With Russian army’s invasion of Georgia, has the post-Cold War period ended: has a new Cold War begun? This is the question that was repeated asked in the international media and state officials were subjected to responding to it. The specter of a new Cold War and the possibility of returning to a period that had apparently ended about 20 years ago is opening a new chapter in the minds of the generation that witnessed the Cold War.
The key issue of articles published in prominent media on this subject is a warning to the West that in a uni-polar world it may again look for another rival and create another period of anxiety over a possible nuclear war. This is the West’s horror. But the Cold War is not just a political and historical concept. For my generation – that came after World War II and during the Cold war – the reference to another Cold War invokes a different set of memories. It speaks of a world which like the original black and white films, every person belonged to one of the camps of good or evil. It was as if life had not yet become multi-colored, and it was not full of shades like it is today. At least this is how it is viewed in the Third World.
It was the end of the Cold War that catapulted dissidents ranging from Lech Walesa to Nelson Mandela to the presidential palace. During the Cold war this could have only been accomplished through a coup d’etat or the rolling of the tanks. It was this new atmosphere that enabled Giddens, the most prominent sociologist of this generation, to shake the House of Lords, unlike philosopher Bertrand Russell, None of this could have happened without the coloring of the world after the Cold War, the end of idealism and the end of the war between the devil and the angel.
Thinker Arthur Koestler has an episode in his book Sleepwalkers which is quoted by Andre Fontaine, a French writer and intellectual in a chapter of his book that deals with nuclear games during the Cold War. In it he says, “No other period, no matter how decaying and decadent, had as many tools to completely annihilate mankind or to manipulate nature as we do today. The peculiarity of our period is that the rapid and unprecedented growth of material power has joined hands with the unparalleled intellectual revolution” [loose translation into English].
This unmatched intellectual revolution is the reason why the 60-years generation view the world as empty and absurd, when compared to the beginnings of the 20th century. This is why idealist long for the days of the Cold War. This is why with all its blood, drugs, revolutions, coups that the Cold War (and its ideals of the sixties) still are the dreams of the older generation.
At no other time has man pursued peace, human rights, women’s rights, battled the population explosion, and consumerism, nature and the fights against the environment, the struggle against the proliferation of the atom, the struggle against poverty and hunger more vigorously than during the sixties. These events existed during the Cold War years along with the political struggle between the camps, and Iran too the joy of the Third World over the possible return of the Cold war is perhaps because they have seen that the constitution and rules of the savage world in which when the vultures, the bears and crocodiles get into a fight, the deer get a chance to breathe a fresh air and experience some peace.
But it is still too soon for idealists to be singing the song of victory and return for the Cold War because, as Lenin once said, history does not repeat itself, and if it does then it is merely a comedy. Because of today’s mass communication and telecommunication means and the rapid exchange of information through means that are available to everybody, events similar to those during the Cold War will not be similar in their workings. As one can see, despite the images that Western caricatures draw of Putin and present him as a demagogue and wicket, he is far from a Stalin or even a Brezhnev.
Fidel Castro, one of the old guard from the days of the Cold War, knows this too well that the old days are gone forever and will not return. In one of his letters to Khrushchev, Castro wrote that he understood the period to be one in which the weak were fried so that they could be easily swallowed.
One of the reasons why the Cold War days will not return is that when the famous in the realm of politics rose to power, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Adenauer, de Gaulle, Marshal Petain, Chamberlain, Nehru, Nkrumah, Titov, Brant, Palme, etc, have made or written remarks and observations that have become parts of the human civilization today. Even if the midgets of the gray era bring back the ambiance of the Cold War, things will still not be the same and they will have a different meaning and interpretation.
