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The Cold War

15:55 / 08.04.02

This may get more responses in The Conversation, but we'll see:

In 1995, when I was 17, I first started paying attention to current events and the news and the rest. The result of this, is that I have no real memory of the Cold War and the Evil Soviets beyond Mad Magazine jokes, Doonesbury, and vague memories of the Berlin Wall coming down.

I'm just wondering to those who were old enough to realise what was going on back then: Is the whole Bush-threatening-with-nukes/Chaos in the West Bank/Russians massacaring Chechnyians with US approval/Afghanistan being re-occupied/etc./ that's going on now, nothing compared to the stress and feeling of nuclear doom that was (apparently) common back then?

15:57 / 08.04.02

Were things like Iran/Contra, the Sandanistas, 80s Afghanistan, just as stressful as Israel, the pending bombing of Bagdhad, etc.? I thought of this as many times I'll go to write a reply in an Israel thread, but find myself too stressed out and frustrated to actually articulate a sentence. Were things worse in the 70s-80s? Same? Better?

gozer the destructor

16:38 / 08.04.02

It feels it to me, just since 'the tragic events of' 9/11, the governments of the world seems to more paranoid, civil liberties seem to be being reduced quite rapidly with regards to free speach esp. in this country-perhaps it's just me, but I have got rid of my TV now.

19:46 / 08.04.02

But is this something new? Or was it like this before the 90s, and we just missed it?

18:47 / 09.04.02

It's fresher now.
And less existential - the Cold War was really about the extinction of life on Earth. All gone.
This latest thing, though, is more about dangerous strangers. Personal death rather than global extinction.

Would you rather be standing in a room with a trapdoor over a shark tank, or in a room with 30 kilogram weights dropping from the ceiling at random intervals?

It's also less about puppets - Sandanistas vs. Contras is safer (farther away) than al Qaeda vs. New York, London, Berlin, wherever.

19:55 / 09.04.02

Grant's right. There was certainly an air of world annihilation and possible dystopia via our government but it always seemed kept at bay. Less possible than it is now.

I do remember the same sort of insipid jingoism around the time of the Gulf War (endless repeats of Lee Greenwood's God Bless The USA on the radio and those obnoxious yellow ribbons) which makes me think that all this patriotic b.s. will eventually exhaust itself and Bush's number will probably be up by the end of his term.

Dubya may think he lucked out by getting this so early on but he needs to ask his dad how long public support for his father lasted when the war spectacle was over and the press focused on riots in the streets.

20:17 / 09.04.02

It's also less about puppets - Sandanistas vs. Contras is safer (farther away) than al Qaeda vs. New York, London, Berlin, wherever.

The concept of governments using puppets to fight their wars has been well understood after the Cold War and now people are more likely to respond against the puppet master, so one follows from the other. It's also generally a more globalised age. Still, if we think that we're in more danger, it's not much compared to the millions who are living in war zones right now...

21:46 / 09.04.02

Grant wrote: It's fresher now. And less existential - the Cold War was really about the extinction of life on Earth. All gone.
This latest thing, though, is more about dangerous strangers. Personal death rather than global extinction

Dekapot Mass wrote: Grant's right. There was certainly an air of world annihilation and possible dystopia via our government but it always seemed kept at bay. Less possible than it is now.

So: The Cold War was more stable since it was always there (I'm assuming very few of the 1007 of us were actually around in the 40s-60s when it began), and had more of the 'same old' to it when shit went down in whatever part of the world, whereas all of this is more chaotic and seems to be leading to a large change, with the outlook for the worse?

Maybe this is what the Cold War was like at the beginning, with the first threats of a nuclear holocaust and the spread of right-wing dictatorships to counter the left-wing dictatorships around the world....

...another circle of history coming around again, with a hopeful change at some vital moment soon.

22:31 / 09.04.02

I remember the world broken in to two parts, one without colour - a grey, cloth-capped demonic Totalitarian/Communism - and the other a fragile bickering riot of life and Social Democracy/Capitalism.

I remember wondering where the nearest bomb shelter to my home was, and whether it would work to go down into the subway like they did in the Blitz.

I remember the book 'The Big One' a savagely funny anti-nukes collection which chilled me to the bone, and still does.

I remember the near-misses caused by glitches in the Doomsday machines: flock of geese crosses the radar defenses at the wrong altitude, bombers are scrambled, forty minutes to total committal. Fortunately, someone always spotted the mistake in time. Just.

I rememeber knowing that the Soviet Military Machine could crush Europe in days.

I remember having it explained what the fallout shelter in the basement was for (all Swiss houses built after a certain date had fallout shelters by law - perhaps they still do).

I remember 'Just waiting for the hammer to fall', and the knowledge that we were capable of extinguishing life from the surface of the planet.

I remember writing (and to some extent I still believe it) that from August 6th 1945, the first duty of every government in the world was to prevent recurrence.

That was M.A.D..

But the Cold War...that was another thing again. Lifeless, existential espionage, grey men killing, rain and raincoats. Georgi Markov, radio broadcaster, murdered with a fucking actual poisoned umbrella in London, for speaking his mind. I met the guy who fixed it, years later. He was still laughing. 'We are not innocents,' he said. Blair's government used the same phrase just the other day.

The Cold War was fear and despair and mistrust and the lesser of evils and the myth that the end justifies the means and that there are some things which just have to be done, however immoral the may seem, to safeguard morality in general, and secure freedom.

And it was the lie that no one was enjoying the power.

God, I'm going to shut up. I could just go on forever.

01:51 / 10.04.02

One cartoonish evil for another. *sighs*

02:09 / 10.04.02

From the other side of the Cold War, I could tell you that the Soviet government had been doing the whole scaremongering thing since the Revolution: everybody - the looming spectre of world capitalism and the bloating bourgeosie - were out to get the USSR for breaking the mould. Everything that went wrong with the internal economy, with the day-to-day operation of life logistics, way directly the fault of saboteurs, spies, and "wreckers" who undermined the Soviet lifestyle.
Of course, we were also told that the rest of the world was much worse off, and furthermore that we should never complain, because showing weakness would mean America pouncing on us.
[All of this, of course, issued by a long line of pontificators at the Kremlin (starting with Lenin), feeding caviar to well-proportioned mistresses done up in fur while planning the construction of their second dacha in Yalta, which, if it was not been constructed by forced labor from an internment camp, was paid for by wealth "confiscated" from detainees sent off to the Archipelago]

It was supposed to be about ideology and heorism, but in reality, it was just a new brand of monarchy, playing upon the best and worst instincts of a society, both at once.

10:09 / 10.04.02

I swear Ronald Reagan scared the shit out of me when I was a kid, and no surprise, so did Margaret Thatcher, and Bob Hawke, they all just looked so unhinged to me. It's weird seeing the commies and the cappos fighting it out, because the ever present threat was placed in front of us at intermediate school: If a nuclear bomb goes off in the Northern Hemisphere, we would have two years before our part of the world would be fucked. Can you imagine living in that kind of climate? It would be freaky, that the rest of the world just does not exist now.
And, it all seemed so fucking dumb, just like a dumb game of "I know you are, you said you are, but what am I?", I mean, it is still okay when you know so much better?