The Good Guys Lost the Cold War

The Cold War: A War of Capitalist Aggression

The capitalist empires of Europe and their imperialist master, the United States, who waged war on the world’s people during the Cold War—not in defense of freedom, but in defense of profit.

Colonialism Never Ended

When the guns of World War II fell silent, the European bourgeoisie faced a crisis: their empires were crumbling under the pressure of national liberation movements. From Algeria to Vietnam, Kenya to Malaya, the oppressed peoples of the Global South were rising up. They demanded not simply independence, but transformation—land, dignity, and socialism. What was the response of the so-called “free world”?

Massacres, torture, and military occupation.

Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal all sought to cling to their colonial possessions through violence, often with the full support or collaboration of U.S. imperialism. The Cold War for them was not a defensive posture against Soviet expansion—it was a counterrevolutionary war to suppress socialist uprisings and preserve neocolonial domination. When France lost Vietnam, the U.S. took its place. When Britain lost influence in the Middle East, the CIA moved in. The Cold War was a relay race of imperial terror.

Capitalist Europe: Reactionary Terrors

Western Europe cloaked itself in the language of “liberalism” while erecting a continent-wide security architecture designed to crush labor militancy, resist socialist currents, and secure capitalist rule. NATO was not a shield against aggression—it was an offensive instrument of imperial unity, a gendarme force that protected capital’s access to markets and resources.

Even within their own borders, the European capitalist states acted with brutal discipline. Communist parties were banned, labor strikes crushed, and workers' movements surveilled and infiltrated. Anti-communist hysteria justified everything: McCarthyism in the U.S. had its counterparts in France, Germany, Italy, and beyond. Bourgeois democracy, so loudly celebrated, was allowed only so long as it posed no threat to private property and class hierarchy.

The Socialist CounterHegemonic Force

Contrary to Western propaganda, the USSR and its allies did not initiate the Cold War—they responded to it. Surrounded, encircled, and blockaded from the very beginning, the Soviet Union nonetheless stood as a material force against global imperialism. It armed anti-colonial movements in Africa, supported Cuba against U.S. aggression, and helped rebuild the colonized world.

The USSR's defense of anti-colonial revolutions was at its core, an attempt to build a society beyond neo-imperialist exploitation—a project that terrified the European bourgeoisie not because it was tyrannical, but because it offered greater freedom the working masses of the colonized world.

Whose Freedom? Whose Democracy?

The Cold War was not a war between “freedom” and “tyranny.” It was a class war on a global scale. It was a war between empires trying to preserve their wealth and privilege and peoples fighting for liberation, equality, and sovereignty. The European capitalist states were not victims—they were perpetrators.

They bombed villages in the name of liberty. They propped up fascist dictators in the name of democracy. They murdered revolutionaries in the name of peace. They lied, time and again, to their own populations to preserve a system in which a tiny minority could live in luxury while billions toiled in poverty.

The Cold War never truly ended—it simply evolved. Today, European capitalist powers, alongside U.S. imperialism, continue to wage economic warfare through debt, sanctions, and military alliances. They continue to demonize any country that resists their hegemony as “authoritarian” while turning a blind eye to monarchies, apartheid states, and fascist collaborators when it suits capital.