Mabon Moon of the First Snow
The cold war. Hard to imagine explaining this to someone who didn’t experience it.
That Sputnik, for example, was not just or even primarily a first satellite in space, but instead a dire political statement of the advanced Soviet state.
That there was an iron curtain that separated eastern Europe from western Europe, a series of checkpoints and border controls that kept folks in as much as it kept folks out.
That the possible advance of communism became a convenient tool for paranoid patriots, just as muslim terror is today. That once the Soviet Union strode across the world as China has begun to do today.
That Kremlinology referred to the arcane practice of reading the intentions of the politburo from esoteric sources like economic reports, propaganda, and spy gathered intelligence. That the wave of spy movies and books had their roots in the post-WW II struggle between the advocates of communism and those of capitalism (not democracy).
That we put missile silos in the prairie and mountain states of Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, and Montana seeding the earth with the most poisonous and powerful weapons ever imagined. That we did it to create a balance of terror which was seen as rational policy. And, even stranger, that it seemed to work.
Movies like Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, On the Beach gave creative expression to the unspeakable angst of a world living under the threat of annihilation, not from an exploding sun, not from climate catastrophe, but from decisions made by politicians. This angst, symbolized by the odd notion of fall-out shelters, is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the cold war to convey. It created an atmosphere in which children feared the future and adults worked with an atomic cloud not far from their consciousness.
A great deal has been done in popular literature and media to explain Hitler and the nazis, the holocaust; but, there is little comparable work around the cold war. This is a mistake and one those of us who lived through it are responsible for rectifying. Why a mistake? Because at an emotional level it is so close in tone to the Bush/Osama Bin Laden created fear of terrorism. The cold war shows the ultimate futility and extraordinary cost of using fear as a primary definer for foreign policy. And, we are already far down the same road in our so-called war on terror.