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La Tâche Rouge, le roman de la guerre froide / The Red Stain, the Cold War Novel (Book) by André Fontaine, Very Good Condition, 559 pages. Editions La Martinière. 2004. French language.
Globalization is not exactly a new idea. The October Revolution was intended to be just as global as the war from which it emerged, and President Wilson’s America already believed itself responsible for converting the entire world to democracy and capitalism. The ambitions of the two empires were too universal to be reconcilable. Lenin repeated: “It will be them or us.” And Stalin told an emissary of Tito in June 1944 that the Anglo-Saxons, then his allies against Hitler, would never accept the existence of the immense Soviet red stain.
In light of the many revelations that have come to light since the breakup of the USSR, this book recounts the origins and major stages of what would ultimately be the Third World War. A war that was called “cold”, because the fear of the apocalypse allowed, sometimes at the last second, as in the Cuban missile crisis, to find exits from all the dramatic “death to the brink” that marked it. From Korea to the Caribbean, via Vietnam, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and ex-Portuguese Africa, it nonetheless caused more deaths than all the other wars in History, with the exception of that of 39-45. And it led to a crazy arms race. On several occasions, the use of nuclear weapons had many advocates in the West, and Mao lightly envisaged an atomic conflict that could have wiped out “half the world’s population” to ensure the final victory of socialism.
André Fontaine, director of the newspaper Le Monde, retraces half a century of the Cold War. It highlights the chain of events that led to the separation of the world into two blocs, describes the issues: ideological, strategic, colonial, etc., discusses the conflicts that it gave rise to: Vietnam, Ethiopia, etc. and takes stock of its consequences: arms race, human losses, etc.
