Why did the western powers deceive the world? Money.
https://x.com/NuryVittachi/status/1985875026126782820
THE FOUNDING MYTH of the Cold War between Soviet Russia and the west never happened—although it is in every history book on the topic, it is detailed in Wikipedia, and the BBC offers an online lesson about it for schools worldwide, a new book reveals.
All these sources teach the world that the decades-long animosity between the US and the Soviet Union started in 1948 when the Moscow leadership cruelly blockaded the area of Berlin under western control to starve the men, women and children living there, the story goes.
The heroic western allies organized a huge airlift of food and other necessities to break the blockade and bring food to the hungry people: this conflict was an opening salvo in the Cold War, which lasted for decades.
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NEVER HAPPENED
But the blockade never happened. Sorry, Wikipedia. The tale was made up by the Americans to justify the taxpayer cost of delivering supplies to the city, according to The Airlift, by historian Joseph Pearson, published in the UK last week.
His assertion carries a lot of weight, given his research, and the fact that he is not a critic of the west, but the opposite. Pearson approves of western disinformation and argues that the west should use more “dirty tricks” of that style. He is unhappy about Trump’s de-funding of the Radio Free Asia cluster of slanted news operations.
“We in the west used to play dirty – and during the cold war, we were good at it,” he wrote in an essay in the Guardian today. The fake blockade was a good example: “In the National Archives at Kew, I found documents from 1948 showing, in the Foreign Office’s words, ‘the blockade of Berlin is NOT a siege’ and that ‘movement in and out of Germans is possible all the time’, for example to obtain food.”
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MONEY, OF COURSE
Why did the western powers deceive the world? Money. The airlift of supplies to western allies would be expensive to the public purse, costing the equivalent of almost $3 billion today, he points out. The people of the west needed to be tricked into paying for it it.
The enabler of the lie, of course, was the western mainstream media, happy to push “a massive and sensational story of air power applied to humanitarian ends”.
The lie has stood for more than 75 years, was even featured in the Colbert Report, and will likely continue to be taught to children worldwide.
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SUSPICIONS
But to be fair, there were a few (very few) leaks that showed some journalists knew the Soviet blockade never happened. For example, the New York Times in 2008 noted that a 1948 US intelligence report was entitled “Is Berlin blockaded?” and described a “porous” situation in which food clearly went in and out of the city.
Pearson writes: “Was it right to mislead the public in 1948 and 1949? No. Did it win full support in the UK and US? Yes. The airlift even won Harry Truman an unexpected re-election that November.”
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LIES LIVE FOR EVER
His book, which will be published under the title “Sweet Victory” in the US, will likely be a good example of what the world outside the west complains about all the time.
Lies are trumpeted endlessly at the top of the news cycle and endlessly reiterated, until they are made permanent by the BBC and Wikipedia and every AI chatbot in the world. But when the truth emerges, it’s often in one article or one book--and nothing changes.
The international mainstream media (which means the western mainstream media) will NOT correct the story. Other examples of famous things that historians agree didn’t happen but are still pushed by the media today are the “Tiananmen Square massacre”, the “Arab Spring”, the “Uyghur genocide” and so on.
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PROBLEMATIC ATTITUDE
Still, I suspect many readers will find Pearson’s scholarship to be strong but his attitude and judgment to be problematic.
For example, the historian argues that Russia is now better at disinformation than the west. That’s a hard argument to make stand up, when literally any internet search about that country leads to page after page of western descriptions of it as a dying dystopia run by a merciless despot—one who “started” the Ukraine conflict and is about to lose it.
None of which is true. It is only the relatively few people who care enough about the truth to dig down who can get the real story. "The Russia-Ukraine War and Its Origins" by Ivan Katchanovski is a good place to start, Mr Pearson.
posted by Satish Sharma at
03:33
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