Cold War
1951
Joseph
Stalin attacks the United Nations
In a
statement focusing on the situation in Korea, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin
charges that the United Nations has become “a weapon of aggressive war.” He
also suggested that although a world war was not inevitable “at the present
time,” “warmongers” in the West might trigger such a conflict.
Stalin’s
comments in response to queries from the Soviet newspaper Pravdawere
his first public statements about the nearly year-old conflict in Korea, in
which the United States, South Korea, and other member nations of the United
Nations were arrayed against forces of North Korea and communist China. Coming
just over two weeks after the U.N. General Assembly’s resolution condemning
China as an aggressor, Stalin’s statement turned the tables by declaring that the
United Nations was “burying its moral prestige and dooming itself to
disintegration.” He warned that Western “warmongers,” through their aggressive
posture in Korea, would “manage to entangle the popular masses in lies, deceive
them, and drag them into a new world war.” In any event, he confidently
predicted that Chinese forces in Korea would be victorious because the armies
opposing them lacked morale and dedication to the war.
Despite
the rather blistering tone of Stalin’s words, Western observers were not unduly
alarmed. Stalin’s attacks on Western “aggression” were familiar, and some
officials in Washington took comfort in the premier’s assertion that a world
war was not inevitable “at the present time.” Indeed, there was some feeling
that Stalin’s denouncement of the United Nations’ actions was actually a veiled
call for negotiations through the auspices of that body. Stalin’s comments, and
the intense scrutiny they were subjected to in the West, were more evidence
that in the Cold War, the “war of words” was almost as significant as any
actual fighting.
COURTESY: HISTORY.com
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