An incredible piece not only confessing to but proudly bragging about the West's historic lies during the Cold War that are still repeated and taught to this day!
Think of the Berlin Airlift as a big-budget movie sold as a true story. Now one of its loudest fans finally admits it was staged.
For decades, the Berlin Airlift has been told as a fairy tale. Stalin blockaded the city: cruel and heartless, while heroic Western pilots fed starving Berliners with flour and chocolate from the sky.
The perfect moral script: light against darkness, liberty against tyranny, good vs evil. Exactly the same moral wiring that still fuels the superhero industry today, cultural programming as moral training.
The same Guardian now admits what Soviet and Eastern historians said all along: there was no full blockade. In Britain’s own National Archives, the Foreign Office wrote in 1948:
“The blockade of Berlin is NOT a siege… movement in and out of Germany is possible all the time.”
Do you want to know what really happened? Washington and London imposed a new currency in their occupation zones, breaking prior agreements with Moscow.
The Soviets responded with limited restrictions on Western transport: not starvation, not tanks, just a border dispute over sovereignty. But the West needed a story and it created one.
A three-billion-dollar media performance named The Berlin Airlift complete with cameras, pathos, and heroic speeches about “freedom.”
As The Guardian now concedes, the entire operation was “a massive and sensational story of air power applied to humanitarian ends.” In other words, propaganda. It even helped re-elect Harry Truman that same year.
By the way, the article doesn’t condemn this psychological manipulation but actually celebrates it. The author writes with longing for the era when the West “lied effectively,” calling for a revival of those tactics. But he got it wrong: the tactics never changed, the Western media keeps lying at the same speed and volume. The only thing that changed is that people recognize the pattern, and the spell weakens.
When liberal newspapers begin revealing their own disinformation with nostalgia, recalling the days when it worked and lamenting that it no longer does, they’re mourning the decay of their own illusion, fully aware of it, and desperate to keep the echo alive.