Every time I turn on radio or open a paper I am bombarded with news that should make me run into a bomb raid shelter and stay there. But I don’t – none of us does.
Have we lost fear or is it that we don’t believe what we are told anymore?
I think it is a little bit of both.
When I think of the cold war (or should this be “first cold war” as we seem to be entering a new one now) – I wasn’t scared then. When I was 10 – the nuclear shelter under a small apartment building where my parents lived was the ideal place to play hide and seek – this is my memory of cold war.
Also, I think, over time we learned not to worry too much about stuff we can do nothing about. This may be a dangerous trend as it is often too easy to assume we can do nothing about stuff. Global warming is the prime example – with everybody else pumping all sort of crap into atmosphere – it is easy to think that what we do doesn’t matter, so we do nothing and don’t worry too much.
However, while I am not scared, it is hard to escape depression when you look around. I would not even mention terrorism – it is obvious, we all see what it does and nobody has any idea how to deal with it. But the new cold war is almost as depressing and almost as hopeless. At times one is tempted to think that in the end Trump trying to sound friendly towards Putin may be a sign that there could be a way of avoiding cold war… – until you realise that Trump is simply trying to realign US – a cold war against China may be the new idea.
Does it matter? It probably doesn’t. Cold war is a bad idea, and it is a much worse idea today than it was in the 50s. One redeeming feature of the first cold war was its ideological context. Both sides tried to prove that their political and economic system was better than the other side. Much of that was done with propaganda and misinformation. Some of that was done with stunts like sending dogs into orbit or people to the moon. However, I believe that cold war had some influence on smoothing of some glaring problems in both systems. It is very difficult to prove direct causality, but we saw easing of the most extreme injustices in the west – health service, welfare, civic rights – and at the same time, we saw Soviet Union making some careful compromises to consumerism. We can laugh at Lada cars, but – this was the first time they actually produced a working car that people could buy.
The problem is… we won. They are gone – North Korea and Cuba are not really an ‘opponent’ in a cold war. So – a new cold war is not going to be the same, there is no ideology behind it – market economy in some form dominates in Russia and China now – whatever the details of the political system. This makes the cold war simply about power. It could be the Syrian conflict or a trade war between China and US – I cannot see what’s in it for us. So – we win it or lose it – would it make any difference?
That is why – I am not scared, but I am depressed by that.
