A Cold War chill hangs in the New World Order air

The Globe and Mail ^ | August 2, 2003 | DOUG SAUNDERS

[freeforall]

A Cold War chill hangs in the New World Order air

By DOUG SAUNDERS Saturday, August 2, 2003

It was yet another rainy summer day, so I picked up the big commemorative umbrella this newspaper had issued in the early 1990s. As I walked along dreary Bloor Street, my anachronistic pastiche of old front pages shouted at the sky: Tide of Joy Overwhelms Berlin Wall; Soviet Union to be dissolved Jan. 1; Cold War Era Finally Dead, Leaders Say.

The sky laughed back. Dead, you say? Where have you been? Look at the big stories of our age: American Marines trying to hunt down and kill a totalitarian leader who looks like and until recently acted exactly like Joseph Stalin. A Russian President getting awfully testy in his defence of that same leader. An American President warning his people about the unified waves of "evil" emanating from three or four disparate countries whose governments happen to be among the last remainders of the Soviet system. That President's scholarly friends reminding us that Islamist extremists could provoke a "domino effect" of global instability, if we don't do something dirty to stop them.

Europe may have moved dramatically beyond that eerie age, and South America seems to have stepped happily away from the pendulum swing between rightist strongmen and leftist demagogues. But look into the world's farther corners, and 1989 does not seem so distant: Undemocratic, religious Pakistan is preferred by Washington to democratic, pro-Western India (for the same old reason: It's a go-between into the world of Evil); and the Saudis, for no good reason, and despite endless betrayals, still command more respect in Washington than those Arab states that were once Soviet clients.

Even if the alliances and boundaries have changed, there are plenty of signs that the old mentality is still there. I spoke to Douglas Little, an American historian who specializes in the Cold War's effects on the Middle East, and he told me he sees that era's shadows on the ground today. "There's still a tendency in America today to try to imagine the world in bipolar terms," he said. "Now that the Communists are gone, there remains a temptation to replace them with other threats, and to unify those threats into a monolithic enemy."

But let's not heap all the blame on the White House. How many of us still view the world's events through a Cold War lens? I suspect that many Canadians do. The Iraq war was our first major test, and we failed miserably: Presented with a morally complex event that thinking people could neither fully support nor guiltlessly oppose, most people turned to the Cold War tropes of the Vietnam war: either a seamless empire of evil trying to take over the world, or an American imperialism bent on destroying human autonomy.

Historian Steven Marks argues, in his book How Russia Shaped the Modern World, that the very notion of anti-Westernism, in its modern sense, was a Soviet invention, and the survival of these views is very much a Cold War residue.

"The Soviet anti-Western propaganda was very persuasive -- it hasn't disappeared, just taken root in many cultures," he told me. "Now, the West, more frequently identified with America alone, is scapegoated for misfortunes whose causes are local and unrelated to it."

In his view, our caricature of the United States is a hallucination brought about by Cold War hypothermia.

American writer Peter Beinart, in the New Republic, recently chided his country's political activists, left and right, for a strange omission. First, he assaulted the left, noting that its biggest protest event this fall will be titled "International Days of Protest against Occupation and Empire, from Palestine to Iraq to the Philippines to Cuba and Everywhere."

Unless one counts "Everywhere," the left seems to have omitted an entire explosion of oppression -- central and western Africa's unsurpassable death toll (3.3 million in the Congo's recent civil war alone), by far the leading outcome of injustice and persecution in the world.

Mr. Beinart searched the writings of the world's leading left-wing commentators during the past four years. Congo, Liberia, Sudan and Zimbabwe received not a word of mention from Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Michael Moore, Michael Lerner, Gore Vidal, Cornel West or Howard Zinn.

He blames "the left's preoccupation with U.S. empire." The left, he says, "isn't galvanized by victims, it's galvanized by victimizers." Under this logic, Africa is exempt from discussion, since it suffers not from imperialism (which was its problem during the Cold War), but from an acute lack of such foreign attention. And how can you decry American intervention in one place and demand it in another?

Whether or not this accusation is really fair (while it simplifies a complex movement, it contains a painful core of truth), it applies in equally strong measure to conservatives. The right (including much of the White House, and certainly Canada's leading voices) seems to choose its targets of interest according to the same 30-year-old logic.

As Mr. Beinart says: "The right, which on Iraq and Cuba speaks in high moral tones, adopts a cold and narrow realism when it comes to Africa, where it blithely assumes the United States has no interests."

If it isn't part of the monolithic Evil bloc, it falls off the radar.

Perhaps things are beginning to change. But far from living in a whole new era, I think history will remember us as living in the dusty tail end of the Cold War. Its remains cover our maps, and our minds.

dsaunders@globeandmail.ca

[IoCaster]

Interesting article. Thanks for posting it.