Indelibly imprinted on both the global psyche and its landscape, the Cold War proved to be a lengthy and fearsome element of 20th century life that was facilitated in part by the growth of a vast military industrial complex. Today, much of that complex, the physical legacy of the Cold War, is coming of age, in preservationist terms, and will soon need to be managed in one way or another by heritage specialists.
Despite, or perhaps due to, its relative propinquity, making cultural or historical sense of the Cold War might prove difficult. Complicated by both past and lingering issues of national security, geopolitics, and partisanship, any serious attempt at reading the Cold War, even if done broadly through the use of archival texts, personal narratives, provenienced artifacts, and cultural landscapes, can be as academically risky as they it is intellectually rewarding. Still, it is a critical reading that needs to be done.
Unprecedented as a form of war, I believe that only some of what we think we know about the Cold War past is accurate, as the powers of national secrecy, revisionism, and nationalism have been constantly working to cloud our view. It is as if, as David Lowenthal proclaimed in a book of the same name, the past is a “foreign country” that is continually being enlarged and diminished, embellished and purified, and lengthened and abbreviated, all while simultaneously being tinged with the colors of our present. However, despite this subjective coloring, a reading of the Cold War past offers to our present the broad potential benefits of identity, guidance, enrichment, and even escape. These benefits, in turn, provide a rationale and foundation for the work of identifying, understanding, and preserving some of our most critical of Cold War cultural and historic resources.
For better or worse, the Cold War was, and remains, a principal driver in defining America’s identity as a global nuclear superpower. Chilling for many, more comforting for others, this identity is deeply rooted in a collection of powerful Cold War spaces, places, and technologies. Beyond the obvious and not-so-obvious technological advances in weapons of mass destruction, the Cold War led to the construction of thousands (literally) of structures and sites around the globe whose sole function was to serve and sustain that war. In the United States alone, trillions of dollars were spent on the creation and expansion of a vast military-industrial complex that was unprecedented in human history. A vast and sometimes secret Cold War cultural landscape emerged in the form of military bases, nuclear weapons research and production facilities, weapons testing grounds, strategic bomber bases, radar station networks, intercontinental ballistic missile complexes, and elaborate control and command centers. Today, the physical legacy of the Cold War is a profusion of both inhabited and abandoned facilities and sites of which scholars are only now beginning to understand the true military, scientific, political, or social significance.
The concept of gaining guidance from the past is hardly a new notion and the Cold War’s physical legacy is no exception. What history has to teach us about the rigid politics of distrust, the elusive qualities of national security, and the enduring social, economic and environmental hazards of militarization often lies only shallowly buried in Cold War era sites. Guidance for political leadership might still be found in understanding of the ways in which the physical legacy of the Cold War was created and used-or perhaps misused–with the ultimate goal of not making the same mistakes again in the future. Effective historical guidance, however, hinges principally on awareness and that awareness comes from knowing the Cold War in all its archival, biographical, and material forms.
Enrichment is a tricky term. Because it can mean to both improve and enhance the quality or value of something, as well as to make someone wealthy or wealthier, the notion of enrichment can be seen as either constructive or predatory. The predatory nature of neo-capitalism, for example, could mean that the greatest enrichment some would find in Cold War landscape is in its destruction for the siting of new shopping malls or upscale condominiums. In the context of this discussion, however, the benefit that I think reading the Cold War past offers to the present is a constructive enhancement of the quality of our shared cultural landscape. In a world where the existing built landscape of the Cold War is falling down (quite literally), the identification and preservation of the elements of the Cold War landscape that have the most meaning for all the world’s citizens seems to make great sense. Of course, if you want more shopping malls or condominiums and the capitalistic escapism they provide, the Cold War landscape may provide that benefit as well.
Several years ago, my sons discovered the James Bond films. Relatively unaware of the temporal, political and social contexts of the movies, they were quickly entranced by the films in the same way previous generations of teenage boys had been. For them James Bond quickly came to symbolize Cold War espionage, but was pure escapism that I doubt few sites of the Cold War’s actual physical legacy could ever match. On the contrary, the authentic stories and sites of Cold War espionage and intrigue are real, interesting, even alarming, in ways that surpass the fantasy of Bond. The trick, of course, is to tease out these real stories of Cold War intrigue and espionage–or whatever other stories they may hold–out of seemingly mute stone (or perhaps concrete) walls.
Because the Cold War dominated global politics, economics, and popular culture so largely for more than forty years, its landscapes and legacies will likely be with us for some time. Indeed, they are with us even today as America confronts its past practices in global affairs. Ultimately, what the world learns from the Cold War period, or what benefits that experience brings to future generations, will depend upon at least partly upon how fully and accurately we present its history to future generations. It may be difficult to imagine that the benefits of identity, guidance, enrichment, and escape might be somehow found in confronting the Cold War’s historical identity and concrete physical legacies, but in my mind, helping the world discover, define, understand and preserve that past are critical tasks for the nascent Cold War archaeologist.
No comments:
Post a Comment