WHy study a cold war?
In the midst of our historical journey you may ask yourself, why are we studying this? Why of all the things we could be learning should I care about the Cold War, it is over, we won, right? Yes there are endless fascinating things we could learn in a history class and over the course of this year we have learned about quite a number of them. However it is the Cold War that is the most unique and important to our lives today. It is unique because not since we studied Imperialism all those months ago was any area of study so completely global. The World Wars were global events but they happened in focused pockets. The Cold War was far reaching, touching every part of nearly every nation on earth. The nearly 50 year era of global politics was driven by political and philosophical differences in how society should function, either as a capitalistic free democracy or a communist socialist totalitarian regime. The Cold War, it could be said, began even before WWII ended with the seeds being planted at Yalta and Potsdam (some historians could even argue that it started before WWII). After the war the “Iron Curtain” fell dividing the world into stark black and white, either you were with the Americans and the West or the Soviets and the East. Both sides enacted policies that only made the divide greater using nearly every option short of war. While they would never come to a hot war the two super powers would readily use other conflicts to fight indirectly. In Vietnam, the United States would fight the Soviet backed Vietnamese Communists and in Afghanistan the Soviets would fight the American backed Taliban. These are just two examples of what we call proxy wars where there was not direct official fighting but indirect conflict through another party. There are also those countries that did not pick an official side opting out of the two super power’s groups of nations. It is also in this period where we see major fallout from the imperial era. All of our last few units of study come together into this one. As you can tell this is a complex time for the world and would be an excellent opportunity for us to look at the situation from multiple perspectives. We will look at how a leader and a nation were attracted to communism in Vietnam and you will get to discuss how those unallied nations negotiated the world. We will also look closely at one of the closest confrontations the two super powers ever had and the closest the world got to nuclear war, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Again we will take the unusual path and look at the event from all angles taking everything into account. We will gain more in depth insights into understanding our fellow humans and practice detaching ourselves from the present to become immersed into the time and place and then we will bring ourselves back out and look at the long term and how many of these events and decisions still have a very real impact on our lives.