The good old Cold War

To recapture those frightening atmospherics these days, university professors must resort to showing Cold War movies: "The Manchurian Candidate," "Fail Safe," "Dr. Strangelove," "The Hunt for Red October," "Five Days in May," "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold." Students look rather dumbfounded when told that we came close, on several occasions, to World War III.

Yet what if, for example, Josef Stalin had prevented American and British supply aircraft from flying into Berlin in 1948-49? Phew! The years 1945 to, say, 1990 were horrible on other accounts. China's Mao Tse-tung's ghastly Great Leap Forward led to as many as 30 million deaths, the greatest loss of life since the Black Death. The Soviet Union was incarcerating tens of thousands of its citizens in the gulags, as were most of the other members of the Warsaw Pact. The Indo-Pakistan wars, and the repeated conflicts between Israel and its neighbors, produced enormous casualties, but nothing like the numbers that were being slaughtered in Angola, Nigeria, the Congo, Vietnam and Cambodia. Most of the nations of the world were "un-free."

It is hard to explain to a younger generation that such delightful countries as Greece, Spain, Portugal, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Poland and Czechoslovakia (to name only a few) were run in those days by fascist generals, avowed racists or one-party totalitarian regimes. I am ancient enough to remember the long list of countries I would \o7not \f7visit for summer holidays; old enough to recall how creepy it was to enter Walter Ulbricht's East German prison house of a state via Checkpoint Charlie in the late 1960s. Ugh.

Let us not, then, wax too nostalgic about the good old days of the Cold War. Today's global challenges, from Iraq to Darfur to climate change, are indeed grave and cry out for solutions.

But humankind as a whole is a lot more prosperous, a great deal more free and democratic and a considerable way further from nuclear obliteration than we were in Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy's time. We should drink to that.