was the cold war a holy war?

[freepcrusher]

I've read in some books that during the 1950s and 60s a lot of hardcore anticommunist organizations were heavily catholic or fundamentalist christian in background. Jews and mainline protestants, while not pro-communist, were long skeptical of the anticommunist crusades.

[Indy Texas]

You can make just about anything into a holy war. Abolition was a holy war for some people. The War on Terror is a holy war for some people.

[anvi]

The first time I visited Washington D.C., I was 24 years old.  One of the first things I learned in visiting all the sites was that most of the text of the Constitution was buried deep underground so that it could survive a potential nuclear blast.  My mind flashed to all those years growing up surrounded by missile silos and hearing test warning sirens blare all the time in North Dakota, knowing full well that in case of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, we would all die.  But now I also realized that, despite all our deaths, the Constitution would survive a nuclear war.  If that's not proof that the Constitution is considered a fully sacred document in this country, I don't know what could make it more clear.

[jaichind]

There are many Cold Wars since the Cold War conflicts were really many sub-conflicts all over the globe that subsumed into one large confederated conflict.  For me, until I moved to USA toward the end of the Cold War, my Cold War was really the Chinese Civil War.  For me for sure it was a holy war.  For me the Chinese Civil War was a battle for the preservation of Chinese culture and traditionalism againist an foreign alien ideology (Marxism and Socialism) that sought to destory Chinese tradition and way of social and economic life.  It was easy for me to identify with the USA when I arrived here in its Cold War because I saw the USA-USSR conflict in those terms.  Once the Chinese Communist Party gave up on Socialism and turned around to become the advocate of Chinese traditionalist thinking and norms in the early 1990s the Cold War for me came to an end.  For there my view of world politics revered to the Great Power rivialiry narrative that always operated for thousands of years.  

[anvi]

jaichind, your response is quite interesting, and of course you are right that the cold war had longstanding legacies that continued to be felt and are still felt around the world since 1990.  Maybe the International Politics discussion board is a better place for this question, but since you brought it up here, I'd like to ask one question about your comments.  In what ways do you feel that the Nationalists (Guomindang) represented Chinese traditionalism.  Of course, you're right that Mao and his allies launched a full-scale attack on traditionalism both before and after they took power.  But weren't most of the Nationalists just as much inheritors of the New Culture Movement's intellectual and political legacies, particularly in the ways they sought to depart from Chinese tradition?  As always, I think the story is more complicated than we normally take it to be.  But I'd be really interested to hear more about this issue from you.  Thanks!

[DrScholl]

In a way, it was a holy and cultural war. A lot of the rhetoric wasn't political at all, but more about way of life and how communism threatened that.

[angus]

was the cold war a holy war?

Sure, but it has nothing to do with Catholics, Jews, or mainline protestants.

The cold war was the holy war between Communism, which had become a religion for its adherents, and Capitalism, which had become a religion for us.  There was also the element of fear and hatred of the other side's religion.  When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill famously stated that "if Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons," regarding his policy toward Stalin.  For his part, Stalin commented that future wars on the scale of WWII would inevitably be the consequence of "capitalist imperialism."

You could call it a nice tidy Jihad on both sides, except that Jihad actually implies internal struggle and reflection.   I don't really get the feeling that Churchill and Stalin were very open to reflection upon the possibility that the other side might not be evil.  Same goes for Kennedy.  I think that Brezhnev was the first one who came along and started acting like a grown-up.  But it was Gorbachev who became the Martin Luther of that religion known as Communism.  The Yankees and the Brits are still waiting for our own Martin Luther.  

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

To the hawks, I'm sure it was a Cold War. It was freedom vs. absolute tyranny, capitalism vs. its opposite, religious tolerance vs. state religion, etc. Of course, there were leaders who tried to bridge the gap, and those who tried to view it as nothing more than two relatively equal ideologies, etc. Most wars, for their fighters, are "holy wars". I'm sure the fight against Nazism was for quite a few people a holy war.

[Hnv1]

From growing in a MAPAM household (the now defunct Marxist Unified Workers Party of Israel) the cold war for us was a holy war only not in the religious way, but our belief in class struggle and the crusade to abolish capitalism was pretty spiritual. Though I grow up far after the split of the party with the USSR the disliking of America and the values of the free market lived strong.

As I grew older I understood the conflict in the broader sense as a conflict between two national empires aiming to expand their power across the world. Both represent elements of human life and political culture I deplore while having other traits I admire. I disliked the USSR centralized bureaucracy but admired the accomplishments of the Marxist society in sciences, human thought and equality; whilst loathing the cupidity of the American way of life with strong appreciation to the honour Democracy had in the foundation of the American dream 
Most importantly I learned to realize few are the things in life that are either black or white; most revolve around the spectrum of grey 

[Reaganfan]

To the hawks, I'm sure it was a Cold War. It was freedom vs. absolute tyranny, capitalism vs. its opposite, religious tolerance vs. state religion, etc. Of course, there were leaders who tried to bridge the gap, and those who tried to view it as nothing more than two relatively equal ideologies, etc. Most wars, for their fighters, are "holy wars". I'm sure the fight against Nazism was for quite a few people a holy war.

Exactly. This is why it was so critical for the Reagan-Thatcher-Gorbachev coalition of leadership that came along at exactly the right time in the 1980s. Liberals thought (and they seemed to have a valid point) that by cooperation or the idea of arms limitation or nuclear freezes, that cooler heads would prevail. The conservatives believed that by poking the snake, building up arms, testing more planes and weapons, calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and joking about bombing them and Communism ending up on the "ash heap of history" that the Soviet's would try and compete, fail and thus the war would end without a shot being fired. Nuclear deterrence is a very successful item in the analog of history.

Reagan described it best in 1983 when he said, "I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."

Those statements in bold were absolute, direct attacks on liberalism itself. How many threads on this forum about something negative have liberals trying to "be above it all" or "equally blame both sides at fault". It's a reasonable concept but in the final analysis, it is the wrong concept. This is why today, I know that past liberal leaders such as Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman or even John F. Kennedy might well clash with people in their own party today for the aura of defeatism within the modern Democratic party. I think many Democrats are said to be "unpatriotic" because they seem to want to find both sides at fault. They seem to want their country to have done something negative to instigate a situation. They want to be "fair" and "above it all". Perhaps they feel that if they give equal blame to the U.S. for problems such as war, terrorism, ect, then those who dislike the country will give mercy to them for having openly negatively critiqued their own country.

Much of this can be seen with the War on Terror. Liberals, especially those in the media, chomp at the bit for any act of terrorism to be seen as "isolated" or "possibly Tea Party related" or a "loner". This baffled me at first because liberals are often conspiracy-types. Then I realized that perhaps they did this because they want to avoid admitting that these attacks are all connected. Al Qaida, Hamas, PLO, the beheading in London, Boston. It doesn't matter what the exact specifics, they were attacks against free people. Liberals seem too eager for a blame game, for trying to, as Reagan said, be "above it all". For trying to find a "reason" for the attack. While they may mean well and seem logical, deep down the most complicated things usually are that simple.

[© tweed]

so according to this sort of analysis Nixon was a liberal.

[jaichind]

jaichind, your response is quite interesting, and of course you are right that the cold war had longstanding legacies that continued to be felt and are still felt around the world since 1990.  Maybe the International Politics discussion board is a better place for this question, but since you brought it up here, I'd like to ask one question about your comments.  In what ways do you feel that the Nationalists (Guomindang) represented Chinese traditionalism.  Of course, you're right that Mao and his allies launched a full-scale attack on traditionalism both before and after they took power.  But weren't most of the Nationalists just as much inheritors of the New Culture Movement's intellectual and political legacies, particularly in the ways they sought to depart from Chinese tradition?  As always, I think the story is more complicated than we normally take it to be.  But I'd be really interested to hear more about this issue from you.  Thanks!

I will not spend too much time to respond to this because as you point out these issues are really for the  International Politics discussion board.  My point was more that my Cold War which I viewed as a holy war made it easy for me to identify with the USA in its Cold War and see it as a holy war as well.  As for KMT vs CCP, my political views in the Greater Chinese region are very unusual.  While I favor the KMT over the CCP by leaps and miles, I support the KMT of the 1950s when it turned itself from a revolutionary party into a party of Chinese nationalism and protector of Chinese traditionalism.  The KMT of the 1970s and beyond turned it into more of a modernist center right party which I support but much less so.  I am against the 1911 Chinese Republican Revolution just as I am against the 1949 Communist Revolution.  I felt the system was really not broken and a revolution would make things worse, as both 1911 and 1949 both proved.  The best metric of measuring any modern Chinese political entity and its relative position on the traditionalism-modernism scale is how it views the 1851-1864 Taiping Rebellion.  Attitudes toward the Taiping Rebellion would pit support for preservation of Chinese values with the Han vs Manchu conflict.  It was the ethnic minority Manchu Ching regime that was the protector of Chinese civilization and it crafted the war in those terms.  The Taiping Rebellion along with the Communist Revolution are two events in Chinese history that I completely oppose.  The KMT in its revolutionary days touted itself as the modern Taipings.  This is the KMT I oppose.  Starting in the 1930s the KMT view on the Taiping Rebellion turned toward being on the side of the Ching.  This turn completed its course by the 1950s.  Likewise the CCP view of history was very positive for the Taipings but starting in the 1980s it slowly turned toward in favor of the gradualism of the Ching Dynasty and against the Taipings.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Inserting "under god" into the pledge to show how anti-communist we were was pretty idiotic.