Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

Everybody saw this coming.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

We still have time to mess this up!

Thanks for reminding me that Van Jones needs to be slapped.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread: Wind of Change?

Open Thread: Wind of Change?

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This post is in: 

I have an idea for next week’s Medium Cool, and I want to run it past you guys to see if there’s interest.

Open Thread: Wind of Change?

I have been listening to the podcast Wind of Change, and I think it would be fun to talk about it on Medium Cool either next week or the week after that.

Is anyone interested?  I bet MomSense will be, because I know she really liked Wind of Change, too.

Podcast Review: Hair Metal, the CIA, and a Cold War Plot: Wind of Change Is a Thrilling Ride

The elevator pitch is exquisite: What if I told you that “Wind of Change,” the sorta corny but kinda great 1990 power ballad from Scorpions, the German rock band best known for “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” might have actually been written by the CIA? And furthermore, that the song, which upon its release became a kind of anthem for peaceful revolution across Europe, was possibly a successful entry in a broader underground campaign by the West to expand its soft power against the Soviet Union during the Cold War?

That’s the mystery driving the new eight-part podcast series Wind of Change.

The podcast has an engaging premise.  It’s filled with interesting people, captivating stories, musical interludes, intrigue, and history that I never knew.

Anyone interested in listening to the podcast and talking about it next week?  Please let me know in the comments.

Besides that, open thread.

 

 

Reader Interactions

87Comments

  1. 1.

    Barbara

    I will be driving 8 hours this coming Saturday or Sunday to ferry my daughter home from NYC for the holidays, so I am looking for a good podcast to keep me company at least for the part where she isn’t in the car with me.  So count me in, assuming I can find the podcast.

  3. 3.

    Dan B

    Sounds great for filling time until we free ourselves from the web of Covid.  We’ve escaped the Orange Haired spider and his fake Golden web.  We have only the Turtle to evade.

  4. 4.

    WaterGirl

    I’m thinking maybe Sunday 12/27 would be better than this Sunday 12/20.  That gives people 10 days to listen if they are interested.  There are two bonus episodes after the 8 episodes that tell this story, but I haven’t listened to those yet.

  5. 5.

    gwangung

    Huh.

    Soft power is something Republicans disdain (possibly because they are not good at using it well). Certainly this past administration went out of their to destroy whatever soft power we had….

  7. 7.

    geg6

    I would be interested in this. I saw the Scorpions with a boyfriend back in the early 80s. He was big on the more mainstream metal bands. And I liked the song back when it came out. Sounds like a fun story.

  9. 9.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    I’d be down for it. It’s interesting in retrospect that during the late 60s, 70s, and even into the 80s a lot of people thought the USSR was stronger than it really was in reality. So much so, that in the 70s many believed that the aggressive posture that the US/NATO had assumed towards the USSR/WP was not sustainable; that the USSR and the US had to accept one another and either work together more closely on world governance as the two superpowers, or at the very least agree to not dick around in each other’s spheres of influence anymore. Essentially, either choice would have meant the “permanent” division between East and West. Other factors, such as American urban decay as well as the energy crises in this same time period, also represented to some an irrevocable decline in American power. This was most prominently used in Jerry Pournelle’s CoDominium series

    Of course, none of this came to pass. The Soviet Union was sicker than was commonly known and of course dissolved in 199

    I’d also be interested in discussing George Orwell’s 1984. It’s always still relevant. Truth be told, I think it’s three superstates could serve as stand-ins for potential 3 powerblocs that will exist in the coming decades. China will certainly be the leader of one of them.

  10. 10.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I listened to this when it was released (and I enjoyed it a lot), but as much as I can remember, I’d be interested in seeing what people think. I never listened to those bonus episodes, maybe I could do that as a way to refresh my memory .

  11. 11.

    Benw

    I heard this before and will NOT have The Scorps demeaned so!

    :)

    Since it’s open: Ga Tech vs FSU. Go Jackets!!

  13. 13.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Gin & Tonic:

    I know what MAD is. It was during the era of détente; some people, such as Jerry Pournelle, thought the USSR (and by extension, the East/West division) would last a lot longer than it did. Perhaps centuries. The US’ perceived decline during this period also played into this view; some people thought MAD wasn’t tenabl

    From the Wiki article, Predictions of the Collapse of the USSR:

    Conventional wisdom discounting a collapse

    U.S. analysts

    Predictions of the Soviet Union’s impending demise were discounted by many Western academic specialists,and had little impact on mainstream Sovietology. For example, Amalrik’s book “was welcomed as a piece of brilliant literature in the West” but “virtually no one tended to take it at face value as a piece of political prediction.” Up to about 1980, the strength of the Soviet Union was widely overrated by critics and revisionists alike.

    In 1983, Princeton University professor Stephen Cohen described the Soviet system as remarkably stable.

    The Central Intelligence Agency also badly over-estimated the internal stability of the Soviet Union, and did not anticipate the speed of its collapse. Former DCI Stansfield Turner in 1991 wrote in the US Journal Foreign Affairs, “We should not gloss over the enormity of this failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis . . . Yet I never heard a suggestion from the CIA, or the intelligence arms of the departments of Defense or State, that numerous Soviets recognized a growing, systemic economic problem.”

    In a symposium launched to review Michel Garder’s French book: L’Agonie du Regime en Russie Sovietique (The Death Struggle of the Regime in Soviet Russia), which also predicted the collapse of the USSR, Yale Professor Frederick C. Barghoorn dismissed Garder’s book as “the latest in a long line of apocalyptic predictions of the collapse of communism.” He warns that “great revolutions are most infrequent and that successful political systems are tenacious and adaptive

  15. 15.

    laura

    It’s very engaging – though Patrick Raddon Keefe is a better writer than podcaster. Roadie Brother the Younger was on a couple of the tours and his stories and anecdotes about Klaus Meine, Doc McGee and the shenanigans of the late 80’s and early 90’s made this podcast a must listen for me. It is definitely worth mulling over IMHO. Count me in.

  17. 17.

    WaterGirl

    @Omnes Omnibus: No zooming, no pods, guessing you are a words person.  You could always google and learn about it, instead of listening to it.

    Oh wait, what am I thinking?  Since when does one have to have read/seen/watched/learned about something in order to have an opinion!

    Hope to see you at the Medium Cool, anyway.  Lots of interesting historical stuff that I never knew.

  21. 21.

    beth

    i had no idea how fascinating this podcast was going to be. i accidentally caught it early enough i had to impatiently wait for each episode to drop. i’d love to follow along with a discussion about it.

  22. 22.

    WaterGirl

    @Lacuna Synechdoche: I love that his Florida neighbors want nothing to do with Trump.  I think he is in for a rude awakening in just about a month.

    We will soon know whether Gin & Tonic is right, that Trump will be carried out of the white house.  Or maybe it’s Martin who thought that?

  25. 25.

    NotMax

    Sounds like a very niche-y, limited and narrow topic. Plus what Omnes Omnibus and zhena gogolia said. And am not more than a fair weather fan of the more modern rock music, also too.

  26. 26.

    Yutsano

    @Omnes Omnibus:  Neither am I.
    …
    Waitaminute…

    In all seriousness, I’m much better reading than writing. If I feel there’s too much droning on my brain will clamour for something either written to match it or just tune it out. I can try but no guarantees I’ll pick everything up.

  28. 28.

    WaterGirl

    @NotMax: There’s politics, spy craft, history, stories of musicians, rock-and-roll, how black musicians were sent overseas as goodwill ambassadors, one who refused because they were being used for goodwill while dogs and hoses were being used on black people at home.  Not niche-like or limited at all, in my opinion.

    But of course you are obviously welcome to skip, or participate as you wish.

  30. 30.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Sorry, I didn’t word that comment you responded to very well. I know that MAD stands for “Mutually Assured Destruction”. Which means, basically, that if nuclear weapons are ever used, both sides will be utterly destroyed, which acts as a deterrent to using them in the first place. However, there were several times during the Cold War where technical and human errors almost caused a nuclear holocaust. And if a conventional WW3 had ever broken out, the pressure to use nuclear weapons would have been great. Though, I’m hard pressed to offer any alternative. Nuclear weapons were sort of inevitable and the circumstances under which they were created (WW2) and the geopolitics of the early Cold War forced the arms race to happen

  32. 32.

    NotMax

    @WaterGirl

    All I had to go on was in your description so that’s why mentioned rock music. Podcasts which have sampled in the past have left me (a) blasé and (b) enervated. Format just doesn’t work for me. YMMV.

    Same with audiobooks. Find the mind wandering by about page 2.

  33. 33.

    mousebumples

    I listened to it this summer, and it was interesting. Might also be interesting to tie into Argo (the 2012 movie) since there are similar themes. I don’t want to spoil the podcast at all for those that haven’t listened, but both were about potential CIA operations that had been under wraps/classified (and perhaps still are … )

    Not sure if I’ll be around to partake in the thread live (I think you usually have been running them Sunday nights?), but if I can, I’ll try to stop by.

  34. 34.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @NotMax:

    Do/did you ever listen to radio programs? Podcasts are a lot like those, imo. I usually like to listen to them while I’m driving

  37. 37.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Oh, shit:

    In an article for The Nation, published in the March 3, 2014 issue, he made an accusation of “media malpractice” resulting in the “relentless demonization of Putin”, and disputed the Russian president’s reputation as an “autocrat”. He believed that the American media’s coverage of Russia was “less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological” than it had been during the Cold War.[13][14]

    Cohen participated in a Munk Debate in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in April 2015, on the proposal “Be it resolved the West should engage not isolate Russia.” With Vladimir Posner, he argued in favor of engagement, while Anne Applebaum and Garry Kasparov argued against. Cohen’s side lost the debate, with 52% of the audience voting against the motion.[15]

    In May 2014 Nation column coauthored with his wife, Cohen claimed that President Barack Obama had unilaterally declared a new Cold War against Russia and that those inside the Beltway were complicit in it by their silence. Julia Ioffe in The New Republic saw this as Cohen disagreeing with a consensus that did not exist.[16] In an interview with Tucker Carlson on May 17, 2017, Cohen said: “You and I have to ask a subversive question: are there really three branches of government, or is there a fourth branch of government — these intel services?” He stated that a military alliance that President Obama had tried to establish with Putin against terrorism was “sabotaged by the Department of Defense and its allies in the intelligence services”. Each of Trump’s efforts to “cooperate with Russia” was “thwarted [by] a new leak of a story”.[17]

    Cohen’s views on US-Russian relations were criticized by Julia Ioffe and others as being pro-Putin.[14][16] Ioffe’s assessment was, in turn, criticized in The American Conservative by James W. Carden,[18] the executive director[19] of the American Committee for East–West Accord (ACEWA).[1]

    So THAT Cohen. Well, sorry. I feel a little stupid

  38. 38.

    EveryDayIHaveTheBlues

    WaterGirl, my calendar arrived today. The photos are marvelously arranged, and their quality is excellent! I’m so stoked to give this to my wife as one of her gifts. She misses our dear departed kids so much, especially Mutton… thank you, sincerely for taking the time to arrange this.

  39. 39.

    NotMax

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    Big fan of OTR. Writing for radio during its Golden Age was a tailored skill (and tempo) which many who tried never mastered as it’s purposely exaggeratedly evocative as opposed to informative.

    Those who did excel in that area (Arch Oboler, Paul Rhymer, etc.) shone like beacons in the night.

  40. 40.

    zhena gogolia

    @WaterGirl:

    I’m not complaining about your choice of topic. Some of them will grab me, some won’t, and that’s fine. This looks like too much homework!

  41. 41.

    geg6

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    I can only say that not everyone agreed with this.  I was, at the time, a poli sci major with a concentration on US/Soviet relations. At the time, Pitt had one of the top Eastern European studies departments in the nation.  Dr. Dunnorumo, who was the star of the department, was a great lecturer and scholar in the field and I had several classes with him.  He was not fooled about the weaknesses in Soviet control over their satellite states.  I never heard him predict a date for the crumbling of the Soviet Union, but he was sure it was starting to happen back when I was an undergrad in the early to mid-80s.  This is why I chose to put grad school on hold.  I was sure need for my expertise would be extinct and I needed to figure out another direction.

  42. 42.

    Poe Larity

    “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair

    The notional security state had no interest in the truth about the Soviet state. I didn’t know that Cohen had died in Sept.

    In other news, Tom Cruise is unhappy with your Covid compliance: https://twitter.com/UpToTASK/status/1339003304802566144

  43. 43.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): The person quoted in your wiki article.

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I had to reword this part of my comment several times to try not to snap at you.  I majored in Government with a strong concentration in international politics in the early to mid ’80s.  I then became an army officer assigned to nuclear capable field artillery units in the latter part of the ’80s and early ’90s.  I am well aware of MAD.

  44. 44.

    NotMax

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    As for listening while driving I’ll sometimes have music on as a background soundtrack (which doesn’t have to be paid attention to other than functioning as a silence breaker) but shy away from anything else which might divert a percentage of my attention from the road.

  48. 48.

    Martin

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): 
    It’s interesting in retrospect that during the late 60s, 70s, and even into the 80s a lot of people thought the USSR was stronger than it really was in reality.

    That’s the cost of an arms race and asymmetrical information. You are required to assume your enemy is stronger and more aggressive than they are. If they launch 100 missiles as a first strike, you need 200 missiles to counter that threat – 100 to stop that first strike and another 100 to cripple them from doing it again. They see your 200, assume a first strike out of you, and now they need 300, or less conservatively 400, and so on. And that’s if you are certain they only have 100. If you don’t know, because we have to drop film canisters from space and catch them on the way down with planes, then you assume they have more than you can see.

    The taxpayers want to know what we need all those missiles for so you invite them into escalatory thinking. Next thing you know, they’re the ones demanding more missiles. Things get out of hand really fast.

    Wrote a mathematical paper on the phenomena. Was a fun one.

  51. 51.

    Gin & Tonic

    I mentioned downstairs that the hospital my dear wife works at has gotten some doses of the Pfizer vaccine. Since the pharmacy is closed for the night (it’s a small hospital) and the vaccine is in the freezer, they have an armed guard outside the door.

  54. 54.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I had to reword this part of my comment several times to try not to snap at you.  I majored in Government with a strong concentration in international politics in the early to mid ’80s.  I then became an army officer assigned to nuclear capable field artillery units in the latter part of the ’80s and early ’90s.  I am well aware of MAD.

    I meant no offense. I was just trying to show I knew what it meant

  57. 57.

    Scout211

    Just curious.  I thought the Medium Cool posts were more free flowing open discussion of thoughts, ideas, memories, favorites, likes and dislikes centered around a general theme.

    I’m not saying it shouldn’t go in a different direction but this sounds like a very different direction.

    I’m another person who does not enjoy podcasts or even audiobooks.

  59. 59.

    Mary G

    Also not a podcast person, partly because there are so many of them the choice is overwhelming. The few I’ve listened to involved a lot of in jokes and chitter chatter that made me feel like my time was being wasted, or talking over each other or too fast for my lousy hearing to keep up with.

    I love audiobooks, and Audible has added a zillion podcasts free to members. I listened to one called “The Sea in the Sky” which is science fiction, and while I loved the writing and the performers were excellent, in the end it just felt like a radio play from olden times, and a reminder why those went out of fashion. I hope Netflix signs the writer Jackson Musker up to make a movie or series; I’d be first in line.

  62. 62.

    HumboldtBlue

    The elevator pitch is exquisite: What if I told you that “Wind of Change,” the sorta corny but kinda great 1990 power ballad from Scorpions, the German rock band best known for “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” might have actually been written by the CIA?

    You had me at guten tag.

  63. 63.

    Poe Larity

    Without Afghanistan (CIA, DIA, ISI, Charlie Wilson, etc), Cash Strangling (gold, arms sales, Iraq/Iran war oil prices), Chernobyl and Mathias Rust, the SU would have been more durable. We lucked out with Gorbachev and Nancy worrying about Ronnie’s legacy (bringing adult mgmt to the WH).

  66. 66.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Martin: I remember spending too much time in the 90s poking around a Buck-A-Book in Boston, which served as a sort of dustbin of history. Stacks of things like guides to using WordStar on the Kaypro, along with obsolete political books and autobiographies of obscure tycoons.

    Once I found a book that was some conservative’s stern extended warning from the 80s about how the Soviet Union was on the verge of crushing us. The phrase he kept repeating over and over was that the USSR, unlike the US, had “high morale and a balanced budget”.

  67. 67.

    WaterGirl

    @Scout211: Medium Cool isn’t going in a different direction.

    The Wind of Change thread could easily have been a regular post.

    There’s a ton of culture running all through this podcast, and with BG taking a month off to finish his book, I thought this might be something nice for that slot.

    But maybe you’re right that I could do it not in the Medium Cool slot.

    It seems like there is interest in talking about the story – because this particular podcast really is the unfolding of a story and is unlike any other podcast I have listened to.

  68. 68.

    WaterGirl

    @satby: Not to worry!  BG is still doing Medium Cool, but he is taking a month off so he can focus on finishing up his latest book.

    Grades are in for the semester, and he won’t be teaching for the next few weeks, so it’s a good time for a break from everything while he finishes up  his book.

    I’m just holding down the fort.

  73. 73.

    WaterGirl

    @Punchy: It really is.  There are so many things that came out in this podcast, though – where the CIA and the government really did use music and musical groups to further their political goals – that it doesn’t seem crazy to think that they may have done that here.

    Listen for yourself and then tell us what you think.

  77. 77.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @NotMax:

    Understandable. I preferred listening to podcasts on morning commutes on the freeway to classes, which usually weren’t that busy in the morning (rural route)

  81. 81.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    CIA is responsible for Adam Sandler’s movies.  They play them in continuous loop to torture prisoners.

  82. 82.

    Pittsburgh Mike

    @WaterGirl: I use an app that retrieves the RSS feed from Apple’s servers, and all the episodes and bonus episodes are present there.

    The series is a lot of fun, as well as somewhat educational, especially if you don’t know any spooks.

  83. 83.

    Pittsburgh Mike

    This is a great idea.  I listened to all the episodes already, but it would be fun to discuss theories about what parts are true and which are false.

  84. 84.

    Skookum in Oly

    I listened to the first episode last night, and will be listening to them all. Fascinating stuff.  True story? Who knows, but it’s certainly in that fun valley of what was and what might have been.  Lacking the knowledge to know one way or the other, I find myself hooked.

    Count me in.

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