I grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, when the fear of nuclear war with the Soviet Union was the threat the government confronted, and in hindsight used to bind us together so we would ignore the racism and other domestic problems the nation faced. In addition to the fire drills we had, we would also have nuclear attack drills where we would all hide in the halls or under our desks as the hordes of Soviet Bombers flew over our little town on their way to New York City.
Of course, we had the “Red” scare where Senator Joseph McCarthy dug up all the communists in government and Hollywood. There were “Black” lists where people linked to the communist movement popular in the 1930s suddenly found they were no longer employable and if they were lucky enough could still find work writing under a pseudonym, but for hundreds of artists their fascination with communism led to their ruin.
In the 1980s we finally had a President who had enough of the Soviet Union and embarked on a plan, over the deep objections of his opponents to break the Soviet Union. By the end of the decade the Soviet Union was no more. It had been broken up into its individual states. Since then those border countries like Poland have seen their fortunes rise as they left the Warsaw pact to align with the developed countries of Western Europe.
The military of the Soviet Union was always portrayed as exceptional and would destroy the west in any conflict by their shear mass. Fortunately, for all of us we never had to learn the truth or fallacy of this assumption, but it played well with the military-industrial complex who has sold increasingly expensive weapons to counter the mass and tech China brings as that threat the military-industrial complex must shift to, but that is the way of the world. Those who design, build and sell weapons must always have an really dangerous adversary to defeat.
Back in 2009, then Secretary of State, Ms. Hillary Rodham Clinton drug out an Office Depot “Easy Button” to tell her counter-part we were resetting the Russian-US relationship.
And who can forget the 2012 whispered conversation between Barrack Obama and Russia’s President Dimitry Medvedev that after the election “He would have more flexibility.”
Well let’s fast forward to 2016 where the same two thought it would be a great idea to blame the Russians for interfering with the election to get Donald Trump elected. Ever since then all the Democrats can see are Russians. Every time one investigation fails they roll out Adam Schiff with another accusation.
As they scramble to bolster what I would describe as a weak ticket they have to do something to get us to ignore the man behind the curtain. So, to paraphrase a cosmology metaphor[1] “It’s Russians all the way down.”
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