truman nukes atomic energy
© Flickr/Nuclear Regulatory CommissionPresident Truman signs the Atomic Energy Act on August 1 1946.
This will be the first-ever credible, or "historical," but brief, account of how the Cold War actually began, and of why it started, and of why it continues today (even though it started on the basis of lies which have long-since become exposed but — for reasons which will become obvious — the exposing of which lies remains hidden from the public, so that 'history' can be preserved, and the public thus remains deceived).

Introduction

To understand today's world, an introduction is needed first that summarizes what World War II (the Cold War's predecessor) was actually all about, in geostrategic terms:

The key decision-makers who coordinated together, in order to defeat the three fascist powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy, in WWII, were America's Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), Britain's Winston Churchill, and the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin. If any one of those three would abandon the Allied side, or as FDR anticipatorily named it the "United Nations," then the Axis would win the war, and then a war between the three Axis leaders — Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini — would follow afterward, in which Hitler was generally considered to be the likeliest to achieve his "Thousand Year Reich": global control. If so, the result would have been a Nazi-controlled planet. But each of the three Allied leaders had different political views and priorities.

Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill
© Wikimedia CommonsThe "Big Three" at the Tehran Conference.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an intense anti-imperialist: he believed that the Second World War had been started by the fascist, or "Axis," powers because each one of them wanted to increase the percentage of the planet's surface that it controlled.

Winston Churchill was an intense imperialist: he believed, exactly as did the founder of modern British imperialism, Cecil Rhodes, starting in 1877, that the larger the percentage of this planet's surface that is controlled by the English "race," the better. The only difference between Rhodesist imperialism and prior British imperialism is that Rhodes's plan was based upon the geostrategic belief that the only way in which Britain could continue and expand its empire would be by retaking the United States via subversion (as he planned), in which the leaders of America would be deceived to believe that, in the U.S.-and-UK "Special Relationship" which Rhodes had in mind, Britain would be following America's lead, when actually those American leaders would be following Britain's lead and not be aware of that subterranean UK supremacy. (Rhodes championed subversive aristocratic rule. Subversion is basic to his plan.)

cecil rhodes
'Race Patriot' Cecil Rhodes, as depicted in the 19th century 'Punch' magazine, lording it over Africa
Joseph Stalin was an intense anti-imperialist like FDR was, especially because Stalin's chief competitor for leadership of the Soviet Union was Leon Trotsky, the most passionate supporter of a Soviet imperialism, "Trotskyism." Wikipedia contains an accurate thumbnail description of this:
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky identified as an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist. He supported founding a vanguard party of the proletariat, proletarian internationalism and a dictatorship of the proletariat based on working class self-emancipation and mass democracy. Trotskyists are critical of Stalinism as they oppose Joseph Stalin's theory of socialism in one country in favor of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. Trotskyists also criticize the bureaucracy that developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
trotsky
© GoogleLeón Trotsky (1879-1940)
In order for Stalin to support Soviet imperialism, he would have had to accept Trotskyism, which he refused to do. At Yalta (February 1945), FDR and Stalin agreed together that though every major power has a right to intervene in the internal affairs of other nations in its "neighborhood" insofar as is necessary in order to block such nearby nation's alliance with any hostile major power (an example is the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when Kennedy had a right to block Cuba from receiving Soviet missiles), no such right to intervene in a foreign country's purely internal or domestic affairs exists: i.e., the right to intervene exists ONLY to protect that given major power's own national security, but not to intervene into that nearby nation's internal affairs for any other reason than this. This was FDR's view and Stalin's view. They both agreed to disagree together against Churchill's view that a major power should be allowed to intervene outside of its own neighborhood or to "have an empire."

In the billionaires' updated and far more hypocritical version of the pro-imperialistic argument, such as George Soros's argument, the case for imperialism is "R2P" or "the rulers of a sovereign state have a responsibility to protect ['R2P'] the state's citizens. When they fail to do so, the responsibility is transferred to the international community," which is then allowed to invade. This is the 'democratic' argument to invade foreign countries that one wants to conquer and turn into a vassal-nation. The world's billionaires started pushing for this argument internationally in 1994 because the 'anti-communist' excuse for invading had just recently ended, in 1991. Soros stated the argument this way in 2009, after George W. Bush's having done, to such disastrous effect, such an invasion against Iraq in 2003. But Bush's lies to 'justify' invading had been mainly of the 'national security' variety. He was conservative, not liberal; so, his lies were different.

FDR rejected dictatorship as an internal-policy matter and therefore he disapproved of communism (because it is internally dictatorial), but he had no trouble negotiating with Stalin, because that relationship concerned only international and never domestic-policy matters (since Stalin was not a Trotskyist).

Consequently, amongst the Allies, only Churchill — the British imperialist who, in accord with Cecil Rhodes's scheme, was seeking America's help so as to conquer other imperialisms in order to 'preserve' The British Empire — endorsed imperialism. His actual aim was ultimately to extend that Empire and to use American might so as to assist this, as being U.S. rule or "hegemony" over the entire planet, which would be controlled behind the scenes by Britain's aristocracy. When Churchill came to power within the United Kingdom, the change in leadership represented a supreme victory of Rhodes's branch of the British Conservative Party, pushing aside the pre-Rhodes Tories (such as Neville Chamberlain). Under Labour Party leader Tony Blair starting on 2 May 1997, both of Britain's major Parties were Rhodesist, and (after Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's defeat) they still are in Rhodes's mold.

There was a severe split within Britain's aristocracy over whether to ally with Hitler or instead with FDR and Stalin. (FDR himself wasn't able to avoid having lots of pro-Nazis even in his own Administration: for example, the U.S. intelligence official Allen Dulles secretly said in late 1942, "We're fighting the wrong enemy," and General George Patton said exactly the same thing at war's-end, May 1945. America's billionaires have profited enormously from invasions and therefore sponsor the careers of many high policy officials, and did so even when FDR was in power.) Churchill's immediate predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, represented England's pro-Hitler aristocrats. They were not followers of Rhodes's plan. They were instead pure anti-socialists. (They were more concerned to protect the aristocracy than to extend their empire.) There were actually two varieties of socialism: one, dictatorial, which was Marxism, the other democratic, which was the main type and the one that prevailed in much of Europe. By contrast, there was only a dictatorial form of fascism, because fascism was (and is) dictatorial capitalism, and any form of democratic capitalism was called simply "democracy." Thus, there was "social democracy" versus "democracy" versus "fascism" versus "communism." The Axis powers all were fascist. (Hitler labelled his German fascism Nazism as "National Socialism" in order to be able to win support from workers, but his "Volkisch" 'socialism' was actually very different: pro-racist, instead of anti-classist or anti-aristocratic like almost all of the actually "socialist" parties in Europe were.)

These facts (including the internal ideological conflicts within the United Kingdom, and also within the Soviet Union) are basic, in order to be able to understand recent world history, and current events.

Now we get to the Cold War:

FDR died on 12 April 1945, and his naive V.P., Harry Truman, became President. Promptly, Truman was surrounded by Rhodesists and he didn't understand what was going on. Churchill advised him against accepting the Soviet Union. However, the key person who also did was U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, who seems to have clinched the case on 26 July 1945 by confirming Churchill's view and telling the President that either the U.S. would conquer the Soviet Union or else the Soviet Union would conquer the U.S. (In other words: Ike was telling Truman that Stalin was a Trotskyist, and Truman believed it even if he had no idea of what Stalinism versus Trotskyism were — Truman was tragically naive.) Though Truman had been advised by the scientists not to A-bomb Japan, which was about to fall anyway, Ike's advice clinched the case in Truman's mind, to A-bomb it in order to prevent the Soviet Union from conquering Japan, as the Soviets were on the verge of doing. (Under FDR's plan, not only would the UN have been much stronger, but Stalin would have taken Japan, whereas all of the Western Hemisphere plus central and western Europe would have been within the U.S. sphere, and there would have been negotiations at the UN internationalizing nuclear weapons and the control over other strategic issues between the East and the West, so as to prevent, by clear international laws backed up by the UN's diplomatic mechanisms and control over all strategic forces, any imperialism or military conflicts, between the U.S. and USSR. Both the U.S. and USSR would have, within a context of effective international law, been allowed some sway over international relations within its own respective sphere of influence. This would have been a bipolar world within a single federal global government, the UN, but a very different UN than Truman participated in. Hegemony, or global empire, would have been outlawed, and the UN would have had the military forces to back up its authority in that regard. The current international gangland would not exist. International law would have been established and enforced instead of having become the hypocritical farce that it is. It would be FDR's world, if western democracy would have outproduced communism, which — given Marxism's crippling labor theory of value — seems likely. Marxist economics was a crippler, but abandoning it means abandoning Marxism.)


Comment: A rather large leap of imagination on the part of the author, especially with regards to the alternative development of the UN and atomic weapons treaties. Reality does not proceed so neatly.


Here, providing a favorable (pro-Rhodesist-regime, anti-Soviet-regime) slant upon the same ugly reality that has just been documented about Rhodesism, is from the CIA's own retired Miles Copeland's 1969 book, The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics, the opening of Chapter 2:
On a cold and rainy February afternoon in 1947 [21 February 1947], one year before the Games Center was established, First Secretary H. M. Sichel of the British Embassy in Washington telephoned Loy Henderson, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and African Affairs. He had two messages from the Foreign Office which were "rather important." They were of a sort that normally should be delivered by the British Ambassador direct to the Secretary of State, George Marshall, but since General Marshall had already left the office for the weekend perhaps, Sichel suggested he could drop off the notes, have a "brief" chat about them, and allow Mr. Henderson a weekend of reflection on them before briefing the Secretary prior to meeting the British Ambassador on Monday morning.

Sichel arrived as State Department employees, after a comparatively dull week, were donning their raincoats and galoshes to take off for an indoor weekend. Loy Henderson, who habitually worked until eight or nine o'clock even on Fridays, had sent off all his secretaries and was alone in the office. The scene was the one of utter calm that skillful dramatists often establish to provide the psychological setting for a shattering announcement.

The announcement, which Mr. Sichel delivered in the course of his "brief chat," was certainly shattering. The two messages were official notification that the Pax Britannica, which had kept order in much of the world for over a century, was at an end. Specifically, His Majesty's Government could no longer afford the $50,000,000 or so that was required to support the resistance of the Greek and Turkish Governments to Communist aggression either, as in the first case, by guerrilla warfare or, in the second, by direct military action of the Soviet Union. Either the United States Government would fill the gap, or it would go unfilled — or it would be left to the Russians. Mr. Henderson, whose considerable diplomatic experience included assignments in Moscow and other capitals in the Soviet orbit, didn't need a weekend of reflection to realize that more than Greece and Turkey was at stake. The vacuum of which these two countries were a part extended throughout all of southern Europe that was not already behind the Iron Curtain, and through North Africa and the Middle East. With the British announcement, delivered so calmly by Mr. Sichel, the United States was given the choice of becoming an active world power — an "on-the-ground" world power, as a lecturer at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute was later to put it — or seeing the Soviets become a more menacing feature of world politics than Nazi Germany could ever have been.
THEN P. 38:
there was the necessary discrepancy between the publicly stated attitude of our Government toward world questions and the attitudes held in the inner sanctums of the State Department and the Pentagon. Early in 1946, George Kennan, during the last few weeks in his assignment as deputy chief of mission in Moscow, wrote a letter to the State Department which correctly outlined the shape of the oncoming Cold War and which was immediately accepted as the definitive analysis of Soviet intentions, outlook and behavior. At the same time, Mr. Kennan argued convincingly that if Europe was to be divided the blame should be placed on the Russians and not on ourselves. Winston Churchill, in a speech delivered at Fulton, Missouri, referred to the "Iron Curtain," and the presence of President Truman at his side implied official U.S. Government endorsement of such an attitude. Apart from this one lapse, however, official policy was still to pretend that the "spirit of Yalta" guided our actions.
Page 42:
Our aboveboard response to the British diplomatic notes of February 21, 1947, was the Truman Doctrine, which was announced, after three weeks of hectic State Department and White House staff work, on March 12. Announcement of the Marshall Plan followed shortly; in July and from then on a flood of editorial, semiofficial and official comment (the latter mainly in the form of college commencement addresses delivered by top government officials) began to deal openly with the Cold War and our policy of "containing" Soviet expansion.
And here is about the Marshall Plan, which was an extremely effective Cold War tactic.

And, then, there was the American double-crossing of Mikhail Gorbachev when he ended communism in 1991 and the U.S. secretly continued the Cold War nonetheless, and of post-1991 U.S. coups such as against neutralist Ukraine on Russia's border in February 2014.

A typical coup under Truman was the Miles-Copeland-engineered coup against Syria in 1949, which he discussed here. Between the lines he described it as a Deep State operation which carried out what was being kept secret from the President but which was tacitly approved by the State Department. He, of course, never revealed who actually controlled the CIA and the State Department. But he probably knew.

And, as they say: "The rest is history." And this is the "history" that we've actually been living through and are still experiencing — not the myth that the 'news'-media merely presume.

For further information, click on the links in this article. By means of those links (and what's linked to in those online sources), this article is at least one full book, and it's all right here, and without any paper. No paper or broadcast medium (TV or otherwise) can do that. Only this type of medium — online text that includes links — can. That's a crucial advantage of this medium, which you're now reading.