![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Cold War memories
The first 25 years of my life were lived under the shadow of imminent nuclear war. It wasn't a case of 'if' the button would be pushed, but when. I grew up with my friends knowing that it was only a matter of time, and that our fate was completely out of our hands. One day, we would die, and it would be because faceless people on the other side of the world had decided that 'mutually assured destruction' was no longer a deterrent.
There were no missile silos in Australia. We probably weren't considered a 'primary target' - not like Washington DC, or Moscow. What we did have was an ever-strengthening alliance with the US, which led to their warships in our harbours, their money invested in our defence, and our promise to follow them into whatever hell they saw fit to drag us. Most frighteningly, there were the secret bases up north - Pine Gap, Northwest Cape - and no one, not even our elected Prime Minister, could find out what was going on up there. All we knew is that it had something to do with satellites, and radar - and with the Cold War mindset that permeated our lives, we just knew that it was dangerous. This was only confirmed when we saw Gough Whitlam's government toppled, just when he was demanding answers from our allies.
Strangely, all this led to a kind of cheerful fatalism. If it was inevitable, then we were - to an extent - absolved from any compulsion to plan for a long-term future. Oh, we still talked about going to uni, getting married, having kids, maybe buying a house - the habits of our Baby Boomer parents were well-established in us. Somehow we never examined the absolute incompatibility of these two ideas. Instead, we drew pictures of our dream homes, chose names for our one-day children and talked seriously about where we might go to escape the fallout, and what skills we would need to survive.
We also had a morbid fascination with the post-apocalyptic books and movies that proliferated during that time. A Canticle for Leibowitz told us that we would shy away from technology and create pseudo-religion from the ashes. The Day After showed us the American heartland become refugee wasteland. Threads laid out the horrible consequences, even years afterwards, of a 'limited nuclear exchange'* with blood-chilling British understatement. Z for Zachariah, which I read in primary school, terrified me because what it showed me was a world in which I - a soon-to-be young woman - could be taken, held and violated, and no one would stop it. Even with the nightmares that book gave me, I still kept reading. Part of me had to know. Perhaps it was a way of preparing myself. If I knew what to expect, I could plan - and so I made sure I knew where the gun shops were, and how to recognise a .22 rifle (the only one I had ever used, thanks to my farmer grandfather).
This need to know - to not be surprised when it came - was part of a growing fascination with news and politics. I was lucky enough to have journalists for parents, and to have access to information that may not have made the 6 pm broadcast each night. I found out about the Dismissal, and the part the US played in it, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, New Zealand's refusal to allow US nuclear warships to dock in their harbours - and our strident re-affirmation of complete cooperation with the superpower, no matter what. Each time I tried to work out - is it now? Will this be the incident that spirals out of control?
Understand, this was almost an intellectual exercise for many of us. We were so inured to the idea that it had very little power to disrupt us on an emotional level. I remember one conversation, when the rhetoric was particularly high at the beginning of the '80s; we looked at our friends and family and tried to work out who might be a good person to have with us when we made our escape. No one was guaranteed a spot on our makeshift 'ark' - family ties seemed unimportant compared to survival. We knew we would suffer, but we also knew that we could not afford to look after our aging grandparents, or our baby siblings. Cold? Absolutely.
This is how we grew up.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I felt real fear. Our household watched the television reports of people climbing over that ugly concrete symbol of the insanity and paranoia that had shaped my world, and we all looked at each other with white faces and tears in our eyes. Even now, I still wonder why.
Was it that we thought this was the line that could not be crossed, that it was simply too provocative an act to be dismissed with political rhetoric? I thought of myself as relatively politically enlightened - I didn't think Communism was an epidemic waiting to sweep through the world and destroy my way of life - but nonetheless, the Soviet Union was, to me, a surreal mixture of suspiciously talented super-gymnasts and war-mongering men in secret rooms. Was Berlin simply too valuable, symbolically, to lose?
Or - and this is something that I've only thought about relatively recently - was it because the sight of that Wall tumbling down meant that our world was gone? Was it a dislocation that was far more profound than we ever realised? There's a truism that states that one can get used to anything, no matter how horrible. Were we actually comfortable with the idea of inevitable nuclear devastation? And what would we do now?
I don't know the answer. Perhaps I never will. Perhaps that isn't important. Perhaps it's enough that I remember the feeling.
People of my parent's generation asked: 'Where were you when you heard Harold Holt had disappeared?' or 'Where were you when you heard JFK had been shot?' My children's generation will probably ask themselves in later years, 'Where were you when you saw the video of the Towers coming down?'
My generation - or at least, a good number of it - ask: 'Where were you when you saw the Fall of the Wall?' For us, that was the moment that changed our lives, and when we had to learn who to be, and how to live in the world, all over again.
* Translation: we only destroy the world once, instead of many times over. Yes, we could explode enough bombs to rip our planet into pieces, but why have an orgy of annihilation when a few 'surgical' - and how hideous is that word applied to this idea? - strikes could do the job far more efficiently.
There were no missile silos in Australia. We probably weren't considered a 'primary target' - not like Washington DC, or Moscow. What we did have was an ever-strengthening alliance with the US, which led to their warships in our harbours, their money invested in our defence, and our promise to follow them into whatever hell they saw fit to drag us. Most frighteningly, there were the secret bases up north - Pine Gap, Northwest Cape - and no one, not even our elected Prime Minister, could find out what was going on up there. All we knew is that it had something to do with satellites, and radar - and with the Cold War mindset that permeated our lives, we just knew that it was dangerous. This was only confirmed when we saw Gough Whitlam's government toppled, just when he was demanding answers from our allies.
Strangely, all this led to a kind of cheerful fatalism. If it was inevitable, then we were - to an extent - absolved from any compulsion to plan for a long-term future. Oh, we still talked about going to uni, getting married, having kids, maybe buying a house - the habits of our Baby Boomer parents were well-established in us. Somehow we never examined the absolute incompatibility of these two ideas. Instead, we drew pictures of our dream homes, chose names for our one-day children and talked seriously about where we might go to escape the fallout, and what skills we would need to survive.
We also had a morbid fascination with the post-apocalyptic books and movies that proliferated during that time. A Canticle for Leibowitz told us that we would shy away from technology and create pseudo-religion from the ashes. The Day After showed us the American heartland become refugee wasteland. Threads laid out the horrible consequences, even years afterwards, of a 'limited nuclear exchange'* with blood-chilling British understatement. Z for Zachariah, which I read in primary school, terrified me because what it showed me was a world in which I - a soon-to-be young woman - could be taken, held and violated, and no one would stop it. Even with the nightmares that book gave me, I still kept reading. Part of me had to know. Perhaps it was a way of preparing myself. If I knew what to expect, I could plan - and so I made sure I knew where the gun shops were, and how to recognise a .22 rifle (the only one I had ever used, thanks to my farmer grandfather).
This need to know - to not be surprised when it came - was part of a growing fascination with news and politics. I was lucky enough to have journalists for parents, and to have access to information that may not have made the 6 pm broadcast each night. I found out about the Dismissal, and the part the US played in it, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, New Zealand's refusal to allow US nuclear warships to dock in their harbours - and our strident re-affirmation of complete cooperation with the superpower, no matter what. Each time I tried to work out - is it now? Will this be the incident that spirals out of control?
Understand, this was almost an intellectual exercise for many of us. We were so inured to the idea that it had very little power to disrupt us on an emotional level. I remember one conversation, when the rhetoric was particularly high at the beginning of the '80s; we looked at our friends and family and tried to work out who might be a good person to have with us when we made our escape. No one was guaranteed a spot on our makeshift 'ark' - family ties seemed unimportant compared to survival. We knew we would suffer, but we also knew that we could not afford to look after our aging grandparents, or our baby siblings. Cold? Absolutely.
This is how we grew up.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I felt real fear. Our household watched the television reports of people climbing over that ugly concrete symbol of the insanity and paranoia that had shaped my world, and we all looked at each other with white faces and tears in our eyes. Even now, I still wonder why.
Was it that we thought this was the line that could not be crossed, that it was simply too provocative an act to be dismissed with political rhetoric? I thought of myself as relatively politically enlightened - I didn't think Communism was an epidemic waiting to sweep through the world and destroy my way of life - but nonetheless, the Soviet Union was, to me, a surreal mixture of suspiciously talented super-gymnasts and war-mongering men in secret rooms. Was Berlin simply too valuable, symbolically, to lose?
Or - and this is something that I've only thought about relatively recently - was it because the sight of that Wall tumbling down meant that our world was gone? Was it a dislocation that was far more profound than we ever realised? There's a truism that states that one can get used to anything, no matter how horrible. Were we actually comfortable with the idea of inevitable nuclear devastation? And what would we do now?
I don't know the answer. Perhaps I never will. Perhaps that isn't important. Perhaps it's enough that I remember the feeling.
People of my parent's generation asked: 'Where were you when you heard Harold Holt had disappeared?' or 'Where were you when you heard JFK had been shot?' My children's generation will probably ask themselves in later years, 'Where were you when you saw the video of the Towers coming down?'
My generation - or at least, a good number of it - ask: 'Where were you when you saw the Fall of the Wall?' For us, that was the moment that changed our lives, and when we had to learn who to be, and how to live in the world, all over again.
* Translation: we only destroy the world once, instead of many times over. Yes, we could explode enough bombs to rip our planet into pieces, but why have an orgy of annihilation when a few 'surgical' - and how hideous is that word applied to this idea? - strikes could do the job far more efficiently.