Exceptional by Dick Cheney Page A

released documents in the Soviet and East European archives, historian Anne Applebaum has methodically detailed the Soviet strategy to quash dissent, eliminate opposition, and establish totalitarian rule across Eastern Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Totalitarian rule meant, as one of Mussolini’s opponents first described it, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state,nothing against the state.”
    In every nation occupied by the Red Army at the end of the war, the Soviets carried out a four-part program to impose their rule. They created localsecret police forces modeled after Stalin’s NKVD. They took over theradio stations. They carried out policies ofethnic cleansing. And they banned or took over the youth groups. Young people were a special target. “Even before they banned independent political parties for adults, and even before they outlawed church organizations and independent trade unions,” Applebaum writes, “they putyoung people’s organizations under the strictest possibleobservation and restraint.” The slogan of the German Young Pioneers explains the philosophy of their Soviet masters: “Those who own the youthown the future.”
    To these methods of suppression and persecution, the Soviets added a military blockade of West Berlin in June 1948. In the aftermath of World War II, the Allies had divided Germany into four occupation zones, overseen by the Americans, the British, the French, and the Soviet Union. Berlin was inside Soviet-occupied East Germany, but the city itself was also divided into four sectors. All overland routes into Berlin went through East Germany.
    In the spring of 1948, the Soviets began imposing restrictions ontravel into West Berlin. Initially they denied entry totrains loaded with coal. The restrictions grew more severe and on June 24 the Soviets imposed a full blockade. Their objective was to drive the Allies out of Berlin, in contravention of the agreement reached after World War II.
    Determined not to abandon the people of West Berlin, the United States and Britain, with some assistance from France, began to airlift food, coal, and other needed items into the blockaded city. Over the next eleven months, the Allies flew 278,228 flights into West Berlin, delivering 2,326,406 tons of food, coal,and other supplies. The Berlin Airlift went on until May 1949, when Stalin, realizing he could not bring the city to her knees, lifted the blockade.
    In these post–World War II years the United States undertook an effort never before seen in history—to restore economic vitality and political freedom across Europe, including to her former enemy Germany. A similar program to establish democracy and free markets was under way in Japan. The economic and political freedom enjoyed today by peoples of Germany and Japan is a testament to the success of these efforts. In the words of historian Andrew Roberts, “To have helped raise their former deadliest foes to such a place is a tribute to the magnanimity of the English-speaking peoples in not going down the path of mass-despoliation that Stalin envisioned for both countries, and which he carried out against much of the industrializedplant of East Germany.”
    Economic support for the rebuilding of Europe was crucial, but it was increasingly clear that the nations of Western Europe also required support to resist Soviet expansionism. “Something needed to be done,” according to President Truman, “to counteract the fear of the peoples of Europe that their countries would be overrun by the Soviet Army before effective help could arrive. Only an inclusive security systemcould dispel these fears.”
    As discussions were under way to design this new security alliance, the British outlined some of the risks involved. The biggest riskthey identified was one that is still raised in nearly all discussions of European security arrangements and Russia today.