The Slacker's Guide to U.S. History: The Bare Minimum on Discovering America, the Boston Tea Party, the California Gold Rush, and Lots of Other Stuff Dead White Guys Did (28 page)

World War II made Germany look so bad that even giving us Heidi Klum isn't enough to make up for the damage. Hitler made good on his hate for Jewish people, as a staggering 6 million were killed in concentration camps during the war. At the end of the day, Hitler makes Osama Bin Laden look like a teenage punk with a can of spray paint. The estimates of those killed in the war are mind numbing. Germany lost approximately 8.3 million people, of which 20 percent were civilians. The Allied count was a staggering 39.9 million, with civilians making up over half that number.

The result of the war shaped the world as we know it today. The United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union emerged as the dominant global players.
NATO WAS FORMED, AND GERMANY EVENTUALLY BECAME KNOWN MORE FOR BEER AND SAUSAGE THAN ASPIRATIONS OF GLOBAL DOMINATION.

Brrr! The Cold War was not the battle between Dairy Queen and Baskin Robbins to establish ice-cream supremacy and the right to feed overweight and willing Americans all the high-caloric dairy products they could ever eat. No, the Cold War entailed the competition on all fronts between the Soviet Union, the United States, and their respective allies and puppet governments.
THE COMPETITION WAS ABOUT AS SUBTLE AS A MESSAGE ON YOUR ANSWERING MACHINE FROM PAT O'BRIEN OR A MARV ALBERT TOUPEE.
So whether it was the arms race, the space race, or a three-legged race, the two superpowers were in competition over anything and everything.

Allies at the conclusion of World War II, the United States and the USSR turned enemies as they disagreed on how to put the world back together again. Their different government philosophies made things extremely difficult. Like two giants entangled in a massive game of “1-2-3-4, I declare a thumb war,” these two nations fought indirectly for the better part of four decades.

The Korean War, Vietnam War, and the Soviet-Afghan crisis were all wars in which the United States and the Soviets did battle without having an all out Hearns/Sugar Ray throw-down. Terms of endearment like “mutual assured destruction” prevented the two foes from pushing the big red button, launching nukes at each other, and throwing the world into nuclear chaos.

From the jump, the Soviets pushed for international supremacy. They defended their right to spread communism globally despite its shortcomings, while at the same time attempting to intimidate the United States. In 1957, the Soviets shot a little fear into the American mindset when they launched the first intercontinental ballistic missile and, later that same year, sent the first satellite, named Sputnik, into orbit. Four years later, in 1961, Mother Russia demanded the withdrawal of all Allied troops from Berlin, Germany. When they received a polite, yet firm “no,” they created scores of day-labor jobs by building a “keep the people in” wall.

As the arms race continued, a game of chicken ensued. Both superpowers stockpiled enough nukes to blow up our planet, Venus, Mercury, and our planet again. In 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the two nations to the brink of war. Finally, cooler heads prevailed, as neither nation wanted to bring nuclear winter to the world. Tension eased slightly, and the world breathed a sigh of relief.

As the years dragged on like an unhappy sexless marriage, the Soviet Union continued to spend gazillions of rubles on an arsenal of weapons designed to destroy the United States, to the detriment of their own people's standard of living.
ONCE PRESIDENT REAGAN RAN OUT OF BIRTHMARK JOKES, SOVIET PRESIDENT MIKHAIL GORBACHEV AGREED TO AN ARMS REDUCTION BETWEEN THE TWO NATIONS.
This reduction was followed by the Soviet Union embracing its own version of capitalism.

Unfortunately for Gorbachev, he learned that capitalism is no quick fix for a struggling economy. After years of experimenting with capitalism, the Russian people are now enjoying the good with the bad. For many, the best part of capitalism is their new-found choices in American ice cream.