The world is now wide awake to communist hostility — coordinated action must follow
Winston Churchill was rebuked as a warmonger when he tried to alert the United States to the immense danger of the Soviet Union with his “Iron Curtain” speech. In March 1946, the USSR was still America’s heroic ally; Stalin was the benign pipe-smoking Uncle Joe who had valiantly defeated the Germans, thereby sparing countless American boys an early death.
But this wilful ignorance was best captured in another call to arms that also celebrates its 75th anniversary this year: that of George F Kennan’s “Long Telegram” on the sources of Soviet conduct, which was received by the State Department in February 1946. Written by Kennan under the pseudonym ‘Mr X’, the Telegram was an attempt to bore through the layers of ignorance, foolish optimism and disinformation spread by local Communists and Soviet sympathisers. He hoped to mobilise his fellow foreign service officers in the State Department and their chiefs, and through them the press and then Congress, to “contain” the further spread of Stalin’s power across Europe. Kennan had to estrange the USSR in order to make his colleagues and the wider world see its threat.
