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“The political theory of the Cold War was first publicly proclaimed to the world in the famous Fulton speech of Sir Winston Churchill delivered in March 1946, under the chairmanship of President Truman. It received its first official embodiment in a major statement of American policy with the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947. This date of the Fulton speech and the subsequent Truman Doctrine is worthy of note. For it demonstrates that the Anglo-American proclamation of the Cold War preceded and did not follow the rejection of the Marshall Plan by the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe in the summer of 1947. It preceded the formation of the Communist Information Bureau in September 1947 (which was a defensive answer to American interventionist strategy in Europe). It preceded the democratic victory over the attempted right-wing coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948. Thus it preceded all the events which have been subsequently quoted by apologists, with their customary falsification of history, as the causes and justification of the policy. The initial Anglo-American character of the proclamation of the Cold War at Fulton in 1946 is also worthy of note. For it is characteristic that, while the speech was uttered from the mouth of a British elder statesmen out of office, the proclamation was in fact made on American soil, and under the presiding sponsorship of the President of the United States. Thus from the outset the formal Anglo-American partnership in sponsoring the Cold War has not concealed the reality of the predominant role of American imperialism in practice. Walter Lippmann, the leading American publicist, issued in 1947 a booklet entitled The Cold War: A Study in United States Foreign Policy. [7] He criticised the policy in the following terms: The policy can be implemented only by recruiting, subsidising and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets. The instrument of the policy of containment is therefore a coalition of disorganised, disunited, feeble or disorderly nations, tribes and factions around the perimeter of the Soviet Union… It would require, however much the real name for it were disavowed, continual and complicated intervention by the United States in the affairs of all the members of the coalition which we were proposing to organise, to protect, to lead and to use. Subsequent events have abundantly proved the correctness of this prediction. … Consider for example that most familiar formula of the Cold War, ‘the Iron Curtain’, which is currently used a million times a day in every Western speech and press article to denote the frontiers of the socialist countries and peoples who won freedom from fascism at the end of the Second World War. This formula is universally stated to have been coined by the genius of Sir Winston Churchill in his Fulton speech in March 1946. But in fact it was first used in this sense, that is, to describe the situation of the countries of Eastern Europe liberated from Nazism through the advance of the Soviet armies, by Josef Goebbels in an editorial published in Das Reich on 25 February 1945: If the German people lay down their arms, the whole of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, together with the Reich, would come under Russian occupation. Behind the iron curtain, mass butcheries of people would begin, and all that would remain would be a crude automation, a daily fermenting mass of thousands of proletarians and despairing slave animals knowing nothing of the outside world. In a series of controversies in The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and other journals I have established this origin of the use of this phrase in this context (now recognised in the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations). The formula was borrowed by Sir Winston Churchill – no doubt unconsciously, but after having read it prominently displayed

“We must fight for one Arab nation, for unity, for freedom, for socialism. We must defeat enemy number one, America, the supplier of Hawk missiles to Israel, and we must seize our own oil resources. We must learn to emulate our Algerian brethren in order to liberate Palestine. Long live Palestine, Arab and revolutionary!” -Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live (1973), p. 24.