Source: The Militant, Vol. X No. 11, 16 March 1946, pp. 1 & 7.
Transcription/Editing/HTML Markup: 2018 by Einde O’Callaghan.
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Wall Street and the British imperialists are beginning public preparations for the Third World War. This is the underlying meaning of the tremendous hue and cry they have raised against the Soviet Union. This war-mongering campaign reached its highest point to date with the March 5 speech of Winston Churchill at Fulton, Missouri.
Churchill savagely attacked the Soviet Union and Communism. He denounced the USSR as a threat to world peace and he called for immediate military measures along the following lines:
These war-like proposals came from the principal political representative of the reactionary British Tories. The choice of Churchill as spokesman was a deliberate device to indicate the class solidarity of the British capitalists with Wall Street’s drive against the Soviet Union.
Churchill became the symbol of world imperialism’s antagonism against socialism following the First World War. Churchill was the guiding spirit in the intervention of 14 capitalist nations against the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik revolution. His venomous hatred of Leon Trotsky for successfully organizing the Red Army defense of the workers’ state has long been notorious.
President Truman made a conspicuous effort to demonstrate his agreement with Churchill’s call for military measures against the Soviet Union. Truman travelled a thousand miles to attend the gathering. He let it be known he had read the speech in advance, and he introduced. Churchill.
Truman’s stamp of approval on Churchill’s speech is analogous to the “made in the United States” label on the tanks and airplanes used by British, Dutch and French imperialist troops against the colonial peoples in the Far East.
The whole anti-Soviet campaign is obviously a calculated one. Churchill’s warmongering speech merely climaxes a whole series of incidents. The spy- scare manufactured in Canada was one item. The speeches of Vandenberg and Byrnes against the Soviet Union (reported in last week’s Militant) were part of the plan. To this can be added the ferocious press campaign against the Soviet Union, the preparations for the colossally expensive atom bomb tests in the Pacific, the war “games” in the Arctic in the direction of the USSR, and so on.
The immediate purpose of this “get tough” propaganda is to put diplomatic pressure on the man Churchill still hailed in his speech as “my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin.” Anglo-American imperialism is seeking to build a steel curtain around the Soviet Union to prevent it from any further expansion no matter if “wartime comrade” Stalin heads the USSR and no matter what valuable services he has rendered capitalism. For the imperialists look at the economic system in the Soviet Union as a deadly threat to world capitalism. They are prepared to use all means to crush it.
The long range purpose of the intensified anti-Soviet campaign, consequently, is to prepare the masses psychologically for, a Third World War – a war of world imperialism against the USSR. The imperialists and their agents told the masses the Second World War would bring peace to mankind. Now to get ready for another slaughter, they must begin to place the blame for the war they plan on the prospective foe, to picture that foe as an “aggressor,” etc. That is the sinister objective in Churchill’s insinuations about “a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.” That is why he uttered such ominous words as “this is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up: Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.”
Thus within a short six months after V-J Day, the profiteers are laying their calculations for another worldwide slaughter. All the promises about winning “Four Freedoms,” securing democracy, establishing lasting peace, are revealed as deliberate lies designed for no other purpose but to delude the masses into fighting and dying for capitalism in the Second World War.
In the face of this unbridled propagandistic assault on the Soviet Union, the Kremlin is at an extreme disadvantage.
Throughout the war, Stalin assured the people of the Soviet Union that nothing need be feared from the “democratic” capitalist powers. He told the workers of the world that with the defeat of the Axis, peace would be guaranteed.
The whole international Stalinist machine backed up Wall Street’s war propaganda to the hilt and denied the possibility of any danger of a Third World War from the “peace-loving” powers. In this way Stalin deceived and disarmed the world working class, strengthened Anglo-American imperialism and paved the way for the present barrage of the capitalist warmongers.
Last updated on: 18 October 2018