Agreed. I don’t think it’s good or wise (I’m just reviewing a book about the costs of such political realism), but it is the reality. I keep reading books on the CW that are all, “well, bad shit happened, but it was necessary…” But then I think about this line from a Mike Davis book, Late Victorian Holocausts-- where he makes the point that while the Victorian era looked like a Golden Age to Europeans and Americans, for much of the global south it looked like, in his words, a “funeral pyre”… I think we can make a similar assessment about the Cold War.
