Speak, Memory

As one grows older, the temptation to play the curmudgeon becomes dangerously strong—to moan that everything is going to hell, or, conversely, that things have gotten easier, and young people today have no idea how hard they used to be (some curmudgeons manage to hold both beliefs simultaneously). But there are ways in which a long memory can help put current events in critical perspective. Here are two of them, and please forgive any descents into curmudgeonhood.

The first involves the shadow of the Bomb. For anyone born in the early 1960’s, as I was, this shadow was hard to avoid while growing up. Although I didn’t have to do absurd “duck and cover” drills in school, long before I was ten I knew about nuclear missiles, and fallout shelters. As I grew older, I learned about throw weights, MIRVs, nuclear umbrellas and “mutually assured destruction.” The bomb was everywhere in popular culture, especially film: comedy like Wargames, black comedy like Dr. Strangelove, and deadly serious treatments like On the Beach and The Day After. My parents liked to play the comic songs of Tom Lehrer, including the one called “So Long, Mom (A Song of World War III),” sung by a bomber pilot who concludes with the lines “I’ll look for you when the war is over / An hour and a half from now.” The coming of détente in the 1970’s eased anxieties for a time, but they returned with a vengeance when Ronald Reagan decided to station medium-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe in the 1980’s, spurring massive antiwar protests (including a million people in Central Park in 1982). Today, when I teach my lecture course on the history of modern warfare, I spend some time with the horrifically absurd calculations of Cold War strategists like Herman Kahn, who speculated about how many tens of millions of dead Americans might constitute “acceptable losses” in a nuclear exchange. I also devote part of a lecture to the heroic Soviet submarine officer Vasili Arkhipov, who came as close as any individual in history to saving the world by preventing a fellow officer from launching a tactical nuclear weapon at American ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The threat of Armageddon has not really diminished since the end of the Cold War. The US and Russia have culled their nuclear arsenals, but still have more than enough doomsday weapons to turn much of the globe into a smoking wasteland. More powers have nuclear weapons than was the case at the height of the Cold War, and a frightening number of them have very unstable politics. And yet, curiously, since the end of the Cold War, the threat of a massive nuclear exchange seems to have receded, at least in the public mind.

That’s one reason, I think, why so many commentators today talk so readily, and in such frightening terms, of needing to gird the West for war against Russia, to defend Ukraine and to resist further Russian aggression by any means necessary. That moral duty, they repeat, overrides every other conceivable factor. Sorry, but the factor that overrides everything else is the need to avoid nuclear war. It doesn’t mean simply giving in to Vladimir Putin, but it does mean using much more caution than would be the case with an ordinary, non-nuclear armed dictator, even if doing so comes with serious and regrettable costs and bears its own risks. Some risks are much worse than others, and it is absurd to make comparisons between the world we live in today and the world before the Bomb. We are not in 1938 today, and will never be again, even if Putin is a fascist aggressor. Because of the Bomb.

More than a few of the moralizing absolutists on Ukraine and Russia are old enough to have grown up under the shadow of the Bomb themselves (e.g. Timothy Snyder, born in 1969). But, especially in Europe, I have found the tendency particularly strong among people who came of age well after the end of the Cold War. They sometimes seem to talk as if Hiroshima and Nagasaki had never happened. We don’t have to agree with Tucker Carlson, and left-wing analysts like John Mearsheimer, who both say we are closer to Armageddon than ever (and blame the Biden Administration), in order to criticize the war talk that seems all too prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic these days.

The second way in which a long memory can offer a critical perspective also involves the Cold War period, but in a very different manner. Through the 1980’s, a large portion of the American leadership class was made up of war veterans. President George H.W. Bush was a World War II hero, like John F. Kennedy before him. No one could doubt either man’s patriotism, or their willingness to risk their lives for their country. And, at the same time, most Americans genuinely believed that the US stood at the forefront of a global struggle for freedom. Together, the memory of shared sacrifice, and the sense of a common struggle, provided an important sense of national unity, of national cohesion.

People on the left today have a particularly hard time thinking of the Cold War in these terms. They tend to regard it as a giant fraud, and worse. They blame the US (mostly) for starting it, for grossly exaggerating the Soviet threat, and for using that threat as an excuse to carry out all manner of atrocities in the cause of American empire. They condemn “Cold Warriors” as war criminals, and “Cold War liberals” as collaborators who not only helped legitimate the crimes but undermined the cause of liberalism in the process. I’ve criticized this last interpretation elsewhere. But even if you accept the entire interpretation, it doesn’t change the fact that, along with the memory of shared sacrifice in World War II, the Cold War created bonds across classes in the United States. The sort of resentment against supposedly out-of-touch, uncaring elites that Donald Trump provokes today would have been far more difficult under a President like Kennedy, who almost died in the war, lost his brother in it, and was leading the US in white-knuckled confrontations with the USSR (the John Birch society and other conservatives tried, of course, but with relatively little success). The Vietnam War, and especially the way American elites mostly escaped military service in it, did a great deal to damage this sense of cohesion, but it didn’t destroy it entirely.

Today, is there any larger cause, or any memory of shared sacrifice, that bonds Western nations together? I’m not so sure. European elites believe passionately in “Europe,” and invoke the now-distant memory of World War II in defending it. But that belief is mostly not shared by the people voting, in France, for either Marine Le Pen or Jean-Luc Mélenchon, or elsewhere in Europe for other populists. In fact, the constant push for more European integration, at the necessary cost of individual national sovereignties, has done more than the elites acknowledge to fuel the growth of populist movements, of both the right and left. In a 2005 referendum, French voters resoundingly rejected a proposed European constitutional treaty. I was at a conference in France at the time, and I remember many of the French participants breaking into tears when they heard the result. But the conclusion the French government drew from the defeat was not to abandon further steps towards European integration, but to avoid further referenda. That sort of arrogance has prompted the strong reactions we see playing out in France this week.

In writing about the Cold War in this way, I don’t mean to deny the economic trends that have done so much to fuel right-wing populism, in the US and Europe alike. But, during the Cold War, a sense of national cohesion and unity, fostered by the memory of shared wartime sacrifice and by a belief in a shared Cold War mission (however possibly mistaken), did much to counteract the most toxic and destructive forms of resentment among people suffering economic reverses—in the US and in many other nations. But today, on both sides of the Atlantic, these guardrails are gone, and we can see the consequences all too clearly.