Cold War in Berlin

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The Cold War in Berlin An Ideological battle for Khrushchev and propaganda win for Kennedy The Berlin Wall, which stood between 1961-1989, is an illustrative case study to investigate how the Cold War was fought between two ideological superpowers and their leaders. It will allow for a full investigation into the extent to which an individual can shape the course of history. The Berlin Wall was primarily a way for Khrushchev to impose his communist ideology on East Germany; however, there was a personal dimension of one-upmanship between U.S President Kennedy, and Khrushchev that pushed Khrushchev into building the wall out of sheer spite for Kennedy. This will be proven by using a variety of primary and secondary evidence. Berlin was the epicentre of the Cold War. Many battles between Kennedy, President of the United States, and Khrushchev, premier of the Soviet Union, were fought in Berlin. In fact, the Berlin Wall came to symbolise American and Soviet Intransigence in the Cold War period. The Cold War is defined by historian Noam Chomsky: “[the] Cold War system is a macabre dance of death in which the rulers of the superpowers mobilize their own populations to support harsh and brutal measures directed against victims within what they take to be their respective domains, where they are protecting their ‘legitimate interests’. (cited in Hoepper et.al. 1996,p.194) Chomsky’s definition applies to the Berlin Wall as it describes how the leaders mobilized their nations to support their harsh ideological endevours. Khrushchev attempted to convince the East German population that the wall was being built to protect them from spies from West Germany. Kennedy saw the Wall as an oppurtunity to expose the unpopularity of Soviet Communism. Ideology pertains to the basis of an ecenomic or political theory(Moore. B 2008). Kennedy’s ideology of democracy,
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