Beauvoir and Sartre as Public Intellectuals in 2022

Reviewed by: Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis, and: Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro's Cuba, and: Unfinished Business: America and Cuba after the Cold War, 1989-2001 Michael Erisman James G. Blight and Philip Brenner. Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. 352 pp. Juan J. López . Democracy Delayed: The Case of Castro's Cuba. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 232 pp. Morris Morley and Chris McGillion. Unfinished Business: America and Cuba after the Cold War, 1989–2001. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 253 pp. According to Webster's Universal Unabridged Dictionary, "asymmetry" is best defined as "the want of proportion between the parts of a thing." In a political sense, however, the term is commonly used to refer to a relationship wherein there are major inequities (e.g., in power) between the parties involved, and it is this concept that provides the common thread linking the three books under consideration here. In other words, the three studies exhibit a thematic convergence in the sense that all of them, despite differences in their analytical emphases and priorities, are examining the dynamics of the asymmetries in the Cuban Revolution's foreign relations. As might be expected, there are significant variations in their attitudes toward these asymmetries; both the Blight-Brenner and the Morley-McGillion volumes are basically sympathetic with regard to the difficulties that Havana has confronted while López is quite forthright in his desire to see Washington take full advantage of the situation to destroy Castro's government. Undoubtedly the Blight-Brenner effort is the most conceptually ambitious and analytically elegant of the three books. Its main thrust focuses on Cuba's perceptions of and reactions to its asymmetrical association with the USSR and the implications thereof with respect to current U.S.-Cuban relations. Within this context the authors emphasize the 1962 Missile Crisis as an extremely traumatic primal event that triggered well-established and deeply rooted Cuban fears about the dangers inherent in any asymmetrical relationship. It is, they stress, very important to understand that there inevitably were tensions between Moscow and Havana—the Missile Crisis did not create them, but rather they were inherent in the relationship because of its asymmetrical nature and would have had a negative impact in any case. What the crisis did was to function as a catalyst that brought these preexisting strains to the surface and severely exacerbated them. Among the Soviet actions during the crisis that infuriated the Cubans were such moves as reaching an agreement with the United States to end the crisis without ever consulting Havana about the terms of the settlement or even informing the Cubans that a deal had been made. Likewise Moscow's decision, in response to pressure from Washington, to withdraw bombers and troops from Cuba was seen in Havana "as tantamount to inviting a U.S. invasion, because it demonstrated to the United States that the Soviet Union would not stand with Cuba in the face of U.S. threats" (31). These developments generated, say Blight and Brenner, a poisoned climate wherein Havana would never again really trust Moscow. In other words, the relationship would never escape the pall cast over it by the Cubans' conviction that they had been betrayed by the USSR at the height of the Missile Crisis. Indeed the basic lesson that the authors believe the Cubans took away from the Missile Crisis was that they could not trust and had to protect themselves against both of the superpowers, and that henceforth their cold war foreign policy became characterized by an [End Page 143] effort to maximize the political maneuvering space available to them within the context of these two asymmetrical relationships. This analysis of the Missile Crisis's legacy works very well when dealing with the cold war period. The epilogue then tries to incorporate the contemporary U.S.-Cuban relationship into this framework, arguing that the essential nature of the cold war Cuban-Soviet relationship that flowed from the crisis (i.e., serious tensions rooted in a mutual lack of empathy) is...

The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy: Volumes 1–3, The Great Crises. Edited by Phillip D. Zelikow, Timothy Naftali, and Ernest R. May. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001; pp xxiv + 691 (vol. 1), pp xxiv + 642 (vol. 2), pp xxiv + 549 (vol. 3). $165.00 cloth. Averting 'The Final Failure': John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings. By Sheldon M. Stern. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003; pp xxx + 459. $35.00 cloth. Awaiting Armageddon: How America Faced the Cuban Missile Crisis. By Alice L. George. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003; pp xxiii + 238. $29.95 cloth. October Fury. By Peter A. Huchthausen. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2002; pp v + 281. $17.47 cloth. Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers After the Missile Crisis. By James G. Blight and Philip Brenner. Lanham, Md.: Bowman and Littlefield, 2002; pp xxvii + 324. $29.95 cloth. The fortieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis has produced a wealth of thought-provoking works that examine "the event that might have triggered WWIII." In October 1962, an American U-2 reconnaissance plane recorded photographs of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. Ongoing tension between President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev concerning both Berlin and the placement of Soviet weapons in Cuba motivated the president to act. He selected a group of seasoned advisors, referred to as the Executive [End Page 133] Committee (ExComm). ExComm, with the participation and leadership of President Kennedy, created the strategies and tactics of diplomacy that averted potential nuclear catastrophe. This review essay offers a collection of variegated viewpoints. First, The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy: Volumes 1–3, The Great Crises, edited by Philip D. Zelikow, Timothy Naftali, and Ernest R. May, noted scholars and professors of public affairs and history, includes declassified presidential transcripts from July 30 through October 28, 1962. A CD with audio recordings of meetings accompanies the publication. Volume 3 covers transcripts of President Kennedy and the ExComm. The transcripts capture decision makers navigating their way through the quicksands of international diplomacy, escalating tension, and the management of public information. Examples of problem definition, reframing, and consensus building provide rich resources for rhetoricians, public policy analysts, and graduate students. This three-volume collection provides a captivating and comprehensive sense of the presidency as an institution. Civil rights, South American regime changes, currency fluctuations, along with lesser ceremonial responsibilities, convey the multifaceted tasks the chief executive faces daily. Next, Sheldon M. Stern's Averting 'The Final Failure,': John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings provides a narrative approach to the ExComm transcripts. Stern, as an historian, chief librarian of the Kennedy Library for over two decades, and a compelling storyteller, captures personality and contextual nuances, adding rich dimensions to the collective wisdom on this topic. The author, having studied the Kennedy tapes for decades, conscientiously retranscribes and reinterprets a number of the transactions presented in The Presidential Recordings. In Awaiting Armageddon: How Americans Faced the Cuban Missile Crisis, historian Alice L. George details a social history of Middle America's world during the Cold War. As a unique contribution to the available literature, she provides a diorama of children's lives as they experience the attempts of government, schools, and the media to manage and communicate the threat of nuclear war. Then, retired navy captain Peter A. Huchthausen's October Fury breaks new ground by dramatically recounting moment-by-moment decision making and lifestyles of both the Russian and American naval crews aboard submarines and ships participating in maneuvers during the crisis. The author effectively builds the case that a combination of exceptional political and naval leadership, plus superior American naval power, determined the outcome of events. Finally, Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers After the Missile Crisis, authored by international...

Atomic Historiography Michael Kimmage (bio) Rosemary B. Mariner and G. Kurt Piehler, eds. The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. Illustrations, bibliography, index, and notes. xxxi + 447 pp. $42.00. The large-scale periodization of American history rests on a few phrases, usually referring to a military conflict of one kind or another. There is the age of conquest, the revolutionary age, the antebellum era, the interwar years, the postwar period and, finally, the atomic or nuclear age. This is the age that began definitively with the creation of the atomic bomb, and it encompasses both the Cold War, which would not have been cold without atomic weapons, and the rise of the nuclear family. One could go a step further and describe the individualism of the postwar period as atomistic individualism, as if the mobile atom—and its power—were metaphors for modern culture and modern geopolitics alike. The Atomic Bomb and American Society, a collection of essays edited by Rosemary B. Mariner and G. Kurt Piehler, takes as its working premise the link between atomic weaponry and the drift of postwar American history. Based on a 2005 conference held in Oak Ridge, Tennessee—itself a significant site in atomic and American history—The Atomic Bomb and American Society is devoted to charting “the social swath of this atomic sword [nuclear weapons] in the context of the Cold War” and to examining the atomic bomb and “its lead role in the culture surrounding the Cold War” (pp. xix, xxiii). The included essays range from military to cultural history, from women’s history to the history of public memory. They demonstrate how wide the bomb’s “social swath” was, wider perhaps than Americans may have known during the Cold War. In the volume’s concluding essay, “The Challenges of Preserving America’s Nuclear Weapons Complex,” Jason Krupar remarks on the vastness and the relative invisibility of America’s nuclear weapons complex. “The Cold War created a national web of black spaces,” Krupar writes, “zones hidden from public sight even while located in the midst of it” (p. 399). The Atomic Bomb and American Society helps to illuminate these black spaces, without fully proving the bomb’s lead role in the culture surrounding the Cold War. In an essay that frames this volume as a whole, “Sixty Years and Counting: Nuclear Themes in American Culture, 1945 to the Present,” Paul Boyer [End Page 145] addresses the complexity of the bomb’s role in postwar American culture. A distinguished historian of American culture and the bomb, Boyer breaks this role into three phases: an early phase of anxiety, running from 1945 to the mid-1950s; a relaxation of fear in the 1960s and 1970s, after the Cuban Missile Crisis had passed without incident; and a widening fear of atomic catastrophe in the late 1970s and 1980s.1 Boyer emphasizes that nuclear fear or questions prompted by the existence of nuclear weapons were unsteady variables in American culture, waxing and waning for the duration of the Cold War. Nor did nuclear questions disappear together with the Cold War: the 1995 dispute over the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibition demonstrated precisely how unmasterable America’s nuclear past had remained, some six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.2 What did disappear after 1989, according to Boyer, was the coherence or urgency that had previously been attached to nuclear questions. “In contrast to earlier eras, a fundamental disconnect arose between politics and the popular culture” after the Cold War, Boyer writes (p. 14). Nuclear proliferation was sharply relevant as a strategic issue in the 1990s, while American popular culture was celebrating the harmless incompetence of Homer Simpson, the cartoon employee of an atomic energy plant (p. 14). And yet, the old fears were still there under the surface, made worse, in fact, by the fading of the Cold War. “During the Cold War, the adversary was at least the nation-state headed by rational leaders with whom one could negotiate,” Boyer states. “In the volatile destabilized post–Cold War world, lethal menace could lurk anywhere, and the popular culture reflected the resulting anxieties” (p. 12). One...

1. The Cuban missile crisis: what can we know, why did it start, how did it end? Robert Jervis 2. Examining The Fourteenth Day: studying the neglected aftermath period of the October Cuban missile crisis, and underscoring missed analytical opportunities Barton Bernstein 3. Prime Minister and President: Harold Macmillan's accounts of the Cuban missile crisis, Peter Catterall 4. Reform or revolution? Scott Sagan's Limits of Safety and its contemporary implications Campbell Craig 5. The 'Best and the Brightest': the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy administration and the lessons of history R. Gerald Hughes 6. The three puzzles: Essence of Decision and the missile crisis Don Munton 7. We all lost the 'Cuban missile crisis': revisiting Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein's landmark analysis in We All Lost the Cold War Benoit Pelopidas 8. On hedgehogs and passions: history, hearsay, and hotchpotch in the writing of the Cuban missile crisis Sergey Radchenko 9. Beyond the smoke and mirrors: the real JFK White House Cuban missile crisis, Sheldon M. Stern 10. 'The only thing to look forward to's the past': reflection, revision and reinterpreting reinterpretation Len Scott

Nakano Shigeharu, who led socialist literature in modern Japan, considered “conversion” as his literary task throughout his life. In particular, the novel “Procrastination” (1963) presents intriguing points regarding Nakano Shigeharu’s perception of the issue of conversion during the post-war periods. First, the novel approaches the event of conversion from the perspective of a third party rather than that of the individuals involved. The novel adopts a structure where a character named Yasuda observes the “converters.” This narrative structure aims to engage the reader’s interest in the question of why conversion continues, rather than who converted and for what reasons. Within the novel, Yasuda has long remained silent regarding the conversions of Nogami and the Communist Party, indicating his complicity in the persistence of the conversion issue. Second, the novel addresses conversion not as a past event before the war but as an ongoing issue in the post-war period. The Communist Party demonstrates indifference to public trends even in the post-war era, and Nogami remains oblivious to the Cold War strategies of the United States that support his research activities. However, it cannot be said that the novel solely deals with conversions in the post-war period. The conversion of the Communist Party remains unchanged between pre and post-war, while Nogami’s conversion takes the form of a conversion from pre to post-war. Third, the novel’s characteristic is the backdrop of the nuclear war crisis that triggers Yasuda’s contemplation of the conversion issue. The nuclear war crisis instills a profound fear of human annihilation in Yasuda and prompts a determination not to remain silent about the problem of conversion any longer. In this regard, the nuclear war crisis becomes a decisive context in the novel. From the perspective of Japan’s intellectual history in the post-war era, this novel can be evaluated as a text that records the brief crisis of post-war in the early 1960s. The confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, known as the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, was considered a precursor to a new world war. As a result, Japanese people were engulfed in anxiety that the post-war period might come to an end. However, the threat of a nuclear war swiftly diminished the sense of reality along with the compromise between the United States and the Soviet Union. Consequently, the sense of crisis that the post-war period might come to an end was concealed in Japan as well. The early 1960s are often remembered as a period of one-sided progress towards prosperity and affluence. However, such a memory is constructed upon the forgetting of the events that plunged the post-war period into a crisis. It can be confirmed from this perspective that “Procrastination,” which deals with conversions in the nuclear war era, is a text that records forgotten history and holds unique historical significance.

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Playa Girón: Bay of Pigs: Washington’s First Military Defeat in the AmericasThe Missile Crisis in Cuba

By the Bomb’s Early Noir Michael S. Mayer (bio) Margot A. Henriksen. Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xxvi + 450 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Long ignored by historians, the impact of the cold war and nuclear weapons on American culture has become a burgeoning area of scholarly inquiry in the last decade. 1 Margot A. Henriksen makes a contribution to this body of scholarship with Dr. Strangelove’s America. Henriksen begins with the premise that “given a conjunction between revolutionary technological change and revolutionary cultural change, it seems only reasonable to expect that an invention as revolutionary as the atomic bomb wrought an accompanying cultural revolution” (p. xv). She maintains that previous scholars have contended that, until the 1980s, “no such revolutionary change engulfed American culture” (p. xvi). These scholars, argues Henriksen, have ignored important connections between the bomb and American culture in the postwar decades. While positing the development of an “atomic consensus” that formed around the “cold war imperative” and regarded the bomb as a symbol of security, she argues at the same time for “the bomb’s central role in fomenting the kind of countercultural rebelliousness that characterized America throughout the 1960s” (p. xix). Henriksen holds that, in spite of the dominance of the atomic consensus in the 1940s and 1950s, “many dark visions of atomic age life” (p. xxii) emerged during those years. By necessity, however, these visions were largely allusive and metaphorical. She suggests that film noir, “with its disturbing themes and distorted view of American life” (p. xxii), exemplified this sort of indirect dissent. Through its presentation of blurred lines between good and evil, film noir reflected an American society corrupted by the knowledge of atomic destruction, in which “everyone seemed guilty and no one seemed innocent” (p. 61). Similar themes dominated the fiction of Mickey Spillane, Jim Thompson, and Harry Whittington. By the 1960s, the author contends, the atomic consensus began to break down, and the black humor of Stanley Kubrick’s film, Dr. Strangelove (1964), and Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Cat’s Cradle (1963), exemplified a new openness in [End Page 778] cultural dissent. Central to this process was “Kennedy’s public brandishing of America’s atomic arsenal,” which “shattered the cold war silence of the later Eisenhower years and shook Americans out of a long sleep of avoidance” (p. 187). In particular, the debate over the morality of bomb shelters, generated by the Berlin crisis and the Kennedy administration’s civil defense program, marked an important cultural shift away from acceptance of America’s nuclear policy. By late 1962, opinion had shifted so far that not even the Cuban missile crisis could spark a renewal of interest in bomb shelters. Henriksen sees the reaction against bomb shelters as a significant antecedent to the dissent of the later 1960s. Though the Cuban missile crisis did not revive enthusiasm for bomb shelters, it did reinforce dissenting views concerned about imminent nuclear destruction. Such dissenting views would expand to question the cold war and American values. “Black humor, which combined the ‘darkness’ associated with the film noir sensibility of the earlier years of dissent with the rambunctious and iconoclastic laughter associated with the fearless rebelliousness of sixties protests” (p. xxiii), signified the corresponding cultural shift. The buoyancy and the disdain of this cultural mirth in the early sixties broke the constraints of fear and intimidation that had curtailed free expression in the late forties and fifties and loosed the spirit of iconoclasm that complemented the dominant mood of the rebellious sixties. . . . Black humor matched both the explosive power and the deadly nihilism of the atomic bomb, and it announced the dawn of the cultural revolution that also finally matched the transforming power of the bomb. (p. 245) To demonstrate the conflict between the dominant culture of consensus and the oppositional culture of dissent in the immediate postwar era, the author juxtaposes Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) with the film noir classic, White Heat (1949). Capra’s film celebrates traditional American values and the American way of life, characterized by life in a small town, a...

This article reviews major issues in the historiography of the Russian/Soviet side of the Cuban missile crisis, as it has developed since the early 1990s. Focusing on key works, including Fursenko and Naftali’s One Hell of a Gamble and Mikoyan’s Anatomi’ia Karibskogo Krizisa, the article explores three issues: why Nikita Khrushchev decided to send missiles to Cuba, why he resolved to withdraw them, and how close the world came to ‘the brink’. The author contends that in our understanding of the Kremlin’s motivations in the Cuban missile crisis, we have come to over-rely on disparate pieces of ‘evidence’, which, at closer investigation, turn out to be one-sided, undocumented, or demonstrably false. The author therefore urges caution in drawing far-reaching conclusions from the crisis, especially in projecting its uncertain lessons onto the broader scholarship on the Soviet decision making during the Cold War.

<i>The War of Nerves: Inside the Cold War Mind</i> by Martin Sixsmith

In December 1961, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower reflected that Berlin is not so much a beleaguered city or threatened city as it is a symbol - for the West, of principle, of good faith, of determination; for the Soviets, a thorn in their flesh, a wound to their pride, an impediment to their designs.1 He had played an integral part in the development of the German situation, firstly as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, and later as President of the United States. During this period Berlin was one issue around which many others were gathered. From the time of the defeat of Nazi Germany, the 'German Question' was never far from the diplomatic negotiations. As the capital of Prussia it had assumed the symbolism of German aggression and militarism, and as such it was the prize of V-E Day. When relations between the occupation powers became strained Berlin became the 'front line' of the Cold War. While the city was of little material value to either side, both East and West were willing to go to the brink of war in pursuit of its diplomatic symbolism. The Berlin Crisis of 1961 remains an important example of Cold War crisis management. The following year the contest between East and West assumed a far more sinister character with the serious threat of nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba. The contest over Berlin was as important for hs diplomatic confrontation as the Cuban crisis was over its military threat. In 1961, both East and West were trying to secure a German nation sympathetic to their own causes. The Federal Republic of Germany, with its capital in Bonn, was an active member of NATO, while the German Democratic Republic claimed its capital as Berlin and was a signatory of the Warsaw Pact. Berlin enjoyed a 'special status.' All four Occupation Powers still maintained garrisons in the city and despite the formation of West Germany in 1949, West Berlin was not incorporated as part of this new German state, but rather was maintained and supervised by the joint occupation of the United States, Great Britain and France. The 2 ½ million people living in West Berlin were joined by approximately thirteen thousand troops: a mere token when the geographical position of Berlin is taken into account. Situated one hundred and ten miles within Soviet-controlled territory, the city was militarily indefensible. The West's position was assured only so long as NATO posed a credible threat of going to war over the issue. While the term 'Berlin Crisis' may be applied to the period from 1958 to 1963, 1961 brought the climax. Tensions grew from January to July as the new Kennedy Administration struggled to establish itself while faced with already established problems. In June Soviet Premier Nikita S. Krushchev repeated a demand first specifically made in November 1958 that a peace treaty finally be signed with Germany. In August the East German government erected barricades along sector boundaries. With the erection of the Berlin Wall the Cold War gained its most sinister symbol. Germany and Berlin were officially and visibly dismembered, though this took a form very different from the wartime notion of German partition. From the time that the Allies seemed to be gaining the upper hand in Europe, tentative plans were made for postwar Europe. These plans were often inconsistent and relegated to a secondary priority after the winning of the war. The 'German Question' became a central issue in international diplomacy from the Moscow Conference of 1943 with the establishment of the European Advisory Council. In 1944, Henry Morgenthau Jr.'s proposals were put on the international stage. Various flashpoints such as the airlift of 1948 and the sealing of Berlin in 1961 brought the issue to the forefront. Arms control, national sovereignty, spheres of influence, and German rearmament were all major issues in their own right, and all of these played important roles in the 'German Question' Accordingly, Berlin assumed a value far beyond its own merit by being the focus of many other diplomatic issues between East and West. The agreements reached during the latter stages of the Second World War were designed to be temporary measures to occupy Germany during denazification and demilitarization so that the Germans could never again start an aggressive war. Zonal occupation was introduced for Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and later France. By 1961 these wartime agreements could no longer support the conflict of the Cold War. The Potsdam Protocol was repeatedly quoted in justification of the Western presence, but both sides willingly violated the protocol if h was in their interests. The Berlin Crisis of 1961 was not an isolated crisis. Consequently, the origins of the 'Berlin problem' are as significant as the crisis itself The dispute of 1961 was a direct result of the postwar occupation of Germany and was presaged by the Soviet ultimatum of 1958. The first two chapters examine these origins of the Berlin question. Chapter One concerns the postwar partition of Germany. Initially done in the spirit of Allied cooperation, this partnership soon soured. Consideration of the 'German Question' includes the Allies' insistence upon unconditional surrender, propositions for the postwar treatment of Germany as given by Morgenthau and the Department of State, as well as the conferences of Yalta and Potsdam. Special attention is given to the documents that came out of these conferences, as well as the directive known as JCS 1067. This document, along with the Potsdam Protocol, was originally intended as a temporary directive for the Allied occupation of Germany. Both assumed greater importance with the prolonged presence of Allied troops. The imposition of unconditional surrender upon the Germans was a major factor in the foreign relations of the next several years. Having inherited the 'German Question' from Roosevelt, President Truman found Europe already divided. As the postwar world polarised, Cold War diplomacy dominated foreign policy, prompting the President to develop the Truman Doctrine of containment. In this environment the Berlin Blockade and Airlift of 1948-49 became a major conflict. Chapter Two focuses on the Eisenhower Administration's relationship with the issues of Berlin. Potential for gathering international opinion was not taken by the United States during the 1953 Berlin riots. After having been relatively quiet for several years, the Berlin issue was again raised by Krushchev in 1958 where he called for a final resolution. He gave six months for this resolution to be found before he would relinquish all control over access to Berlin to East German officials. The issue was allowed to fade in 1959 with the promise of a summit meeting. Chapters Three and Four examine the Berlin Crisis of 1961, from its development to its resolution. The U-2 incident and the failed summit signalled a hardening of differences between East and West. President John F. Kennedy assumed office in January 1961 and found that to such issues as Berlin and Cuba there was no easy solution. His buildup of conventional weapons and the shoring up of the NATO alliance in anticipation of a crisis in 1961 were attempts at preventing such a confrontation. Kennedy struggled to define the crisis in order that NATO could be faced with a simple decision of what would constitute a sufficient threat to their interests to justify war. Ostensibly, internal issues led to the East German government sealing off the city of Berlin on the 13 August. As such it was not a direct threat to the occupation powers and did not prompt a strong reaction from NATO. The Warsaw Pact and NATO faced each other in the streets of Berlin. The city was in the unenviable position of being the battle ground for Cold War diplomacy. With its emotional separation of families and loved ones for almost thirty years h was the focus of the international community's condemnation of the superpower diplomacy. The construction of the Berlin Wall was the most visible representation of Cold War divisions, representing for the free world the oppression of the communist system. As such, its collapse in 1989 signalled the imminent fall of the communist world and the end of the Cold War. 1Dwight D. Eisenhower, My Views on Berlin, Saturday Evening Post, 9 December 1961. p. 28

(2005). High Noon in the Cold War: Kennedy, Khruschev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 138-138.

Lessons of the Cold War

Reviewed by: A Short History of the 20th Century Grace J. Chae A Short History of the 20th Century. By Geoffrey Blainey. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008. 384 pp. $16.95 (paper). This newest volume by Geoffrey Blainey makes a brave attempt to survey the past one hundred years of world history. Blainey grapples with this daunting task and brings to it his own knowledge from writing A Short History of the World (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), The Causes of War (New York: Free Press, 1973), among many others. Recognizing the challenge of producing such a broad account, he applies a narrative style to address some major themes with a focus on war and peace. Blainey finds this approach suitable as the two world wars and the “nervous peace,” a phrase he prefers over “Cold War,” dominated so much of the century that many scientific, social, and political developments were precipitated by them. He provides no overarching argument or theory, admits that this endeavor forces him to generalize on things like causations, and hopes readers will look to his other publications for explanations. This book is divided into three sections, beginning with a short overview of the world at the beginning of the century, larger coverage of World War I and World War II, and then the postwar world. Since Blainey makes no substantive argument, I have concentrated my comments on the methodological challenges posed by his attempt to present a broad history in such a short space. Reading Blainey’s book may serve as a useful exercise in the classroom. How does one decide what topics are significant and how to situate them in “world history”? How is space allocated? Does writing a period of history according to a unit of time as opposed to a subject’s own discernable beginning and end diminish our ability to appreciate significant details and complexities? While the connections between some topics seem obvious, such as the link between ethnic tensions in the Balkans and the start of World War I, others are not. For example, after completing a discussion on the Cuban missile crisis and the Six-Day War, Blainey ends the chapter with a section on the race to the moon and Mars. Although his title, [End Page 475] “Explosive Island and Ghostly Galleon,” attempts to link these loosely connected events under one heading, the restrictions posed by a limited space and a large topic hinders Blainey from providing an explanation for the precise relevance of space exploration to the tensions that mounted in these two regions (p. 230). There is also the problem of time/text allocation. As a student of modern U.S. and East Asian history, I was struck by his discussion of the Korean War in his chapter on how the “Curtain” fell. In the opening sentence to the subject he writes, “Korea did not seem a likely site for a world-shaking event” (p. 189, all subsequent italics are my own). Expecting a relatively detailed discussion on the Korean War, he spent only four paragraphs describing it in summary. He designated more time and specifics to the rise of the entertainment industry (pp. 94–96). Similarly, in his section on “The Plight of Jews and Gypsies” in his chapter on Hitler, I had not anticipated that only six of the total forty-eight sentences in the section would be allocated to the latter group (pp. 133–135). The final significant challenge of writing a broad history in a short space relates to the tendency to generalize, raising subsequent problems with sources, cursory statements, and perspective. In his note on sources, he writes that they “are not exhaustive,” that the trivia he has provided often leaves him with “no idea where it came from,” and his usage of the two primary sources that deserve the most note are the 1922 and 1926 editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Understanding that this volume is an overview, I was still disappointed with the lack of primary materials. I was also frustrated by inadequate citations. On one occasion, he writes that the “present viewpoint is that Stalin proved to be the most resolute leader, that the Soviet Union exerted undue...

in the summer of 2019, the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–present) partnered with Eggo for a marketing campaign in the build-up to the release of its highly anticipated third season. The show, which follows a group of teens and adults in small-town 1980s Indiana as they struggle to keep at bay a succession of supernatural forces unleashed following the opening of a portal to an alternate dimension, was a surprise hit following its 2016 premiere, and it quickly became the streaming service's most recognizable original production. Eggo waffles—a favorite of Eleven, one of the show's teen protagonists—had seen a surge in sales following the show's premiere and gained iconic status within its fandom, so a partnership capitalizing on the hype represented a logical next step. The two franchises had previously collaborated on a trailer for the series’ second season, which premiered during Super Bowl LI, in which a vintage “L'eggo my Eggo” commercial was progressively interrupted and eventually overtaken by scenes from show's upcoming season. The much more elaborate 2019 campaign featured a variety of tie-ins, including an Eggo-branded Stranger Things spoiler blocker for fans’ internet browsers, recipes tied to each of the upcoming nine episodes, and instructions for making costumes using Eggo boxes. Eggo also bought billboards across the country in cities named Hawkins, the fictional town in which the series is set. These billboards featured the Eggo logo with blood dripping from the E—a nod to Eleven's frequent nosebleeds.This marketing effort culminated in two larger releases. In June, Eggo claimed to have unearthed a series of unreleased advertisements from 1985 featuring hidden teasers related to the show, which they subsequently posted across social media platforms. Following this, the company also created limited-edition boxes replicating the look of the ones they sold in the 1980s—identical save for the “Limited Edition 1985 Graphics” label at the top. These retro Eggos initially were available only online through Amazon but saw a larger release in select stores across the United States following the series’ July 4 debut.The latter two examples, the ads and the box, provide an acute illustration of the hyper-aestheticized nostalgia for which Stranger Things is the archetype. The ads, for instance, hinge on a nostalgia for consumer products and advertising that is entirely mediated and thus based on the recreation of an aesthetic object; the nostalgic allure of the ads, in other words, derives from their replication of the style of 1980s ads. Grainy visuals and tape distortions blanket one video showing a “typical” middle-class suburban breakfast table featuring milk, orange juice, and of course, Eggos before cutting to a screen that reads “One Eggo Can Change Everything.” These visual imperfections exist even though the ad was produced digitally and published exclusively online, thus bypassing the analog processes that created such imperfections in the ads being copied. The ads, in this way, are simulacra: detailed recreations of objects that never existed but are meant to appear as though they did in order to replicate the same response one would have had toward the originals, had they ever existed. The ad is, in other words, a thing that serves, at best, as a vague reminder of the thing it is parodying, and therefore the nostalgia it seeks to produce is further removed from its actual object.The boxes also emphasize aesthetics as primary content: while the packaging is retro-styled, the waffles inside—supposedly the product—remain unchanged. The only difference between the Limited Edition 1985 Graphics Eggos and regular 2019 Eggos is the package itself, and thus, in relation to the function or quality of the product, nothing substantial is different. The aesthetic, therefore, is the substance. Consumers buy Limited Edition 1985 Graphics Eggos not for the Eggos, but for the Limited Edition 1985 Graphics. As with the ads, the sole draw of the product derives from its visual recreation of something from the past. The irony, however, is that this recreation is inherently imperfect because the Limited Edition 1985 Graphics label announces the boxes as a recreation, breaking the illusion of visual fidelity, signifying that it is, in fact, not the thing it is meant to look like. The Limited Edition 1985 Graphics Eggos are, therefore, a reproduction whose status as reproduction is built into the item's appeal—it's not the real thing, but it sure looks like it.This is Stranger Things in a nutshell. The series’ nostalgic appeal derives from its seemingly faithful recreation and reassembly of a variety of tropes and aesthetic norms common to 1980s media, a hyper-recombinatorial approach to the past, in which the past is configured merely as a particular confluence of genres, tropes, and styles. Its nostalgia is thus primarily oriented toward cultural ephemera rather than grounded in past experiences. Though there is potential overlap between lived experience and the experiences represented in cultural ephemera for viewers of a certain age, it is significant that the lens the show provides for those viewers to reminisce about their lived experiences is explicitly tropological and mediated—it is accessed, if at all, through reference, genre, narrative structure, sound, and visual style. Like the Eggo ads, Stranger Things aims to recreate a thing that never truly existed: 1980s childhood, but only as it was depicted in films of the era and only through a kind of parodic pastiche—childhood in a hundred references. To the extent that the show depicts seemingly generalizable nostalgic experiences (e.g., children riding bikes in the suburbs), it regularly converts those realities into mediated references (E.T. [1982], The Goonies [1985]), distancing the nostalgia those moments induce from its mnemonic core, always already framed by media. Like the Limited Edition 1985 Graphics Eggos, Stranger Things is all about recreation: a copy whose entire function is to call attention to itself as a copy. Yet in doing so, it also announces itself as decidedly not the thing it is aiming to recreate. For Stranger Things, therefore, looking like the thing (sounding like it, feeling like it) is everything; as with the box, the aesthetic is the substance.In this regard, Stranger Things and the Limited Edition 1985 Graphics Eggo boxes are the same product: hyper-aestheticized containers whose draw and value lie more in the exterior than the interior,1 whose form supersedes their substance, and whose interior qualities are artificially elevated by the nature of the exterior. In addition to the stylistic similarities, Stranger Things’ design shares an aesthetic paradigm with the Eggo boxes. Stranger Things is not simply an Eggo box; rather, it is functionally akin to a Limited Edition 1985 Graphics Eggo box whose contents are (for the sake of analogy) unknown: they could be plain, blueberry, chocolate chip, or perhaps some special Stranger Things tie-in flavor—or better yet, the box could be empty. An evocative exterior coupled with an indeterminant interior allows—even encourages—the consumer to project into the box whatever its graphics elicit for that individual, and the box is crucially never opened to reveal its actual contents. What one imagines inside the box is overdetermined by what one sees on the outside, and this act of imagination—or interpretation—is only partially delimited, allowing for a wide range of possibilities. Stranger Things thus produces a system of meaning-making through suggestion and accumulation; it is a pastiche whose signification allows for a seemingly endless range of interpretations.In the relatively short time since the release of its first season—despite what I have argued previously (or, as I will shortly show, because of it)—the series has become the subject of surprisingly diverse readings by fans as well as critics, both popular and academic. A gloss of the interpretive frames into which viewers have placed the show offers a glimpse into this myriad and often contradictory landscape: the series has been seen as a distinctly celebratory, nostalgic vision of the 1980s and its media (McCarthy; Genzlinger; Chaney); as a critique of the 1980s, Reaganism, and middle-class suburbia (Butler; Smith; Burges; Nussbaum); as an allegory or metaphor for the traumatic experience of coming-of-age and entering into a world of adult conformity (Khan; Butler); as a form of digital gothic or an expression of longing for the analog in a digital world (Landrum; Rust); as an exploration of queerness past and present as well as a critique of straight nostalgia (Burges and Middleton; Roach; Berns et al.; Briefel); as an example of a distinctly white nostalgia (Bering-Porter; Giovannone); and as a critique of white nostalgia (Reich).A list such as this would seem to illustrate that Stranger Things is a rich, complex, and perhaps even profound series. While there is textual evidence supporting any of the aforementioned interpretations, taken together the readings reveal that the core function of the series is to reconstruct a 1980s in which every major narrative incident or component, by replication or divergence, cites some “source.” The show's references, therefore, weave together potential meanings so vast as to embrace numerous self-contradictory interpretations, for which the show offers no path to a final judgment or method for achieving argumentative clarity. Stranger Things relies on ambiguity produced through connotation, and beyond overly familiar maxims such as “friendship is important” and “growing up is hard,” it provides no clear denotations. To the extent that we consider meaning to be a text's content, the series’ reliance on stereotype, trope, and genre provides both its form and its primary content. Put simply, it suggests a lot but says very little, and each new suggestive connotation diminishes its capacity for saying anything.The abundant critical readings, overwhelmingly devoted to elucidating the meaning encoded by the aesthetics, often mistake aesthetic posturing for thematic substance. Aviva Briefel's Post45 essay “Familiar Things: Snow Ball ’84 and Straight Nostalgia” exemplifies this mistake in its reading of season 2’s closing sequence, which takes place at a school dance. On its face, the scenes that occur at “Snow Ball ’84”—including, most notably, a dance between two of the series’ adolescent protagonists, Mike and Eleven, which signals the culmination of a heterosexual coupling the show had been building toward since early in the first season (and one of the central narrative components of season 3, which was released concurrently with Post45’s special issue and is thus not incorporated into Briefel's analysis)—depict a conventionally nostalgic vision of adolescent romance that could be found in many films produced before, during, or after the 1980s. Briefel argues, however, that the scenes pointedly “invoke the iconic and distinctly non-nostalgic prom scene from Brian De Palma's Carrie, which subtly counteracts the forced identification of Snow Ball ’84.” Carrie (1976) and Stranger Things, she argues, [b]oth show characters grooming in front of mirrors in preparation for the big event, deploy overhead establishing shots of the glittery gym and its painfully invested teenagers, and rotate the camera around the dancing couples. At the center of both sequences is a “pity” dance that serves as an initiation into heterosexual rituals: Tommy's girlfriend, Sue, forces him to ask Carrie to the prom to compensate for her own prior bullying of the outcast girl; in Stranger Things, Nancy invites Dustin to dance after he has been rejected by several girls his age. In both cases, the pitying character teaches the pitied one to dance through instructions to “just listen to the music.”Briefel seems to have fallen into Stranger Things’ referential trap. As the described evidence inadvertently indicates, there is no obvious visual link to Carrie in the scene unless one counts establishing shots and basic camera movements employed in practically every school dance scene in recent film history.2 The author's focus on Carrie, and the ignoring of more obvious links to ’80s films such as Footloose (1984) and Pretty in Pink (1986), seems to derive especially from the “pity” dance, which, although not unique to Carrie, is admittedly a more selective reference point. However, such a reading relies heavily on a flimsy correlation (that the dances are out of “pity”) that ignores key differences. In the scene, Mike's older sister Nancy—one of the show's unambiguously “good” characters—notices Dustin crying alone on the bleachers after his crush chose to couple up with his friend Lucas and after his subsequent request to dance with another girl was crudely rejected. After convincing Dustin to join her on the dance floor, Nancy offers advice: “Girls this age are dumb,” she explains as Dustin, now smiling, holds her waist. “Give them a few years, and they'll wise up. You're gonna drive them nuts.” Unlike Tommy, who as Briefel notes was “forced” to dance with Carrie, Nancy dances with Dustin out of sincere sympathy, and Dustin appears genuinely reassured. In contrast to Carrie, whose scenes of relentless bullying before the dance give audiences every reason to be skeptical, there is nothing sinister or foreboding in Nancy's encouragement, and the show itself provides no reason to doubt Dustin's newfound resolve. In fact, Dustin's trajectory over the third season unambiguously validates Nancy's mid-dance counsel and, in doing so, further distances their dance from Mike and Carrie's and thus from the critique of heteronormativity Briefel reads into it. Stranger Things 3 (2019), which takes place a year after Snow Ball ’84, concludes with the revelation that Dustin's mythical “girlfriend from camp” is, in fact, real and climaxes with the two performing a ham radio duet of the theme from The NeverEnding Story (1984). Heteronormativity may be inevitable in both texts, but in Stranger Things, its attainment is a source of triumph.Nonetheless, Briefel concludes, “With these allusions, the audience is invited to recognize the oppressiveness of dominant nostalgia narratives and turn to the cinematic memory of a horror film in which heterosexuality is an undeniable source of terror” (emphasis added). In other words, Briefel's reading requires an intertextual relationship in which the entirety of the scene's “meaning” is revealed by the reference: although the scene shows one thing, an intertextual reference proves that it is saying the opposite. Stranger Things, in other words, merely has to look like something else to borrow its message. The fact that the series elsewhere shows little to no interest in such a critique of heteronormative nostalgia (and often celebrates it) is seemingly unimportant because of its reference—or, to more precisely lower the allusive bar, because of its referential environment. Where everything is a reference, all potential meanings are subordinated to the connections.Briefel's article, therefore, typifies an apparent desire throughout Stranger Things scholarship to make the show transcend the confines of nostalgic pablum and say something, even if that means upending its nostalgic premise. The series, in this light, is functionally a husk that allows viewers to find within its panoply of ’80s cultural ephemera whatever they want to see. To be sure, Stranger Things is not unique in generating contradictory and/or mutually exclusive critical readings. What is unique, however, is that the source of this trend in Stranger Things criticism can be tied to a couple of specific factors, both of which have larger cultural and critical implications.The series converts nostalgia and the 1980s into aesthetics, participating in the same system of reference that, as Joel Burges and Jason Middleton have argued, distinguishes the 1980s as a historical period from the ’80s as a phenomenological object. Stranger Things is, in other words, not interested in investigating the 1980s as a historical moment or in reflecting the period beyond the show's invocation of cultural ephemera. In this process of aestheticization, in the move from the 1980s to the ’80s, cultural artifacts and historical realities become de- or re-contextualized markers—kids ride bikes as in E.T., and otherwise apolitical families have Reagan–Bush ’84 signs in their yards—hollowed of purpose and thus endlessly signifying. This vagueness produces a vision of the ’80s that is more indeterminant and thus more alienated from historical reality than traditional nostalgic texts.The series’ indeterminacy, however, is one of its central draws. 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