It's Hot, It's Cold

The Cold War. It's something I know NOTHING about yet have this desire to know all about. I understand Hot wars. They're easy. But Cold Wars. Gets me confused every time. Gav explained it to me years ago when we were together but still..... there's this book called, of course, The Cold War -A New History by John Gaddis that looks really good. It all seems so complex and intriguing and political. Will I even understand it?

I have a thing with war and military. I want to learn as much as I can about it. It's not the act of men killing men (and innocent men, women and children, heck, isn't everyone 'innocent' in war? If you strip it all down to its bear minimum, is it not one man with a weapon standing pitched against another?) it's the actual thought that goes behind it, the strategy, the manouvering, the weapons, the mental and physical strength. It's fascinating yet vile. What humans do to each other, all in the name of ideology.

I've started reading The Fall of Yugoslavia. So I can have an understanding of the last war in the Balkans if I want to try for an internship at the ICTY. It's a hard read. But also important given I'm going to Croatia in June for 2 weeks. I didn't realise the war there was in 1990/1991. That's not so long ago. It was like going to Romania and being in Bucharest and followed around my undercover cops who thought we'd been 'robbed' by the woman who took us around for a tour of the city. Because we paid her money in the street and they saw, they thought we had been forced to give her money. We also couldn't say our tour group leader was just that. Whilst communism had apparently died with Ceausescu, remnants still remained in Bucharest. That was slightly scary.