Boris, Natasha, and the Cold War

June 26, 2013 — cold war, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Russia

When I was in elementary school we had air raid drills to teach us how to protect ourselves if Russians tried to blow us up during school hours.  We went out in the hall and stood against the wall with our arms against the wall wondering why Russians wanted to bomb us.  The cartoon spies Boris and Natasha explained this reality to us.  Fearless Leader, a thinly veiled Nikita Krushchev, was out to destroy us by sending hacks like Boris and Natasha to spy on us.  The cold war was about nuclear weapons, but we had no idea what they were.  We only knew they made mushroom clouds in cartoons.  Maybe some of us knew about Hiroshima, but generally the big conspiracy against us remained unexplained.  We shifted our national hatred from Germany to Russia after WWII, and our effort was focused on keeping communists from ruling the world.  We were not alive for the Nazis but saw them in movies plenty.  We had heavy brainwashing about Europe, which we also did not understand.  History for us was all about the western hemisphere and manifest destiny.

The details of communism and how it operated to destroy us were vague at best.  We later became aware that James Bond also recognized Russia as evil, but sometimes slept with Russian spies to gain intelligence.  The plot thickened.  We needed to stop communism in Viet Nam by killing people in the jungle while tripping on LSD.  Things went downhill from there, even though communism and capitalism looked exactly the same on the inside.  When the Soviet Union imploded it was from the same kind of corruption and propaganda that the United States is known for now.  This war will be the globally warmer war, in which the stakes are higher, the cartoons more sinister.  Now Fearless Leader is Vladamir Putin, and the accent still fits perfectly.