Sure the US propaganda machine is powerful now but ngl it was worse at the height of the Cold War.
The Kennedy administration ordered 41 ballistic missile submarines whose only purpose was the wholesale destruction of Soviet cities and called them the “41 for Freedom”.
Like, say what you will about Fox News and CNN, they can’t hold a candle to that kind of spin.
Oh and don’t even get me started on how John F Kennedy brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation over the Soviets pulling a tit-for-tat on medium range missiles.
Ok so I’ve got myself started.
The western narrative around the Cuban Missile Crisis is bullshit from top to bottom.
It’s been framed for 60 years as JFK bravely standing up to unprovoked aggression against the Soviet Union and persevering through superior resolve.
The reality is that the Soviet Union brought those missiles to Cuba as a direct counterweight to US missiles in Italy and Turkey of similar range, accuracy, and payload.
The whole crisis ended more or less by accident as both leader’s concessions literally crossed in the mail. Kennedy secretly promised to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey and Italy (a move that the USAF already wanted because they viewed the missiles as useless and obsolete) in exchange for Khrushchev withdrawing his missiles from Cuba.
But Khrushchev had already ordered the removal when he received kennedy’s word. (He was elated to accept, as this was entirely the purpose of the whole stationing)
This trade was kept secret for the better part of 50 years and while widely understood to have taken place in inner policy circles it was only declassified in the mid 2000s.
In short, rather than stoically calling Nikita Khrushchev’s bluff, Kennedy gave the USSR exactly what it wanted, but only after threatening to destroy the entire world and coming damn close to actually doing it.
I would say conservatively that half of Americans don’t know about them.
What’s even worse is that generations of people–including people who have since become politicians and political reporters–grew up believing the “badass chicken-playing Kennedy” myth and now think that that’s how “great men” are supposed to handle such crises.
Important addition to this, the nationalism we are currently facing is a direct result of the propaganda that was created in the ideologically warfare of the cold war. Both sides lost that war, we’re just losing it slower.
