Beyond the Cold War: Bread and Puppet Theater at the End of the Century

Abstract

In House of War, his masterful history of U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century, James Carroll traces the development of the power of the Pentagon and the conflicted rise of American hegemonic ideology, in a quest to discover what happened “when the impersonal forces of mass bureaucracy … were joined to the critical mass of nuclear power.”1 Carroll traces this history by focusing on certain key events: the development of aerial bombardment in World War Two as a method of mass destruction; the extension of this philosophy into the use of nuclear weapons; the cold war and its repressive ideological consequences; the Vietnam War and the success of antiwar street demonstrations and the rise of peaceful opposition to that war; the 1970s Central American wars, and the rise of a sanctuary movement to protect refugees from that conflict in the United States; the success of the nuclear freeze movement and its articulation of an antinuclear future; and finally the paroxysms of George Bush’s “war on terrorism” and its concomitant invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. As I read Carroll’s book I was struck again and again by how the pivotal events of the past century, which Carroll describes in terms of both personal and global significance, were also pivotal moments in the work of Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater.