I say a lot that I miss the Cold War, or that I wish the Soviets had won for some cultural reason, but honestly, I just wish sometimes that the understandings of the world that feel like common sense to me, weren’t something I have to explain over and over and over again to the older family members who are supposed to be teaching me this stuff. I wish I didn’t have to tell people I’m a socialist, it was everyone who isn’t a commie who has to state their position as an outlier and a bias and the default assumption was that everyone’s a Marxist-Leninist.
I don’t even necessarily wish the USSR had won the Cold War, though that’d be a neat way to achieve this goal, I just wish that the Second World still existed and the Anglosphere was part of it. Would mean we’d have our own piles of old commie propaganda and our own well known and respected historical list of socialist writers, at least.
(By the way, comrades, anyone got a favourite old Soviet movie at this time of year? Could use a recommendation. Just found out I’m not invited to my mom’s for New Years’ Eve like usual, she only wants me there Jan 1, and I’ve got the day to kill, festively. Don’t know if that’ll just make me miss the USSR more, but it might make me feel better instead, so.)
Oh, you’re in good company, I’m not old enough to have actually lived through the Cold War either. I’m mostly being facetious and playing up a tankie stereotype when I say I miss it. I’ve done a lot of research and hyperfixated pretty bad, though. I probably know more about certain elements of the Cold War than folks like my mum ever did, but I’ll never truly know how it felt to be In It as it were. (Though I went to a Catholic school for my entire childhood that was very much stuck in Cold War Christianity paradigms, so I know at least some of the effects the culture of fear had on the children.) I like to think I’d still have been a Soviet sympathiser and a pro socialism voice of reason even if I was born much earlier than I was, but I can’t know that for certain.
And yeah. You get it. What I miss isn’t the fear or the stalemate or anything most people think of as the Cold War. It’s that socialism was taken seriously as a political ideology that had power and force behind it. Sure, that usually manifested as fear induced anger, but commies were scary and that could make you feel powerful, when you weren’t busy being terrified yourself of what some local government crank would do if they knew you were a “commie”.