Beyond quaint; I think a lot of people born after genuinely find it hard to comprehend the mindset. (Maybe we're just still in cultural shock from winning. If we won so handily it couldn't have been big of a deal, was it?)
I encountered this with a friend when discussing MKUltra recently. He was hung-up on the why. But why? Why did they do it? Well, despite the reputation for its straightlacedness slapped on the decade after the fact, the 1950s were actually a rather wonky time culturally in America. (Flying saucer madness... hm. Sounds familiar.) A time when a lot of rather sensible people were at least open to the possibility of far-out ideas like telepathy, extra-sensory perception, and brain reprogramming. And these same sensible people were lying awake at night in genuine terror that the Soviets would develop telepathic brainwashing agents before red-blooded Americans did. Their motivations, as bizarre as it seems to us today, were quite straightforward.
I always felt I lacked context on the why, since I'm not American and all.
But now I get it. Over here, uncomfortably close to Russia, until 2022 people thought Russians have some scary stuff in store, considering they've spent an estimated $600bln on modernizing their military.
They may still have some scary stuff in store. They just started with truly nasty attacks on the population by blowing up dams. Sure they don't have good troops or supply lines, but WMDs, and especially bio programs, don't need many trips or long supply lines. And are, compared to tanks and aircraft, both cheaper and easier to develop and maintain as part of a massive military expenditure.
Right now, when they are getting more desperate, is getting closer to when Putin may feel compelled to push the red button.
Not in quite the same way with people's imaginations running away from them. Perhaps important to remember how opaque the USSR was at the time -- e.g. when Chernobyl blew up, no one outside the USSR knew until radiation drifted over the border, and large riots were often received as only vague word of mouth rumour in the West. In such an information void, your imagination fills in the details. Especially if you worry about their industrial capacity, and maybe even secretly wonder if they do have a better way of organizing society like they claim, in terms of pure brutal results. A closer analogy today would be with China, and how paranoid some people were with the offensive potential of a balloon.
Middle? It had just begun and will get worse before it gets better, but now world has 3 big players. Plus plenty of smaller ones with matching egos. Look what China is doing, very smart from longterm perspective
I encountered this with a friend when discussing MKUltra recently. He was hung-up on the why. But why? Why did they do it? Well, despite the reputation for its straightlacedness slapped on the decade after the fact, the 1950s were actually a rather wonky time culturally in America. (Flying saucer madness... hm. Sounds familiar.) A time when a lot of rather sensible people were at least open to the possibility of far-out ideas like telepathy, extra-sensory perception, and brain reprogramming. And these same sensible people were lying awake at night in genuine terror that the Soviets would develop telepathic brainwashing agents before red-blooded Americans did. Their motivations, as bizarre as it seems to us today, were quite straightforward.