No, We’re The Greatest Generation

by digby

One of the things thats driven me nuts over the past few years is this reflexive portrayal of the GWOT as the most dangerous and challenging in world history. They have from the beginning behaved in a way that I think history will see as panicked and overwrought. As a nation we behaved with much more calm and deliberation when we were much more seriously threatened in the past. These last few years were not our finest.

Still they audaciously insist that the forty years of the cold war were a cakewalk compared to what we are dealing with now. Indeed, many of them also believe that WWII was nothing to the horrors we face today. (Chris Hayes wrote a great piece about this for In These Times some months back.) Bush still repeats his completely absurd line about how the oceans used to protect us and he’s just dumb enough to actually believe it. Paul Kennedy, a professor of history and the director of international security studies at Yale discusses this in today’s LA Times:

IT WAS FUNNY, in a grim sort of way. Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates responded to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s polemical attack on the United States by remembering the 50-year Cold War as a “less complex time” and saying he was “almost nostalgic” for its return.

Gates should know. He himself is the quintessential Cold Warrior, having served nearly 27 years in the Central Intelligence Agency (facing off against the likes of Putin, who was for 17 years an agent in the foreign intelligence branch of the Soviet KGB). So we should take him seriously when he suggests that the problems of 20 or 30 years ago were in some ways more manageable than our current global predicament.

Nor is he alone. There is a palpable sense of nostalgia these days for the familiar contours of that bygone conflict, which has been replaced by a much more murky, elusive and confusing age.

The argument goes as follows: The Cold War, although unpleasant, was inherently stable. It was a bipolar world — centered on Washington and Moscow — and, as UC Berkeley political scientist Kenneth Waltz argued, it was much more predictable than, say, the shifting, multipolar world of the 1910s or 1930s, decades that were followed by calamitous wars. Yes, it’s true that the two sides possessed masses of nuclear weapons aimed at each other’s biggest cities, but the reality is that they were constrained by a mutual balance of terror.

I see this as being two different phenomena. The first is the unreconstructed cold warriors who are both rewriting history and adhering to their long standing hysterical position that the sky is always falling and the only thing to do is fight, invade, bomb or some other form of violence. They have never seen any use in diplomacy, international law, sophisticated containment strategies or anything else that requires finesse and subtlety. It’s always been about might makes right with these people. They were frustrated to no end by anyone who tried something different and that includes St. Ronnie who was roundly denounced for taking yes for an answer when the Soviets saw the light.

One would have thought that the outcome of the cold war would make them embarrassed to ever offer an opinion again, but they simply airbrushed the facts to suggest that Ronald Reagan’s welfare for middle aged white males (otherwise known as the 80’s defense buildup) somehow meant they had defeated the Soviets on the battlefield. But it wasn’t truly satisfying and they were looking for a proper boogeyman to hate from the moment Gorbachev and Ronnie made nice.

Then 9/11 happens when they are in charge and they have a chance to do it the way they always wanted to — by roaring and flailing about like a wounded Giant under the ridiculous assumption that this will scare the enemy so much he will just give up. They are facing this complicated threat with all the sophistication of early man trying to scare off a big predator.

The doughy pantload generation of wingnuts, on the other hand, thinks it’s some sort of game and they are the star players. They yearned to be “part” of something momentous — but from a distance, like you are when you are watching movies about war and heroism and identify with the main characters. No need to give up your Milk Duds just to enjoy a good bloodbath. They are writing an exciting plotline that has Islamic terrorism somehow so uniquely dangerous that it has surpassed WWII and the cold war and is more like something out of science fiction: “Star Wars” or “War of the Worlds.” To these people, naitonal security is cheap pulp fiction.

Of course it is all nonsense. After acknowledging that today’s world is complicated and difficult, yadda, yadda yadda, Kennedy continues:

So is it true? Was the Cold War era, on the whole, a safer era? Ponder the following counterarguments:

First, however tricky our relationships with Putin’s Russia and President Hu Jintao’s China are nowadays, the prospect of our entering a massive and mutually cataclysmic conflict with either nation are vastly reduced.

We seem to have forgotten that our right-wing hawks argued passionately for “nuking” communist China during the Korean War and again during the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1954. We also have apparently forgotten — although newly released archival evidence overwhelmingly confirms this — how close we came to a nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Likewise, we’ve forgotten the shock of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which prompted then-German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to ask, “Is this the new Sarajevo?” a reference to the outbreak of World War I. And who still remembers 1984-85, when we were riveted by Jonathan Schell’s argument in the New Yorker that even a few nuclear explosions would trigger such dust storms as to produce a “nuclear winter”?

Those were really scary times, and much more dangerous than our present circumstance because the potential damage that could be inflicted during an East-West conflagration was far, far greater than anything that Al Qaeda can do to us now. No one has the exact totals, but we probably had 20,000 missiles pointed at each other, often on high alert. And the threat of an accidental discharge was high.

None of today’s college-age students were born in 1945, 1979 or maybe even 1984. None lived with those triangular signs proclaiming their schools to be nuclear bomb shelters.

To recapture those frightening atmospherics these days, university professors must resort to showing Cold War movies: “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Fail Safe,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “The Hunt for Red October,” “Five Days in May,” “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.” Students look rather dumbfounded when told that we came close, on several occasions, to World War III.

Yet what if, for example, Josef Stalin had prevented American and British supply aircraft from flying into Berlin in 1948-49? Phew! The years 1945 to, say, 1990 were horrible on other accounts. China’s Mao Tse-tung’s ghastly Great Leap Forward led to as many as 30 million deaths, the greatest loss of life since the Black Death. The Soviet Union was incarcerating tens of thousands of its citizens in the gulags, as were most of the other members of the Warsaw Pact. The Indo-Pakistan wars, and the repeated conflicts between Israel and its neighbors, produced enormous casualties, but nothing like the numbers that were being slaughtered in Angola, Nigeria, the Congo, Vietnam and Cambodia. Most of the nations of the world were “un-free.”

It is hard to explain to a younger generation that such delightful countries as Greece, Spain, Portugal, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Poland and Czechoslovakia (to name only a few) were run in those days by fascist generals, avowed racists or one-party totalitarian regimes. I am ancient enough to remember the long list of countries I would not visit for summer holidays; old enough to recall how creepy it was to enter Walter Ulbricht’s East German prison house of a state via Checkpoint Charlie in the late 1960s. Ugh.

Let us not, then, wax too nostalgic about the good old days of the Cold War. Today’s global challenges, from Iraq to Darfur to climate change, are indeed grave and cry out for solutions.

But humankind as a whole is a lot more prosperous, a great deal more free and democratic and a considerable way further from nuclear obliteration than we were in Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy’s time. We should drink to that.

No thanks to the rabid right which has been lobbying for a nuclear meltdown (and global domination, let’s face it) since the end of WWII. It is a worldview that has almost nothing to do with actual events or facts on the ground. It reached its zenith with Bush, but they will never go away. They are fearful, insecure people whose temperament and ideology create a need for them to believe that they are warrior heroes in spite of all evidence to the contrary. They are the last people on earth who should be leading a powerful nation in a time of great challenge. Talk about putting the inmates in charge of the asylum.

Update: Tangentially related is this column by David Brooks today in which he says, “Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong order-imposing state.” My goodness, that sounds an awful lot like and endorsement of totalitarianism, don’t you think? (Read this by Arthur Silber, to see Brooks revealed as the cramped, anti-enlightenment fraud he is.)

This, again, relates more to psychology than ideology. These are people who are apparently motivated by a rather simple desire to dominate. Gone now are the lovely paeans to democracy and freedom and liberty and even private enterprise. Within three short years we are back to a Hobbesian hellhole where the wogs need a strong hand. Man, you’d think they’d get whiplash.

On a political level, this all means that it’s silly to believe that anything they say or do is sincere. We have seen the Bush administration cast aside virtually every tenet of modern conservatism and yet the base remains devoted believers in the Party. Indeed, they are getting ready to vote for one of three other world class conservative hypocrites, knowing full well that they are liars, cheats and panderers. So let’s cut the crap about them ever having strong principles. It’s all about kicking ass and taking names with these people. All other aspects of the conservative “philosophy” clearly mean nothing to them.

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