EVERYONE LOST THE COLD WAR

This week marks the thirtieth anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. On December 25th, 1991, the Kremlin in Moscow lowered the red and yellow of the Soviet hammer and sickle, bringing to close an epoch of history that would change everything forever. In the United States, we are told stories, so many stories, almost all of them aggrandizing ourselves and laundering our history. The Cold War as a story is a triumph of American culture, perseverance, and courage, a victory of the Good over the Evil. And, like so many of those American stories, this narrative is nothing more than a fairy-tale.

With the passing of thirty years the truth of that conflict has both grown clearer and more opaque. The immediate aftermath gave birth to a prophecy of a new order that was quickly revealed as a fiction. The so-called “End of History” and the triumph of American-style capitalism and liberal democracy as the final form of human society was interrupted as ideology reemerged and the War on Terror brought militarism to the forefront, bankrupting any semblance of purpose, integrity, and ensuring that no money or political capital, all of it arrested for generations by the arms race and standoff with the USSR, could ever be changed into human investment or social projects. The only means for the US to continue was to continue on a war footing, relentlessly shifting our wealth into the accounts of the military-industrial complex.

Meanwhile, we have reached a strange place, where meaning has evaporated, where conspiracy theories infect every facet of our lives, and the future seems more than uncertain, it feels terrifying. And any alternative, once terribly embodied by the Soviet Union, is not only unthinkable but dangerous.

The legacy of the Cold War isn’t victory.

It is failure.

It is tragedy.

To understand the Cold War one must first reject the traditional framing of the United States versus the Soviet Union. Nation-states and empires are imaginary constructs, after all, vessels that contain and tragically hide the people and energies contained within. Considering the Cold War as a clash of cultures obfuscates that living, breathing people are being marshaled against one another, their fates affected by tensions and violence, their well-being constantly harmed by belligerence, suspicion, and tension.

This is not simply a phenomenon of the 20th century and it certainly isn’t isolated to the Cold War. The grouping of people into states and empires and kingdoms has been used to quell internal frictions and calls for progress and reform for centuries and centuries. By redirecting frustrations and anger outward, these states have resolved seemingly unresolvable problems and conditions, allowing the wealthy and powerful to continue unabated and even increase their wealth and power.

Ironically, and tragically, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the ideology it represented was meant to disrupt this cycle. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, saw the mystification of society and the grouping of people as nations as a means of exploitation. The overthrow of the czar was intended to be the beginning of a worldwide revolution in which the people would overcome these limitations, eliminate all borders and distinctions, and bring about a new era of peace and equality.

Lenin’s dream would be thwarted. The forces of international capitalism were quick to respond. The armies of the United States and Britain flooded into Russia even while World War One still raged. The fate of capitalism was so important that the War To End All Wars and Make The World Safe For Democracy could spare the manpower. The Bolsheviks paused what they believed was a Permanent Revolution in order to protect their project, a protection that also saw unbelievable human suffering and oppression. When Lenin died, gangster and dictator Joseph Stalin seized power, permanently halted any possibility of spreading revolution, and cultivated an authoritarian dystopia.

In the United States, the Cold War provided an opportunity. Labor unions were attacked, the Left was decimated, and opportunists within the Republican and Democratic Party rolled back New Deal programs in favor of unvarnished free-market capitalism. Anyone questioning these developments was affixed with the label of communist and designated as an enemy of the state. Meanwhile, progress among human projects of healthcare, education, and infrastructure were halted in favor of arms production and the permanent warfooting that still plagues us to this day.

The pandemic has made so much crystal clear. Failures to invest in these human projects have exacerbated the tragedy, leaving us defenseless against a generational threat and making all too obvious that the United States, as presently constituted and as it presently operates, cannot possibly answer the pressing questions of inequality, rising authoritarianism, and most definitely the existential threat of global climate change. Instead, we have been submerged into a twisted and dark alternate reality where science and experts and objective existence has been subsumed by conspiracy theories tailored to and, in some cases, created by the wealthy to obfuscate their responsibility or attack their enemies.

That anyone could win the Cold war was an absolute fiction. There are consequences. There are deep, deep wounds that have yet to heal. They may never heal, honestly. The dichotomy of the US and the USSR, framed forever as a war between capitalism and communism while both parties only practiced twisted versions of these economic and ideological systems, left us unable to adapt as conditions changed and as our own political and economic systems collapsed. When the Financial Crisis of 2008 flattened us, the only answer was to embrace socialist ideology, but for the purposes of saving extreme capitalism. The rest of us were left to suffer and do without and the can was merely kicked down the road.

What came to a close in the Winter of 1991 was a useless and tragic conflict that set humanity and human progress back generations of progress. Our societies were perverted, twisted, focused on war and warmaking, exploitation in the pursuit of meaningless political victories, and the conditions created that have set us on the path toward neofascism and tragedy on a scale most still fail to comprehend. By continuing these fictions, this idea that anyone can win a cold war, that anyone profits in any of these situations, ensures that these terrible outcomes are more likely to come to fruition. It is sleepwalking into the abyss.

The mortal wound we still carry is the legacy of the Cold War and it reflects the same senseless brutality and human exploitation that is being carried out in the authoritarian and criminal regime of Putinist Russia. Enough time has passed that we should be able to reconsider these nonsensical stories and find clarity and purpose. The bleeding must be stopped.