FROM ARCHIE GULAG IN WASHINGTON

“YOU HEAR IT now in bars, in quiet whispers, occasionally followed by a smile and a clenched fist, and maybe even the humming of The Internationale. Even on Wall Street. It’s not so much sentimentality as a desire for return to old certainties.”

The words of Dr Henrietta Kiss, one-time unseen author of detente between the USSR and the USA, now a 121-year-old professor emeritus at online University The Socrates Method, were spoken at video symposium comparing the stability of the world from 1945 to 1991, to what exits today.

“I was born on the same day the Wright Brothers flew the first powered aircraft at Kitty Hawk; my father was killed in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, my brother in WW1 in 1918. I served in the OSS in WW2 and later in the CIA. Much of my extended family went to the gas in Poland. The first third of my life ended in Nagasak in 1945; the second in Moscow in 1991; and the last third I will soon discover. By far the best of the three ages of my life was the middle one. Even though the USA and USSR faced each other with the threat of annihilation ever-present. Because we knew where we stood. Two guys, eyeball to eyeball, each holding a gun to the other’s head. And while they did that, the world thrived. Then one guy lowered his weapon because he saw that he wasn’t doing as well as the rest of the world. And he gave up everything he believed in, everything that had kept him standing with that gun, and he embraced his enemy and his enemy’ s ways.

“But his enemy did not embrace him. His enemy did not lower his gun. Instead, his enemy got more guns and began to tell him and the rest of the world what to do. You see his enemy believed that he had won when all that had happened was a change of game. An untempered sense of victory breeds contempt and hubris. And so my country has spent 30 years trying to control a world that will not be controlled, unable to grasp the fact that it had only been with its enemy’s help that it had succeeded in keeping a general peace between 1945 and 1991. Without that help, the task became too much. And now the USA finds itself facing the old enemy, except the old enemy is now unfettered by its belief in uniting the human race and building paradise on earth. Remember, you have to have an earth to build paradise on it. And the old enemy has a long memory. While my country seems to remember nothing.”