https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-5-2025
"In the gym of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946,
former and future prime minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill rose
to deliver a speech. Formally titled “Sinews of Peace,” the talk called for the
United States and Britain to stand together against the growing menace of
Soviet communism. Less than a year after the end of the war, the U.S. and its
allies were concerned about the Soviets’ increasing control over the countries
of eastern Europe and their apparent intent to continue spreading communism
throughout the world.
“Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organisation
intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their
expansive and proselytising tendencies,” Churchill said. He expressed “strong
admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime
comrade, Marshal Stalin,” but he urged Europe and the U.S. to work together to
stand against “dictators or…compact oligarchies operating through a privileged
party and a political police” to control an all-powerful state.
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has
descended across the Continent,” Churchill declared, and his warning that
Europe had been divided in two by an iron curtain defined the coming era.
President Harry Truman had urged Churchill to come and had conferred with him
about the Iron Curtain speech, lending his support to Churchill’s argument. In
Fulton, Truman introduced Churchill. The growing distrust between the Soviet
bloc and the western allies led to the Soviet blockade in 1948 of the parts of
Berlin under western control—a blockade broken by the Berlin airlift in which
the U.S. and the U.K. delivered food and fuel to West Berlin by airplane—and
the creation in 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a
security agreement to resist Soviet expansion."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
