Do you recall the old mustached German (OMG) from the post "The Great Seal of Disapproval" and his promise to tell us a couple of stories?
After a bit of coaxing and bribing with a couple of beers, we got one. It goes back to the last years of the cold war, so we start with Once Upon a Time if you don't mind.
Once upon a time, there was a great split down the middle of Europe with two teams, Team Blue and Team Red, with big armies pointing a crazy amount of killware at each other, and there was unease, anxiety, teasing, oppression, hope and a willingness to cautiously try and do something about it.
The OSZE, an organization whose name you may never have heard, contributed a lot to making Team Blue and Team Red talk to each other. Sure, even in the cold war, there had been people who talked, for example the East German border guards who would simply hop across the border and have a beer with the West German colleagues in a small village right at the border. But the organizations at large took a long time to open up.
Eventually, it came to pass that observers from the opposite team were invited to military exercises for handshakes and briefings, for vodka and whiskey.
This is one way how OMG got his mug shot into the forgotten East German or Russian archives.
You know, he said, I vividly remember the first time I was in the thick of one such event, quite a few of the guys from Team Red had small cameras under their clipboards and would take pictures of everything around them.
Everybody involved knew it, everybody was fine with it.
The western media never picked up on these small practical twists, said OMG, as far as I know, at least this never made it into the nice TV reports about what we called "confidence building measures".
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