Nostalgia is a congenital liar. It makes gilded that which was not. I take as examples my seventy-something Italian friends who — still smarting from the effects of a globe-stopping viral epidemic — bemoan the wars in Ukraine and Gaza while looking back upon their less stressful, less tension-clad times. Oh, how the young must suffer, burdened by such ever-present anxiety.
To which I say to myself, what planet did you, dear friend, live on forty years ago? Eden? If so, I was decidedly east of it, on a real world as nasty if not nastier than the one we now allegedly share. Stress, to be sure, is now a commodity peddled as tea and tobacco once were, and with it the anxiety regarding life’s purpose, but when it comes to comparing the actual state of the world then and now, history trashes nostalgia.
I have no wish to write a tome, so I’ll limit myself to the equivalent of highlight-reel snippets.
This is the year 2024, which makes the 1980s a good point of reference for seventy-year-old nostalgists. So, what to say about the bittersweet ’80s, when I was a thirty-something? Here’s what — but, reader beware, my dates are not chronological. Nor do I intend any sequence of moral importance. Consider this instead one journalist’s impressionistic, Euro-centric landscape, one so idiosyncratic it tends to skip past seminal events that occurred very early on, including the murder of Beatles cofounder John Lennon in 1980 and the near-assassinations of Pope John Paul II and American President Ronald Reagan in 1981 (a president destined to meddle dangerously and at times illegally in Central and South American affairs). These abortive muzzle-blasts were but harbingers of a deeper chaos.
In 1979, as if to start the decade’s wrecking ball rolling, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, an exercise in folly and futility that would lead to a horrific decade-long conflict that would traumatize Russia and provoke two Summer Olympic boycotts, America refusing to send a team to Moscow in 1980 and Russia returning the favor when the Games moved to Los Angeles in 1984. Bipolar tension that had eased in the early 1970s rose again to a fever pitch as a veteran anti-communist president — the fully recovered and ever-glib Reagan — labeled the Soviet Union the Evil Empire. Did Big Stick America learn something from Russia about the perils of stepping into Afghanistan? Not a chance.
When it comes to comparing the actual state of the world then and now, history trashes nostalgia.
Not far from that forever-benighted nation, a skirmish over a southern waterway provoked a war between Iran and Iraq that would last nearly a decade and claimed at least half a million dead on both sides. It was a World War I–style conflict fought in the Near East between countries the West cared little about. As a result, it is lost to time. Yet it was that war that planted the seeds of America’s ties to Saddam Hussein and deepened its enmity toward post-Shah Islamic Iran, by then Israel’s most intractable enemy (as it remains today). The consequences of these feelings need not be discussed. Just open your history browser.
Israel, tired of constant Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) strikes across its borders, invaded civil war–marred Lebanon to silence the PLO and the many other militant groups like it. The Israeli air force bombed Beirut, hitting civilian areas. Israel also created detention camps to house prisoners, with the conditions in those camps producing an international outcry.
When the war failed to calm tempers, the U.S. sent forces to Beirut; they were often under attack or bombed, with a suicide attack on a Marine barracks killing more than 200. A wider war seemed at the ready. Hostages were taken. Washington sent weapons to Iran to get the hostages back. Times were confusing and ugly.
In Italy, scenes of the Marine barracks attack brought back memories of a 1980 bomb blast at the Bologna train station that killed 85 and injured hundreds.
Despite this visible landscape of shards, an on-edge, war-ready Washington grew increasingly unsettled by events in Nicaragua, where a communist-style government anointed as the Sandinistas took power. Many were the schemes and plots to unseat that government, and Washington privately turned to the CIA to consider how to seed an overthrow. Through the ’80s, Central America was a so-called hot-button issue, with many Americans fearing open, on-the-ground warfare. In this same period, the U.S., saying its citizens were at risk, briefly invaded the island of Grenada, whose leaders had taken an anti-Reagan stance.
Deeper into the South Atlantic, Britain went to battle with Argentina in 1982 after the Argentines retook the British-run Falkland Islands. Buenos Aires said the islands were its property and known as the Islas Malvinas. Queen and country disagreed, led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and, after sending fleet and troops, won. Not much of a war, admittedly, but a real one nonetheless.
Soon after, in 1985, France — one of the good guys, right? — got very mad at the environmentalist group Greenpeace, which had sent a ship to the South Pacific to protest French nuclear testing. So, what did the good guys, in the name of a Socialist president, no less, do? They sent agents to sink the ship, the “Rainbow Warrior,” and initially denied it all. The good guys’ president, François Mitterrand, was forever tarred, having real blood on his hands.
Along the way, an Italian commercial jet was shot down by what many believe was an errant NATO missile (case still unsolved five decades later) and a Russian Sukhoi Su-15 downed a Korean Airlines 747 Moscow claimed had strayed into Russian air space – all 269 aboard perished. On the stricken jet was a U.S. congressman. Threats and counterthreats followed. As did further “Evil Empire” references, as well as White House calls to build a vast missile shield to protect the American homeland from a pre-emptive Soviet attack. This uneasy mood permeated Reagan’s first term. If today’s American chief executive can rally behind Israel’s no-limits war in Gaza, the commander-in-chief of the 1980s vowed the U.S. would use any and all means to exterminate communism and terrorism, whether Iranian, Palestinian or Libyan. The enduring logic was simple: America and its allies (Israel foremost among them) were free and just and flat-out right, its adversaries were cruel and conniving and swollen with wrongness – a point made time and again by Reagan.
Oh yes. In 1986, just as ties between Moscow and Washing began softening ever-so-slightly, the core of a nuclear reactor melted down. Where? Ukraine of all places. The Chernobyl accident caused widespread and under-reported contamination in Russia. Radioactivity also cropped up throughout Europe, though the hazard never reached red-alert status. Still, Western Europeans grew anxious about their food. With America’s 1979 Three Mile Island accident still fresh, Chernobyl cast an enduring pall on the future of civilian uses of nuclear energy.
In case you missed it amid the troubling events of the 1980s (including a handful of more-to-follow terrorist attacks against cities and commercial jets), Olof Palme, a peacemaking if controversial pro-Palestinian prime minister of Sweden, among the critical players in Middle East negotiations, was shot dead while out with his wife and son on a busy street in the otherwise generally safe city of Stockholm. A random act of personal terrorism that would presage others in the decades to come.
The enduring logic was simple: America and its allies were free and just and flat-out right, its adversaries were cruel and conniving and swollen with wrongness.
A final point deserves mention: Throughout the decade, the U.S. armed a bearded rebel who hated America’s public enemy No. 1, the Soviet Union, and later turned his attention to loathing secular figures Washington had come to cultivate, including one guy called Saddam Hussein, a “friend” of the likes of Dick Cheney for his boundless antipathy toward Iran. In the event you like fine print, the name of the rebel once prized by the CIA and others was Osama bin Laden. Both Saddam and Osama fit the saying “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” — at least for a time, and the mid-1980s were just such a time. After which, no thanks to hapless American meddling, came a maelstrom of vicious proportions.
All this said — and I have left out a great deal — please understand my skepticism toward those who look to Kiev and to Gaza and mourn the good old days of their youth. What they remember, of course, is the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Oh, such a great time! Peace for all at last! Unless you’d contracted the AIDS virus, in the late 80s a primordial scare like no other.
After which, by then well into the 1990s, came Serbia nationalist Slobodan Milošević, author of perhaps the most pointedly wicked civil war of the postwar twentieth century. NATO intervention was late and feeble. In that same time frame, largely overlooked by a giddy no-more-communism West, came the Rwanda genocide. More millions died – but, like Palestinians, “expendable” beings removed from civilized values and traditions – children, like countless others, of some lesser god. To steal from historian Barbara Tuchman, the march of folly, then as now, in pathetic perpetuity.
I rest my case.
