Great Story About How the Cold War Did Not Become a Hot War

The sub in the picture is a current Russian nuke boat.

In a story by Robert Krulwich on Nat Geo, we get the story of Russian nuclear submarines and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The story is here.

For those of us who served during the Cold War, the vivid thing in this story is the layers of restraint in the Soviet system.  During the Cold War, America faced a civilized enemy.  Our civilizations differed, but each side wanted to be the superior civilization.

Our current enemy, Islamic Terrorists, have no civilization and are the enemies of all civilization.

I very much miss having a uniformed enemy with a 1000-year-old culture.

1984: Big Brother Never Showed Up

I am re-reading "1984" for the Cold War class I am taking.  George Orwell's tale is so completely Evil Empire and so completely wrong.  In a bleak, battered London, Winston Smith toils rewriting history at his day job and trying to remember and write down the truth at night.

As a storyteller Orwell is brilliant and chilling.

As a prophet, he is a failure.  The world he imagined is nothing like what actually happened.  Orwell imagined a future with central control of information and nearly all history wiped out.  In this gray, impoverished world everyone is starving.

Closer to the future is Ray Bradbury's 1953 book "Fahrenheit 451."  You and I and everyone who read that book 30 years ago remember it as the book about burning books.  In this terrifying world in which Firemen start fires instead of putting them out.

But when I re-read the book several years ago, the thing that stood out was the video walls and the ear bugs.  The main character's wife had a room with three walls of video and wanted her husband to get promoted in the fire department so they could afford four walls of video.  With four walls, the video became interactive and she could be on game shows.  And everyone got music through bugs they fitted in their ears.  Bigger TVs, TVs that cover walls, music direct to your ears--that sounds like the near present and near future.

The guy who got the future right is Aldous Huxley in his 1931 book "Brave, New World."  Huxley imagines the future in which no one has to burn books because no one reads them.  In the Brave New World people are so glutted with entertainment and information that they are easy to manipulate.

Any prospect of the horrors of 1984 becoming reality died with the Soviet Union.  Communist China is becoming capitalist in a way that will eventually end the communist domination of the government.

But people who no longer read, who are obsessed with music and video, who are lazy and stupid--that world is here.  Prophetic Gold Medal to Huxley, Silver to Bradbury, no medal for Orwell.

Soviet Era Propaganda Reminds Me of East-West Border, And Advertising

Yesterday was the first day of a class I am taking about the Cold War Era in books, film, and images, like the one above.  Today we saw Soviet propaganda films from 1924 to the 1960s and discussed several propaganda posters.  Before class we read a 30-page article about Soviet cartoons and cartoonists.  

Among the cartoonists, Boris Efimov story was chilling.  He lived from the beginning of the 20th century, either 1899 or 1900 until 2008.  He drew cartoons for the entire Soviet era.  

In interviews he said he drew what he was told to draw, Soviets as heroes, westerners as fat and greedy.  In his tale, I remembered both seeing Soviet posters when I was stationed in Germany in the 1970s and at home in newspapers and on TV.  

I worked at an ad agency for 13 years and have worked in marketing communications of various kinds for the past 30 years.  What stands out in the Soviet images is how well they controlled their "brand."  From the 1920s to the end of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the image of the Soviet citizen/worker/soldier was a strong, tall, clean, happy man or woman.  The capitalist enemy was fat, greedy, foolish and deceptive.

If you are going to create and impression through media, this control is very important.  And as the world changes, the brand has to stay consistent.  So with Ford, the brand image is quality, reliability, and performance though the actual product has changed from a Model T to a Ford GT.

The brand image is the coolest car on the road whether it's 1908 or 2015.  And the Soviet's controlled their image just that well--and exploited every weakness in their enemies.

Their propaganda was effective enough to keep me and 250,000 other American soldiers permanently stationed in Germany to defend Western Europe from an attack we thought could come at any time.  Our tanks were fully loaded with cannon ammunition and ready to fight when World War 3 started.  When we went to the border, we saw this on the other side of the fence.

They convinced us!

Soldier on a Train: Talking about the Cold War with a Suspense Writer

Last week in one of the over-scheduled trips I make as part of my day job, I flew from Chicago to Philadelphia on the morning of Tuesday, March 4.  I was in uniform because there is no better way to fly than in uniform.  In 15 months when I get out, this is the benefit I may miss the most.

At about 3 pm I was on Rt. 95 driving to a Public Science meeting in DC.  Because of traffic at that time of day, I did not drive all the way to DC, but stopped at the BWI Airport rail station and took a train into Union Station then a Metro to Busboys and Poets Cafe where the meeting was being held.

The meeting was a science writers travelogue of two visits to North Korea.  He was very funny about his North Korean handlers, even while painting a very bleak picture of North Korea.

At 9pm I was back in Union Station and just made the 9:05 train to BWI.  I sat in cafe car and a young woman sat opposite me.  As she sat down she took three thick paperback novels from a bag and said, "I'm checking out the competition."  The woman I sat with for the next 20 minutes was Leslie Silbert, author of "The Intelligencer:" a spy novel set in 16th Century London and in New York today.  Her main character in the late 1500s is the playwright Christopher Marlowe, who was a spy for Queen Elizabeth.

We talked a little bit about her book and that she is writing another suspense novel.  But with Ukraine and Crimea in the news, the conversation turned to the Cold War.  She asked me a lot of questions about being a tank commander on the East-West border and what we thought about war with Russia.  That question was easy:  We thought there would be a war and that we would die in the first ten minutes.

I bought the book and really like it so far, especially the parts about Marlowe and spying in 16th Century London.  As you would expect, she has a web site: http://lesliesilbert.com/

On the opposite side of the aisle was a guy who knew a lot about the Russia-Ukraine conflict.  It was an interesting conversation with two very bright people (and me).  It was fun to remember again how different the world looked during the Cold War when we had any enemy with planes, ships, tanks and uniforms.  I was thinking, at least if we go to war with Russia, we won't be trying to "win hearts and minds."