#hot war

Because I feel like there are others that have a more relevant perspective than I do, and can say things that are more important.

But I’m old enough learned political activism in the last years of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. And these last few weeks have been bringing up All the Feels. They’ve been leaking into my dreams, waking me up in the middle of the night, and not letting me get back to sleep for hours.

And I feel like if I don’t talk about that, something is going to crack inside.

The first Presidential Election I was old enough to vote in was between Ronald Reagan (running for his second term), and Walter Mondale (President Carter’s VP). Note that during his first term, Reagan joked about nuking the Soviet Union. And the likelihood of nuclear war was a recurring topic of conversation / gallows humor among my friends in high school (What position should you assume in case of nuclear war? Bend over, and kiss your ass goodbye).*

Mother and I both volunteered for the Mondale campaign. And we watched the election from the local campaign headquarters. When the the counting and projections were all in, and the electoral map on the TV screen at the front of the room showed 49 states putting their votes in for Reagan, and only 1 state for Mondale, I wept uncontrollably. I was utterly convinced that I would not live to see my next presidential campaign.

She talked me down, and assured me that the people working for peace were still working for peace, and that we would survive this, and it would be okay. And she was right. We did keep working for peace, and we both lived to see the Berlin Wall come down and the end (or so we thought) of the Cold War, and the start of dismantling of nuclear arms stockpiles on both sides (Mom died in ‘91).

[Then, when Clinton ran for president in ‘96, in order to “win back” the Democrats who’d voted for Reagan, he pledged to “govern from the Center,” and the whole Overton Window shifted to the Right. But that’s another story.]**

Today, the United States government and NATO officials are declining to send  arms and fighter jets directly in aid to Ukraine, because they don’t want to “expand the conflict to a wider war.”

And I’m hearing the subtext that “Wider War” is code for ”Nuclear War.”

And my Inner Adolescent is freaking out. It’s like that old cliche of “There are two wolves inside you ...,” except it’s 20-year-old me and my Mom. And she’s only here in my memory, now. I think she’s probably still right, though. But I wish she were here to tell me that, in person.

(Sigh}

*Here’s more realistic advice on what to do, from Beau of the Fifth Column (he also notes that it’s probably not needed right now. Auto-generated captions)

(This is a follow-up thought / memory to this post, about hearing news from Ukraine)

The term “The Third World” was coined by U.S. foreign policy people in the aftermath of WW2.

The term “First World” was used for industrialized -- and Capitalist -- countries that were under U.S. influence.

The term “Second World” was used for industrialized -- and Communist -- countries that were under Soviet influence.

“Third World” was used for those countries (usually recovering from exploitation) that were unaligned and were (sarcastic quotes) “up for grabs.” And instead of fighting a hot war with each other, directly, the U.S.A and the Soviet Union fought multiple wars-by-proxy in these countries in the mostly global south.

Yes, it was racism. And imperialism. Because both the Soviet and US American governments just took for granted that those (brown-skinned) peoples’ destiny was to be pawns in their game of Nuclear War Chicken.

So anyway, that’s why news pundits around the world are making such shocked noises about how Putin has moved his war to Europe, even while shrugging off the wars in Yemen, and Syria, and Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and ...

It’s because Putin has moved the game to a different board

He’s completely tossing out the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” that governments and diplomats tacitly agreed to, at the end of World War II.

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