This is a track I heard in the 80s. Some of the people from Meridian School went on a German exchange in 1983 and one time I visited Graham had a party where some of the German singles they had got were played.
I remembered it again when it was used as the theme for Deutschland 83. One of the best things (in entertainment terms) of the last dozen or so years has been the increased availability of foreign language TV series. Subtitles, rather than dubbed – people who dub shows have a special circle of hell reserved for them.
For people of my age Deutschland 83 is a flashback to our childhoods. For younger people it probably looks like a trip to an alternative world. Its depiction of the split East and West Germany at one of the peaks of the Cold War (probably only the Cuban Missile Crisis was a worse point) is chilling. These days living through the Cold War is displayed by a certain sort of person on Facebook – the kind of people who would like to say they coped with the Second World War, but were born afterwards – as a badge of honour. They particularly like to say how easy young people (inevitably described as the pejorative “Snowflakes” – but if you question their views they are the most sensitive people ever) have it not having to endure it. Sure, the post-Cold War world of America stirring up terrorist action against the West by their imperialist interventions is not a problem. Of course, a lot of them do not believe in climate change, so the doomsday level threat from that passes them by.
Make no mistake, everyone was aware of the threat of nuclear destruction in 1983. The BBC TV series Threads, showing the effect of a nuclear attack on Sheffield, is still genuinely terrifying. It was almost a given that it would happen in speculative fiction – Alan Moore’s classic comic series V For Vendetta starts from the premise that there is a nuclear action that causes fascism to take over (he was wrong there – fascism just takes stupid white people to take over).
I am not saying that this fear was a good thing, nor was The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe being dictatorships was a good thing, but… Apart from the threat of nuclear Armageddon the world was a stable place, in particular Europe had stability. If you look at maps of Europe throughout history borders shift, countries appear and disappear, then you have the period 1945 to 1990 where it is frozen. After that Yugoslavia fractures into seven countries, several of which waged genocidal wars against each other. The lack of Western intervention in these conflicts is measured against what happened with Iraq in the 90s and Afghanistan in the 80s and gives an impression of rampant hypocrisy on interventions involving Muslims. The split of the Soviet Union is still causing tension in Georgia and the Crimea. Vladimir Putin still has not got over the split of the USSR and Russia’s geopolitical aims for the last 20 years have been about regaining power and hurting the West.
Before anyone thinks I have rose coloured glasses on for this period let’s talk about proxy wars. The USA and the USSR and/or China used other countries as battlefields for the capitalism versus communism battle. Some of these are famous like the Korean Police Action (never declared a war, not actually concluded – there is something we still live with), others were less overt action, such as the attempts to arm and influence India and Pakistan.
In the West, when proxy war details are reported, they focus on Western casualties. The end of JFK reverses this when it lists the American deaths in Vietnam (under 100,000) after the two million Vietnamese casualties (boomers love to give living through the Vietnam War as a badge of honour, unless you were Vietnamese it was not tough). Is it any wonder that countries across the world do not like the USA? Some Americans see themselves as a global policeman, the world largely sees them as a global vigilante.
The most striking example is Afghanistan and the Middle East. In the 1980s the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan (the reason the USA, and others, boycotted the 1980 Olympics) so the USA funnelled support to the insurgent Mujahedeen. Any enemy of the Soviet Union was a friend of the USA. The comedy series Black Monday has a wonderful scene where Don Cheadle is giving the Mujahedeen money, only to be told they were rebranding themselves at the Taliban. The Mujahedeen included Osama Bin-Laden, who used many of the donated weapons to fight American forces 20 years later.
You could argue that the USA decision to free Kuwait was a moral choice (though initially dubbing it Operation Crusader was stunningly dumb). However, Baby Bush’s decision to invade Iraq 12 years later had nothing to do with 9/11 or freedom. It was to get US hands on oilfields and allow private American business in – the Vice President was ex-Haliburton. Haliburton got phenomenal amounts of money from operating after the invasion.
The more I think about it, the more the USA appears to have been the most destabilising force in the world over the last 70 years – and that is before considering the impact of the arrival of the Orange Goblin. Russia is doing its best to catch up though with Chechnya, Crimea and interference in the West. A few years ago, I would have said at least nuclear Armageddon is off the table and humanity was maturing– but trust humanity to find other ways to mess things up.
Major Tom (Coming Home)
Five Miles Out 