On this episode of American Prestige, more of our conversation with Penny Von Eschen.
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at a press conference following the EU-Russia summit on November 11, 2002, in Brussels, Belgium.(Paul O’Driscoll / Getty Images)
Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
On this episode of American Prestige, Danny and Derek again chat with Penny Von Eschen, William R. Kennan Jr. professor of American studies and professor of history at UVA, about her book Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder since 1989. This second part of the conversation picks up with Cold War nostalgia in American pop culture, the 90s search for a new “bad guy” in places like DPRK/North Korea and the Balkans, the “kitschification” of the Cold War, ways this nostalgia manifested throughout the War on Terror, how U.S.-Russia relations were reshaped in the 1990s and 2000s, and the influences of this refracted view of the Cold War on the “New Cold War” dynamic we’re seeing today.
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On this episode of American Prestige, we’re back with Penny Von Eschen, William R. Kennan Jr. Professor of American Studies and professor of history at UVA, about her book Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder since 1989. This second part of the conversation picks up with Cold War nostalgia in American pop culture, the 1990s search for a new “bad guy” in places like DPRK/North Korea and the Balkans, the “kitschification” of the Cold War, ways this nostalgia manifested throughout the War on Terror, how US-Russia relations were reshaped in the 1990s and 2000s, and the influences of this refracted view of the Cold War on the “New Cold War” dynamic we’re seeing today.
Listen to Part 1 here.
Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen our skies engulfed in dystopian haze. We’ve had lethal heat waves ruin our Fourth of July cookouts. States have announced emergency water rationing due to record-breaking droughts. Tens of thousands of Europeans have been killed by extreme heat so far this summer; hundreds of thousands are being evacuated by apocalyptic wildfires. And we know it’s just the beginning—this is, after all, not just the hottest summer of our lives, but the coolest summer for the rest of our lives.
This didn’t just happen. Climate change is overwhelmingly the result of pollution and deception from specific Big Oil companies that were predicting decades ago that their fossil fuels would cause, in their own words, “globally catastrophic” climate harms that would create “more violent weather” and cause “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.” Even as they used this knowledge to protect their own infrastructure, they orchestrated fraudulent campaigns of climate denial to lock us into the disasters we are currently experiencing.
But we’re not powerless in the face of these nightmares. We can take on Big Oil, and the fossil-fueled authoritarianism that these corporations have done so much to engender. And there are few people with more experience in these fights than Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media. He joined us for a great conversation about making polluters pay, the ways clean energy developments have totally transformed the climate fight, and how to balance hope and fear in the midsts of climate chaos.
Fighting Fascism Podcast is produced by Nik Damants in collaboration with The Nation.
Intro song and music by Horse Radish.
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Daniel BessnerTwitterDaniel Bessner is an historian of US foreign relations, and cohost of American Prestige, a podcast on international affairs.
Derek DavisonDerek Davison is a writer and analyst specializing in international affairs and US foreign policy. He is the publisher of the Foreign Exchanges newsletter, cohost of the American Prestige podcast, and former editor of LobeLog.