that it is gradually being de-escalated is the most costly of illusions. The continuation of the Cold War can be proven with facts--very blunt facts.
Is militarism being cut back?
For example, we hear about the many cuts taking place in the military field. It sounds as though billions are being slashed when you add it all up. The Air Force will cut so much, the Navy so much, the Army so much. The media are talking about massive layoffs in the defense industries.
But what has been and is the principal military aim of the Pentagon imperialists? It is to secure, promote and widen U.S. nuclear-military hegemony on a global scale. Has that changed?
That is the question. Not whether some military bases will be closed down. Not whether the "requested budgets" of each of the services will be cut. That always happens. At different times there have been deep military cuts, and peaceful gestures between the U.S. and the USSR. Some even seemed genuine indications of a progressive demilitarization of the imperialist war machine. At one time during the Nixon administration, there was even a meeting of U.S. and Soviet astronauts in space. Nevertheless, the Cold War went on uninterrupted.
So what's the reality of the situation today?
There are two Pentagon programs that must be watched carefully for a sign of whether the tendency towards militarization is growing or declining.
Star Wars deployment nears
The one known best by most progressives and advanced workers is the Star Wars program. It hasn't gone away. Its essence is a first-strike nuclear capability. While this is said to be aimed at the USSR only, its targets could of course be anywhere.
Now, after seven years of this program, has its research and development declined or progressed? Are there more men and women scientists in it now than earlier? Of course, the Pentagon always asks for more money than Congress will allot for the program. That's known in advance. But every year more and more money has been appropriated for it, and the program has advanced steadily and consistently.
Whether a successful deployment of this doomsday space weapon will happen is another question. But they are working on it. The only questions they have are how effective it will be and how costly. But those are subsidiary issues. The main thing is that the work goes on--consistent research and development, the key element in the eventual deployment of this deadly weapons system. And who is there to confirm it? The Pentagon itself!
Let us not be fooled by the fact that the Pentagon's new nominee to lead the Star Wars program, Henry Cooper, was offered to the public dressed in civilian and not military attire. Presumably he'll be an improvement over the former chief, General James A. Abrahamson. But who is Cooper? An Air Force weapons scientist, who worked on development of a rocket targeted at Soviet satellites. That may not be regarded as much, except for the fact that from 1987 to 1989 he was chief U.S. negotiator for space and defense matters at the Geneva arms talks. (New York Daily News, July 22, 1990.)
And what is Cooper's aim? It is not just to keep the program alive, according to the Daily News, but (in Cooper's words) "to help the Secretary of Defense and the President to pick the architecture for a viable defense that could be deployed. ... " Remember all the arguments from the Pentagon over these many years that they were only experimenting, only carrying out research and development? But you see, the aim is not just research and development, but deployment! This could come within the next two years, according to a timetable made public in 1985 by former CIA head Admiral Bobby Inman.
Matthew Bunn, Associate Director of the Anti-SDI (Star Wars) Arms Control Association, has characterized Cooper as "a fanatic advocate of space weapons."
The significant thing about Cooper's appointment by the Secretary of Defense to head the Star Wars project is that it doesn't require Senate confirmation--which means no public hearings.
U.S. long-range nuclear plans get little publicity
Last week we called attention to the plans drawn up by the Department of Energy for production of nuclear arms until the middle of the next century. This truly sensational disclosure has fallen on deaf ears. Even the New York Times didn't pick it up, nor has anybody in official Washington been heard from to oppose it. (The only notice we've seen appeared in a July 15 Washington Post article entitled "DOE plans for production of nuclear arms until 2050." The plan, instead of phasing out nuclear weapons, calls for "revitalizing the existing network of factories and reactors.")
Substantially the same thing is going on in the Navy, even though a great deal of fuss is made when this or that carrier is mothballed (which just means putting it aside for now). The emphasis is on the use of nuclear energy in modernizing all forms of naval warfare--aircraft carriers, submarines, etc.
Thus the overall military orientation of U.S. imperialism is to maintain and strengthen its global nuclear supremacy. This must always be kept in mind when analyzing U.S. geopolitical moves. They would take on an entirely different connotation if the U.S. were, for instance, to abandon its global nuclear strategy of overall predominance worldwide. But this is not happening, a stubborn fact which cannot be disputed.
All this must be kept in mind as we turn now to examine what is being called the reunification of Germany under NATO.
West wanted Germany's division
Whoever wants to understand the meaning of the reunification policy of the Western imperialist powers must first of all have a clear view of how Germany came to be divided. Without this indispensable element it is utterly inconceivable that the U.S. public in particular can make an unbiased judgment with respect to the current policies of the U.S., Britain and their imperialist allies in Western Europe.
The capitalist press has unloosed a massive propaganda campaign in regard to the upsets in Eastern Europe to show that now the long-cherished dream of ending the division of Germany can be realized within the framework of NATO. They have unanimously stated again and again that the division was imposed by the Soviet Union, and that the Berlin Wall was the symbol of Soviet resistance to a united Germany.
Such is the interpretation of the imperialist bourgeoisie. But is this true?
Is it true that the Western imperialists, particularly the U.S. and Great Britain, were for a united Germany when the war ended in 1945? Was the USSR still regarded as their ally in 1945, at the end of the war? Was the USSR opposed to the unification of Germany?
The historical record is clear.
What happened at Potsdam
No one has to look much further than the Potsdam conference of July 1945. Records of the lengthy discussions that took place at the Potsdam conference clearly show that the U.S. and its British allies were completely opposed to the unification of Germany. In fact, extremist elements like Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau were not only opposed to unification but were for the complete deindustrialization of Germany, to reduce it to an agricultural country so it would never again have the economic wherewithal to become a military power.
At the end of the war, Soviet troops occupied all of eastern Germany. They had liberated the capital, Berlin, from the Nazis and advanced as far as the Elbe river to the west, where at the end of April they made contact with the U.S. First Army.
At Potsdam, the position of the U.S. and Britain was to create three zones in Germany--two for them plus a Soviet zone--to correspond to the military exigencies at the end of the war. France got added later, making it a four-power occupation.
What was the position of the USSR at the time? It was to create a democratic, denazified Germany, free from any occupying powers. Germany would be bound by a treaty which would nullify its war potential.
Nowhere and at no time during the long discussions and struggles over the reunification of Germany was there an attempt by the USSR to freeze the status quo based on the military situation, or to erect different sectors, a western area based on capitalism and an eastern one based on a socialist model. How and when did the situation become reversed?
The Potsdam conference had been scheduled to take place sometime in June 1945. This important conference was delayed until July. And who asked for the delay?
Truman goes to Potsdam with A-bomb in his pocket
The postponement was at the behest of President Harry S. Truman on the U.S. side and Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the British side. (Also attending the Potsdam conference was the leader of the Labor Party in Britain, Clement Attlee, whose party won election in the middle of the conference and who then became the new British Prime Minister.)
The conference was delayed long enough for the testing of the U.S. atom bomb, so that Truman could present a fait accompli to the Soviet Union, one which would radically alter the geopolitical relations among the victorious Allies. To this day, it is the most significant factor in the international situation.
Truman received a secret message informing him of the successful A-bomb test just as the Potsdam conference was beginning. All accounts agree that it immensely affected his tough negotiating stance, as he was now confident of U.S. supremacy in the post-war world.
In his memoirs, Truman related how towards the end of the Potsdam conference he "casually mentioned" to Stalin that the U.S. "had a new weapon of unusual destructive force." Stalin didn't bat an eye. But Soviet scientists knew the U.S. had been working on an atomic bomb, and could estimate its awesome power. From then on, the Soviet Union had to reconsider its position, at least from the military point of view.
However, it would be altogether erroneous to look at the international situation in 1945 solely from the viewpoint of the military exigencies, heightened as they were by the testing of the atom bomb in July and the genocidal U.S. attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, a bare three weeks after the Potsdam conference.
Political situation in Europe
What was the political situation then on the European continent? It was a revolutionary cauldron. All during the war, the working class, in particular its most oppressed sections, had been developing a military resistance to the German Nazi-imperialists and the monopolies whose interests they served. The political influence of this resistance spread to all corners of Europe.
In the West, the Communist parties became the leading organizations of the working class and of armed resistance in France and Italy. In Yugoslavia and Albania, the old monarchist-landlord regimes were overthrown by Communist-led partisans and socialist governments were formed. Communists also led the armed resistance struggle in Greece.
How did the Western imperialists see the international situation at that time? They were afraid that a reunified Germany, free from the military occupation of the Allied powers, and taking into account the considerable strength which the German socialist and communist movements had developed over the war years, would offer an opportunity for a communist-socialist coalition government that would reject the German imperialist monopolies, the bankers and industrialists.
In the book Meeting at Potsdam, historian Charles L. Mee wrote that the U.S. and Britain opposed Soviet demands for reparations from Germany because "a poor Germany might be a revolutionary Germany, a potentially Communist Germany."
From the point of view of the USSR, even a so-called neutral bourgeois state in Germany, similar to the one in Austria, if it were bound by treaty and conditions against remilitarization and free of any occupying armies, would be far more acceptable and less of a danger than a divided and occupied Germany, which would put the victorious Allied imperialists dangerously close to the Soviet Union.
All the diplomatic efforts of the USSR at the time were calculated to avoid the continuing division and occupation of Germany.
The setting up of the Federal Republic of (West) Germany in August 1949 was the inevitable result of what the Allied imperialists had been planning all along--to establish an imperialist state completely subservient to the U.S. and to a lesser extent to Britain. The U.S. in fact began to plan this long before the war ended. Considering the significance of the German surrender at Stalingrad, it must have given them plenty of food for thought at that time.
Changed situation from Yalta to Potsdam
After its troops entered western Germany toward the end of the war, the U.S. bargained with the Nazi scientific establishment, taking out as many scientists as it could along with much of their equipment, especially in the field of rocketry. It shouldn't be forgotten that one of Hitler's leading rocket scientists, Werner von Braun, became the chief of the U.S. missile development program, whose purpose was to perfect a delivery system aimed against the USSR for the new atomic arsenal.
In February of 1945, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt had met at Yalta in the Russian Crimea in what was presented as an amicable conference to discuss the terms of the coming peace. At that time they agreed on a democratic post-war Germany free of Nazism, militarism, and foreign troops.
It is often claimed in U.S. historiography that the difference between the Yalta and Potsdam conferences lay in personality changes, from Roosevelt to Truman, from Churchill to Attlee. But this had little to do with it.
Nor was it the atomic bomb alone that intensified the rivalry between East and West at Potsdam. It was also the fear on the part of the Allied imperialists that Western Europe would go communist, as would China. Within a short time, both the domestic and foreign policy of the U.S. would undergo a profound change, to witchhunting at home and nuclear saber-rattling abroad.
The U.S. thought that its nuclear monopoly would assure it the dominant position in the world for ages to come. But it was gravely mistaken. Its reliance on a nuclear monopoly did not prevent socialist revolutions in China, Vietnam, Korea, and later Cuba. But it did prevent a revolutionary working class alternative to imperialist domination of the European continent.
The vast influence of the Communist parties in Western Europe proved incapable of preventing the revival of the capitalist system. This was due in large part to the massive economic, military and political intervention of the U.S. through the Marshall Plan and the establishment of NATO.
The USSR had to confine itself to attempting the reconstruction of Eastern Europe on a socialist basis, in which its military assistance was the principal factor along with the resistance movements. Yet even then, the Soviet attitude toward Germany remained open to reunification.
In his recently published memoirs, veteran Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko wrote that as late as March 10, 1952, when the Cold War was probably at its coldest, "The Soviet government had submitted an outline for a peace treaty with Germany in which the restoration of Germany as a united sovereign state was proposed with the guarantee of an equal place among the other European states. Germany would have the right to armed forces for national defense and the right to produce arms and technology for their use but not for coalitions and alliances aimed against any state that had fought against Hitler. We proposed the rapid formation of an all-German government and free elections throughout the country. The reaction of the Western powers was unenthusiastic." To say the least.
At that time, the international communist movement was as strong as it had ever been, even taking into consideration that the U.S. had wielded its enormous military and economic capability in Europe to force the Communist parties out of the bourgeois coalition governments set up right after the war in France and Italy.
Was there another course open?
Theoretically, the USSR might have avoided the division of Germany into two opposing class camps if it had from the very beginning pursued a policy of spreading its cadres throughout both areas and preparing the Communist Party not for state power but for a revolutionary working class opposition to imperialism. Looking at it in hindsight, this might have avoided the disastrous situation that has developed.
At present, the U.S. regards West Germany's reunification plans with a mixture of applause and misgivings. With respect to the USSR and Eastern Europe, and of course the German Democratic Republic, U.S. finance capital is most concerned that the West German imperialists first and foremost push Gorbachev's anti-socialist reforms, to further destabilize whatever is still left of a progressive social and political character.
To destabilize and wreck socialized property in the USSR and Eastern Europe and to absorb the GDR, Western finance capital must spend a considerable sum of money in so-called aid. However, U.S. financial and economic interests dictate that none of these plans should succeed to the extent that West Germany becomes the overwhelming economic power in Europe, undermining its British ally, endangering French expansion into the East, and becoming a stronger and more formidable competitor of the U.S.
But this has to do with inter-imperialist rivalries. The first objective of the imperialists regarding the GDR is to transform its class character. The New York Times on July 23 reported that the new military oath now sworn to by soldiers in the GDR no longer contains a pledge to "defend socialism against all enemies side by side with the Soviet army." This symbolic act gets to the nub of it. The struggle over Germany since 1945 has been a class struggle between two social systems, one based on the rule of monopoly capitalism, and the other based on socialized property and the working class.