Remember the cold war?

June 30, 2006 9:46 PM

My wife and I were watching the first episode of LeCarre's Smiley's People. Afterwards, we were talking about how the Cold War was such a big part of growing up, to the degree that my wife was taken back by the appearance of a *Russian* basketball player on a lunchbox promotion. Ok, so my question is, if the cold war was such a huge part of US history, why does it seem to have slipped so quickly from our national consciousness?

Apologies if this is too open-ended of a question. It just struck us both as odd that we have endless Private Ryans depicting WWII, and depictions of the cold war seems to be relegated to a handful of LeCarre adaptations done for public television.

posted by craniac to Media & Arts (52 answers total)

Globalization.
posted by Mr. Six at 9:51 PM on June 30, 2006

I always thought it was because the US won WWII, so there's the 'winner writes history' aspect and also the fact that you can be proud of it. Nobody won the Cold War, and now you're trying to be friends with Russia, so you have to go easy on the stories about 'back in the day, when we were battling those evil communist bastards for world domination...'

However, I think there is more than you are noticing: doesn't 13 Days qualify as Cold War? (Cuban missile crisis). However, this isn't the kind of hugely popular action movie you can make out of an actual war - this difference may also be relevant. Most of the Cold War is about politics and ideas and maybe spy stories (maybe still classified?), not people running around blowing things up, which is easy to make a movie out of.
posted by jacalata at 10:02 PM on June 30, 2006

I was born in 1979, so the cold war was pretty well over by the time I started paying attention to the world. I've always been interested by the bits of cultural dissonance I have with my parents over that, but hasn't come up very much over the years.

Part of the reason, by my impression, is that the Cold War was such a long, exhausting, high-maintenance non-event. While there were things Going On (McCarthy, the Cuban Missle Crisis, however many other details I'm too young and bad at history to recall), there was no Hiroshima, no cataclysmic and cathartic Event. It was just a lot of people feeling uneasy and xenophobic for, you know, decades. A big long unpleasant stretch.

However, very accessible shows like The Wonder Years and films like Matinee have certainly touched on the Cold War, with varying levels of obliqueness, so I'm not sure your question is entirely on target—there are plenty of examples in popular media, but perhaps Cold War isn't as distinct or identifiable of a genre as WWII.

Also, people are probably still embarassed about Red Dawn.
posted by cortex at 10:05 PM on June 30, 2006

There used to be a lot of anti-Turkish sentiment in the West. Then Turkey became a member of NATO.

Anti-Turkish sentiment declined.

The Soviet Union was once the sworn enemy of the American Way of Life. Now, they're a useful ally, a non-Muslim source of oil, etc.

The cold war isn't something Washington wants to evoke when dealing with such a useful ally.

Does this analogy make sense?
posted by jason's_planet at 10:06 PM on June 30, 2006

I think we consume different media, because I certainly don't feel like the Cold War has slipped out of the national consciousness. Good Night and Good Luck comes to mind as the most recent example. Fail-safe came back into print in 1999. Bobby Fischer's arrest was still newsworthy last year. I suspect the reason that there are fewer movies and television shows, specifically, relating to the Cold War than to the Second World War is that, as jacalenta points out, WWII had blood and guts and shit getting blown up, whereas the Cold War had Kruschev.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 10:13 PM on June 30, 2006

I was born in 1978, and I definitely remember Yakov Smirnoff, jokes about Eastern European women, and the like as a child in the 80s. Not so much the fear from the 60s and 70s, but perestroika, Gorbachev's birthmark, etc. I was 12 when the wall fell and remember being like, what? It's over? So fast? I definitely felt like it fell out of our conciousness, became a thing of the past very quickly.
posted by sweetkid at 10:17 PM on June 30, 2006

Dude, we've ALWAYS been at war with Oceania...
posted by Aquaman at 10:31 PM on June 30, 2006 [1 favorite]

K-19: The Widowmaker was a recent revisitation of the early days of the Cold War. Tom Clancy made some money exploring the ending days of Cold War cat and mouse with the fictional The Hunt For Red October. The Internet Movie Database returns 514 movies on the search term "cold war" including such classics as Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Fail-Safe (1964), and The Bedford Incident (1965) to WarGames (1983) and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003). I don't think that even counts all the Sean Connery as James Bond flicks...
posted by paulsc at 10:37 PM on June 30, 2006

I grew up outside Washington DC, and I remember being worried about nuclear war in the early 1980s, when there were movies like The Day After (TV) and Testament. And there was Firefox and The Falcon and the Snowman. The Cold War got hot in Red Dawn.

There was a TV movie of Fail-Safe in 2000.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:54 PM on June 30, 2006

My guess is that: in a physical war, lots of dramatic action takes place, which holds the imagination long after the physical action takes place.
In a cold war (or any non-physical tense situation), while the tension exists, there is the possibility of something physical and dramatic taking place, so the imagination can be held. If that situation ends without reaching physical action, then the imagination is held for much less time. So, while it's happening, a cold war will command as much attention as a previous hot war, but if the cold war fizzles out instead of exploding, the command of attention will drop much faster.
posted by Bugbread at 11:04 PM on June 30, 2006

Parsing addendum: Part of that seems really awkward on reread, so in case anyone is confused, when I said "while the tension exists", I didn't mean "although the tension exists", but "during the time when the tension exists".
posted by Bugbread at 11:05 PM on June 30, 2006

James Bond fought the Soviets alongside the Mujahideen (but not Osama bin Laden) in The Living Daylights, and Rambo did in Rambo III.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:13 PM on June 30, 2006 [1 favorite]

Jason's Planet: Russia has 25m muslims, that is about 8% of its population.

I think it depends upon where you live in the US as well. In Cleveland there are thousands of Russians, Ukrainians and Romanians who've arrived since the 1980s and on

The single most horrific, yet realistic Cold War film I've ever seen is the BBC television docudrama "Threads."

I've travelled a bit in the former USSR and Romania. People there have certainly not forgotten the Cold War, even though appearances may tell otherwise.

I think that most of the major problems we have today in the post-Communist world are actually still problems caused by World War II. Many conflicts that resulted from the homogenization of Europe during its reconstruction on both sides of the Iron Curtain have reared their ugly heads over and over since--Balkanization, Armenia/Azerbaijan, Georgia/Abkhazia, Romania/Bessarabia-Transnistria, the list goes on and on.

It's important to remember that prior to the 1930s, Europe was more divided between the wealthier northern states like Czechoslovakia, Germany, Sweden, France, the Baltics, etc--all those countries who had a highly-skilled labor force and manufactured finished goods. The north-south division diminished slightly after WWII and the Iron Curtain really sealed the deal for the West-"East" divide.

Europe's geographical borders really place Romania, Moldova and Western Ukraine squarely in Central Europe with Eastern Europe including Georgia, East Ukraine, Russia and even a portion of Kazakhstan that is twice the size of the European side of Turkey.
posted by vkxmai at 11:31 PM on June 30, 2006

IshmaelGraves: That famous quote of Kruschev saying "we will bury you" was actually a mis-translation. What he said was something closer to "We will be at your funeral," as in "A mother should never have to bury her child."
posted by vkxmai at 11:34 PM on June 30, 2006

Ok, so my question is, if the cold war was such a huge part of US history, why does it seem to have slipped so quickly from our national consciousness?

A couple suggestions:

Historical awareness in general is not very high.

Movies are the dominant art form in today's culture, and a shooting war--like World War II or even the Vietnam War--is much better suited to the movies than the Cold War.

That said, I think the Cold War did make an impression on popular culture in at least one respect: I suspect the threat of nuclear war was a major factor behind people's interest in post-apocalyptic scenarios.
posted by russilwvong at 11:36 PM on June 30, 2006

Cold war history is too recent and too ambiguous. We're still not sure who the heroes were or if we made the right decisions.

For the US, the cold war was marked by two things :

1) The largest peacetime buildup of armaments in world history.
2) A bunch of dirty little wars that we fought through proxies in various parts of the world.

Sure, in the end we "won" the cold war. Nobody got nuked, and we're buying Hummers while Russia is still struggling with things like hot water and electricity. However, in our pursuit of the cold war, we sowed the seeds of our own destruction.

Yes, we built up a huge arsenal of weapons, which we largely still have. However, some of Russia's arsenal was sold to the highest bidder, and may potentially fall into the hands of unstable governments. And those dirty little wars that we fought through proxies? We practically created Hussein, BinLaden, and modern Iran.

So yeah, no clear heroes and an outcome that we have yet to fully understand. Not the makings of a good movie.
posted by Afroblanco at 11:46 PM on June 30, 2006

I think Stallone doesn't get enough credit for ending the Cold War. His speech at the end of "Rocky IV" (you remember it, it's part of history now: "If I can change...and you can change...everybody can change!!") pretty much sealed the deal. Sting should probably get at least a partial credit as well, for that song about how the Russians love their children too. But mostly it was Stallone's work.

Allies change quickly and we are expected to go along with those changes, basically. Even in WWII this was so. After it was over, suddenly the Evil Nazis are our buddies, helping us get into space and etc. So a little of it would be that impetus from up above to move on, and a little would be the fact that there were no big battles or defining moments save for the ones mentioned above, which don't necessarily have the "zing" of some of the high points of WWII history.
posted by First Post at 11:49 PM on June 30, 2006

I think the Cold War was part of movies, TV and popular culture for ages, but as a kind of default. The default baddies were the Russians in all kind of movies, as kirkaracha points out. Hell, the Russians were to blame for Vietnam, weren't they, according to Johm Wayne in The Green Berets?

I think you don't see the Cold War in popular culture because it was a kind of constant background hum, something you took for granted.

Indeed, popular culture had a bit of a difficult period between the end of the Cold War and September 11 -- there was no default bad guy. Now there is.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 12:09 AM on July 1, 2006

For my money, Aquaman has is. Everything slips from the national consciousness. It's just what national consciousnesses do.

(still maintaining the rage)
posted by flabdablet at 12:17 AM on July 1, 2006

flabdablet: I'd love to discuss that particular event with you sometime - for example, why Labor harbours to this very day such intense hatred for Kerr, when he was only taking the most open option (putting the matter to the people) available to him. But, unfortunately, here & now is neither the time not the place...

As for the original question: I'm not sure that it has slipped so far from the (American) national consciousness. The pressure, the threat, was there for years - and then, all of a sudden, with the collapse of the USSR & Berlin wall, it wasnt. In some ways, it seems that after those events the US started flailing around looking for a new enemy to direct their accustomed 5-minute hate towards. And we all know how that's ended up...
posted by Pinback at 12:32 AM on July 1, 2006

What Bugbread said. Like the "War on Terror" the Cold War was an internal psy-ops campaign of disinformation based on ignorance, mistrust, and the business concerns of a select elite of arms manufactureres, commercial interests, and the C-grade congressmen who love them. Same in the USSR. If anybody had to die the preffered victim was either standing in a rice paddy or wearing a turban. When the business end of the war was no longer expedient, it ended.
posted by zaelic at 1:09 AM on July 1, 2006

"I always thought it was because the US won WWII"

Whoah. What? The ALLIES won WWII.

I'm in Russia now, and if you said that here, someone would either brain you or lecture you for hours about how Russia won the war.
posted by fake at 2:04 AM on July 1, 2006

zaelic : "What Bugbread said. Like the 'War on Terror' the Cold War was an internal psy-ops campaign of disinformation based on ignorance, mistrust, and the business concerns of a select elite of arms manufactureres, commercial interests, and the C-grade congressmen who love them. Same in the USSR. If anybody had to die the preffered victim was either standing in a rice paddy or wearing a turban. When the business end of the war was no longer expedient, it ended."

Whoa. That's not what I said.
posted by Bugbread at 3:09 AM on July 1, 2006

I think the people who say "dude, America forgets everything!" are giving a simplistic answer. There's a lot of stuff the U.S. national consciousness chooses to remember in some form or another, like D-Day, Rosa Parks, Valley Forge, the Boston Tea Party... The question is WHY hasn't the Cold War received the same attention. It even had some pretty defining moments: the fall of the Berlin wall, the Cuban missile crisis. Then there's the way the Vietnam war is well-remembered but the (probably more interesting and important) Korean war has almost completely vanished. Ask an American about the Korean war and he will probably be able to tell you next to nothing beyond it being the setting for M*A*S*H.

I'm basically with Afroblanco. The Cold War was epic and ugly, and depressing; from the inside it appeared to be an endless high-tension standoff with nuclear annihilation of the human species at risk.

America's public consciousness decided it was something it had to do and win, but it wasn't something it particularly wanted to look at or think about. During that time America grew used to a state of permanent semi-war. It's like a dream state, so deep that when the Cold War ended America didn't really know what to do. There were no plans for the end of the war because the war was too pervasive; vaguely like caring for a sick loved one for so long that their eventual passing on doesn't cause one's day-to-day life to feel any different or miss a beat. It's a mixture of both having moved on already, and being resigned to an unhappy state.

So it's not surprising that when a new challenge came in 2001, she sunk right back into the comfortable dream state of living normally while being vaguely at war somewhere. And BushCo has done all it can to make the GWoT seem like the Cold War: long-term, vague, a matter of overriding importance.

Sorry to babble... this has been a pet topic of mine, how dumb shit like abortion and drugs have sucked up all the oxygen in the public debates when what've we accomplshed and what are we going to do now? would have been more interesting. But that's the American way, really, to have her public obsessed with trivial inward issues while her businessmen crack their knuckles and go to work, and occasionally drag her into wars.

*passes out*
posted by fleacircus at 3:23 AM on July 1, 2006 [1 favorite]

Both of these are untrue. The second of them is simply appalling to anyone who has even a passing knowledge of history. Take a look at the Black Book of Communism and then ask whether this is even arguable.

Nobody won the Cold War.

We're still not sure who the heroes were or if we made the right decisions.

(This is not to say that all of the decisions we made were the right ones. Far from it. We are a nation of human beings, some admirable and some despicable. But on balance, and considering everything that we now know, we are better off for having confronted the monster rather than keeping to ourselves and letting it have its way with the rest of the world.)

The "Cold War" was a metaphor, and not a real war. There was no declaration of war, no mobilization of armies to go overseas to fight, and no surrender ceremony. There are no recognition ceremories for "our brave men who died in the Cold War". Much of the "national consciousness" in that era was a sense of "what the hell is going on?". This was an era that needed some historical perspective before it could be seen clearly - as is this one. And I acknowledge that there still may need to be some distance to go.
posted by yclipse at 4:29 AM on July 1, 2006

if the cold war was such a huge part of US history, why does it seem to have slipped so quickly from our national consciousness?

Because one of the main drivers of perceived history is entertainment - movies, books and TV.

And those media have switched wholeheartedly to "War on Terror" story lines.

Iraq (Jarhead, We Three Kings), Afghanistan, oil (Syriana), Mideast tensions, 24 and other domestic torture apologia, too many novels to mention.

When Frederick Forsyth gives up on Nazis and KGB double-agents to Afghan jihad sowers as the archvillains of his turgid bricks of paper pulp, the paradigm hasn't just shifted, it's left the building.

(His latest is called The Afghan, and it's terrible. I mean, how can you trust an English author who does not know that Chivas Regal is a blended whisky, not a single malt? Par for the course since he went to seed, you might say. I loved his early stuff, though. OK, I'll stop.)
posted by sacre_bleu at 6:55 AM on July 1, 2006

There doesn't seem to me anything that particularly needs explaining. It's been 15 years since the fall of the USSR and two decades since anybody worried about the Cold War (perestroika pretty much put an end to that). Twenty years after WWII nobody was thinking about that either; in 1965 it was the Beatles, civil rights, and Vietnam. Twenty years is a long time for humanity with its short-term memory.

Trust me, by 2021 September 11 will be a date again, and the attack on the WTC will be something kids study in school, not something that's on everyone's mind daily.

That famous quote of Kruschev saying "we will bury you" was actually a mis-translation. What he said was something closer to "We will be at your funeral," as in "A mother should never have to bury her child."

Link/citation please?
posted by languagehat at 7:36 AM on July 1, 2006

languagehat: I originally was told this by a Russian professor at my university and then heard it mentioned again on On the Media on this segment "Fighting Words" of a program a few weeks ago about the mis-translation of Ahmadinejad's statementss about Israel and the debate surrounding them.

Here's a transcript of the program:
Fighting Words

And the requisite wikipedia article mentioning the contention surrounding his words "My vas pohoronim."
posted by vkxmai at 7:46 AM on July 1, 2006

I just don't want to be the only reader of this thread with this song in my head:

ARTIST: Sting
TITLE: Russians
ALBUM: Dream of the Blue Turtles
YEAR: 1985

In Europe and America
There's a growing feeling of hysteria
Conditioned to respond to all the threats
In the rhetorical speeches of the Soviets

Mr. Krushchev said we will bury you
I don't subscribe to this point of view
It would be such an ignorant thing to do
If the Russians love their children too

How can I save my little boy
From Oppenheimer's deadly toy
There is no monopoly of common sense
On either side of the political fence

We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too
posted by xo at 8:39 AM on July 1, 2006

The Cold War started almost immediately after the end of World War II (and some historians say it overlapped, with tensions at the Yalta Conference and the dropping of the atomic bombs). Patton advocated allying with Germany and forcing the Soviet Union out of Eastern Europe. George Kennan's February 1946 "Long Telegram" laid the foundation for the containment doctrine. Churchill's March 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech was seven months after the end of World War II.

The US exaggerated the threat of the Soviet Union. The "blueprint" for the Cold War, the April 1950 National Security Council report NSC-68, said the Soviet Union had a "design for world conquest." John F. Kennedy frequently mentioned the "missile gap" during the 1960 election, but the US had many more missiles than the Soviets did. The Cuban Missile Crisis was provoked by the US deployment of ballistic missiles in Turkey, and was resolved by a deal that removed the missiles from Turkey and Cuba.

Life behind the Iron Curtain was brutally oppressive, but the Soviet Union didn't make any aggressive moves externally except for backing North Korea in the Korean War and invading Afghanistan (which was partially provoked by the US). The territory the Soviet Union controlled (Eastern Europe and North Korea) was basically the territory they'd conquered in World War II. Their belligerence was largely due to xenophobia and paranoia. Napoleon and Hitler invaded Russia from the West, and they wanted Eastern Europe as a buffer zone. (Also, the US and Western European countries had sent troops into Russia to support the White Russians during the Russian Civil War.)

The Space Race was also a proxy for the Cold War, as shown in The Right Stuff, for example.
posted by kirkaracha at 8:41 AM on July 1, 2006

It just struck us both as odd that we have endless Private Ryans depicting WWII, and depictions of the cold war seems to be relegated to a handful of LeCarre adaptations done for public television.

Apart from all of the cold war movies people mentioned:

Who wants to watch a movie about people doing boring jobs on base in Germany, going home to their apartment/barracks, and watching AFN in their undies? Or endlessly training for a decade or two, seeing no action, and then leaving to go to law school?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:09 AM on July 1, 2006

We practically created Hussein, BinLaden, and modern Iran.

Practically? We did create them.

I think the people who say "dude, America forgets everything!" are giving a simplistic answer. There's a lot of stuff the U.S. national consciousness chooses to remember in some form or another, like D-Day, Rosa Parks, Valley Forge, the Boston Tea Party... The question is WHY hasn't the Cold War received the same attention.

But surely you see the difference between D-Day or the Boston Tea Party and The Cold War? The Cold War was too complex, too drawn-out and sordid an affair to be remembered the same way as those other things. I tend to agree with the "dude, America forgets everything" crowd.
posted by ludwig_van at 10:52 AM on July 1, 2006

What ludwig_van said.

Also, it's double-plus ungood to have conflicting national memories while we're in a state of perpetual war.

Some national memes are useful in establishing a group identity, and others just get in the way of whipping up a nice frothy 5-minute hate, dog.
posted by Aquaman at 11:10 AM on July 1, 2006

vkxmai: Thanks for the links, but they explicitly contradict your suggestion of mistranslation:

There was a similar dispute in the beginning of the Cold War when Khrushchev said, "We will bury you." Now, I'm not saying that it was mistranslated, but there were those who argued that the Russian, in fact, was closer to "I will attend your funeral" or "I will be there at your burial," and that it wasn't quite the attack that it seemed to be to Americans at the time.

(Emphasis added.) In point of fact, "Мы вас похороним!" means exactly "We will bury you!"—no more, no less. Of course you can argue interpretation, as you can for anything anyone says, but there's no question of mistranslation.

kirkaracha: I'm not sure what your point is in terms of this question. The U.S. may or may not have exaggerated the threat of the Soviet Union, but the fact is the Cold War was a huge deal at the time—I was there—and it would be surprising it had receded so quickly from the popular consciousness if everything didn't recede just as quickly.
posted by languagehat at 11:22 AM on July 1, 2006

The U.S. may or may not have exaggerated the threat of the Soviet Union

There were certainly some who were hard at work at doing just that.
posted by ludwig_van at 11:43 AM on July 1, 2006

Derail:

kirkaracha: The US exaggerated the threat of the Soviet Union.

Jerald Combs:

Soviet mobilization in 1948 and afterward did indeed provide the capability of an attack on Western Europe. Nikita Khrushchev admitted in his famous speech of 1960 that the Soviet armed forces (and therefore presumably the army as well) nearly doubled between 1948 and 1955. Western intelligence certainly detected a growth in the Soviet army in Eastern Europe and the Western zones of the Soviet Union during that time. In 1948, three of the four mechanized Soviet armies stationed in Eastern Europe were cadred at about 1/3 of their TO/E manpower (but 100% of their armament, including tanks). By May 1949 all of those divisions were at 70% of their manpower, a level at which they could either go into combat immediately at this reduced strength or be quickly brought up to full strength by mobilization. Western intelligence also saw the deployment of ten armies (40 divisions) in the Western zones of the Soviet Union to support the 25 divisions in East Germany and Poland, although they did not have clear knowledge of how much the divisions in the western Soviet Union were building up. By 1952 all of the Soviet divisions in East Germany were at close to 100% of their manpower. This was clearly a transition from an occupation to an offensive army that had both the manpower and armament to invade Western Europe, whether or not Stalin had any intention to do so and whether or not, if he did so, he would have considered it a defensive measure against the superior U.S. atomic force. Meanwhile, NATO did not have more that 18 ready divisions in Western Europe at any time during this period, so it posed no military threat whatever to the Soviet sphere.

Acheson and Nitze did not fear an immediate Soviet invasion of Europe in 1948, and they only temporarily feared in 1950 that the Soviets might use their conventional superiority in Europe and the diversion of the Korean War to take Berlin or some other limited object in Europe. They did fear however, that once the Soviets had accumulated a hundred or so atomic bombs (perhaps by 1954), even if those could be delivered only by one-way suicide attacks on American cities, the Soviets might think that even though such an attack would not defeat the United States, the potential damage and casualties might be enough to deter the Americans from launching their superior nuclear force in response to a mere conventional attack in Europe. (By the way, NSC-68 said only that the Soviets might think the U.S. would be deterred from a nuclear attack in response to a conventional invasion of Europe, not that it actually would be.) Readers will have to decide for themselves whether that was a rational fear, but I think there is no question that the Soviets had or were developing the capabilities that Nitze and Acheson thought they were.

Louis J. Halle, The Cold War as History (1967):

The great fear in the West was of what would happen when, as was inevitable in time (assuming that a preventive war would not be launched), Moscow did acquire such [a nuclear] armament. Its acquisition, everyone supposed, would deter and thereby neutralize the Western atomic armament, leaving the Red Army free to advance once more. This logic seemed unassailable, and the fear it inspired in the West made us all contemplate the future with awful foreboding. For years one had the feeling that the time left for the enjoyment of a tolerable existence was running out. Thinking of the fate of the Carthaginians, one wondered what except tribal habit caused one to take such pains in the rearing of one's children. Historians may recapitulate events such as these, but they can never recapture the emotion.

Douglas J. Macdonald, Communist Bloc Expansion in the Early Cold War: Challenging Realism, Refuting Revisionism:

Although many critics of the Cold War concentrate their attention on alleged U.S. misperceptions of Soviet expansion, it is worth noting that most other non-communist nations shared these perceptions in the early Cold War with unusual consensus. This included not only governments but also many groups not afraid to criticize the United States or to attempt to get along with the Soviets, such as the British Labour Party or the French Socialists. Even such an unexpected source as Bertrand Russell wondered aloud whether a preemptive attack on Stalin might not be necessary in the 1940s.(15) This particularly challenges those analysts who utilize cognitive theories of decision-making and domestic politics explanations for U.S. foreign policy. Many such critics emphasize Soviet defensiveness, caution, and decidedly limited aims, disparaging the very notion of a unified communist bloc.(16)

British and other allied threat perceptions were often higher than U.S. fears prior to the Korean War, both in Europe and in the periphery. This phenomenon cannot be explained by reference to internal U.S. psychological or political processes. Indeed, in congruence with traditionalist interpretations, recent British historical works emphasize that prior to the Korean War, the Foreign Office saw the United States as too sanguine about the Soviet bloc threat and felt it necessary to prod the Americans into action in Asia and elsewhere.(17) Fears of Soviet bloc expansion became widespread among the other Western powers also, especially following the Czech coup in February 1948, the onset of the Berlin Blockade in June, and the beginning of the collapse of the Chinese Nationalist armies in the fall of that year.(18)

The traditionalist view that European threat perceptions precipitated U.S. threat perceptions is supported by historian Geir Lundestad's "Empire by Invitation" thesis.(19) Lundestad argues that, far from thrusting itself upon Europe in an anti-communist crusade, as the revisionists would have it, the United States was invited into a position of hegemonic leadership by European states who still faced the abysmal aftereffects of World War II and who believed they were facing an expansionist Soviet Union. Several of these countries, especially France and Italy, were also facing the challenge of large and vigorous local communist movements who were very likely to align with Moscow should they come to power.(20) Although some critics play down the Western European fears of Soviet expansion and emphasize that their need for aid for internal reconstruction influenced their desire for a U.S. effort in Europe,(21) these issues were strongly interconnected in the minds of many in the West.

posted by russilwvong at 4:33 PM on July 1, 2006

I'm not sure what your point is in terms of this question.
Are you really asking me why I'm discussing the perception of the Cold War in response to a question about the Cold War in our national consciousness, where it had already been described as "an internal psy-ops campaign of disinformation"? I believe my take on the Cold War is just as legitimate and just as germane to the topic as anyone else's. It's more complex than the "Evil Empire trying to take over the world image that our government and entertainment industry presented us with." Maybe the military-industrial complex had something to do with it.

russilwvong: Ooga-booga-booga, look at the big scary Soviet Union with their big scary army. If only we had some kind of Doomsday Device to even the odds. If only we had a massive edge in nuclear weapons. Oh wait, we did. Maybe they wanted a big army because the head of the Strategic Air Command advocated using "the entire stockpile of atomic bombs. In a single massive attack." If they were so intent on conquering the world, why didn't they try?
posted by kirkaracha at 5:33 PM on July 1, 2006

Yes, yes I am. The question can be rephrased as "Why has the Cold War, which was such a big deal, been forgotten?" Your response was that the Soviet threat was exaggerated, the implication being that the Cold War shouldn't have been such a big deal. I continue to fail to see the relevance. It was a big deal (in popular perception), and it's been forgotten (in the sense meant by the poster). Your take on the Cold War, however worthy on its own, is not germane to the question.
posted by languagehat at 5:51 PM on July 1, 2006

Actually, on further thought, I suspect we're looking at this all wrong.

We're looking for what about the Cold War has resulted in it being forgotten, compared to other big American historical events.

Perhaps it would make more sense if we assumed that these things recede and fade, and asked "What is it about WWII, Vietnam, Rosa Parks, the Boston Tea Party, etc. that prevented them from receding.

Well, WWII witnessed a massive amount of war movies and war TV shows, which were shown as reruns through my youth, so that before I ever learned about WWII in school, I knew the basics. It also had a supervillain, in the form of Hitler. The Nazis had striking iconography and aesthetics. It had the whole racism angle, as opposed to difficult-to-understand wars based purely on historical land disagreements or the like.

Vietnam had hippies, protests, protest music, and the like.

Rosa Parks is an iconic everywoman who stood up against the system.

The Boston Tea Party is, similarly, an iconic rebellion.

Now, the Cold War had its icons, too, but compared with the above, I suspect that they weren't quite strong enough to counter the natural recession of interest over time. I was a kid through the end of the Cold War, and the only icons I can remember are Reagan, his Big Red Phone, his jelly beans, Gorbachev's birthmark, and the movie The Day After. It's not that there was something about the Cold War which resulted it being forgotten, but that there wasn't enough to prevent it.

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Also, thinking about how we define "in the national consciousness", I'm thinking my own meterstick would be: "An event which has stuck in the national consciousness is one which most kids who weren't alive at the time are vaguely aware before they study it in school". I knew that we fought Germany and Japan in WWII. I knew that we fought somebody in Vietnam, but that a lot of people didn't want us to be in that war. I knew Martin Luther King was some kind of civil rights guy. I knew there was a president called Kennedy who got shot. I didn't know we had a war in Korea. I didn't know that there was some big missile issue in Cuba.

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languagehat : "Trust me, by 2021 September 11 will be a date again, and the attack on the WTC will be something kids study in school, not something that's on everyone's mind daily."

LH, I don't know who you're trying to counter with this statement. Has anyone made the argument that it would be something on everyone's mind daily? Craniac is asking about why memory of the Cold War has faded compared to, say, memory of WWII. He's not implying that WWII is something on people's minds daily, just that we think about it far more than, say, the Korean War. So where does this "everyone's mind daily" stuff come from?

I would say, however, that the destruction of the towers is iconic enough that it will stay remembered, NOT in a "think about daily nevar forget America 9/11!!" sense, but in a "Pearl Harbor", "Kennedy assisination" way (where some people care a whole hell of a lot, some people care not a whit, but everyone is generally aware, though they may seldom if ever actually think about it)
posted by Bugbread at 8:37 PM on July 1, 2006

kirkaracha: If only we had some kind of Doomsday Device to even the odds.

Not for long. The US only had a nuclear monopoly until 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear bomb. After that, the problem was that the US nuclear deterrent was no longer ... plausible. The key thing to remember is that NATO never had a conventional army that could stand up to the Soviet army. (It was called the "plate-glass defense".) People believed that once the Soviet Union had its own nuclear arsenal, capable of reaching the United States, it'd be able to deter the US from intervening in the case of a political or conventional Soviet takeover of Western Europe--presumably the US wouldn't risk the nuclear destruction of its own homeland. They turned out to be wrong, but nobody knew that at the time.

I have yet more Louis Halle quotes, but they're way too long to post here. Part one: Soviet Union achieves ability to launch nuclear attack against US. In November 1958, Khrushchev demands that the West withdraw from Berlin by May 27, 1959. The three Western governments refuse. Part two.

Ah, what the hell. Here's one quote regarding the 1958-1959 crisis:

It was not only that the peoples of the West had to contemplate the destruction of all their hopes, of everything they cherished, of their civilization, their families, their homes, and themselves, in a sudden exchange of blows that might, it seemed, leave the northern hemisphere a radioactive desert. They were being asked to accept the risk of this for the sake of one local community [Berlin] belonging to the nation that, in the course of bitter and still recent experience, they had learned to regard as the enemy of mankind itself. To many who not only remembered Hitler vividly, but who still identified the whole German nation with what he had represented, it seemed intolerable that they should be expected to take such terrible risks for the inhabitants of Hitler's capital, the traditional center of Prussia and Prussianism. In 1939, when Britain and France went to war, there were many in their midst who asked: Why die for Danzig? Inevitably, now, there were many to ask: Why die for Berlin? In this, rather than in the declarations of the governments, lay Moscow's hope that its nuclear diplomacy would succeed.[2]

[2] A personal note may help make vivid, although it cannot truly recall, the fear that now gripped the populations of the West. One [Halle] who, living in Geneva, is on record as having consistently supported a firm stand at Berlin, recalls how, nevertheless, he lay awake night after night, thinking of his wife, thinking of his children one by one, thinking of what might be the end for them after so much of love, of promise, and of hope as had become associated with them in his mind over the years. Still he recalls the physical sensation in the abdomen, preventing sleep, that the imagination of the possible horror in store for them produced in him. Multiply this man, now, by millions, spread over half the earth, think of the sum of their fear, with its physical manifestations, and it seems a wonder that the very air which wrapped our planet was not visibly altered by it.

posted by russilwvong at 8:54 PM on July 1, 2006

languagehat, I never said the Cold War wasn't a big deal, just that it was a different deal than it's been portrayed in the popular consciousness. Maybe it's not as much a part of the popular consciousness because the Soviet Union, in retrospect, wasn't as big a threat as they were presented to be at the time.

The key thing to remember is that NATO never had a conventional army that could stand up to the Soviet army.

Then why didn't the Soviet army roll right through Western Europe? Was it because of the implausible nuclear deterrent? Or was it because they didn't want to?
posted by kirkaracha at 10:08 AM on July 2, 2006

Then why didn't the Soviet army roll right through Western Europe?

Because it turned out in 1958-1959 that in a nuclear stalemate, it's very hard to change the status quo. Even if you think that your adversary is probably bluffing (which presumably the United States was), the fact remains that you're risking nuclear war, not conventional war. So in the end Khrushchev backed down.

But people didn't know this beforehand. Hence their extreme fear, which didn't really end (because Khrushchev could have restarted the crisis at any time) until the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

During the early Cold War (the period I'm most familiar with), US policymakers really were afraid of the Soviet Union. They weren't exaggerating the threat for domestic consumption.

I should also point out that Stalin wasn't Zombie Hitler. Believing in the inevitability of victory, he was much more cautious and patient; and also more interested in using the Soviet army to back up political takeovers (as in Czechoslovakia in 1948), as opposed to having to fight a war. But that isn't to say that the Soviet Union wasn't expansionist. Analysts such as George F. Kennan argued that fear--particularly fear of a revived, remilitarized Germany--was a driving factor behind Soviet expansionism. Charles Burton Marshall: Anxiety over the challenge and competition to its own domination within its own sphere from the areas beyond its control impels the rulers within the Soviet system to press on the areas beyond--like a mythical man in Texas who bought up seven counties bit by bit because he liked to own the lot next door.

Kennan's assessment in 1952:

In these circumstances, ever since the beginning of the revolution it had been orthodox Communist strategy not to seek an open and general military confrontation with capitalist power, but rather precisely to avoid such confrontation and to conduct the attack on the capitalist world in a much more cautious manner, representing what Lenin termed a "state of partial war," and involving the elastic and opportunistic use of a wide variety of tactics including outstandingly such things as deception, concealed penetration and subversion, psychological warfare, and above all the adroit exploitation of every conceivable form of division in capitalist society, whether on the international scale or within the domestic framework of capitalist states. By such means it was considered, the Soviet Union could avoid the danger of annihilation that had always to be considered to reside in a general war between communism and capitalism, and yet make the most of those weaknesses, divisions and diseases to which the capitalist world was held to be a prey.

Actually, the conditions that existed as World War II came to an end seemed to offer high promise for the success of such tactics. The effects of Nazi rule on the social fabric of the occupied countries, as well as of Germany herself, had weakened the traditional institutions of those countries, and had in fact performed a good deal of the work which the Communists would in any case have wished to carry out in order to soften these countries up for seizure of power by Communist minorities. The postwar exhaustion and bewilderment of peoples everywhere heightened vulnerability to Communist pressures and deceits. The positions gained in Eastern Europe by the advance of the Red Army in the final phases of the war, plus the Soviet right, on the basis of Yalta and Potsdam, to a prominent voice in the determination of the future of Germany, protected by the veto power in the Council of Foreign Ministers, made it seem to Moscow implausible that vigor and hope and economic strength could ever be returned to the Western European area otherwise than on Moscow's terms; and these terms, in the Kremlin's mind, would be built around a set of conditions in which the triumph of Soviet-controlled forces would be assured. In France and Italy, furthermore, the Communists had succeeded in exploiting both the resistance to the Germans and ultimately the liberation from them, for purposes of infiltration into every possible point of political, military and economic control, and had thereby reached positions of influence from which it seemed most unlikely that they could be dislodged without chaos and civil war. In these circumstances the Kremlin had good reason to hope that a relatively brief period—let us say three to five years—would see Communist power, or at least Communist domination, extended to the Western European area in general, even in the absence of any further military effort by the Soviet Union. By virtue of such a development, as Moscow saw it, the preponderance of military-industrial strength in the world would be assembled under Soviet control. England would represent at best an isolated industrial slum, extensively dependent on the Communist-controlled Continent across the channel. Taken together with the possibilities for Communist success in China, where the immediately desired phase of "expelling the imperialists" seemed to he progressing almost unbelievably well with no effort at all on Moscow's part, all this meant that prospects were not bad for the rapid advance of the Kremlin to a dominant and almost unchallengeable position in world affairs. Thus the lack of desire or expectancy for a new major foreign war did not mean that Moscow had no hope for the expansion of Bolshevik power in the postwar period.

Kennan argued that the US response was too militarized--that the Marshall Plan, which strengthened Western Europe economically and politically, was a more appropriate response than NATO.
posted by russilwvong at 11:34 AM on July 2, 2006

LH, I don't know who you're trying to counter with this statement.

I wasn't trying to counter anyone, just give another example of a major historical event that will follow the general rule.

Maybe it's not as much a part of the popular consciousness because the Soviet Union, in retrospect, wasn't as big a threat as they were presented to be at the time.

That assumes a level of popular understanding of recent historical discoveries that I find frankly incredible, considering most Americans can't find anything on a map and don't even study history in school any more. During the Cold War it was a given that the US and USSR were equivalent powers, facing off with their nukes over the heads of the rest of the world; yes, now that the Wall has fallen and we've gotten a look at Soviet archives, it's quite clear the strength of the USSR was vastly exaggerated, but 1) that's not the same as saying it wasn't dangerous, and 2) the average person does not know it. You're free to dispute that, but you'd be wrong.
posted by languagehat at 12:27 PM on July 2, 2006

I did not know about Team B. Thanks, ludwig_van.
posted by cortex at 12:34 PM on July 2, 2006

I never said Cold War wasn't a big deal and I never said the the USSR wasn't dangerous. Enjoy beating up on straw men if you want. I'm done.
posted by kirkaracha at 1:57 PM on July 2, 2006

Jason's Planet: Russia has 25m muslims, that is about 8% of its population.

I'm well aware that Russia is a multicultural society, that it does have a significant (and rapidly increasing) population of Muslims. It is not, however, a Muslim country in the sense that the Islamic faith sets the tone of everyday life, and defines the parameters of acceptable behavior, as it does in a country such as Egypt or Algeria. Much of Russian culture, from my own outsider's perspective, seems violently anti-Islamic and pretty racist towards Islamic minorities from Central Asian.

When pork and vodka become illegal, and Putin bows down to Mecca five times a day, I think you might have a point. But until then, I will continue to refer to Russia as a "non-Muslim source of oil."
posted by jason's_planet at 2:19 PM on July 2, 2006

I did not know about Team B. Thanks, ludwig_van.

No prob. I found it interesting to learn about as well. It was covered extensively in the free documentary The Power of Nightmares.
posted by ludwig_van at 3:24 PM on July 2, 2006

Enjoy beating up on straw men if you want. I'm done.

Hey hey hey! I didn't think I was being nasty or personal, just countering your ideas, which I thought were interesting but not relevant to the question. Sorry if I pissed you off.
posted by languagehat at 4:13 PM on July 2, 2006

I'm pretty sure the country still has a case of post-traumatic stress disorder. That's what will happen if two regular people have guns pointed at each other's heads for 40 years.
posted by ontic at 5:04 PM on July 2, 2006

But surely you see the difference between D-Day or the Boston Tea Party and The Cold War? The Cold War was too complex, too drawn-out and sordid an affair to be remembered the same way as those other things. I tend to agree with the "dude, America forgets everything" crowd.

... forgets everything that's shown to the public as too complex, drawn-out, and sordid—yaknow, Cold Warish— which is basically what I was saying in my drunk and stupid way. So I think we agree.

I could argue that the point of view of "America forgets everything the Cold War was nothing special" is actually evidence of the mindset-lock I was babbling about but that gets Catch-22ish.. (hmm..).

Of course WWII (for example) was pretty complex although America remembers a certain simple narrative of it very well. Perhaps the real difference is the changing role of the media (its attitude and especially its reach) in letting the public dwell on the details.
posted by fleacircus at 2:04 PM on July 3, 2006

Of course WWII (for example) was pretty complex although America remembers a certain simple narrative of it very well.

Right. Pretty much everything can be simple or complex, depending on how one looks at it. My point was that the Cold War in many ways lacked the sort of tidy, easily comprehensible narrative that other events have had/been given.
posted by ludwig_van at 2:24 PM on July 3, 2006

languagehat: That assumes a level of popular understanding of recent historical discoveries that I find frankly incredible, considering most Americans can't find anything on a map and don't even study history in school any more.

Actually, I don't think it's so hard to believe that most people would assume the Soviet threat was exaggerated, now that they've seen the broken-down state of Russian society during the 1990s. Think of the Kursk disaster, for example.

I've been thinking about this the last couple of days--when was the turning point? I recently read a collection of articles written during the 1950s (Hans Morgenthau, Politics in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2), and the image of the Soviet Union was very different back then. The US felt on the defensive: it seemed that the Soviet Union was steadily growing stronger, Khrushchev had the initiative, and time was running out. Besides Sputnik, which demonstrated the Soviet Union's technical superiority, in the Middle East the Suez Crisis had given Nasser an immense boost in prestige and had forced out Britain and France; in the Far East, France had lost the battle of Dien Bien Phu.

Paul Krugman: Living in a world strewn with the wreckage of the Soviet empire, it is hard for most people to realize that there was a time when the Soviet economy, far from being a byword for the failure of socialism, was one of the wonders of the world--that when Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the U.N. podium and declared, "We will bury you," it was an economic rather than a military boast. It is therefore a shock to browse through, say, issues of Foreign Affairs from the mid 1950s through the early 1960s and discover that at least one article a year dealt with the implications of growing Soviet industrial might.

By the 1980s, things looked very different--the Soviet Union retreated from Afghanistan, Chernobyl demonstrated the weakness of Soviet technology. But when did this start? Was it with Gorbachev? In popular literature, Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park (1981) portrayed a Soviet society that didn't work very well (I believe he was subsequently barred from entering the Soviet Union); was this widely known already, or was Cruz Smith ahead of his time?

It seems to me that there were three different narratives during the Cold War:

1. The early Cold War--containment. The Soviet Union appears dynamic and aggressive, expanding into the power vacuum in Central Europe.

2. Stalemate, starting around the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The limits of nuclear diplomacy are demonstrated. The level of fear in the West diminishes. Soviet power reaches its high-water mark relative to the US in the 1970s (Vietnam, Watergate, Helsinki).

3. The collapse of the Soviet empire, under Gorbachev. In retrospect, it appears inevitable.
posted by russilwvong at 10:08 AM on July 4, 2006