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Peace Movements and Revisionist History

Posted May 14, 2008

Peace Movements and Revisionist History

Baltimore — (TFN): Opponents of the war in Iraq like to claim that neither Congress nor the U.S. Senate would have voted to support the war if the offspring of congressmen, senators, and members of the Administration were forced to actively participate in a military capacity.

In other words, there can be no just war without Jenna Bush firing a howitzer at terrorist positions in Mosul, or Mary Cheney leading Marines into close combat in Sadr City.

Just like it was in the good old times… when Hillary and Chelsea Clinton single-handedly took on Serbian snipers. And little Amy Carter headed a platoon of special forces operating clandestinely behind the Iron Curtain. Those were the days…

Click here to view the video.

But despite sporadic populist flare-ups to end the war by instituting a draft, it is quite amazing just how little the ongoing five-year conflict is affecting every-day life in the United States for those who are not directly involved.

Quite the same, however, can be said about the last decades of the Cold War.

I never cease to be amazed at the indifference and the lack of perspective I encounter when it comes to the confrontation between East and West, Freedom and Totalitarianism that shaped the second half of the 20th century.

I’ve seen educated young Americans wear t-shirts decorated with the Soviet symbol of hammer and sickle. To millions of people around the world this stands for genocide, suppression, systemic human rights violations, mass graves, starvation and prison camps. Spoiled young Americans consider it “ironic”.

But it’s not just the suburbanite college crowd. Members of my own generation told me that the Soviet Collapse of 1990 was not due to the economic impact of President Reagan’s much-derided SDI program—but because young Russians wanted to wear jeans and listen to Bruce Springsteen.

According to them, U.S. military involvement in Asia, Africa, and South America from 1950 to 1990 was due to evil imperialist motives of the American military industrial complex—and had nothing to do at all with the Soviet ambitions to bring as many countries into the Communist, anti-Capitalist fold as they possibly could.

My own interjections that most conflicts of that era indeed involved resistance to the violent imperialist establishment of Communist satellite regimes usually earn me the title of revisionist.

So I began to wonder. Did my growing up four miles from the next Red Army barracks indeed skew my worldview? Did Germans on both sides of the Wall wonder for nothing if NATO was meant to actually defend their soil, or if we were merely the tripwires for a Soviet-American suicide pact… good enough to provide a smooth ride for Russian tanks on their way to embrace their French admirers?

Last weekend, we had a reunion of sorts with an old friend.

Back in the early 1980s, he was a Green Beret with the American forces in West Berlin—one of the thousands of American, British and French troops who served knowing that in the event of hostilities, they were expected to resist until reinforcements arrived, or until their loss of life caused a nuclear retaliation.

I was relieved to hear that he did not consider his assignment a paid vacation in the rear echelon — but lived and worked in the consciousness of a very defined, omnipresent threat. Of being part of that proverbial trip wire that ran between East and West, and that had the very real potential of triggering the terminal scenario of mutually assured destruction.

Something the people living back in the States were all to happy to forget.

From my perspective, as a native West Berliner, I have to admit that arrangement worked out quite nicely, though.

Had today’s political mainstream, personified by Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, been developed to the same degree during the Cold War as it is today, one of Jimmy Carter’s first official acts may have been “bringing the troops home” back in 1976—and trading West Berlin and West Germany to the Soviets for a photo-op with Leonid Brezhnev and a crate of nesting dolls.

And for peace in our time.

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Posted by J. Christoph Amberger · Filed Under Politics 

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