Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

It was the same story in France—and the same throughout Europe. In fact, if you look back, the main reason for the partition of Germany into Eastern and Western countries—which was Western-initiated, remember—was put rather nicely by George Kennan [of the U.S. State Department], who was one of the main architects of the post-war world. Back in 1946, he said: we have to “wall off” Western Germany (nice phrase) from the Eastern Zone, because of the danger that a German Communist movement might develop—which would just be too powerful; Germany’s an important, powerful country, you know, and since the world was kind of social-democratic at that time, a unified socialist movement in a place like Germany or Japan would have been totally intolerable. So therefore we had to wall off Western Germany from the Eastern Zone in order to prevent that possibility from taking place.