A Historian Reacts | Oversimplified - Cold War (Part 1)

welcome back everybody to another reaction video this has been one of the most requested reaction videos uh the people have been asking for it's the cold war series from oversimplified there's a part two that we will get to tomorrow today we're going to take a look at part one a couple of things before we get started you may notice if you're familiar with the channel a little bit different format for the reaction video today i'm just trying something new i would love to hear your feedback your thoughts on it typically i do it with a green screen and i have the whole video playing behind me but i've had some people comment and let me know a couple of things number one that sometimes you can't see everything on the screen because i'm sitting in front of parts of it especially if there are words on the screen the other thing is that some of the reaction videos i've tried to do but have had copyright issues with in particular epic history tv some folks have let me know that the reason why is because i make it full screen instead of smaller like this so i'm going to try it with a couple of videos and get your feedback on it i may have to do this with some series just to avoid any copyright issues because of how big i make the video uh so but let me know your thoughts about that a couple other things i want to mention number one if you're into uh history gaming or strategy gaming at all i do have a gaming channel that i've had for the last four years it's called history guy gaming there's a link in the description if you want to check that out and subscribe to that channel i would greatly appreciate that the other thing is i had an unexpected trip to virginia over the last couple of days i just got back from that that's why there hasn't been any content the last few days but because of that i managed to squeeze in visits to the yorktown battlefield to cold harbor and hollywood cemetery in richmond so you can be watching in the coming days for some original content from my visits to those places make sure you're subscribed and hit the notification bell so that you'll be notified as soon as those videos go live all right let's dive into this this is cold war oversimplified part one uh this is cool because this is one of the few uh reaction videos i do uh over an event that i actually lived through part of i'm old enough to remember the the fall of the berlin wall the fall of the soviet union those were really big deals uh at the time that they happened i was uh 12 13 years old when all those events were unfolding so i'm excited when we get to part two to talk about that but here we go i've decided that in order to sell more merch i should do a face reveal wearing some of it so are you ready here we go boom new minimalist and cold war merch available now and get the new limited edition churchill character pin before it sells out with more characters coming in the future link in the description down below the year is 1917. fighting rages on the eastern front of the first world war both germany and russia are on the brink of collapse soldier i need you to bring me this man got it found himself sean lennon no not let none lennon the russian communist what why would i need a beetle lenin the russian communist he was exiled to switzerland you know what i'll do it myself who wants to start a revolution [Music] the germans put london on a train and sent him all the way back to russia hoping he and his mates would create an internal crisis so one of the things that i always really appreciate about uh oversimplified is they do a good job of showing you how different events are tied together uh how one event leads into another and of course how world war one and the events of the rebel russian revolution lead directly into the events of world war ii which lead directly into the events of the cold war you back all that up you know without certain things happening uh even all the way back to the franco-prussian war to the napoleonic wars certain things all set up the next domino that falls and so obviously the russian revolution and communism and the cold war have its direct roots in the events of world war one and create an internal crisis they did the government was overthrown and lenin was in charge he immediately pulled out of the first world war made the country communist started a three-year-long civil war got shot broke the economy caused the famine and then he died and one of the other things that i won't harp on this too much but i've talked about this in some other videos um you know it's it's pretty much common parlance to describe the soviet union as communist to describe it as a communist government a communist revolution we still to this day call china communist and vietnam communist and cuba communists but technically speaking none of those countries are communists because communism by nef by definition is a stateless existence and so in order to have communism you can't have a government so there can't really be a communist government um we we use that term obviously but it really is just an extreme form of totalitarian socialism on his deathbed he said hey man tell whoever's in charge of giving people jobs not to let that jerk stalin become the next leader by the way who did i put in charge of giving people stalin that would be stalin sir stalin was a rising force in the communist party he still had some opponents but conveniently all of them were arrested or disappeared so that was lucky and so stalin took over he implemented his five-year plans which transformed the country from an agriculture-based economy to an industrial one and like lenin before him he reigned with terror anyone who dared criticize or oppose him would either be killed or left to rot in the horrendous soviet work camps and we've talked about this before in other videos as well that reigning with terror will get you so far but eventually it will hurt you because you need in order to be effective leader you need people who are willing to tell you the things that you don't want to hear and when you rule through terror you don't get that you get a bunch of yes men who tell you what they think you want to hear rather than what you need to hear and eventually it actually hurts stalin to the point where he may have died because of it it hurt hitler because um you know when the normandy landings happened nobody wanted to wake him up so all throughout history it's a double-edged sword you get so far but then eventually you hurt yourself by not hearing the tough things and we all need that we need friends who tell us the things we don't want to hear but we that we need to hear in our lives and we're better off for it then a short man with a silly mustache tried to take over the world it's interesting that he calls hitler a short man i don't think hitler was all that short i want to say it was like 5 10. i'm gonna look it up because i'm not sure okay so here you go churchill's five seven so i would put stalin right around the same about five seven hitler was five nine uh so there you have it if we're talking short men stalin was shorter than hitler so was churchill all right let's get back to the uh the video here punch the russians all the way to moscow and then the russians with some help from their faithful ally the winter punch them all the way back to berlin at this point being allies america the uk and the soviet union were good chumps they held a couple of conferences near the end of the war to decide what would happen next hey stalin after all your trials and tribulation you must be pretty happy to be standing here in berlin sarah alexander made it all the way to paris uh hey uh ju just give me a second hey man i think something's up with stalin i know right what should we do shall i tell him about the bomb yeah tell him about the bomb all right so i don't know if they're referring to the potsdam conference here but if they are i don't think churchill was there i think it would have been clement atlee at that point churchill was um was voted out in july of 1945 so by the time you get to the end of world war ii uh with japan's surrender you've got you know new president in the united states uh in april of 1945 um roosevelt dies truman takes over you've got a new prime minister in the uk in july of 1945 so i think it was clement atlee but it was at the potsdam conference that uh the allies since we pretty much know the wars won and for a while now we've been thinking about what comes next and what comes next is everybody already knew that it was going to turn into a struggle between the east and the west a struggle between stalin and the western powers and so by potsdam they're already thinking about how are we going to deal with stalin in a post-war world that will scare him so we got this crazy new big a-bomb that can destroy an entire city in one go yes my spies told me already oh wait i'm intact surprised wow that's amazing and truman did think that using the bomb would help uh with dealing and reigning in stalin but he didn't realize that stalin already knew about it and by this point he was already working on plans to get his own and within a few years he had one he already knew how um am i sure i want to send nuclear secrets via unsecure public coffee shop wi-fi am i ever dude use a vpn and speaking of vpns if like me you take internet safety seriously then you need nordvpn nordvpn hides your online activities from outside intruders preventing anyone from stealing your personal data and stopping your service providers selling your data to advertisers with over 5000 servers in 62 countries it allows you to surf the net anonymously and securely and it's simple to use with just a click of a button you can connect to a server halfway across the world even allowing you to access streaming services from that specific territory say for example you wanted to watch a certain oversimplified video that for some reason has been blocked in your country yeah that's a good point i use it uh for watching content um in the uk such as soccer that sometimes is not airing here um i also have used it when i don't even know why i'm commenting on this this is just his sponsor but um sometimes when i'm out speaking in schools and you're connected to the wi-fi network and it won't let you get on something like facebook you can use a vpn to get around that with nordvpn you can it works seamlessly across pc mobile and tablet go to nordvpn.com oversimplified to get an amazing 75 percent off that's just 2.99 per month with an additional month free for a limited time so again that's nordvpn.com oversimplified also in the description box down below now where were we oh yeah does the a stand for atomic or ass then america dropped their big a-bomb on japan and world war ii officially came to an end hooray we won okay so now it's time to establish the new world order stalin you're in charge of eastern europe now we want you to let them all hold elections oh yes of course elections and these elections are free and fair right oh yes certainly free and fair definitely free and fair communist communist communist communist communist communist if that's not free and fair i don't know it is throughout eastern europe soviet puppet governments were established as a buffer zone between the ussr and the west and churchill who was quite wise about these things and understood that was coming um like i said by this point is no longer prime minister in the uk he's in missouri i think like the year after the war ends giving a speech and that's where he first uses the term iron curtain to describe how an iron curtain has descended over eastern europe and that becomes the term that even in my childhood i still heard all the time the iron curtain describing this kind of line between west and east this is the world i grew up with this is the map that existed when i was a kid was we had in east germany up until i was like 12 years old we had czechoslovakia and poland and hungary and romania and all these communist governments in these countries and it was fascinating to watch this unfold in my the beginning of my teenage years as one by one these countries became real democracies with churchill proclaiming an iron curtain had descended across the continent the relationship between the old allies was deteriorating fast over the next few years the british intervened in the greek civil war to prevent a communist takeover in turkey the russians began demanding more control of turkey's c-axis rats which prompted the us to send their largest battleship to turkey for a friendly visit after world war ii iran was now occupied by both the soviets and the british with an agreement to both pull out once the war was over the british pulled out stalin was like you know what i think i might stick around all in favor of kicking russia out of iran so let's talk about the u.n security council for a minute you don't hear much about it these days because it seems like the un's lost a lot of its power and influence on these things but the security council has five permanent members and that was created after world war ii uh it's the uk france united states china and russia now but at the time soviet union and any resolution there are also other members that rotate any resolution that is brought to the security council could be automatically vetoed by one of those five permanent members so you could have everybody else in favor of something in the entire world and china says nope we're nixing that and it could be vetoed u.s soviet union could do that and a lot of times that happened but in this case everybody else agreed soviet should pull out and this was one of the few times where they actually listened you want to know something you guys suck pressure from the un forced the soviets to leave and with the establishment of nato the soviets had no doubt that the west was out to encircle and destroy them so north atlantic treaty organization i think it's called otan in uh in french america announced the truman doctrine in which they basically said those guys are not cool cannot be trusted and we will do everything we can to prevent containment communism around the world many view this moment as the official declaration of the cold war and this becomes the basis for uh the korean war the vietnam war some of the other things that happened the cuban missile crisis is this constant kind of we can't let communism spread anywhere else it's why you had the bay of pigs you know the u.s did not want a communist country 90 miles off the florida coast even though the soviets were dealing with the same thing with allied countries nato countries right off of their borders so this becomes kind of what dictates politics for the next 50 years world geopolitical system is all based on this idea of containment back in europe everyone was living in a post-apocalyptic void brought on by the second world war cities reduced to rubble not enough food it was terrible this is great the more they suffer the more likely it is they'll turn to communism dude you're really messed up what's wrong with you my father used to punish me severely america so that was a little homage to uh previous oversimplified videos who this enraged his father who punished him severely realized what was going on and quickly made a move under the marshall plan they sent 12 billion dollars to western europe for its economic recovery the countries of stalin's eastern bloc looked on with envy hey czechoslovakia you want to come get some economic aid yeah but i have to check with my mom first [Laughter] so george c marshall is who the marshall plan is named after george c marshall was the army chief of staff during world war ii the guy must have been absolutely brilliant when it came to logistics and things like that uh he's a i think a captain and then later maybe a major or a colonel during world war one but even though he was only a captain he basically planned the us strategy in world war one uh he was on general pershing's staff and pershing trusted marshall so much that he basically let this let marshall plan everything marshall was to pershing what alexander hamilton had been to george washington in the revolution and so then marshall's chief of staff during world war ii uh afterwards he becomes both uh at one time the um secretary of war secretary of defense i guess it is after world war ii and then uh secretary of state for truman uh and so you have the guy who basically was in charge of the u.s military during world war ii ends up getting a nobel peace prize in the early 1950s because of his work with the marshall plan and other things sorry america i can't come this was a full-on economic battle raging between capitalism and communism in europe if the western nations developed faster and better than the east that would be a defeat for stalin so he set up his own rival economic recovery plan which he called comic-con and he also set up common form which gave him more political control over the eastern bloc but nowhere did this economic battle rage harder than in the city of berlin it caught over a hundred miles behind soviet lines the city had been divided up between the allies and the western segments were still under western control east berliners could travel freely to west berlin see the economic prosperity and think hm maybe this communism thing ain't so great after all i'm gonna have fun tonight you're home late oh stalin i was just out with my friends friends you stink of capitalism you're out engaging in imperialist debauchery again i swear ivan i can't keep doing this stalin wanted the west out so he said hey guess what i'm blocking all of your supply routes to west berlin what are you gonna do about it fly it i suppose we'll just fly the supplies in and you see these airplanes coming in like one after the other that is not an exaggeration i mean you look it up sometime i don't know the numbers but the um the logistics involved in this the amount of flights that were going into east berlin or into west berlin to bring these supplies in by air over these next couple of years it's just incredible it's it's absolutely mind-boggling what we pulled off [Music] all right truman you in this round the berlin airlift was an incredible undertaking and a major success for the western allies and stalin ended his blockade of west berlin his aggressive actions worried the west but not as much as this did the soviet union had developed their very own atomic bomb the usa no longer had a nuclear monopoly the world now knew that if a major war broke out between the two superpowers it would be more destructive than anyone could imagine so it was comforting when stalin came out and said the war between the soviet union and the west was unlikely no that's not what he said oh wait inevitable he said it was inevitable hey you know who i haven't checked in on in a while my good friend china whoa what happened to you what happened to them was a full-blown civil war that had been going on since 1927 the people's liberation army under the leadership of mao zedong successfully defeated the republic of china who fled to taiwan the now communist china and the soviet union signed a mutual defense treaty this was terrible news for the west but wait there's more after the second world war korea was divided along the 38th parallel in the north the soviets set up a communist regime in the south america set up an anti-communist regime both were basically dictators people forget that south korea was every bit as much the dictatorship that north korea was it just happened to be a pro-western dictatorship and we can't let that reference to taiwan go by because taiwan does still to this day claim to be the legitimate chinese government and it is a very delicate situation because that little country that little island off the coast very easily could be the spark that starts world war iii if china decided to occupy taiwan and we decided to defend it we meaning the western allies and decided to defend them which we would probably do that could be the the thing that sparks off a major war but in the meantime we're talking about korea and this is where the next fight's going to be and there was a strong consideration for using nuclear weapons using atomic bombs in korea to win that war thankfully it didn't happen both were led by very sweet looking old men but don't let that deceive you they were both ruthless dictators and both dreamed of reuniting korea under their own regime now that he had the bomb stalin was feeling a little more cocky and he finally gave kim permission to attack the north launched a surprise invasion of the south on june 25th 1950 with soviet aid the north koreans steamrolled through taking seoul in just three days and replacing one ruthless dictator with another the un were freaking out and quickly created an emergency force made up of troops from 16 countries to defend the south the west still held busan and made landings at incheon near seoul they pushed the north koreans out of seoul replacing the ruthless dictator that'll replace the first release dictator with the same ruthless dictator that had previously been replaced by the new ruthless dictator and the west then continued all the way up the korean peninsula at this point china was getting worried that the u.n may just keep going the us had sent this guy to lead the operation after winning the pacific theater of world war ii general douglas macarthur's head was big and his balls were bigger so let's talk about macarthur for a second because yeah i mean this photo first of all is a big big deal and if you haven't seen the movie the emperor with tommy lee jones i highly recommend that you do it and uh matthew fox is in it uh he is kind of the main character um plays uh a brigadier general uh who kind of basically was the one most responsible for exonerating the emperor from any implication in war uh war crimes his name was bonner fellers incidentally totally off topic but matthew fox is a great great great grandson of union general george mead but the story behind how this photo came to take place is really fascinating and it's shown in that movie but macarthur has always got these really big ambitions and he's got ambition for being president someday and eventually that comes between him and uh truman he reassured president truman that there was absolutely no way at all that the chinese would ever get involved meanwhile half a million chinese troops were crossing into korea nukem no nukem no ah come on you're fired the u.s considered the nuclear option but now that the soviets also had the bomb they didn't want to risk all that global destruction so if the soviets didn't have the bomb there's a good chance we probably would have used it in north korea my great uncle uh paul was in the korean war and he described seeing the human wave uh attacks by chinese troops that they faced and uh just said it was quite something and uh reminded him a lot of what you read about in the uh first and second world war these massive amounts of uh russian and or soviet troops that were just kind of pouring into the fighting the communists pushed the west right back almost to the exact same spot they had all started from and they ended up in a stalemate where they remained until both sides finally agreed to work towards the peace settlement in 2018. back in america americans decided they wanted a new president who would be tough on communism so they elected a famed world war ii general eisenhower who is really hard to draw it's 1953. hey stalin how you doing oh he's dead he had a cerebral hemorrhage and his reign of terror kinda came back to bite him in the air because he had imprisoned all of his best doctors and those that were left were too terrified to treat him remember we talked about that how fear in the end can be a problem for you and i've mentioned this several times before but if you're new to the channel if you don't mind some dark humor check out the movie the death of stalin it's a comedic version of the events that happened but not real far off the historic reality of what happened definitely worth checking out the new leader nikita khrushchev called the meeting and said hey guys you know how stalin was imprisoning and murdering us all for doing basically nothing yeah he was kind of a jerk destalinization i'm sure how this is news to you khrushchev went on a campaign of destalinization statues of stalin were taken down stalingrad was renamed and khrushchev announced that he wanted the soviet people to be happy and would allow greater freedom in the soviet union so how did that work out well an uprising in east germany was brutally suppressed a revolution in hungary was brutally suppressed and demonstrations in poland were brutally suppressed although he did finally allow some mild reforms back in the soviet union he permitted more cultural expression but then began banning stuff based on his own personal taste modern art looks like a child urinated on a canvas banned jazz music sounds like the feeling of needing to fart banned your poetry is really depressing how could anyone in the soviet union be depressed you're banned khrushchev wanted the soviet people to be happy but not like that or that or that so khrushchev during the second world war was a political commissar it was kind of his responsibility to deal with the morale and the support of the people uh he was in stalingrad during the battle of stalingrad and he was kind of the head of the the commissars dealing with that end of things i think he ended up a lieutenant general during the war incidentally stalin's granddaughter is an american nikita khrushchev's grandson became an american i actually had a chance to meet him a number of years ago he came and spoke at a local high school his name was sergey i think and he was a an american as well um the uh claimant to the romanov dynasty uh as a as a 90 some year old man who lives in california who's an american it's kind of interesting how that all happened young people began enjoying abort western pop culture son remove that disgusting imperialist apparel at once shut up dad you can't tell me what to do well would you look at that turns out he can tell me what to do the west had initially liked the cut of khrushchev's jib but world events soon soured relations even more the two sides were spying on each other a whole lot throughout the cold war the kgb had spies and informants in nearly every aspect of western life and government so much so that whenever the u.s tried to send spies into the soviet union the kgb were usually ready to arrest them on the spot members of the manhattan project aided the soviet union in acquiring the bomb some american officials believed they were on the wrong side i'll sell you three secrets for five million dollars okay go ahead the allies are digging a tunnel under east berlin to tap your communications there's an american agent living at this address in moscow and sometimes when i'm home alone i like to put on my wife's dresses sit in the corner and cry for hours very interesting in america fear took hold during the red scare and the mccarthy trials american values imploded as fear of communism collided with freedom of thought and expression and actually that's something that we learned at least when i was in high school we learned a lot about and there were actually a lot of comparisons made at least in my english class between mccarthyism and the salem witch trials in the 1690s where you have people going after anybody they suspect and people would start that was a way of getting rid of people right in salem it was uh you know that person i have a grudge about from five years ago over a fight over my farmland i'm going to accuse them of being a witch so i can get rid of them in the 1950s it became accuse your political enemies of being communists so that you can out them and get them dealt with and get them blacklisted from society today we throw around terms like racism or we throw around terms like fascism and i'm not saying that those things don't exist and that they are an evil i'm just saying that in every generation there are accusations that people will hurl at someone to effectively remove them from influence and communists kind of became a buzzword thrown around to describe anything people didn't like hollywood communist your next door neighbor's dog communist when the grocery store cashier asks if you need a bag when you clearly can't carry 10 tubs of bacon a's in your hands communist but one area in particular where the us had an edge over the soviet union was in its espionage technology in particular u2 spy planes flew across russia carrying out surveillance from the skies there was a nasty incident in 1960 though when one was shot down and khrushchev was furious who the hell is this he's a high altitude weather enthusiast of course okay that sounds plausible wait a minute why does he have a gun and a poison needle because he's a very naughty high-altitude weather enthusiast but much to america's concern the soviet union appeared to be ahead in the space race everyone freaked out when russia launched the world's first satellite and then they actually sent a man into space even worse there also appeared to be a missile gap in the soviet's favor and khrushchev was so confident that even allowed the u.s to set up a technology exhibit in moscow attended by a certain vice president richard nixon check this out we have color tv yes but we've been to space and can obliterate you with our massive nuclear arsenal check out this vegetable peeler tensions increased further when both sides upgraded their atomic bombs to hydrogen bombs and after west germany was allowed to join nato in 1955 khrushchev set up the defensive warsaw pact strengthening the military ties between the soviet union and its satellite states in 1960 americans decided they wanted a new president who would be tough on communism so they elected john f kennedy the soviet union was advancing its technology but it was also bleeding its coffers dry and all the money was going towards the military not the people life under communism was still as hard as ever and berlin remained a thorn in the soviet side the contrast between the economically prosperous west and the struggling east was clearer day by day and east berliners were still able to freely travel to the west now many of them were deciding to stay there so it's interesting that under stalin who everyone perceives as being the more hard line of the two east and west berlin were still open and people could pass freely from one to the other that it's only under uh under khrushchev that you get the berlin wall uh and you get this big showdown with the cuban missile crisis and again as i mentioned i don't know if we'll get to it today uh the us is all concerned about cuba and the possibility of missiles there but you have turkey and west germany right there i mean turkey in particular is just as close to the soviet union as cuba is to the united states and we had missiles there and that actually becomes a bargaining chip millions defected to west germany by west berlin causing eastern factories to lose workers and taking a heavy toll on the economy soviet leaders decided this couldn't continue any longer first khrushchev tried this leave west berlin or else or else what or else i'll be really mad at you yeah no we're gonna stay listen man west berlin is ours east berlin is yours that's just how it is kennedy felt pretty good about a show of american resolve but wait a second did you catch that let's replay it [Music] uh oh kennedy just told khrushchev that the usa wouldn't interfere what the soviets did with their section of berlin so khrushchev came up with a new idea we're going to build a wall and it's going to be a big beautiful wall and it's going to keep out all the mexicans oh sorry it's going to keep in all the mexicans on august 13 1961 berliners woke up to find their city divided into two with barbed wire and guards blocking the border between east and west over time a wall was constructed throughout the city families were torn apart thousands would risk their lives escaping over the wall and hundreds would die trying and you know for me the berlin wall was probably the most well-known part of the cold war growing up as a kid that was something you heard about all the time i remember watching president reagan's speech where he said mr gorbachev tear down this wall uh it became kind of a focal point and i have to wonder how something as symbolic as that whether or not that played into the eventual fall of these governments in the in the east to the despair of berliners the west were unable to do anything about it but the wall did put on full display the failure of the communist system as kennedy said democracy is not perfect but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in as part of the agreement between the two sides u.s diplomats were still allowed to travel to east berlin but suddenly east berlin crossing guards started giving them the business and kennedy was like in october the us world tanks up to the crossing point at checkpoint charlie as a show of strength the soviets did the same and the two were in a standoff they stayed like that for 16 hours and the world braced for nuclear armageddon thankfully though kennedy called khrushchev directly and was like hey man this is getting way too hot how about you back your tanks up by an inch and we'll do the same sounds good okay how about you back your tanks up by another inch and we'll follow suit alright hey you want to do another inch and they both very slowly inched away from the apocalypse phew let's hope that's the biggest crisis of my presidency it wasn't yeah so i people don't realize how close how incredibly close we came to uh just devastating world war iii in uh during kennedy's administration and to his great credit he handled that crisis beautifully i give him all the credit in the world for that but we'll talk about that in tomorrow's episode let me know your thoughts about all of that i'm excited to continue this conversation use a comment section below check out those links in the description below that i i mentioned earlier and make sure you head over to the original video which is also in the link in the description give them a like and a comment we'll see you tomorrow thanks for watching

Channel: Vlogging Through History

Views: 232,171

Rating: 4.9352493 out of 5

Keywords: oversimplified reaction, cold war, historian reacts, history reaction, oversimplified cold war, oversimplified cold war reaction, history guy gaming, mr terry reaction, History teacher reaction, oversimplified reaction cold war, historian reacts to oversimplified, oversimplified reaction history teacher, history teacher reacts, reaction video, vlogging through history, cold war oversimplified

Id: zqGgKycT-Uo

Length: 32min 54sec (1974 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021