Our Story
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If you were alive from 1950 - 1990, the Cold War was an ever-present reality. We grew up being told that the world could end any minute - and you probably wouldn't know it was coming until it hit. If you were lucky you might get a couple of minutes warning - just enough time to hide under your bed - a few minutes before it, and you, would be reduced to ashes by a nuclear blast.
Or, if you were one of the lucky ones not in the direct path of a nuclear strike, you'd live out the rest of your life in a world devastated by a nuclear winter, where plants and animals struggled to survive without sunlight.
And then, in the early 90s, the fear suddenly went away. It was replaced a decade later, after 9/11, with a new fear, and today the Cold War seems like a distant memory from antiquity, like the campaigns of Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great.
But the reality is - the Cold War didn't end in the 90s. It's still with us today. The same basic motivations that lead to the Cold War survive today. It was never really about Communist versus Capitalism. It wasn't about Totalitarianism versus Democracy. It wasn't even about 99 Luft Balloons versus 99 RED Balloons.
If you're like most people who grew up in the West, you probably think of the Cold War in fairly simplistic terms. You've been taught a dumbed-down fairy tale about "bad Communists versus good Americans". But of course, life is rarely that simplistic and binary. As we've explore on our other podcast series, the truth is usually way more complicated and interesting that good versus evil.
The Cold War was fought over the same basic motivations that nearly every war in history has been fought over - money and power.
If you are too young to remember the fear of the Cold War, it's vitally important that you understand what caused it if you want to understand the world you live in today. Because the Cold War shaped the 21st century in many ways.
As we tell this story over the coming years, we're going to talk about some of the most important events in the late 20th century.
We're going to go deep on the atom bomb; Communism; the United Nations; the Marshall Plan; the Korean War; The Vietnam War; The Cuban Revolution and the Cuban Missile Crisis; The Berlin Wall; The Space Race; McCarthyism; and the hippy movement. Along the way we're going to meet and spend a lot of time with some of the most interesting characters the world produced in the 20th century, some who are still alive today: politicians like Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman, Molotov, Mao, Kim Il-sung, Eisenhower, Marshall, Macarthur, Kennedy, Khrushchev, Castro, Kissinger, Nixon, Whitlam, Thatcher, Gorbachev and Reagan. There are scientists, artists and activists, like Einstein, Oppenheimer, Yuri Gagarin, The Beatles, Bobby Fischer, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Woodstock, Ian Fleming, George Orwell and Stanley Kubrick. We'll go into the role of the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover in building a fear of "red terror" in the United States as well as the creation and activities of the CIA, MI5, and the KGB. We'll talk about famous spies like Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby.
Most of all, we're going to try to give you an unbiased, neutral account of the facts. Which we already know is going to upset a lot of people. You grew up believing this or that and when we give you a different set of facts, or a different interpretation of the facts, some people are going to lose their damn minds. We know this from past podcast series. So here's a tip - if you're easily offended when your country, political ideology, religion of favourite kind of pizza topping is criticized, DON'T LISTEN TO THIS SHOW.
One last thing - as with some of our other podcast series, this one is going to be a premium subscription series. We'll put out about ten free episodes, to get into the swing of it, and then we're going to be charging a small monthly or annual subscription to listen to the rest of the series. If you don't like the idea of paying the cost of a cup of coffee to listen to an hour long podcast, then, again, DON'T LISTEN TO THIS SHOW.
