From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Sat Apr 06 2002 - 03:55:44 MST
> > It only takes me a few seconds to infer that by Spike's lights, WWIII was the
> > Cold War. In the popular theory, NATO / USA won because the FSU broke up, the
> > Berlin Wall came down, Germany reunified, etc., etc.
>
> Errrr, I don't know about you, but I don't consider hordes of grumpy people
> outspending each other an a mad arms race until one collapses to be a "war" at
> all, and it rather cheapens the whole concept of war, really.
Cheapens, eh? The Cold War was "hordes of grumpy people outspending each
other"?
Tell that to the grunting NVA destroying their backs and knees in mud to their
chests as they pulled WWI field artillery pieces up a mesa to take Dien Bien
Phu. Et cetera.
You appear to have a distorted sense of what happened during the period in
question, 1945-7 through 1986-9. This is understandable given your age; you
think Korea, you think "M*A*S*H" and Alan Alda, I bet--not Chosen Reservoir
and POWs whose hands rotted off when they finally thawed. No offense intended,
but I'll take a shot at putting it in perspective.
You were born in '68. So you missed out on most of the hot parts of the Cold
War, and there were plenty: Poland '45, Mao's China, the bitter Korean
Conflict, Castro's Cuba, Stalin through Krushchev, the paired
"impossibilities" of Soviet H-bombs and Sputnik (ballistic missiles meant no
interceptors--suddenly we were naked), the Berlin Airlift, the erection of the
Wall, Hungary in 1956, the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile thing. In brief,
plenty of fucked up shit, dog. Word. Vietnam's devastation was at its peak
when you came into the world.
Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
You were less than a year old, if born, during the sickening crushing of
blossoming Poland in '68 (think Tienanmen Square version 0); Jefferson
Airplane lyrics about "gotta revolution" are quaint to you, not the horrifying
call to destroy civilization they were to people like Chicago's Mayor Daley;
you were in preschool or kindergarten when the last American UH-1 chopper was
pushed off a carrier deck at the fall of Saigon.
Later you might have heard that the Khmer Rouge was piling up skulls, but that
didn't seem connected to anything. Neither did Nicaragua or the Senderos or
any of that stuff. Reagan? stuffed shirt city. Etc.
To tell you the truth, I understand where you're coming from; the stuff
post-1973 is much flatter, and it _all_ seems much ado about nothing, kind of
like the WWF. What's the big deal? We made it, it must have been safe all
along; everybody knows governments lie and wrestling is scripted. But please
consider...
I don't usually call the Cold War WWIII, but I do think it was a very near
thing and I do understand and have some respect for the people whose
stewardship (by skill or dumb luck) let it be that we never saw mushroom
clouds over San Francisco. Or Kiev.
And if they want to call it WWIII--and label it anything from a gutter ball to
a strike for the good guys--I let 'em.
So please let yourself think about your position, maybe do a little more
historical reading sometime. OK?
--
butler a t comp - lib . o r g
I am not here to have an argument. I am here as part of a civilization.
Sometimes I forget.
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