The Cold War is a good expression to use for describing the frozen mentality that created an Ice Age of international diplomacy after World War Two. In 1946, there were major and immediate efforts to create a policy of containment towards the Soviet Union. The fearful vision of Soviet expansion as limitless in its potential was a fallacy that should have dominated discourse for being a fallacy. It was unsafe to take a bellicose chimera that seriously even if the Soviets exhibited such delusion in moments of instability. The catastrophe of the Korean War continues to remind both sides of the danger in hubris.
In 1946, from Russia, authoring a famous editorial called, “The Long Telegram,” George Kennan led the machine into place. Kennan believed that Russia’s political worldview was conditioned by historic experience as long vulnerable farmers fighting nomadic bands. Marxism, which he saw as evil, could only take root, he felt, among people suffering from derangement. World War Two had provided American political mainstream editorialists some very cozy metaphors like Pearl Harbor and Col. Quisling, to use for relief in arguments or as cheap shots, they made for convenient, perennial digest. Kennan rose to the call of making just as convenient perceptions about the Cold War. Kennan’s job was to commence with normalizing our permanent grudge. Making the world Safe for Democracy, the Cold War’s best-selling bumper-sticker slogan, however almost at once began to play second fiddle to making the Red Scare profitable.
There was never much doubt about the moral high-ground implicit in defending democracy. Democracy grants rights and dignities upon citizens who are presumed capable of decency so most well-adjusted adults confirm it the legacy of philosophical progress in society. The question that arises in the Cold War concerns realistic expectations after the terrible misfortune of World War Two. For the United States of America, comparably untouched by the disasters that destroyed Russia, our civilization was forced by conflict to separate ideals from realities and we were faced with the automatic temptation to err on the side of one or the other. Kennan, of course, was not the only person to speak.
Russia’s performance in World War Two had not been unpredictable. They invaded Poland like fascists and brutalized their victims. They fought with unbelievable fury and tenacity against the Barbarosa behemoth that brought upon them Hitler’s hell. Lingering through the demoralizing abandonment during the heat of the war by the Allies who engaged themselves elsewhere, they took all they could in setting up a sphere of influence.
The question of brutal annihilation, and the shocking discovery of the furnaces in Treblinka and Dachau, made clear that Russia had faced down a fate worse than death, and contributed to a small measure of grace on this tragic planet, despite the many criminal acts that traced to Stalin. Henry Wallace counseled acceptance and patience towards them as they shook off the horror. When Kennan’s views bore fruit, the gulags, occupation of Czechoslovakia and repression of dissent sank in, Wallace railed ignobly that he had been hoodwinked and betrayed. Realistically, Wallace’s ideals never held sway so whether they could have mitigated some of Russia’s unreasonableness and misconduct no one can say. Most people presume the die was cast no matter what America did.
In 1946, Kennan felt sure of his guidepost and although his dour views are an ironic curtain shorn of all hope for diplomatic initiative, it was welcome for granting a license of opportunism to High Command and the Executive, allowing them to play different roles of containment and rollback through confrontation, without the need to really explain themselves. We were rich enough to enjoy our power to make mistakes and call by the name of mistakes some of our best moves when they contradicted dogma, as happened to Eisenhower, a reluctant victim of the Cold War. We moved into an era of dangerous simplifications. Due to the inability to take seriously the need to separate ideals from realities and keep both lines of narrative working, the risk from disappointment ran high and Kennan contributed to Wallace’s rage by mutual failure of insight. Being informed may very well be the best position from which to manipulate opinion, and readers should be careful, but agreement does not always happen even among the best informed and disagreement may be sincere. What is clear, however, is that a better job could have been done in separating how America wanted the world to be from our limitations in controlling how the post-war world unfolded. The result was that we needlessly turned on one another. Some of that was not in innocence.
Dangerous oversimplifications can cut backwards. While communists were the loudest to defend the black men wrongfully accused in Scottsboro, there was little to deny them opportunity to bray that what German courts did to The White Rose movement of youthful demonstrators was not different. The White Rose were beheaded for leafleting against Hitler’s inordinately fearful misrepresentation of communism as an excuse for the criminally insane. One chokes on such soliloquy but it’s impossible to erase.
Although a prescription against using fascism as a bogeyman eventually even became part of the minefield in editorial letters, with the popularization of the so-called Godwin’s Law, there was uploaded an effective taboo against calling even the worst corporate war crimes by fascism, yet there was never an effective taboo against calling something communist, as a result liberalism fell entirely after be tagged as weak and self-slaughtering. The whisper campaigns, loyalty inquisitions, all testified to a terror campaign against the dignities of democracy germinating in our own nation, supposedly to protect us. They were called witch hunts and unfortunately, in our real history, someone couldn’t resist following the logic. It is well known that I suspect the British.
There couldn’t be firmer or more damning proof that the Red Scare was covering for a Holy War in the making than the strait jacket that enveloped me. Insidiously, it came wrapped as a tragic jest, full of word play. We live in a society little interested in the safety of students or the disabled. Tacoma, where I live, is hardwired for the prospect of serious injury to the deaf. The lights do not properly announce that there is danger from railcars. There is no clear and visible green light bright enough to offset the red light that stops cars going the same direction as the railcars. If it would be an excess of caution to expect an ambulance passing a bus, with a red light before them both, to consider the possibility of a deaf pedestrian not hearing the siren, which has happened to me, it is still worth noting. I have also had a gun drawn on me by a Federal post office security guard who had abandoned his post and found me entering upon returning. He was shouting at me. Someone waved to me in alarm before he might have killed me. I thought it was just a post office. Excess of caution can also cut both ways. Kennan comes over as Pinkerton Detective made homespun, a wheezy old granddad on the Missouri River in a sagebrush hat with a corncob, spelling out the rustic corn pone of normalcy made ironic curtain. Nothing else need try to get through. Public opinion propitiated the dangerous oversimplifications. It was costly even to responsible conservatives.
Normalcy was exactly what Russia could not hope for in the immediate aftermath. Isolationist history and neutrality made a bad mix with a containment policy straining at the leash for small conflicts on the margins. Cold War extremists argued that such conflicts were necessary to confirm our decision about containment. While often well informed in their justification, some of this was very misleading.
It appeared to be sarcasm at first when the British came to Pittsburgh accusing me of being a witch, using fundamentalism as their medium and setting upon me in an AIDS war game. The British counted on that to work for them. Who would ever believe it was serious? No one has ever been better situated to create slanders and mayhem by slanders as though a holy decree than Yoko Ono. Her slanders were Mt. Desert Islanders. She has been buttressed by Zappa and Reagan together in doing this. Go ahead and tell, they laughed, with a little traumatic enzyme, it will be funny as a barking pumpkin. People who love peace will never love the struggle for domination that comes with realpolitik. The murderers tortured me, they gassed me, they stole my fiance after setting it up and hiring her to humiliate me, they raped my deaf advocate, they continue to play a dialectical war game passing out fliers and implying I have sticky fingers for accepting their handouts. It’s a very evil, menacing situation with elements of medical police and church that barely gets mitigated by the school. The British managed to make AIDS look like a reform school paradigm under cover of their song about schizoid man.
Prof. Johns at my college has said that castrating someone hung up on virginity, even if it was true and without mitigating reasons, is a little bit strange and cruel, counseling would do, but UW has certain varieties of text that allow the deranged. Minorities play a role in a situation driven by the greed behind advance of tokens by Hollywood. All it took was a Queer token to announce rage, even one hired to masquerade as queer would do. Then it became politically correct debate over the history of ancient grudges.
Loyalty oaths are a bandwagon for those who subscribe to them. Galluadet University came to feel they would be found guilty of treason for even indicating concern for the slightest issue of fairness in the way that Warhol, UW and Carnegie Mellon went about processing this affair. There are all sorts of indications in the agent names they used, in the way they secured evidence, in how they allowed themselves no end of license, in the way they destroyed evidence, in the way they refused to admit evidence that was impartial and mitigating, in the tawdry manufacture and sadism, that showed perfectly clearly it was all planned. Their denials are meaningless.
In the 80’s a strange book with a hardhat exhibiting a bullet hole showed up at Pitt Bookstore called, “Death of a Poet.” Really, it was the age of the death of poetic license. It was a double-cross era where saying a word pig, even flippantly, in defense of John Lennon, was rigged to backfire. Mark David Chapman’s caustic words, “I didn’t know he was your friend,” were made to order for Yoko Ono to adopt in selling his war game, and they smothered it all in a Trump-Mueller playfight. Freedom of speech in America was always, at best, for conformists and those behind the border of a loyalty oath, but the reason you can’t tell the truth on stage anymore is because the Zappas will murder you.
