The Cold War Never Left the American Mind
Hi everybody, I'm doing something a little bit different today. I'm sending you a longer article of mine first published in Shadowbanned Magazine. They publish online, and in print. I'll tell you more about them at the end, but suffice it to say I'm excited to be working with them, and I hope you'll check them out! Without further ado:
The great and terrible thing about the modern world is that everything is forgotten. Absorbing the news brings a feeling of impossibility — the impossibility of escaping the flat circle of time, the impossibility of escaping that everything old is new again. As I write this JD Vance is saying that Iran’s nuclear program is moving toward developing a weapon. As I write this Cuba is under siege. As I write this bombs are falling on Iran.
Writing this piece over a period of weeks has stretched and twisted my perception of time. What was in truth a long, steady build up toward the illegal attack on Iran — the drumbeat of war in this country goes back decades, and Trump bombed the country’s nuclear sites last summer — simultaneously felt like a rapid escalation, with my writing unable to keep pace.
February was filled with articles about the U.S. and Iran negotiating, but alongside these headlines was the reality; our government was directing more and more and more of our massive capacity for war to the bases and waters and skies around Iran. As the negotiations progressed, our arsenal of death piled around the borders of yet another country.
February also saw the U.S. tighten its strangulation of Cuba. It saw the first “Board of Peace” meeting shortly before key members bombed Iran and even targeted a girls’ school, killing at least 165 schoolgirls and staff. February saw continued threats toward Greenland, continued attacks on Venezuela’s sovereignty, and the continued slaughter of Palestinians. Since I began writing this piece the U.S. and Israel have not only continued their violence and terror, but accelerated it.
Everyone alive in the early 2000s should be experiencing powerful and painful déjà vu. The attacks on Iran inevitably transport me back to childhood and my early political awakenings. The 20-year war on Iraq was launched under the flimsiest of false pretenses, the weakest of lies, relying more on anti-Arab racist fervor in the wake of 9/11 than anything else. Even when the lies were disproven the United States continued to kill more Iraqis for another decade plus.
Now we’re supposed to want war with Iran because they’re developing nuclear weapons — a line we’ve heard about Iran time after time. Last summer Trump claimed that U.S. strikes took out Iran’s nuclear capabilities. And yet the line was trotted out again in February to justify the coming assault. The pretenses of this war are even weaker than in 2003. Just hours before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, Oman’s Foreign Minister told Face the Nation, “If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, I think we have cracked that problem.” Iran had agreed never to stockpile enriched uranium, a major breakthrough.
But we’re supposed to ignore all of this. The ultimate objective is for us to hate Iran. A mix of bigotry and leftover 9/11 animus is supposed to shut us off from logic and reason. We’re supposed to want war with Iran because they’re attacking protesters, because they’re ruled by an autocrat.
We are, of course, not supposed to contemplate how the U.S. is now ruled by an autocrat who sends his secret police to kill protesters. Considering the thousands of nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile is also off the table. We would be told that U.S. nukes are different, better, more moral nukes — if we ever discussed the topic. But we don’t, at least not in the reputable and sanctioned forums. U.S. nukes are a fact of life, a fact of the world order, while other countries developing them is a problem to be dealt with.
The 1962 Cuban missile crisis revolved around the USSR attempting to place nuclear missiles in Cuba, where they would have been able to reach the United States in seconds. That was unacceptable to anyone and everyone in the U.S., yet in 1960 and 1961, England, Italy, and Turkey all had American nukes that could strike Moscow. That is something for our enemies to accept — their reaction is what’s unacceptable.
That logic permeates every declaration made about Iran, from DC to Tel Aviv. “The enemy” cannot take justified action, and the U.S.-Israel axis cannot take unjustified action. And we know this isn’t new. The ruling class has always been willing and even happy to insist that every American atrocity — from Korea to Vietnam, Iraq to Yemen, and beyond — was justified, while those who dare to fight back against our bombardments and invasions had no justification.
One ideological pillar that enabled atrocity, justified the unjustifiable, and permitted pillaging of much of this world for profit has been the faulty moral absolutes of the Cold War. For decades the USSR, and communism writ large, were painted as the great evil that needed to be destroyed.
Joseph McCarthy, known now as a deplorable man who got off on blacklisting and ruining the lives of countless people under false pretenses, was for a time immensely successful in capturing the American mind. Here he is in 1950, describing the stakes of confronting the USSR and communism:
Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time [...] Lest there be any doubt that the time has been chosen, let us go directly to the leader of communism today — Joseph Stalin. Here is what he said — not back in 1928, not before the war, not during the war — but 2 years after the last war was ended: “To think that the Communist revolution can be carried out peacefully, within the framework of a Christian democracy, means one has either gone out of one’s mind and lost all normal understanding, or has grossly and openly repudiated the Communist revolution.” [...] Can there be anyone who fails to realize that the communist world has said, ‘The time is now’ — that this is the time for the showdown between the democratic Christian world and the communist atheistic world?
But like the supposed list of communists within the State Department that McCarthy referenced in his speech, this quote didn't exist. While Stalin did once say something somewhat similar, it was in a 1926 piece advocating for the USSR to focus on building socialism in one country, rather than world revolution — the exact opposite of McCarthy’s framing.
But the message stuck. Ronald Reagan carried the fear-mongering flame in his “Evil Empire” speech to the National Association of Evangelicals. “The Soviet leaders have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is that which will further their cause, which is world revolution.” Pro-U.S. Cold War propaganda could not acknowledge the political ends of socialism and communism, could not reckon with the desire, however faultily executed, of various socialist uprisings to uplift the working masses around the world. Instead communism needed to be framed as a defective, un-American, and fundamentally evil.
In our modern context we should first note that, according to McCarthy, and Reagan 33 years later, it is the communist who decided that “the time is now.” The Cold War was justified in no small part through the idea that the “reds” were also attacking. Constantly, around the world, and via subterfuge here at home. This justified the countless U.S. “preemptive strikes” against newly minted socialist governments, or even mildly left-leaning presidents and movements globally.
More recently we’ve seen the same with Iran and other countries in the Middle East. McCarthy’s defense of “Christian democracy” carried through to the fervor whipped up against Islam and Arabs. Especially after 9/11, the idea that “those people” were constantly plotting jihad and terror meant every U.S. attack on predominantly Muslim nations would automatically be preemptive.
A real look at U.S. history, however, shows just who is always planning and conducting these attacks. From Chile to Guatemala to Nicaragua to Indonesia to Vietnam to a solid majority of the countries you can name, and those you can’t, the U.S. executed acts of violence where the real justification was to defend capitalism.
The infamous “Bay of Pigs” failed attack on Cuba in 1961 was not launched because the small island of Cuba was about to invade the United States. It was launched because the successful communist revolution in Cuba cost U.S. business interests a lot of money, and they wanted to get that profitable nation back under their thumb. According to the state department, this attempted overthrow pushed Moscow and Havana to place nuclear warheads on the island.
Sixty-five years later, America still wants that profit. Trump is spouting nonsense about a “friendly takeover” of Cuba as his flailing authoritarian regime lashes out at Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, and the people of the United States. In every case Trump does something for us that past presidents have rarely done — he lays bare the financial interests at play, which often happen to be his own.
When it came to attacking Venezuela, its oil was stolen, sold for $500 million, and placed in a Qatari account. When it comes to threats against Greenland, Trump and various billionaire cronies aren’t shy that this is largely about rare earth minerals. When it comes to Cuba, the U.S. regime sees economic as well as political opportunities. Marco Rubio recently talked about bringing “economic freedom” to the island, which we all know means U.S. companies exploiting as many people and extracting as much wealth as they can from Cuba.
The Trump family has already grown their wealth by $4 billion over the first year of his second term, and they’re just getting started. Crypto, hotel deals, naming rights — they’re seeking out every possible opportunity for profit. And imperialism is a highly profitable enterprise. The stock market has been all over the place since Trump launched his attack on Iran, but several of the consistent high performers have been companies like Northrop Grumman and Palantir. And that doesn’t even measure the opportunities that vultures see down the road. We already know that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is neck-deep in vile schemes to develop Gaza into a resort atop the bones of countless Palestinians. These people see genocide as a real estate opportunity.
The thing is, the rest of us are tired of this shit. For years it seemed that we forgot and forgot and forgot. After 9/11 anything could be turned into a battle cry. The anti-war movement around the invasion of Iraq was massive and notable, but the majority of people in the United States salivated for war. We cannot deny that for many years after the fateful attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, Americans leapt even further into anti-Arab and Islamophobic racism. Anything was grounds for violence, for retributions. Hence the invasion of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and the bombing of several more.
But, oddly enough, it seems some lessons have been learned. It took two decades of endless war, over a million lives lost, and trillions of dollars, but something has stuck in the minds of the American people. Just 21% of the U.S. population wants to attack Iran, although you’ll find even lower numbers for Trump’s odd adventurism in Greenland. Nearly three out of four adults worry about excessive military action in Venezuela too. Something has shifted.
Maybe it’s the crumbling highways or unaffordable ambulance rides. Maybe people are tired of seeing trillions of dollars poured into war while their landlord jacks up the rent on their shitty 800 sq ft apartment. Or maybe there’s been a more profound anti-war shift after Afghanistan, Iraq, and the livestreamed genocide in Palestine. I don’t know. I wish I could say that only the ruling class and their strongest fanatics hold on to the bloodlust woven through so much of this country’s history. But I don’t know.
What I do know is that people don’t want war right now. In the past, declaring war has led to an instant bump in presidential popularity – a fact about this country that is a problem in itself. But not for Trump. He campaigned against forever wars, but launched a senseless war in the Middle East. He now says it could be fought forever. When his cabinet and allies say he needed to launch this war to defend Israel, people are viscerally appalled and repelled.
The anger at Trump does not mitigate our complicity, as we might hope. The fact remains that our country is bombing Iran and murdering an unknown number of people. Admittedly done so in the context of an undemocratic democracy by a president who seeks every day to gather more authoritarian power, these actions are taken in our name nonetheless. Our complicity is mixed up in our outrage and grief and horror at our own powerlessness. Rage and helplessness are a difficult combination.
There is a temptation, one people I otherwise respect slide into too often, to slowly step back from confronting fascism and imperialism, to instead pivot to our lack of control over our own government and the presidency in particular. Most Americans have never fully been able to accept the sharp limits of bourgeois democracy, to accept that both parties have generally supported every war and for decades partnered to grow the military industrial complex.
Too often we chose not to confront reality at all. We believe that a better leader will come along, a better world will materialize, all while doing nothing to make it so. We’re scared to fully accept the truth, so we sidestep it, cleverly half-acknowledging it while avoiding a head-on collision. We mourn and protest and talk politics with one another, but we do so within the containment of a daily rhythm, a containment that makes it all doable.
Because what would it look like to confront our reality head-on? What would it look like to fully accept that our country is murdering people overseas and has been doing so virtually non-stop for decades? What would it look like to accept that, as it stands, we have no control over the man in the oval office who is unilaterally committing us to mass violence?
It would look like grief and rage and riot and a complete inability to go about our daily lives. This country would burn with anger and despair. How could it be anything else?
But the moments of rupture that spark political turmoil and uprising seem to come closer together these days. The horror and frustration and sheer un-livability of our society is piling up. In between the uprisings we’re also organizing in larger and larger numbers. More people aren’t waiting for rage to spill over, for grief to break them. They’re doing the mundane work in between seismic shifts, incorporating their fight into their day-to-day lives. For years and decades we have found ways to side-step the horror for fear of confronting it, but now people are confronting it piece by piece, accepting that this work must become a part of our daily lives if we are to make it through.
-- JP
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