Writer's Block: Day of German Unity

[fajrdrako]

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Nostalgic for a war? Are you kidding?

This has to be a question from someone who doesn't remember the Cold War.

The Cold War wasn't always Cold. I remember newly-arrived draft dodgers coming and doing household work for my parents, with body parts missing. (I admired them so much! Heroes.) I remember a sense of frustration with the world - all that fighting and squabbling and fear. Things do not look simpler in retrospect. The instability now and the instability then? Not that much difference.

Sadly, I was thinking about this yesterday: how it all feels like the same old battles being fought over the same old things for the same old reasons by the same sorts of people. Back in the sixties, I really believed that my generation could improve the world. Give peace a chance. Imagine there's no heaven.

Paul McCartney thrilled me by advocating peace in his concert in Israel a week ago. What happened to all the anti-war songs? Are people still writing them?

What good do I remember coming out of the Cold War? James Bond novels and movies. (We still have those.) I once during that era read a rather cool spy novel in translation, in which the hero-spy was Bulgarian... wish I could remember the name of the spy, the author, or the book. The Cold War was a factor in The Professionals, too.

Comments

[cynonymous.livejournal.com]

Drive-by friendsfriends-ing:

John Fogerty's recent album "Revival" has some pointed anti-Bush (and anti-war) songs. It sounds like he's pretty angry. From Long Dark Night:
"George is in the jungle, knockin' on your door, come to get your children, wants to have a war..."

I spent my Cold War childhood and early adulthood wondering when (not if) the planet would be vaporized in a nuclear (not nukular) holocaust. Lots of movies about this, including The Day After and Fail-Safe (1964). Fun times? Not so much. I wonder if my memory of that is what makes it so hard for the current administration to scare me about the terrorists -- unlike global nuclear annihilation, which would kill everyone eventually through radiation poisoning or starvation from nuclear winter, the odds are pretty slim (since I live in a small town) that I'll be killed or injured in a terrorist attack.

[nuptse.livejournal.com]

Heh. Yeah. I was lamenting the other day how without the cold war, the romance of spytrade isn't what it used to be.

[elebridith]

From a German point of view - NO. Uh... how can someone miss a war? And no, I don't want the divided days back.(Some real die-hard thickheads do. *snort*) I can very clearly remember how ecstatic and joyful we felt when we heard that the Berlin Wall opened, when a people's movement tore down a government. I felt pride for my country.
So please, no nostalgia for war days...

[rustydog.livejournal.com]

People are still writing anti-war songs. They're not mainstream, though. I imagine it would be career suicide for an artist on a major label to protest The War. (The Dixie Chicks seem to have survived, but I know people who are still boycotting them.) In my experience you have to look pretty hard, in acoustic/folk singer/songwriter type places, live performances in small venues. I hear them because my local public radio station broadcasts a coffeehouse performance every week. Danny Schmidt, Susan Werner, Greg Brown, Richard Shindell, Ellis Paul, and David Wilcox are artists who are likely to have war protest songs, though they might or might now be on albums. (You can listen to Susan Werner's "My Strange Nation" here (http://www.susanwerner.com/music/m_msn.html) - it's sort of a protest song (not solely about war) that wants to be optimistic at the same time.)

The only clear memory I have of the Cold War is when it ended. I understood what a momentous thing it was, and from reading and films (satire can be so powerful!) I have recognized, like you're saying, our repeating patterns. Sigh.

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

I'm definitely with you. Don't they remember shivering when Ronald Reagan made those sick jokes about his finger on the button?

I knew draft dodgers from the Vietnam WAr: they gave up a lot to protest a stupid, unnecessary war.

I remember how countries like Cambodia and Laos suffered because an American government was fixated on the domino theory. I also remember the news stories of what really happened in East Germany and Romania during the Cold War: people terrorized by their own secret police, in the name of a people's republic. And the Gulags in the Soviet Union.

And learning later that a watchful Soviet technician just barely averted a Launch-on-Warning nuclear strike in the 1980s. Or that the U.S. and the Soviets were a lot closer to nuclear holocaust than we knew in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It was a horrible time.

There was some excellent spy fiction (John Le Carre, Len Deighton) coming out of the Cold War, and even better films (Alec Guinness in _Tinker, Tailer, Soldier Spy_, Michael Caine in the Harry Palmer movies). But that doesn't make up for the reality.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Love your icon! Perfect!

Thanks for the Susan Werner link. I'm glad to hear people are still writing anti-war songs, horrified to hear they're not getting air time. It shouldn't matter that some people wouldn't like it. That's the whole point.

Sigh.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Glad you dropped by!

"George is in the jungle, knockin' on your door, come to get your children, wants to have a war..."

I spent my Cold War childhood and early adulthood wondering when (not if) the planet would be vaporized in a nuclear (not nukular) holocaust.

Me too. And by my mid-teens I was pretty sure civilization would fall through overpopulation or economic collapse. I would have been astounded to hear we'd last this long. And I never anticipated the resurge of wars based on religion.

You're so right about how terrorists are not very scary in comparison.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

You're right - we need a better class of spies. S.H.I.E.L.D.! U.N.C.L.E.! UNIT!

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Some real die-hard thickheads do.

At first glance, this surprised me. Then I realized it shouldn't. There's always someone - !

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Don't they remember shivering when Ronald Reagan made those sick jokes about his finger on the button?

Shudder.

I also remember the news stories of what really happened in East Germany and Romania during the Cold War: people terrorized by their own secret police, in the name of a people's republic. And the Gulags in the Soviet Union.

There are lots of nasty regimes around still (and we could name them) and places where chaos and violence are the rule. But things weren't better then; just different. And different mostly in details.

Danger and fear are always good material for fiction. It doesn't mean there's anything worhtwhile about experiencing them. And it's anything but simple!

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

I remember being taught in middle school that at any random moment, nuclear war could break out and we'd all die horribly. I don't miss that at all.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

No, really, it's not a happy memory. Especially with the lurid speculation on what would happen then, after the end of the world, and what it would all feel like. I'm not saying people talked about this - my imagination dealt with it only too well!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_medley_/]

Nostalgic for the seeming simplicity of... *boggles* Let me just add my two cents to the NO chorus. 1984 stands out in my mind as the year I was most certain mankind wasn't going to make it to party like it was 1999. I was fourteen, "The Day After" was on TV, we were reading some post-nuclear-holocaust novel in English class, and Reagan was being...Reagan. Not nostalgic for that at all, thanks.

Although I am kinda nostalgic for the spy novels.

(Also, I just saw in your profile that your LJ username is Esperanto. *geeks out happily*)

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I was fourteen, "The Day After" was on TV, we were reading some post-nuclear-holocaust novel in English class, and Reagan was being...Reagan.

Ouch! You got a triple dose. Scary. It's a wonder our psychological scars aren't worse.

Spy novels, however, are good things.

Jes, 'fajrdrako' vere estas Esperanta vorton. I get a great kick out of using Esperanto whenever I find (or make) the chance.

[elebridith]

Yup, there is. I expect them to gather around this day... it's always "Oh, but we all had work back then" and such. Oh, how nice. Personally I can remember when I was twelve I had some pen-friends in East Germany and a letter I wrote got opened and they took out a picture of Shakin' Stevens I had sent because the girl liked him. There wasn't even writing on it, but it was a *western* artist - oh woe! Yeah, such things we really want back. *snorts and wents out of sarcasm mode*

[http://users.livejournal.com/_medley_/]

I looked up one day, a good while after the Cold War was over, and thought, huh, nobody's scared of nuclear war any more. Which was awesome, just kinda weird to think about.

And yes, Cold War spy novels were of the good. Frederick Forsythe! Adam Hall!

I think you should make the chance whenever you can. *nods* Did you ever read the Stainless Steel Rat books by Harry Harrison? Speaking of nostalgia...

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

I've never been nostalgic for that one (I remember the Cuban crisis too well, thank you very much; I didn't know then how close run a thing it was, but when I found out later it didn't surprise me) but I grew up nostalgic for the one I just missed: we had dreariness, Austerity, bomb sites, rationing including the ultimate insult of bread rationing and no spirit of "Britain can take it", just miserable anticlimax.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

we had dreariness, Austerity, bomb sites, rationing including the ultimate insult of bread rationing and no spirit of "Britain can take it", just miserable anticlimax.

I can recall reading about British rationing when I was little, and feeling a sort of mix of admiration and wonder and pity.

My mother used to tell me she felt guilty during World War II because the only real hardship she had to undergo was going to dances with all the handsome soldiers who were about to go overseas. She knew how serious the war was; but the Depression made much more of an impact on her life.

My father was with the Navy in England and I'm sure she worried about him, but she never talked about it.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

You're so right about how terrorists are not very scary in comparison.

Au contraire. I find it disturbing that they might get their hands on nuclear stuff. They're unpredictable and have an eschatology that means they don't think death is a big deal.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I think terrorists are a dangerous as anyone. But not as conceptually scary (in the nightmare sense) because they are so chaotic: random targets, and a tendency to think on a smaller scale.

Which is not to say that anyone might not push the red button for whatever reason, but it scares me more when it's governments against governments.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

My mother's family lived in Hull, which was one of the most heavily bombed cities in England. She was working in the Army Pay Corps Office in Manchester, and never knew if she'd see them again. One great-uncle was killed when he went out to get a glass of water for his pregnant wife during an air-raid. When I was a kid, the city was still a bit of a mess, with the nasty concrete buildings slapped up to replace the once-splendid Victorian/Edwardian city centre.

My father was a schoolboy on Bute. But his father was in the regular army, and was permanently disabled when serving in the Middle East. (There was a little-known front against Vichy forces in the French mandates of Lebanon and Syria; also early stirrings of the Israel-Palestine business.) The economic and emotional impact on the family was long-term, and his extensive internal injuries probably contributed to my Grandfather dying in his 50s of cancer. Family members were also killed in the Clydebank Blitz, in Normandy and in the Far East.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, I had more family members killed in World War I and the Boer War than in World War II, which as far as I know didn't claim any of my family. It must have been terrifying for your mother to be in the middle of all that in Hull; and I think the long-term impact of wars on veterans is too often overlooked.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

I just had 2 great-uncles killed in WW1, on my mother's side of the family; my maternal grandfather Arthur (a teenaged merchant seaman) was on a ship that was torpedoed in the Mediterranean, but survived. My paternal great-grandfathers survived, as did my great-granduncles, 2 of whom (Bob and Norrie) were actually in the Canadian forces.

I don't think we've direct family in anything earlier: WW1 was the first one in which conscription was used in the UK, and all parts of the family seem to have been in peaceful trades before then. The exception are the rather distant great-x-n-granduncles on the McLeod side who went to the Carolinas in the early 1770s and served in Loyal American militias. One was tortured. They returned to Scotland as refugees.

[silverwhistle.livejournal.com]

I didn't find the Cold War particularly scary: somehow there was a balance of power, and despite the posturings, I never quite believed they would be that stupid.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I know I had United Empire Loyalist ancestors; I don't know their particular military history. One of them settled down in the Niagara Peninsula and ran an inn. Slightly earlier, one of my ancestors was a medical office under General Wolfe at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. But I don't know details; mostly they were all peaceful types, as far as I know, farmers and doctors and journalists. Spmewhere there are Mennonite cousins, probably the family of my Pensylvania Dutch great-grandmother.

I know very little of the branches of my family who are in England, and what happened to them through the wars. These would be cousins of my father.