Considering the Cold War — An Introduction

My dad had a friend who had spent time in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. When I was old enough to really know what this meant, I asked my dad why this friend never talked about the experience. I didn’t get any big long explanation but I was told the only time this guy would talk about the war was when he was really, really drunk, and pretty much, each time he’d get started, he would end up sobbing. Obviously, my dad didn’t want to talk much about it either.

As I grew older, I realized that nearly all the men round about my father’s age had all gone overseas during the War. Thing was, none of them ever brought it up. Despite all the war movies that were released during my growing up, none of our neighbors would ever talk about their own experiences except maybe to say, in the broadest terms, they were onboard a ship or they had gone to Italy or France or North Africa. Us kids picked up on this, I guess, and we left the subject alone, pretty much.

Recently, it has struck me that “us kids” went through a conflict, a significant conflict that we don’t talk much about, either, but it really had a deep and lasting effect on us, and I’m not thinking of Viet Nam. We went through the “cold war.” What also has struck me, is that we really don’t talk about it much. It’s like, those of us who lived through it, in our “formative years,” would just as much let it stay in the forgotten past, we, simply glad that its worst manifestations never came into the realm of reality.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’ve always suspected that people ten years older or ten years younger than me don’t really know the true weight of the shadowy and terrifying cloud we lived under during the 1950s and 60s. I also suspect that, for whatever reason, I was a little more affected and skittish about the “nuclear threat” than most of the other kids, or maybe they just kept it under the covers a little better than I did. Who knows?

There was a phrase that I remember from that era that you heard all the time, and I’ve almost never heard it since then, the phrase being “cold war propaganda.” We were always hearing that the commies (the communists, our arch enemies) were using cold war propaganda to convert naive little countries to take up the communist style of government. The one, singular goal of all communist governments was to tear down the good old, all American way of life. In fact, there was a great variety of communists with all sorts of goals, but to a seven-year old kid, well, such a kid was not that discriminating about political nuances. All we knew is that they wanted to blow the shit out of us with their huge bombers and nuclear missiles. If we survived the holocaust, we’d be living like cave men, groveling for grubs and worms to eat in the glowing mud left behind in the atomic waste. The threat of such extinction was always hanging over your shoulder, sometimes just faded out of consciousness, sometimes not. The propaganda wasn’t effective just on our enemies but on us kids, too. . .

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