Cold War teaches that what we resist persists - Column

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 19, 1997 by Rosemary Radford Ruether

A rash of recent articles has been written by veterans who return to Vietnam to visit the places they worked and fought during the war. Typically these authors express surprise and gratitude that the Vietnamese people do not seem to harbor resentment against them for having maimed or killed their relatives. They now meet face to face a people they formerly lumped together as dehumanized enemies -- and are amazed to discover they are fellow humans ready to be friends,

One such veteran whose article I read worked for the American Army press. He was moved to discover that what he and fellow workers had called "the war room," where he wrote his military dispatches, was now a day nursery filled with tiny children sleeping on mats.

The experience caused the writer to reflect briefly on the whole era of American intervention in areas such as Vietnam to "stop communism." It occurred to him that there are only a few places left in the world where communist regimes still exist: Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba and China. They are exactly the places where the United States either intervened militarily or engaged in a concerted effort to "stop communism" through economic and political embargoes. He wondered whether America's efforts to end communism in these areas wasn't a key factor in preserving it, whereas in other areas, such as Eastern Europe, it ended of its own accord through internal development.

This thought, on which the author did not elaborate, fascinates me. I wonder if a him of the whole Cold War era -- much of which was not "cold" at all for the people who experienced its firepower raining down on their heads -- might not be written around this insight. Perhaps the idea that we could contain' communism by attacking it as a demonic enemy to be stopped was exactly what prolonged it, and also what helped to distort it into those despotic regimes we saw as communism's "evil" nature.

What if, from the beginning of the rise of communism in Eastern Europe and other areas such as Latin America and Asia, we had taken a different approach? What if we had constructed communism as a movement for justice and national self-determination with which we could sympathize, while offering incentives to develop in an open and pluralistic manner? Where there were totalitarian elements, we would seek change by promoting open trade, economic development and cultural exchange. We would seek to democratize these new states by trade, not war. Would these states have developed in a different way, evolving toward more democratic and pluralistic forms without the trauma of prolonged violence unleashed on their land and people?

We Americans congratulate ourselves today that we "won" the Cold War by our vigorous containment practices, including military intervention. We imagine that we brought about the collapse of communism mamy places through policies of demonization and enmity. But what if it is exactly these policies that both prolonged and warped it, making it more totalitarian, preventing what might have been a more rapid and peaceful evolution toward democratic, open societies, while continuing the efforts to be economically egalitarian?

I am reminded of the famous Asian parable of the contest between the sun and the wind over who can more quickly cause a man to take off his coat. The wind declares that he can force the man to take off his coat by blowing on him. He blows harder and harder, but the man just pulls his coat more tightly around his body. Then the sun comes out and smiles warmly upon the man. As he feels the warmth of the sun's rays, he soon takes off his coat voluntarily.

Americans are culturally disposed to believe that our might is both right and the most effective way to accomplish our ends, seldom considering the possibility that we might have gotten there sooner by friendly means and without the destructive consequences.

Looking at the Cold War era of capitalist-communist conflict over 40 years, we should be aghast at its costs. We and our rivals spent trillions of dollars on militarism. Large regions of the world have been littered with mines that continue to explode, maiming and killing children and farmers seeking to till the land. Uncounted wealth has been poured out on destruction that might have been used for development. This vast waste puts us all in a world that continues to be heavily militarized, and where human needs are slighted for the continuing imperatives of war.

What a different world we would be in today if this wealth had been spent on schools, health and economic development, justly distributed among peoples across the globe. To take an obvious example, what would Nicaragua be like today if the sympathetic Carter policy in response to the Sandinista Revolution had endured, rather than being replaced by a Reaganite anti-communist crusade that promoted the contra war? Today Nicaragua is nominally democratic (due largely to the Sandinista constitution) but desperately impoverished. With a wealthy landowner elite firmly back in the saddle, the Sandinista health, education and welfare reforms have been swept away and the majority of people are unemployed.