Whenever someone launches “a war on X”, it usually means two things. 1: that there are compelling reasons for X to exist and 2: that the powers that be are unwilling to confront those reasons. It is also likely to fail miserably. Just look at the War on Drugs. Or the War on Terror.
So it’s not surprising that this month, the 20th anniversary of the August coup that launched the final unravelling of the USSR and the 50th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, Western governments and opinion leaders have launched a War on Nostalgia.
You know the war is particularly bad when it’s is declared by Reagan’s reanimated corpse, as in the lead editorial in today’s Moscow Times: “Tear Down This Wall of Nostalgia. The article darkly states that “some ordinary Russians are still distraught over the consequences of the wall’s destruction”. These stupid Russians “remember the glory of living in a superpower that sent the first man into space and effectively occupied half of Europe… a country with inexpensive sausage, free education and health care, and no oligarchs or terrorism” instead of “store shelves [that] were empty and [that] there was no freedom of movement”.
“Many of us have met people who long for the Soviet Union”, the article says, unconsciously dividing the world – LIKE A WALL! – into two camps: the free-thinking, rational “us” and the childish, delusional, closed-up, backward, perhaps even mentally deficient and certainly masochistic “ossies”.
In a brilliantly unselfconscious stroke, the article actually accuses the Soviet-separation-anxiety-riddled Russians of false consciousness: if only the poor people recognised just how bad things were, they wouldnt be nostalgic!
That’s also the rhetoric of the Berlin mayor, who has declared that ““The wall was part of a dictatorship. And it’s alarming that even today some people argue there were good reasons to build the wall.”
Certainly, some nostalgia is rose-tinted. But there are many rational reasons to long for at least some of the things that disappeared after the fall of the wall.
Ironically, it is this anti-nostalgia onslaught, not people’s understandable ambivalence about the terrible-ness of their recent past, that most resembles old Eastern Bloc thinking. Paint the world in black and white (present: good; communist past: evil) declare a mantra (no to nostalgia!), label dissenters as delusional, and refuse to address the reasons for why somebody might hold such ‘deviant’ views. In taking on the intellectual brutality and authoritarian closemindedness of their vanquished opponents, the West is making it harder for people to appreciate the difference between their present liberators and their past oppressors.
“The [Post-Communist] creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
No wonder they got nostalgic!
