By Hoffmann the Organizer
I guess the Cuban Missile Crisis wouldn’t make the front page today.
Lots of items related to the war in Ukraine do get headliner treatment from the New York Times. Poetry readings by soldiers, art “inspired” by the war, dancing and singing parties in Kharkiv basements . . . even pedicures as a form of “defiance.”
Meanwhile, a 2.5+ seismic level explosion of an ammo dump in Toropets, hundreds of miles from Ukraine, is relegated to the bottom of page six with a fuzzy picture of a sylvan landscape on fire (looks pretty much like another day in California). Yet this is a significant escalation of a shooting war deep in Russian territory by a US-supplied ally. And it follows close on a debate between Britain’s Starmer and Biden over whether to deploy NATO weapons requiring US guidance against Russia, a decision Putin said would be taken as a declaration of war by NATO. Did this attack require US or NATO guidance? We don’t yet know.
Nor is it the first such attack. Remember the drone attack on Russia’s early-warning station, even deeper in Russia, awhile back? So why do we remain so complacent in the face of these events?
It makes one wonder what people remember or learned about the Cold War. In the entire 43 years of that conflict, neither the US/NATO nor the USSR/Warsaw Pact, set off so much as a hand grenade on the other’s territory. There were intense proxy wars, but the proxies, too, never fired into those nations. Still, we remember those times, as they were also experienced then, as always on the brink of catastrophe, of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).
The event most often cited as the closest we came to Armageddon is the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis. Every moment of that standoff kept millions of Americans in a state of terrible suspense and spurred the home bomb shelter industry into overdrive. No one treated that as page-six below-the-fold news.
How could we in 2024 have allowed ourselves to drift so far deeper into the danger zone than we did in the Cold War with hardly a murmur? How did the ghosts of Generals “Buck” Turgidson and Jack Ripper emerge from Dr. Strangelove to retake the commanding heights of our foreign policy? Since the end of the Soviet Union, we lay abed, dreaming of “one world” (whether capitalist globalization or commonwealth of nations). Then in 2008, as German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder stood with Putin by the statue of Kant in Konigsberg/Kaliningrad and called for a cooperative economic zone from Lisbon to Vladivostok, the U.S. of George W Bush announced the expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia. Another dull news day, judging from how unremarked that went.
Thus began the slow but inexorable march against the hereditary enemy: the Bolshevik sub-humans, Buck Rogers’ Mongol Reds, the Scythians. The stuff of comic books, more “Myth of the Twentieth Century,” you chuckle. Yet as war broke out in 2022, old comrades of the peace movement sent me, in dead earnest, articles like “The Strange Rebirth of Russian Imperialism,” which claim, under a patina of enlightened liberalism, that the Russians are “a civilization that sees itself as the modern incarnation of the Steppe Mongol tribes who ransacked cities and towns wherever they went.”
This is a Manichean Weltanschauung deeper and older than Truman/JFK anti-Communism. The latter may have taken us to the brink, but it did so without fireworks and in public view. The audience was awake. Now the audience is asleep, troubled by other nightmares. When I point to the imminence of nuclear apocalypse, growing apace since 2022, I’m told there are much more pressing threats to worry about: the loss of reproductive rights, the persistence of white supremacism, the bogeyman Trump. (Surprisingly no longer the equally global threat of eco-system collapse – I guess you can’t wage world war and worry about the environment at the same time – nor the intensifying economic inequality between classes and nations – too retro, too “Occupy.”) Worrying about the end of the world, I’m told, is the surest sign of “privilege.” The discreet anxiety of the bourgeoisie.
So why has the threat of nuclear war become harder to grapple with even as it rapidly approaches, why is it so obscured by murky narratives of good and evil that we can no longer recognize it? Perhaps because today’s center-left has embraced the mythos of the Mongol horde, formerly a shibboleth of the right, and forgotten its own critique of the West’s “actually existing” empire (90% of the world’s military bases on foreign territory; a military nearly equal to that of the rest of the world). We point to autocrats near and far but forget that we are in the driver’s seat.
Let’s not fall asleep at the wheel!
—
Hoffmann earned his pen name and sobriquet “the Organizer” through years of work on campaigns for peace, economic justice, and environmental sustainability in numerous cities and regions of the US, as well as in Europe.