Best 63 quotes in «cold war quotes» category

The cold war is over; Japan won.

Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.

Hope is no basis for a defense policy.

The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

And I wonder, therefore, how James Atlas can have been so indulgent in his recent essay ‘The Changing World of New York Intellectuals.’ This rather shallow piece appeared in the New York Times magazine, and took us over the usual jumps. Gone are the days of Partisan Review, Delmore Schwartz, Dwight MacDonald etc etc. No longer the tempest of debate over Trotsky, The Waste Land, Orwell, blah, blah. Today the assimilation of the Jewish American, the rise of rents in midtown Manhattan, the erosion of Village life, yawn, yawn. The drift to the right, the rediscovery of patriotism, the gruesome maturity of the once iconoclastic Norman Podhoretz, okay, okay! I have one question which Atlas in his much-ballyhooed article did not even discuss. The old gang may have had regrettable flirtations. Their political compromises, endlessly reviewed, may have exhibited naivety or self-regard. But much of that record is still educative, and the argument did take place under real pressure from anti-semitic and authoritarian enemies. Today, the alleged ‘neo-conservative’ movement around Jeane Kirkpatrick, Commentary and the New Criterion can be found in unforced alliance with openly obscurantist, fundamentalist and above all anti-intellectual forces. In the old days, there would at least have been a debate on the proprieties of such a united front, with many fine distinctions made and brave attitudes struck. As I write, nearness to power seems the only excuse, and the subject is changed as soon it is raised. I wait for the agonised, self-justifying neo-conservative essay about necessary and contingent alliances. Do I linger in vain?

The trouble with free elections is that you never know how they are going to turn out.

We're no longer in the Cold War. Eavesdropping on friends is unacceptable.

45,000 sections of reinforced concrete—three tons each. Nearly 300 watchtowers. Over 250 dog runs. Twenty bunkers. Sixty five miles of anti-vehicle trenches—signal wire, barbed wire, beds of nails. Over 11,000 armed guards. A death strip of sand, well-raked to reveal footprints. 200 ordinary people shot dead following attempts to escape the communist regime. 96 miles of concrete wall. Not your typical holiday destination. JF Kennedy said the Berlin Wall was a better option than a war. In TDTL, the Anglo-German Bishop family from the pebbledashed English suburb of Oaking argue about this—among other—notions while driving to Cold War Berlin, through all the border checks, with a plan to visit both sides of it.

A high-level government agent was arrested today for selling secrets to Russia. They now have all of the exact locations of our back-to-school headquarters.

American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic policies were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn't like it.

And you know what happened next in my dream? Dick Cheney and I said the same thing at the same time: "Well, we had a Cold War to win." And then I screamed at him: "I KNEW you would say that! You ALWAYS say that!" But then, since Cheney and I made the same remark at the same time, I realized he owed me a Coke. So I said, "Jinx! You owe me a Coke!" And Vice-President Dick Cheney smiled sheepishly. *Shudder*... I don't even DRINK coke. I tastes like robot sweat.

Auch wenn zwei Staaten in Deutschland existieren, sind sie doch füreinander nicht Ausland; ihre Beziehungen zueinander können nur von besonderer Art sein." ("Even though two states in Germany exist, they are not foreign countries to each other—their relations with each other can only be of a special kind.") First Inaugural Address as West German Chancellor, October 28, 1969

C’ in Russian is pronounced like your ‘S’, so first letter in CIA stands for ‘sneaky.

Call no man lucky until he is dead, but there have been moment of rare satisfaction in the often random and fragmented life of the radical freelance scribbler. I have lived to see Ronald Reagan called “a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda” by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which blacked out an interview with Miloš Forman broadcast live on Moscow TV); to see Mao Zedong relegated like a despot of antiquity. I have also had the extraordinary pleasure of revisiting countries—Greece, Spain, Zimbabwe, and others—that were dictatorships or colonies when first I saw them. Other mini-Reichs have melted like dew, often bringing exiled and imprisoned friends blinking modestly and honorably into the glare. E pur si muove—it still moves, all right.

For 70 years Democrats bitterly denied being "socialists". Bernie Sanders has done the service of exposing them.

—Do you know what we mean by Cold War? —War don’t have no temperature.

Dear sirs, The cold war isn’t over. When national borders fail, the epidermis is the last line of defense. We are counting on you. Sincerely, Patriot

Freedom is not free

Influential scholars since the mid-twentieth century have argued that the essential character of Ottoman modernity was reactive, imitative, defensive, and ultimately defective relative to the presumably more successful modernization projects of Germany, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and America, where while exemplifying and eventually monopolizing claims to modernity, also brought two world wars, the Holocaust, the nuclear immolation of Japanese cities, and the Cold War, among other worldwide cataclysms.

History's long rhythm of challenges and response, of solutions that breed new crises, is not to be interrupted. But the Cold War left one shining example of human wisdom as a legacy for the future. Fifty years after the first use of atomic weapons, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain unique and poignant shrines to the inspiring fact that they have no successor. The long confrontation of the Cold War, a struggle to the death between two systems for the mastery of human destiny, was managed and resolved without that nuclear war which lurked in the monstrous imminence in silos and submarines around the globe. That was the real victory.

I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line throughout the 'Cold War,' and was firm in its belief that that Soviet Union and its European empire could not last. Very few people believed that this was the case: The best known anti-Communist to advance the proposition was the great Robert Conquest, but he himself insists that part of the credit for such prescience goes to Orwell. More recently, a very exact prefiguration of the collapse of the USSR was offered by two German Marxists, one of them from the West (Hans Magnus Enzensberger) and one from the East (Rudolf Bahro, the accuracy of whose prediction was almost uncanny). I have never met an American conservative who has even heard of, let alone read, either of these authors.

If you read British Foreign Office records from the 1940s, it’s clear they recognised that their day in the sun was over and that Britain would have to be the “junior partner” of the United States, and sometimes treated in a humiliating way. A striking example of this was in 1962, the time of the Cuban missile crisis. The Kennedy planners were making some very dangerous choices and pursuing policies which they thought had a good chance of leading to nuclear war, and they knew that Britain would be wiped out. The US wouldn’t, because Russia’s missiles couldn’t reach there, but Britain would be wiped out.

In 1953, Allen Dulles, then director of the USA Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), named Dr Sidney Gottlieb to direct the CIA's MKULTRA programme, which included experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new dissociated identities, new memories, and responses to hypnotic access codes. In 1972, then-CIA director Richard Helms and Gottlieb ordered the destruction of all MKULTRA records. A clerical error spared seven boxes, containing 1738 documents, over 17,000 pages. This archive was declassified through a Freedom of Information Act Request in 1977, though the names of most people, universities, and hospitals are redacted. The CIA assigned each document a number preceded by "MORI", for "Managament of Officially Released Information", the CIA's automated electronic system at the time of document release. These documents, to be referenced throughout this chapter, are accessible on the Internet (see: abuse-of-power (dot) org/modules/content/index.php?id=31). The United States Senate held a hearing exposing the abuses of MKULTRA, entitled "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's program of research into behavioral modification" (1977).

It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that 'history' had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election.

It was hard to believe it had finally come down to the nuking of New York City. A virus had managed to bring about what decades of the Cold War and terrorist threats could not accomplish. The United States would never be the same. A major city had been destroyed. Millions were dead.

Many American politicians and journalists are nostalgic about the Cold War period. Seems like those people can see the World only in black and white. They are definitely men of the Past. The World has changed.

Kids in tje East had also grown up with a genuine sense of fear that the world might actually come to an end during their lifetime. That it probably would in fact. For some this fueled nihilistic feelings - one reason Toster from Die Anderen, for instance, never got deeply political was because he stopped giving a shit.

(Mackenzie) King, something of an innocent abroad, proved much slower to bite on the bullet of disillusion.

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.

Mounting tensions in Eastern Europe send shivers down the spine. Barely a quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War we seem to be sliding inexorably towards another.

Never patronize your readers. That means don't talk down to them.

No one likes a braggart, and to praise your children is to curse them with misfortune, but we admit it, if only in secret, if only to ourselves: We are proud, we are so proud of them. We've given them all we can, but our greatest gift has been to imprint upon them our own ordinariness. They may begrudge us, may think us unambitious and narrow-minded, but someday they will realize that what makes them unremarkable is what kept them alive.

Nothing in recent history makes any sense without a deep understanding of WWII and The Holocaust.

Everyone I have spoken with about working with the Russians in space exploration believes that the United States has learned a great deal from Russia and that Russia has learned a great deal from the United States – and that the entire international space partnership is much better because of it.

Most of these people are not going anywhere, and have nothing meaningful to do. They are zombies seeking purpose in an environment that cannot provide it. This is why, at the slightest public commotion, they quickly form their mobs, like a swarm of flies seeking shit on which to settle. But I did not come here to give a lecture. I came here to look for you.

On October 26, 1963, Nikita Khrushchev contacted President Kennedy and offered to remove the missiles from Cuba in exchange for a promise that the United States would not invade the Island Nation. A day later on October 27th, Khrushchev sent a letter proposing that the Soviet Union would dismantle their missiles in Cuba, if the Americans reciprocated by removing their missile installations in Turkey. Although the cold war was far from over, both sides knowing how close they came from an all-out conflict, had a “hot line” installed between Washington and Moscow, hoping to prevent any similar situations in the future. The hot line is sometimes called the red telephone, even though it wasn’t even a telephone, nor was it red. The first connection was a teletype machine, after which a fax machine was used. In 1986, the hotline became a computer link and messages are now sent by email.

On the black cotton was printed a white skull and crossbones - the skull head grinning as if he were mocking her. The nun struggled for her breath and wanted to drop the evil little banner, but her fingers wouldn't let go of it - making her stare into its horrid death face as if she were looking at her own end.

Plastic flowers last for hours

Peace imposible,war improbable.

The Left finds itself up to its knees in these paradoxes because - deprived of its old aims by the end of the Cold War and the end of heavy industry - it needs new masses to serve as a replacement proletariat. It too readily and thoughtlessly accepted Muslims as convenient substitutes for the white working class which has now ceased to support it, or vanished altogether. It has also fallen under the influence of revolutionaries far more subtle and effective than the Russian Bolsheviks and Trotskyist rump. The gaping space left by the death of classical political revolutionary socialism has been filled by the spirit of 1968. That spirit will accept almost any ally against social and cultural conservatism, and against the Christianity that lies beneath those forces. This is why the sexual revolution has become so inseparably linked to the cultural and political revolutions. The 1968 ideology is not merely a ready-made and self-righteous political system, with clear position on every major controversy. It is a limitless process of personal liberation from conscience, guilt and restraint, dressed in the flashy robes of moral superiority. These features are happily combined - in this particular generation - with personal ambition and worldly wealth. In all the most well-regarded and rewarded trades and professions, especially broadcasting, the law and the arts, a full set of 1968 opinions is an asset and an aid to social advancement. Rejection of these opinions is a grave disadvantage.

The Cold War is a psychological game, that is dangerous and counterproductive in the extreme - it does not lead to a benevolent understanding among states - just hatred and discord, in this case, will be sown.

…the end of the Cold War has brought not prosperity for all but a pitiless economic struggle for pole-position on the food chain of information capitalism. The neoliberalism and neocolonialism of the 1990s are the direct heir of the Manchester liberalism and colonialism of the 1890s, the only difference being that whereas Victorian rentiers extracted their Imperial textile-rents from the labor of the Great Unwashed, their postmodern analogues on Wall Street speculate on the viewing-rents of the Great Unwatched.

The idea for the Guild first came up at a party. Your father and I met there and, well, I suppose that's a story all its own. But we were both frustrated by the media at the time. We set out to tell the truth when everyone else seemed set on choosing sides. We had grand ideas about how far we could reach. … Back then, we knew we should be careful, but we had no idea how dangerous it would turn out to be.

Psychology’s service to U.S. national security has produced a variant of what the psychiatrist Robert Lifton has called, in his study of Nazi doctors, a “Faustian bargain.” In this case, the price paid has been the American Psychological Association’s collective silence, ethical “numbing,” and, over time, historical amnesia. 3 Indeed, Lifton emphasizes that “the Nazis were not the only ones to involve doctors in evil”; in defense of this argument, he cites the Cold War “role of …American physicians and psychologists employed by the Central Intelligence Agency…for unethical medical and psychological experiments involving drugs and mind manipulation.” 4

The Intelligence Services of East and West have given Europe over fifty years of peace - the longest the Continent has ever known. They did so by keeping their leaders from being surprised.

The major goal of the Cold War mind control programs was to create dissociative symptoms and disorders, including full multiple personality disorder. The Manchurian Candidate is fact, not fiction, and was created by the CIA in the 1950’s under BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE mind control programs. Experiments with LSD, sensory deprivation, electro-convulsive treatment, brain electrode implants and hypnosis were designed to create amnesia, depersonalization, changes in identity and altered states of consciousness. (p. iii) “Denial of the reality of multiple personality by these doctors [See page 114 for names] in the mind control network, who are also on the FMSF [False Memory Syndrome Foundation] Scientific and Professional Advisory Board, could be disinformation. The disinformation could be amplified by attacks on specialists in multiple personality as CIA conspiracy lunatics” (P.10) “If clinical multiple personality is buried and forgotten, then the Manchurian Candidate Programs will be safe from public scrutiny. (p.141)

Then it seemed that the Colonel was going on about the Space Race and the Cold War. “…Did you really think that your country’s Apollo 1 disaster was an accident? It is Mother Russia that will conquer these new worlds first, not you! It will be a Red Moon that the West sees at night!

The problem, then, is not East versus West. The problem is that the elites in nearly every country have become rotten and socialist. As Bukovsky wrote in his book, “Even the ageless James Bond does not fight the KGB, but is most frequently in an alliance with the KGB, against some mythical super-corporation headed, as a rule, by a lunatic capitalist.” Bukovsky’s book, “Judgment in Moscow,” will be released in English in May. What does he say happened toward the supposed end of the Cold War? Bukovsky wrote, “This was a full debacle, a total surrender of its positions by the West at the most critical moment of our history.

The phone rang and Archie announced, "The Russians would like to see a typical Canadian home, so I am bringing them home in about an hour. Just have some tea and cookies ready for a snack.---At that time in history, the Russians had nuclear weapons pointing at the U.S. and the U.S. had nuclear weapons pointing at them. No one knew what would happen. They called it the "Cold War." but it was a very dangerous time to be having Russians dropping into our home.

There are today many Communists in America. They are everywhere -- in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private businesses. And each carries in himself the germ of death for society.