Thursday Music Link
My plea a couple of years ago that after "Twenty years ago today" had been twenty years in the past for twenty years, we could perhaps stop blaming the 1960s for our problems, fell on stony ground. There is a piece of blah by Michael Kinsley doing the rounds, basically doing the whole "baby boomers, the selfish generation, entitled, not the Greatest Generation, concept of sacrifice, grr hippies, self-loathing, sixties" thing, tied to some dumbass idea or other about the national debt.
Fact: The 1960s postwar generation defeated the Soviet Union, a military power clearly comparable to Nazi Germany. And they did it more or less without firing a shot. They also managed to end apartheid in South Africa and the USA. That's pretty good going actually.
Of course, none of this counts, because what's missing is sacrifice, nobility, suffering for a cause etc. The greatest lesson of both the Sixties and the Cold War is - fuck that for a lark. One of the reasons why, despite it all, I'm still an economist is that economics, for all its many faults, measures the goodness of things by what their results are, not in some twisted calculus of misery. Victory in the Cold War is not less meaningful by the fact that its casualties could be measured in single rather than double digits of millions.
I wrote (but scrapped) a post on something I was going to call "the McCain ratio", after the Senator and Presidential candidate, this being the ratio between the amount of personal suffering and heroism expended in a cause, to the the actual contribution made. If someone had undergone five years of prison camp torture, but the end result was that they destroyed one of their own side's planes and made a propaganda film for the enemy, I would standardise that as minus one McCain units; an alternative numeraire might have been the corresponding ratio for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, which wouldn't have the problem of a negative denominator.
Fortunate Son
I think that's a rather rosy casualty assessment of the cold war. After all, one reason why the Middle East and Africa have the shape they have today is because of the application of the Somoza principle to those parts of the world. Lumumba too close to the Soviets? Killed. Promote Islamic extremism to undermine the Soviets? Done. Overthrow Mossadeq and install the Shah? Sorted. And then there's Indonesia.
ReplyDeleteSo I think single-digit millions is a rather conservative estimate.
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ReplyDeleteLikewise, I doubt that there is a single resident of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Korea, Viet Nam or Chile who would think that the anglo/american anti-communist policy was a bullet-free matter.
ReplyDeleteAnd frankly, it a stretch to call the actions of Kennedy (b1917), Nixon (b1913), Carter (b1924), Reagan (b1911), Bush (b1924) and Thatcher (b1925) as indicative of the values or intents of the post-war boom generation. If the boomers' primary accomplishment was to convince their leaders to fight communism to the death of the last Chilean and Korean, that hardly seems worth crowing about.
After all, one reason why the Middle East and Africa have the shape they have today is because of the application of the Somoza principle to those parts of the world
ReplyDeleteTrue, although there has to be some agency here for the people involved - and also, another reason why the Middle East and Africa have the shape they have today is because of the legacy of WW2. And looking at the bloodiest conflicts in Africa (basically Biafra and the Sudanese civil war), there was a degree of Cold War involvement, but I don't think they can really be seen as secondary theatres. The UK didn't intervene in Biafra at least partly because of Cold War concerns, but are we really going to say that this makes it part of the CW? If we count both the Vietnam and Korean Wars as wholly included in the CW casualties, then we would need there to be 2 million further casualties attributable. I think it's actually quite difficult to find that many in Africa and the Middle East - they're just not populous enough. Of course I might be completely forgetting a massive conflict here in which case I will act suitably embarrassed.
It might get the total up into double figures (although clearly still miles less than WW2) if we included everything in Latin America, but I think it really is reaching to call genocides of indigenous peoples part of the Cold War.
And frankly, it a stretch to call the actions of Kennedy (b1917), Nixon (b1913), Carter (b1924), Reagan (b1911), Bush (b1924) and Thatcher (b1925) as indicative of the values or intents of the post-war boom generation.
I don't think it's a stretch at all; the "Greatest Generation" also had prime ministers and presidents who were about thirty years older than they were.
(and of course, although there is not a single resident of Korea who would have considered the Korean War a bullet free matter, there's probably quite a lot who would regard it as having been better than most of the alternatives).
ReplyDeleteI'm with D^2 here. It may help to remember that the RAND Corporation reckoned up that SIOP-62, fully implemented until all the target packages had been covered, would have killed 325 million people, not counting deaths by fall-out in neutral states.
ReplyDeleteI am not aware that a similar Soviet assessment of their own nuclear strike plan exists, but you'd think it would be at least a few Hitler Units even though at the time, they were very dependent on Tu-95 bombers and quite a lot wouldn't have got through. 380 million? 400 million? in all?
After 1962 the Soviet Union built a hell of a lot of ICBMs and essentially a similar capability to SIOP-62, and the Americans began revising the plan to include options other than "nuke'em and keep on doing so until you run out of either bombs or targets".
That said, there probably isn't a single resident of Angola, Mozambique, or Somalia who would think the Soviet anti-sort-of-capitalist policy was bullet- or even cluster-bomb and attack heli free.
"The 1960s postwar generation defeated the Soviet Union, a military power clearly comparable to Nazi Germany".
ReplyDeleteI wasn't aware that Reagan, Thatcher et al were children of the sixties ..
"They also managed to end apartheid in South Africa and the USA."
Today something good happened while I was focusing on something else, I'd like to claim credit.
I wasn't aware that Reagan, Thatcher et al were children of the sixties ..
ReplyDeletesee above. The Soviet Union wasn't (this is kind of my point) defeated by force of arms, Churchillian speeches, or anything of the kind. It was defeated because of its failure to produce industrial and cultural output at the same rate as the West. People who came over the Berlin Wall were not doing so because of Thatcher or Reagan, they were looking for jeans and mainstream heavy metal (also: freedom of speech, but I don't think Thatcher can take credit for that either).
mainstream heavy metal
ReplyDeleteNWOBHM - the only right leaning musical movement that wasn't actually for fascists. Discuss.
ReplyDeleteIt was defeated because of its failure to produce industrial and cultural output at the same rate as the West. People who came over the Berlin Wall were not doing so because of Thatcher or Reagan, they were looking for jeans and mainstream heavy metal (also: freedom of speech, but I don't think Thatcher can take credit for that either).
Why not? Why deny Thatcher the chance to take credit for the unintended consequences of her actions. What's one more person as compared to an entire generation?
I must be getting old - it always used to be Pope John Paul II's doing.
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