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Date Posted: 18:38:23 05/17/03 Sat
Author: Mr John D Clare
Subject: Cold War - the power of analogy
In reply to: 's message, "The Cold War - what's it all about?" on 16:10:56 05/17/03 Sat

If ever you just can’t ‘get’ something, a good idea I would suggest is to reduce it to analogies – to try to imagine a situation in modern everyday life which parallels what is going on in the history. The key sentence starter is: ‘Well, it’s like when…’
If you can’t do this for the historical situations you think you understand, then perhaps you don’t really understand them.


Take, for instance, the following story of everyday school life. Study the story against the pages on www.johndclare.net about the Cold War 1945–1963, and see if you can spot the analogies – read it, and try to explain how the twists and turns of the story parallel the twists and turns of the story of the Cold War:


The Cold War is like two Year 11 boys who fell out. Both of them were big, strong lads, and each had a lot of support among his peers.

Neither had ever liked the other. They had nothing in common, wanted different jobs – and they had had fights in the past, when they were younger.

Until recently, they had managed to ignore each other – even to work together when necessary – but, in Year 11, there had been a string of clashes. It began over a discussion of uniform rules for Lower School pupils – both the boys were on the Student Council and, after one meeting where they clearly irritated each other, at the next meeting they openly disagreed.

Both boys went about trying to get the rest of the Year 11 pupils on their side – what was interesting was the way they went about it. Boris had neither money nor tact, and his method was just to intimidate people; Boris’s friends daredn’t go against him – in this way he built a little gang of yes-men around him. Sam was wealthy and (on the surface, at least) sociable; he gathered support by lending people money, CDs etc, and inviting them round to his place for parties – as long as they promised not to be friends with Boris.

Each dirty trick and mucky look increased the boys’ mutual hatred. When one of Sam’s friends bad-mouthed Boris, it was the last straw. The two boys openly set about trying to ruin the other.

Why didn’t they just have a huge fight, and get it over with? Well, it would have been just too damaging for them both if they had done so – neither could afford to be permanently excluded. So they did everything possible to hurt each other without actually having a one-on-one fight.

Once, Boris trapped Sam’s little brother in a classroom and wouldn’t let him out all lunchtime. Sam didn’t go and try to push him out of the way – he just passed sandwiches through the window until Boris got bored.

And when two Year 7 boys started a feud, Sam helped one, and Boris’s friend Lee helped the other. But still Sam and Boris held themselves back from fighting each other.

Both Sam and Boris believed that they were in the right, and that the other boy was the troublemaker. They endlessly slagged off each other. And they competed everything fiercely – to gain the highest mark in the Technology exam, to score the first goal in the football, and so on.

As time went on Boris became increasingly aggressive. He beat up a couple of his gang who looked as through they might be wanting to make friends with Sam. In the end, he forced his friends to stay with him all the time, and not even talk to Sam and his friends.

And all the time, there was tension in the air at school – the feeling that at any moment there would be a HUGE fight and dozens of people would get expelled. A group of girls even got a petition about it. There was a nasty moment when Boris found out that Sam had been spying on him and his girlfriend. And there was a terrifying crisis when a rumour went round that Boris was bringing in a knife for his psycho friend Fidel to attack Sam with.

(After that moment, both sides backed off a bit, but the feud went on until the end of Year 11, when Boris failed his exams and left the school.)


Of course, you won’t put any of this kind of thing in your exam answers, except in the most extreme circumstances. It’s a tool you use to help you understand the basic mechanisms of who-did-what-to-whom-and-why. And that will provide mental ‘hooks’ onto which you can hang the events and ideas of your course.


[If you can’t work out the parallels, if you wait a while, I’ll give you a few clues.]

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Replies:

  • Cold War analogy - Do you need some clues? -- Mr John D Clare, 12:31:31 05/18/03 Sun
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