New Albany is a state of mind … but whose? Since 2004, we’ve been observing the contemporary scene in this slowly awakening old river town. If it’s true that a pre-digital stopped clock is right twice a day, when will New Albany learn to tell time?
It's another exemplary two-part Deutsche Welle documentary, focusing on the Cold War as experienced in the two German states that arose from the post-WWII settlement.
For more than four decades, divided Germany was the epicenter of the Cold War. The border severing East and West embodied the animosity between the US and USSR. The smoldering conflict threatened to escalate and destroy both German states. The Cold War was persistently present in the two Germanys - both on the political and military level, but also in everyday life. On the one hand, there was the race for technical progress, the fear of bombs and rockets, the struggle for moral superiority over the other side: and on the other, doubt about each state’s policies, and those of their allies.
How did Germans experience this Cold War? How did it shape attitudes to life on both sides of the Iron Curtain?
This two-part documentary asks political actors and decision-makers in East and West, but above all contemporary witnesses from divided Germany, what experiences they had in the period between 1945 and 1991. Who were the winners and losers in this brutal stand-off between communism and capitalism? The demonstrations on June 17, 1953, the construction of the Berlin Wall, the major demonstrations in Bonn against Pershing missiles, nuclear strike drills, employment bans in West Germany on members of the German Communist Party, the opening of the Wall, the collapse of the Eastern bloc - all were events that shaped people’s lives. This is their story and the story of Germany in the Cold War.
"Globalisation was meant to create wealth, but many Americans complain of inequality; military dominance sucked the country into never-ending wars that sacrificed the children of lower-income families (but, for the most part, no one else’s); the pursuit of fulfilment led to the withering of duty and a selfish, atomised society; and the supremacy of the presidency became a recipe for voters’ disappointment."
Which book should I buy? I'm leaning toward Bacevich's.
(He) warns that, although Mr Trump offered no definition of post-cold-war America, just a rejection, there is no going back. That is a lesson for Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, who gives the sense that going back is what he would most like to do.
Three contrasting books examine a superpower’s malaise
Do Morals Matter? By Joseph Nye. Oxford University Press; 268 pages; $24.95 and £18.99.
The Abandonment of the West. By Michael Kimmage. Basic Books; 368 pages; $32 and £25.
The Age of Illusions. By Andrew Bacevich. Metropolitan Books; 239 pages; $27.
The United States, Andrew Bacevich writes near the start of his account of post-cold-war America, is like the man who won the Mega Millions lottery: his unimagined windfall holds the potential for disaster. Things are not quite that bad. But almost three decades after America watched the Soviet Union fall apart, victory feels like a disappointment.
The end of the cold war established America as the most powerful country in history. Its armed forces were unmatched and its governing philosophy seemingly had no rival. Yet it has struggled either to prevail against illiterate tribesmen and tinpot dictators or to get to grips with a newly assertive Russia and a rising China. In a pandemic its allies might have expected America to co-ordinate a planet-wide response. Instead, it has turned inward. Just as startlingly, America itself fell prey to bitterness and division, culminating in the presidency of a man who won office by rejecting many of the values which had helped bring about that original victory.
This is the sombre backdrop for three very different books about America’s place in the world. Joseph Nye, a former dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, looks at how presidents have struggled to embody their country’s moral leadership. Michael Kimmage, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund, teases out the contradictions in the idea of an American-led “West”. And Mr Bacevich, a professor emeritus at Boston University, depicts the construction (and then, he argues, the demolition) of a post-cold-war doctrine of American power.
None of these books is the last word on an important question. But each offers tantalising insights into how victory soured ...
Germany’s Iron Curtain is now the Green Belt, but turning the old border into a haven for wildlife has taken much more than just letting it be.
For most of its length in Germany, the Iron Curtain was actually a steel fence, and Kai Frobel could see it from his childhood bedroom in the West German village of Hassenberg. The barrier, more than 10 feet tall and made of a kind of mesh specially designed to offer no finger-holds to would-be escapees from East Germany, snaked through the Steinach Valley. It divided the landscape into the domains of documents. On one side, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. On the other, the Warsaw Pact ...
... The 866-mile border was one of the most recognizable and politically charged changes to the landscape following World War II. But all of West Germany was transforming, too. As it had in many parts of the world, industrial agriculture was turning what for millennia had been a patchwork of pasture, fields, and forest sprinkled with small towns into a much more uniform landscape—a monoculture of barely distinguishable crops.
In a twist of fate that reverberates decades later, the land on the Death Strip and some areas around it were protected from the plow and the combine. “In the ‘70s, the landscape was drained, cleared, planted,” Frobel says. “The border was the last refuge.”
In the 30 years after the crumbling of East Germany, known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the border between east and west has transformed again, into the Grünes Band, or Green Belt, a swath of protected land that runs from the Baltic Sea in the north all the way to the mountains of Bavaria in the south. It connects more than 100 different types of habitat, from grasslands to marshes to forests. And the corridor—longer than the distance between New York and Chicago, but only about 50 to 200 yards wide; 68 square miles in total, a little bit less than Brooklyn—is home to a staggering 1,200 threatened species.
If you’ve ever wanted to trudge around in the cold while being shouted at in Russian, the could be the perfect vacation spot.
Set in a Soviet-era bunker, 1984: Survival Experience visitors are treated as though they were Lithuanian citizens under the control of the communist Russian military. The dramatization starts with putting on heavy, damp jackets. A German shepherd and ex-KGB officer bark orders as you enter your new Soviet paradise. Yes, ex-KGB. Believe it or not, all of the attractions actors were in the Soviet army. Some even interrogators trained in psychological tactics.
As a useful preface, it helps to know that I consider American "exceptionalism" to be sheer idiocy.
Ironically, former foreign service officer Louis Sell, now an author and teacher, was at the Louisville Free Public Library on Thursday evening to discuss his latest book. It's about US-Soviet relations in the context of the USSR's collapse, Sell's take was wonderful, and the topic provides an excellent segue into Tom Engelhardt's piece.
Why are we in a state of constant warfare throughout the world, having reached a point where so many Americans on the left side of the aisle are as hawkishly interventionalist, if not more bellicose, than the ones on the right?
Part of it owes to the vast extent of consumer borne fantasy-as-lifestyle, the sort of daily escapism that hinders realism once one steps outside the movie theater or away from the video game console.
But more importantly in terms of America as nation-state, it's about biting off more than we might possibly chew, because we no longer were contained by the Cold War stalemate -- and both God and Big Money told us so.
Who's going to perform the Heimlich maneuver for the United States?
When it comes to cluelessness, there’s another, far stranger path the United States has been following since at least the George W. Bush moment that couldn’t be more consequential and yet somehow remains the least noticed of all. On this subject, Americans don’t have a clue. In fact, if you could put the United States on a psychiatrist’s couch, this might be the place to start.
AMERICA CONTAINED
In a way, it’s the oldest story on Earth: the rise and fall of empires. And note the plural there. It was never — not until recently at least — empire, always empires. Since the fifteenth century, when the fleets of the first European imperial powers broke into the larger world with subjugation in mind, it was invariably a contest of many. There were at least three or sometimes significantly more imperial powers rising and contesting for dominance or slowly falling from it. This was, by definition, the history of great powers on this planet: the challenging rise, the challenged decline. Think of it for so many centuries as the essential narrative of history, the story of how it all happened until at least 1945, when just two “superpowers,” the United States and the Soviet Union, found themselves facing off on a global scale.
Of the two, the U.S. was always stronger, more powerful, and far wealthier. It theoretically feared the Russian Bear, the Evil Empire, which it worked assiduously to “contain” behind that famed Iron Curtain and whose adherents in this country, always modest in number, were subjected to a mania of fear and suppression. However, the truth — at least in retrospect — was that, in the Cold War years, the Soviets were actually doing Washington a strange, if unnoted, favor. Across much of the Eurasian continent, and other places from Cuba to the Middle East, Soviet power and the never-ending contest for influence and dominance that went with it always reminded American leaders that their own power had its limits. This, as the twenty-first century should have (but hasn’t) made clear, was no small thing. It still seemed obvious then that American power could not be total. There were things it could not do, places it could not control, dreams its leaders simply couldn’t have. Though no one ever thought of it that way, from 1945 to 1991, the United States, like the Soviet Union, was, after a fashion, “contained.”
In those years, the Russians were, in essence, saving Washington from itself. Soviet power was a tangible reminder to American political and military leaders that certain areas of the planet remained no-go zones (except in what, in those years, were called “the shadows”). The Soviet Union, in short, rescued Washington from both the fantasy and the hell of going it alone, even if Americans only grasped that reality at the most subliminal of levels.
This equilibrium lasted until the USSR's collapse in 1991, and ten years later, Osama bin Laden's terrorist attacks provided the opportunity for W & Co. to try swallowing the planet.
It's been mostly downhill ever since.
Despite what it looked like in Washington once upon a time, the disappearance of the Soviet Union proved to be no gift at all, but a disaster of the first order. It removed all sense of limits from America’s political class and led to a tale of greed on a planetary scale. In the process, it also set the U.S. on a path to self-decline.
The history of greed in our time has yet to be written, but what a story it will someday make. In it, the greed of those geopolitical dreamers will intersect with the greed of an ever wealthier, ever more gilded 1%, of the billionaires who were preparing to swallow whole the political system of that last superpower and grab so much of the wealth of the planet, leaving so little for others.
Whether you’re talking about the urge to control the planet militarily or financially, what took place in these years could, in the end, result in ruin of a historic kind. To use a favored phrase from the Bush years, one of these days we may be facing little short of “regime change” on a planetary scale. And what a piece of shock and awe that’s likely to prove to be.
All of us, of course, now live on the planet Bush’s boys tried to swallow whole. They left us in a world of infinite war, infinite harm, and in Donald Trump’s America where cluelessness has been raised to a new power.
Seeing as we have time to waste today while awaiting the inevitable White Death (no, I mean the snow), an idle glance at my daily output from six years ago on this date at the blog reveals a digression on the Cold War, which ironically fits into the narrative of this recent travelogue summary.
On January 12, 2012, it had been only a year since my local column in the pre-merger New Albany Tribune was "temporarily" revoked ... never to return, the bastards.
One thing I noticed while lightly editing the column for today's rerun was its length.
Back then, I remained in the quaint habit of writing somewhere around 900 words, which had been my newspaper column's maximum length.
Yesterday's column was almost double this yardstick, and so perhaps my recent fixation with "back to basics" (note the quotation mark usage, David) has another potential outlet in terms of self-editing.
Nah. I gotta be me, right?
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ON THE AVENUES: Spies.
A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.
The Cold War ended … when?
Was it 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and the Warsaw Pact dominoes finally fell?
Or perhaps 1991, when the USSR belatedly went belly up?
Did it begin anew with Putin?
Irrespective of the precise ending date, the Cold War’s late-1940’s origins long predated my own, and until somewhere around the age of 30 -- give or take a year – my perceptions of prevailing geopolitical reality on the planet duly revolved around the received wisdom of two heavily armed camps, with occasional hand-me-downs (guns, butter, trade agreements and news coverage) thrown to the non-aligned “Third” World to secure cooperation amid the attrition.
Naturally, few of the world’s more impoverished sectors actually enjoyed genuine neutrality amid the preeminence of the essential struggle between capitalism and communism. They played their required roles as toadies, and the wheels were greased. When necessary, there were assassinations and wars, and thousands of foreigners died in places Americans scarcely knew existed.
Then, seemingly overnight, this dualistic milieu was gone, and the global stage was cleared. Before we even had time to begin planning the end of history, the next holy crusade commenced, this time against Terrorism, Inc.
The new reality was replete with outrages, annoyances and enemies of various stripes, capable of being conveniently grouped as Muslim, a fact that proved convenient for those Christians in America feeling a need to lash out against persecution to prove their creationism, and to suggest with no discernible irony that homegrown fascism was necessary to combat the threat posed by fascism from afar.
This post-Cold War model of terrorism was different than its predecessor. It was scattered and decentralized, arguably centered on multi-cultural, resource-based petroleum politics rather than the previous ideologies of bearded white folks.
9-11 and smaller scale attacks in Europe showed they were capable of hitting us at home. Things had been so much cleaner and simpler before.
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I’ve remained fascinated by the Cold War period, the more so after traveling in the East Bloc during the 1980’s. Given this, it is perhaps peculiar for me to make today’s confession: At no time when the war was still cold did I have the slightest interest in the genre of espionage/spy thriller, of which the British writer (and former real-life practitioner) John le Carré is the acknowledged master.
Consequently, I cannot comment on his twenty-plus novels. However, last weekend we attended a screening of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the most recent film adaptation of le Carré’s 1974 work of the same name, and found it quite brilliant.
You’ll be spared a lengthy review, apart from the observation that establishing a proper Cold War mood is critical to the movie’s success. Much of the action takes place in murky English interiors, and outdoors, the sun almost never shines amid clouds, rain and gloom. Accordingly, the cinematography is grainy and dated.
The pasty characters smoke and drink to excess. They generally appear to be exhausted, as befits those who, by their own contention, are bearing the weight of the free world’s future, and standing as bulwarks against the likelihood of World War Three.
As one, they recall WWII with affection as being the time when all of the UK stood together, as opposed to the uncertain present, when one of them has become a mole.
While the actual physical battlefields of the Cold War were located in those unfortunate Third World countries used as weapons testing grounds, the primary belligerents and their allies (sycophants?) fought a parallel war almost akin to what we’d now refer to as “virtual.” Certainly it was not bloodless, and the pieces (the players) were real, but much of the action was waged in and against human minds, in a game often likened to three-dimensional chess.
Literally and figuratively, the chess pieces are the central characters in le Carré’s novels and the new film.
In America, the Red Scare was vastly overstated during the 1950’s, exacerbated by the dipsomaniacal tendencies of Joe McCarthy and his Ponzi scheme of traitor production. The Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss aside, most of the targeted Americans remained loyal to the red, white and blue.
Concurrently, the British seemed to suffer the misfortune of harboring a higher per capita percentage of genuine turncoats, epitomized by the villainy of the so-called Cambridge Five.
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In 1988, I’d just started my job abstracting periodicals at the long-defunct Data-Courier in Louisville when the British arch-defector Kim Philby died in Moscow.
I knew this because Philby’s demise was being fervently discussed in all the publications we received from the UK: The Economist, The Spectator, New Statesman and even Punch.
In turn, these were the magazines increasingly shunted onto my stack of work by fellow staffers after it became known that the new guy rather enjoyed reading them, and more importantly, wasn’t troubled by the English essayist’s habit of hiding the topic sentence somewhere other than the opening paragraph. We had quotas, you know.
Philby was the most infamous of the Cambridge Five, alongside Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, although an argument can be made that Burgess was more fundamentally nasty. He’d had the good sense to die young, whereas Philby drank himself to death over a longer period of time, and seemed to absorb the remainder of the accumulated opprobrium.
An American might try to imagine some of David Halberstam’s best and brightest, those highly educated, hyper-patriotic young stalwarts standing in the front line of the far rear echelon during America’s war in Vietnam, eventually revealed as members of a spy ring under the spell of the enemy, and espousing Marxist rhetoric while exposing contacts and double agents to sure death.
There is no evidence to suggest that any of them turned. At the same time, their stewardship of the war in Southeast Asia was faulty, and the war was a failure – or was it?
Back in the good old days, pre-Osama, it would have been handled, right?
It has been only 26 years since the Soviet Union dissolved, which is a blip in the overall timeline of history. Absent context, little can be understood with respect to what this span really means.
Conceding from the outset that this four-part documentary film is very Eurocentric -- it includes nothing about what has been happening east of the Urals and in the various -stans -- it remains a valuable overview of the past two and a half decades of Russian history.
The four-part documentary Moscow’s Empire shows how the former Soviet nations faced an anarchic decade marked by military conflicts and the search for new national identities and a new self-awareness.
In the late 1970s the Soviet empire began to crumble. After the fall of the Iron Curtain it fell apart completely in 1991 - bankrupt, traumatized and humiliated on the world stage. The former Soviet nations then faced an anarchic decade marked by military conflicts and the search for new national identities and a new self-awareness.
The end of a decade of upheavals saw the rise of a ”new tsar” at the helm in Russia, determined to guide the ”old” empire” back to former global power. After becoming president in 2000, Vladimir Putin began undoing the internal chaos that had beset the country, while at the same time restricting newly won freedoms. His leadership style was authoritarian and arguably autocratic. Moscow became an increasingly confident player on the international stage, aiming to limit on western influence.
The war in Georgia, and above all the recent conflict in eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea exacerbated the divide between East and West. A new Cold War appears to have emerged, returning conditions to the 1980s. The four-part documentary Moscow’s Empire looks for answers to these developments, and provides a variety of perspectives on life in the former Soviet block countries - from the people who have experienced events at first hand and in some cases shaped them.
Following are the four parts.
1
2
3
4
Part four of the documentary ends with Russia's annexation of Crimea in March, 2014, and the subsequent imposition of sanctions by the USA and EU. Nothing is said about Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down over eastern Ukraine (presumably by Russian irregulars) on July 17, 2014.
Fighting has continued in Ukraine since then, and of course there is an ongoing investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 American election. This article from August is an update in the vein of Deutsche Welle's fine documentary film.
But whether they will change Vladimir Putin’s behaviour is another matter
... As Mr Putin looks towards his fourth term (he is expected to win next year’s election), Russians are more concerned with their wallets than with Crimea. Growth this year is projected to be 2% or less. For the elite, the prospect of long-term stagnation and endless standoff with the West raises questions about the country’s direction. “The sense of an historic dead-end evokes panic,” writes Vladimir Frolov, a Russian analyst. Sanctions will not cause Mr Putin to reverse course, but they do make it harder for him to drive his way out.
Particularly in the early days after the East Bloc imploded, visiting westerners would scratch their heads at any local mention of Dean Reed, the American pop star. In turn, East Germans, Czechs and Russians would express befuddlement.
How could Americans not know about Dean Reed?
Three days ago, I found myself unable to remember the name of "that American singer in East Germany back then." Google promptly schooled me, and then YouTube sweetened the offer.
I hadn't planned on spending several hours watching videos and reading remembrances of a fellow whose unlikely (red) star already was fading prior to his untimely death 31 years ago, but as regular readers of NA Confidential know, the history of late-period communism has an enduring grip on me, primarily because I had the good fortune to see a wee bit of it first-hand just before the end.
The boy can't help it. Yes, Roger's on a Commie Jag again.
Truth be told, it's likely that my very first exposure to Dean Reed came in 1986, courtesy of the infamous segment on 60 Minutes. I finally made it to the GDR three years later, but by then Reed was dead, and I'm fairly certain I didn't know about his passing until my fellow East German student summer workers told me. By this time Guns 'N' Roses was a thing, even in Karl Marx Stadt -- not exactly Reed's bailiwick.
Dean Reed was born in Denver. He went to Hollywood in search of careers singing and acting, and improbably, he found them. Armed with a few minor American hit songs, Reed traveled to South America in the early 1960s and discovered he was an idol on a par with Elvis.
Amid the Cold War dualism of the time, Reed also abruptly became "woke" as a socialist. One thing led to another, and after stints in Argentina, Chile and Italy, he surfaced in East Germany. There he embraced the party line, made his home (a very nice one, too), became a superstar in the Warsaw Pact, and later fell victim to internal cognitive dissonance and external geopolitical shifts.
American Rebel, the older of these two documentaries (1986) doesn't purport to be a critical examination of Reed's various careers on the other side of the wall. However, it's entertaining, and about as much a period piece as can be imagined from a time that still feels all too immediate to me.
We really talked about those things all the time, didn't we? It might as well have been 300 years ago, not 30.
The Red Elvis gets slightly closer to the central questions of Reed's life (and death), as summarized in this passage from a separate essay.
Over time Reed recognized the contradictions between his idealistic world views and the reality of life in East Germany, but he didn’t know what to do about them. As the years passed, he also saw his fame and star power fade. A new generation barely knew who he was. People who knew him well have said he longed to return to the US, but his socialistic, Marxist views and actions would have made it impossible for him to make a living in the land of his birth – especially after his 1986 appearance on 60 Minutes. Only six weeks after that TV interview his body was pulled out of Lake Zeuthen (Zeuthener See) near his home at the southern tip of East Berlin.
There has been much speculation about Dean Reed’s death. Was it a suicide (as most of his East German friends and family think), a strange accident, or was it something more sinister? We may never know, but he was known to be very depressed and suicidal in the weeks before his death. Dean Reed was caught between two worlds, between two countries, in a trap of his own making.
More from a fan site which looks to have been functional since the Internet's dawning: Dean-Reed-Archiv-Berlin.
That's right. In the beginning, a New Albanian was inspired to hold a mayoral prayer breakfast by the example of Ike, who'd been encouraged by Billy Graham in a time of Cold War consciousness. Let's pursue this narrative to the usual conclusion: "We've always done it that way" -- even though we began this tradition only in 1968, before anchors were Trump.
Wilson Waters got the idea for the New Albany Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast from Dwight Eisenhower 40 years ago. And 40 years ago, Waters and his fellow prayer breakfast committee members started the event.
“I figured they have one in Washington, why can’t we have one here,” he said. “I’m surprised it kept going, but I’m glad it did for 40 years.”
In this decade-old treatment, one prayer breakfast attendee inadvertently gets to the heart of the matter, as New Albany's annual supplicatory extravaganza actually serves as a mirror, reflecting the city's relative absence of religious diversity.
“It’s a gathering of all churches,” said Patty Wolfe. “It means so much; it’s a fellowship of people of all ages, a combination of good Christians.”
In 2017, the institution created by Eisenhower and borrowed by New Albany (as well as numerous other communities) turned 65. Interestingly, while the national version of the prayer breakfast remains associated with the presidency, it has undergone an evolution of identity to remove the direct reference to the office.
Initially called the Presidential Prayer Breakfast, the name was changed in 1970 to the National Prayer Breakfast.
Predictably, it's a memo New Albany has failed to receive -- for 46 years. Jeff Gahan might take note of this, although he won't.
On the morning of Feb. 2, 2017, more than 3,500 political leaders, military chiefs and corporate moguls met for eggs, sausage, muffins – and prayer. The Washington, D.C. gathering, the 65th National Prayer Breakfast, is an opportunity for new friends and old associates, from 50 states and 140 countries, to break bread and forge fellowship in Jesus’ name.
Convened on the first Thursday in February, the gathering, known as the Presidential Prayer Breakfast until 1970, has always included the American head of state. Donald Trump, in his maiden appearance, broke precedent with a powerful no holds barred speech that put other countries on notice, threatened church/state separation and mocked actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
As a scholar of American religious history, I am intrigued by how presidents negotiate the intricacies of church/state relationships versus religion/politics entanglements. Most avoid the former while trying to benefit from the latter. That’s why the prayer breakfast is noteworthy – it is an opportunity for leaders to appear as Christ’s servants rather than formidable heads of state.
Faith first
President Dwight Eisenhower began the tradition with the first breakfast in 1953. While Eisenhower was initially wary of attending a prayer breakfast, evangelist Billy Graham convinced him it was the right move.
It is impossible to separate the National Prayer Breakfast from the Cold War imperatives reigning during the era of its establishment.
During this not-so-distant past, there were many politicians who, like (Senator Joseph) McCarthy, were advocating for a strong nationalism as a means of protection from foreign enemies during a time of growing global fear, and this surge of nationalism was neatly wrapped in religious rhetoric attributed to America’s great past. It is a cocktail from which America has still not fully recovered.
The tradition of the National Prayer Breakfast comes out of that time, as do the other religious components still resident in our contemporary American cultural experience, such as the pledge of allegiance and the motto.
However, it is important to note that there are other politically-based social traditions that are intertwined with similar religiosity, but were not born in that 1950s time frame. The White House Christmas tree lighting began in 1923. Irving Berlin wrote the famous song “God Bless America” in 1918. From the presidential inauguration ceremony to the patriotic songs commonly sung, religious language finds itself in many places. In fact, written into the end of every presidential proclamation at least over the past 150 years is the statement:
“IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this second day of February, in the year of our Lord two thousand seventeen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-first.”
Much of this religious language is so well embedded into America’s systems and cultures that it is largely accepted and ignored, being challenged only periodically by religious freedom organizations.
Readers already know that if given the option, I'd consign the Mayor's Prayer Breakfast to the dustbin of history. But at the very least, shouldn't references to the mayor -- this one or any other -- be removed?
So long as public money isn't being used to fund the event, erasing the connotation of political patronage would go a log way toward neutralizing the objectionable nature of the gathering as currently constituted.
I know; we've always done it this way -- except we haven't, and this doesn't mean cobwebbed rituals can't be modified to suit modernity.
My European travels during the decade of the 1980s began in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev had been in power only a few months, and ended in 1989, with the Berlin Wall reduced to rubble and the Soviet satellite nations falling like dominoes. Two years later, so ended the USSR.
From an older book ...
Ronald Reagan was widely eulogized for having won the cold war, liberated Eastern Europe and pulled the plug on the Soviet Union. Margaret Thatcher, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, Charles Krauthammer and other notables offered variations of The Economist‘s cover headline: “The Man Who Beat Communism.”
Actually, Jack F. Matlock Jr. writes in Reagan and Gorbachev, it was “not so simple.” He should know. A veteran foreign service officer and respected expert on the Soviet Union, he reached the pinnacle of his career under Reagan, serving first as the White House’s senior coordinator of policy toward the Soviet Union, then as ambassador to Moscow. In both the title of his memoir and the story it tells, he gives co-star billing to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Reagan himself went even farther. Asked at a press conference in Moscow in 1988, his last year in office, about the role he played in the great drama of the late 20th century, he described himself essentially as a supporting actor. “Mr. Gorbachev,” he said, “deserves most of the credit, as the leader of this country.”
... to this new one, which I'll be purchasing. Is the bookseller reading?
The peasant boy turned Communist Party boss who liberated his people from 70 years of lies and buried the Soviet Union
... Ever since the end of the Soviet Union, the question of “why” has lingered in Western, Russian and Chinese minds. Why did a man at the head of a superpower undermine his own authority? Did he simply fail to understand the consequences of his actions, or did he act out of courage and vision? How did Mr Gorbachev, the peasant boy turned Communist Party boss in a fedora, become the statesman who liberated his people from 70 years of lies and fear, end the cold war and bury the Soviet Union? Was he a product of the Soviet system, as he claimed, or its “genetic error”, as Andrei Grachev, an earlier biographer described him? What made Gorbachev Gorbachev?
Che Guevara's foray into the Congo in 1965 ended badly, but Fidel Castro was playing a long game, and Cuba's adventures in Africa reached critical mass in Angola during the mid-1980s.
Among many revelations in this excellent two-hour documentary is the USSR's continuing annoyance with Castro's tendency to slip the presumed leash. When Mikhail Gorbachev made negotiations with America his prime focus, Cuba became the leading exponent of Communism measured by troops on the ground.
The US Department of State knew how many Cuban troops were in Angola from the number of baseball diamonds as observed by satellite; Cuban army regulations stipulated a baseball field for every "x" number of soldiers, almost a half million of whom returned home after the 1988 peace accords. Castro justified it as anti-imperialism, and few Americans know the cross-currents in Angola in the 1980s.
Variables included the legacy of three separate armed Angolan forces, South Africa's national security via power politics, independence for neighboring Namibia, Castro's determination to bring about the end of apartheid, Gorbachev and the declining Soviet influence internationally, and of course Ronald Reagan's aggressive determination to make life difficult for Soviets and Cubans wherever they were located.
The testimony of the principles is what sets this film apart. Many key players from all eras were alive to tell the tale in the early 2000s, although several have died since, including the Falstaffian character Jorge Risquet. His unlikely meeting with South Africa's Pik Botha in a Cairo hotel bar provided an impetus to talks that led ultimately to agreement -- and at least made a minor contribution to the freeing of Nelson Mandela two years later.
Risquet's fondness for cigars is an amusing sidebar to the preceding. In summary, it's like a Cold War diplomacy primer, perhaps no longer useful, but still instructive.
I'm unsure which of two titles is accurate. Strictly speaking, the videos are taken from the BBC4 program Storyville, and comprise Cuba! Africa! Revolution! Elsewhere they're referred to as Cuba: An African Odyssey. The director is Jihan El Tahri, and the release date is 2007.
If you're new to the blog, note only that my first visit to the city of Berlin came in the summer of 1989, during which I was part of a cultural exchange program and served as a paid employee of the East Berlin Parks Department for three weeks in August of that year.
Three months later, the Berlin Wall came down.
Seeing the reality of bipolar Germany in 1989, and observing the wall that defined it, has made an indelible impression on me. A quarter-century later, I can't shake it. Search NA Confidential for "Berlin Wall," and you can read all about my obsession.
Following are three readings -- inadequate, but informative.
First, a new book explaining how the wall actually came down. As usual, historically ignorant Americans tend to get it wrong. The book is called The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall, written by Mary Elise Sarotte.
... Many Americans, in particular, appeared to be under the impression that Ronald Reagan set an inevitable process in motion with the exhortation he made to the leader of the Soviet Union in 1987: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” What happened had to happen, they seemed to think: the East German regime was weakened by glasnost and perestroika, the political opening and economic reforms that preceded the dissolution of the Soviet empire, as well as by its own ineptitude and the increasing number of protesters longing for the freedom and comforts of the West.
The reality was quite different, as Ms Sarotte shows in her meticulous account of what she calls the “accidental and contingent” nature of the opening of the wall and her portraits of many local activists.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, 25 years ago, not only reunited Germany and foretold the coming collapse of the Soviet Union; it signaled a profound change in global affairs. The Cold War that followed World War II created a bipolar world, in which relations between countries and contests for state power everywhere were subsumed by the binary conflict of a U.S.-led West vs. a Soviet-dominated East. Even though the U.S.S.R.’s final collapse came two years later, the fall of the Wall that had separated West from East in Berlin more than any other single moment symbolizes the end of the Cold War ...
... To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Al Jazeera examines 25 ways the world was changed in the aftermath of that moment.
Finally, a visit to the city of Görlitz. How has Germany itself changed after 25 years?
Twenty-five years after the long-detested "Iron Curtain" was torn down by people power, there's little left beyond the many monuments along the old route.
Yet travel some 200km (125 miles) to Germany's most easterly city, Goerlitz, and the legacy of 1989's abrupt change in the ruling political and financial system has a much longer tail.
Certainly the roads and communications provide little clue to the City's GDR past. The region shared in the fruits of the 2 trillion euros (£1.6tn) worth of rebuilding work paid for by West German taxpayers.
But in common with most of the old East Germany, the initial surge of departing young economic migrants left behind lower birth rates, higher unemployment and an ageing population.
Am I going to get back into bicycling some day? For a very long time, it was a "bucket list" item to bike from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. Then I became a walker.
Now that the ideal route for a south-to-north ride has been revealed, it means that I'll have to (a) find the time, and (b) get the posterior re-calloused.
We're looking for name of the geo-political border that once stretched from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea. During the Cold War, this border separated the Communist East from the capitalist European West.
Now that the Cold War is over — we think — the demarcation has taken on a less foreboding role: It's now a bike path.
Was it 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and the Warsaw Pact dominoes finally fell? Or perhaps 1991, when the USSR belatedly went belly up? Did it begin anew with Putin?
Irrespective of the precise ending date, the Cold War’s late-1940’s origins long predated my own, and until somewhere around the age of 30 -- give or take a year – my perceptions of prevailing geopolitical reality on the planet duly revolved around the received wisdom of two heavily armed camps, with occasional hand-me-downs (guns, butter, trade agreements and news coverage) thrown to the non-aligned “Third” World to secure cooperation amid the attrition.
Naturally, few of the world’s more impoverished sectors actually enjoyed genuine neutrality amid the pre-eminence of the essential struggle between capitalism and communism. They played their required roles as toadies, and the wheels were greased. When necessary, there were assassinations and wars, and thousands of foreigners died in places Americans scarcely knew existed.
Then, seemingly overnight, this dualistic milieu was gone, and the global stage was cleared. Before we even had time to begin planning the end of history, the next holy crusade commenced, this time against Terrorism, Inc. The new reality was replete with outrages, annoyances and enemies of various stripes, capable of being conveniently grouped as Muslim, a fact that proved convenient for those Christians in America feeling a need to lash out against persecution to prove their creationism, and to suggest with no discernable irony that homegrown fascism was necessary to combat the threat posed by fascism from afar.
This post-Cold War model of terrorism was different than its predecessor. It was scattered and decentralized, arguably centered on multi-cultural, resource-based petroleum politics rather than the previous ideologies of bearded white folks. 9-11 and smaller scale attacks in Europe showed they were capable of hitting us at home.
Things were so much cleaner and simpler before.
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I’ve remained fascinated by the Cold War period, the more so after traveling in the East Bloc during the 1980’s. Given this, it is perhaps peculiar for me to make today’s confession: At no time when the war was still cold did I have the slightest interest in the genre of espionage/spy thriller, of which the British writer (and former real-life practitioner) John le Carré is the acknowledged master.
Consequently, I cannot comment on his twenty-plus novels. However, last weekend we attended a screening of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”, the most recent film adaptation of le Carré’s 1974 work of the same name, and found it quite brilliant.
You’ll be spared a lengthy review, apart from the observation that establishing a proper Cold War mood is critical to the movie’s success. Much of the action takes place in murky English interiors, and outdoors, the sun almost never shines amid clouds, rain and gloom. Accordingly, the cinematography is grainy and dated.
The pasty characters smoke and drink to excess. They generally appear to be exhausted, as befits those who, by their own contention, are bearing the weight of the free world’s future, and standing as bulwarks against the likelihood of World War Three. As one, the recall WWII with affection as being the time when all of the UK stood together, as opposed to the uncertain present, when one of them is a mole.
While the actual physical battlefields of the Cold War were located in those unfortunate Third World countries used as weapons testing grounds, the primary belligerents and their allies (sycophants?) fought a parallel war almost akin to what we’d now refer to as “virtual.” Certainly it was not bloodless, and the pieces (the players) were real, but much of the action was waged in and against human minds, in a game often likened to three-dimensional chess.
Literally and figuratively, the chess pieces are the central characters in Le Carré’s novels and the new film.
In America, the Red Scare was vastly overstated during the 1950’s, exacerbated by the dipsomaniacal tendencies of Joe McCarthy and his Ponzi scheme of traitor production. The Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss aside, most of the targeted Americans remained loyal to the red, white and blue. Concurrently, the British seemed to suffer the misfortune of harboring a higher per capita percentage of genuine turncoats, emblemized by the villainy of the so-called Cambridge Five.
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In 1988, I’d just started my job abstracting periodicals at the long-defunct Data-Courier in Louisville when the British arch-defector Kim Philby died in Moscow.
I knew this because Philby’s demise was being fervently discussed in all the publications we received from the UK: The Economist, The Spectator, New Statesman and even Punch. In turn, these were the magazines increasingly shunted onto my stack of work by fellow staffers after it became known that the new guy rather enjoyed reading them, and more importantly, wasn’t troubled by the English essayist’s habit of hiding the topic sentence somewhere other than the opening paragraph. We had quotas, you know.
Philby was the most infamous of the Cambridge Five, alongside Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, although an argument can be made that Burgess was more fundamentally nasty. He’d had the good sense to die young, whereas Philby drank himself to death over a longer period of time, and seemed to absorb the remainder of the accumulated opprobrium.
An American might try to imagine some of David Halberstam’s best and brightest, those highly educated, hyper-patriotic young stalwarts standing in the front line of the far rear echelon during America’s war in Vietnam, eventually revealed as members of a spy ring under the spell of the enemy, and espousing Marxist rhetoric while exposing contacts and double agents to sure death.
There is no evidence to suggest that any of them turned. At the same time, their stewardship of the war in Southeast Asia was faulty, and the war was a failure – or was it?
Back in the good old days, pre-Osama, it would have been handled, right?
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