To stop all the madness of our world today, just bring back the Cold War

I never thought I would even dream this, but here I am, even going beyond that and saying it: Please bring back the Cold War.

Why? In easily its most horrific and deadliest attack, on Tuesday, the Taliban raided a primary school in Pakistani city of Peshawar and slaughtered at least 132 children and nine staff members.

The Cold War period, when capitalism (and its political variants like West liberal democracy, strongman Third World rule) vs Communism (with its variants like socialism, strongman rule everywhere) was a difficult period.

There were assassinations, invasions of weaker nations, sabotage, and bankrolling of savage right wing or left wing rebels by the West and the East, but generally children were left out of the quarrels.

Religion-fuelled insurgency, either of the Islamic Taliban or Boko Haram type in Nigeria that murder and kidnap children in school uniform or the Christianity fundamentalist type of Uganda’s demented Lord’s Resistance Army of Joseph Kony that abducts school girls, were not fashionable.

POPULARITY CONTEST

Mass murder, though, was still par for the course.

We only have to think back to Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who killed nearly everything that walked on two legs in Cambodia, the purges in Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China, the grim handiwork of Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union, the Contras in Nicaragua, the near-extermination of the left in Latin America (where they were fond of killing Jesuit priests too), and the mayhem in Africa from the likes of Jonas Savimbi’s Unita rebels in Angola to Renamo in Mozambique.

The list is very long.

Still, the Cold War was different from today’s fundamentalist-fuelled madness because there was competition to look good.

The capitalists wanted to show that their way was better than the communist path, and the communists and socialists fought to show that their line was superior.

Instead of killing school children, the two systems raced to build schools, some of them standing empty without children.

When a party official was visiting an area with a nice but empty school, children would be rented from other schools, dressed in crisp uniforms, given caps with patriotic signs, and handed tiny flags with the emblem of the “vanguard” party to wave for the cameras.

That capitalism vs communism and West vs East contest produced many giant white elephant projects built in the wilderness for show.

The other difference then was that the superiority of capitalism and socialism were judged on Earth by its inhabitants.

Their ideological texts were written by ordinary men and women and some revision to their tenets by other mortals was allowed. Neither capitalism nor socialism promised a ticket to heaven. Capitalism encouraged religion in the name of freedom of faith and a necessary distraction in troubled times. Socialism discouraged it, viewing it as unscientific and glorified superstition.

But, at the end of the day, some form of negotiation and hypocrisy was allowed. So communist party officials preached Marxism, but lived large as capitalists in palaces fit for feudal kings.

The capitalists preached private and individual enterprise, but then found clever ways to appropriate its fruits for themselves as if they were socialists.

NO VIRGINS IN AFTERLIFE

Whatever the case, judgment for these systems was left to mortals in elections or party congresses.

There were no 72 virgins stashed away in some heaven for either the heroes of capitalism or socialism. Their rewards were medals, statues, your bust on a bank note, an airport or road named after you, and such worldly things.

There was no Bible or Koran for which you would be stoned or beheaded if you were thought to have misread it.

In between the West vs East capitalism vs socialism race there was a middle ground.

In the West, this middle ground comprised what they called social democrats. In the developing world, they called it the Non-Aligned Movement.

What that meant for the Non-Aligned Movement, and folks like Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere were the stars of this movement, is that you could eat from both sides — you took from the East and West. An African would say it was polygamy.

Then the West won the Cold War, and the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, and the nightmare started. It is time for them to return the trophy.