TraductionCold War : the making up of legend
the Cold War is often misinterpreted as a global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, According to dominant and wide-spread mythology in the West, the so-called Cold War began in the wake of the Second World War when “pacific” western democracies and generally what we called the “Free world” led by the United States of America were assaulted and threatened by totalitarian system and by the thrust of “ remorseless Soviet expansion”. The binary and Manichean picture surrounding the Cold War reduced the post-war period to a mere rivalry and to a simplistic scheme between the “good and evil ”, a struggle between two rival superpowers and two antagonizing ideologies competing both for the domination of international affairs and looking each and other for world hegemony. Basically, the Cold War was about the Free World versus Communist slavery and its outbreak was to be attributed to the Soviet Union accused to be the full responsible for the onset of the conflict while the United States was tally innocent. In the face of Soviet aggressiveness and territorial and ideological expansionism the United States had no choice only to protect both its own legitimate security interests and democracy in the various European nations and to cope with a real danger, the spread and the contagion of international communism sponsored by the government of the Soviet Union. At the end of his account Potsdam Conference Mr Truman accused the Soviet Union for “planning world conquest”
These assumptions by no means exhaust the various fallacies found in the literature on Cold War. When discussing the matter weal with abstractuions and try to isolate to mix and to generalize. As declasiified U.S. policy documents revealed, the primary threat posed by the soviet Union was not its aggressivessness or its expansionary policy but rather its emergence as alternative pattern and a model for the newly independent countries born from the “decolonization” and its willingness to supply military and economic support to third world regimes that were targets of U.S aggression and subversion. The Soviet Union thus served to deter and restrain U.S imperialism and to restrain its actions in the Third World.
