Those Who Don’t Learn From History

Vladimir Putin and friends, in a still from Netflix’s
Turning Point: the Bomb and the Cold War

College-educated progressives might have a natural tendency to sneer at the 2024 Netflix docuseries Turning Point: the Bomb and the Cold War. The entire series has a ponderous, intensely self-serious tone, backed by a Philip Glass-inspired soundtrack that emphasizes the series’ intended Great Deeds of Great Men themes. Letting political insiders like Robert Gates and Condoleeza Rice narrate history risks letting the guilty write their own exoneration.

So sure, there’s a knee-jerk desire to impose a Noam Chomskian interpretation of the series as pro-American propaganda. Yet series creator Brian Knappenberger doesn’t let America off lightly either. Knappenberger’s sources are preponderantly American, yet many willingly doubt America’s official story spotlighting the country’s culpability in constant geopolitical escalation. American policy provides the precedents now bearing fruit in places like Ukraine.

I don’t mention Ukraine lightly. Each of the nine episodes begins with a teaser relating to Russia’s 2022 Ukraine invasion, casting that event in light of Vladimir Putin’s Cold War history. Though Knappenberger avoids anything as high-handed as a thesis statement, his comparisons of current events with Twentieth Century history emphasizes that there’s an arc of continuity which we ignore only at our peril. Sadly, ignorance is something we certainly have.

Despite the series’ title, Knappenberger doesn’t get into the Manhattan Project until episode 2, or the Cold War until Episode 3. His account begins during World War II, when the Allied Powers combined to fight global fascism, but only reluctantly. The “enemy of my enemy” arrangement forced Roosevelt and Stalin to sit down together, despite openly opposing one another politically. Both leaders exposed one united face to the world, while plotting separately in private.

Knappenberger’s style demonstrates influence from legendary documentarian Errol Morris. Like Morris, Knappenberger centers interview subjects largely front-and-center, narrating heir interpretation of events to an interviewer just slightly off-camera. Despite the dramatic importance of the subjects’ narrative (underscored by the soundtrack), they remain largely static. Visual drama comes from the intercutting of archival footage of historical events as they actually happened.

Early episodes involve mostly scholars and historians. As events like the Potsdam Conference, the Trinity test, or Hiroshima largely pass from living memory, we’re left with experts’ interpretations. Not that we’ve entirely forgotten these events. Knappenberger interviews two Hiroshima survivors, reminding us that history isn’t a collection of numbers and heuristics; it’s the combined story of what actually happened to real, living people.

The closer Knappenberger brings us to the present, the more he involves those who participated. Sure, he asks military and academic historians to interpret, say, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. But he also interviews a Spanish-speaking participant who banked everything on American support, then got captured in Cuba. The horror etched on that survivor’s face speaks volumes to history’s human impact, and America’s opportunistic betrayal of its international allies.

Beginning around 1980, Knappenberger relegates historians and scholars to a supporting role. The narrative kicks over to those who participated in, and often caused, history. Archival footage of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev intercuts with interview subjects, including Defense Secretaries, global journalists, and Gorbachev’s official English-language interpreter. Taken together, we receive a working view of how the late Cold War unfolded.

It's possible to raise objections to Knappenberger’s historical lens. He accepts the notion of history as the Great Doings of Great Men—and we indeed mean men, as only in the last twenty years do women drive the story, except as wives or survivors. Knappenberger sees history as happening mainly inside the corridors of power. He includes archival footage of, say, the demolition of the Berlin Wall or the Orange Revolution, but only overlaid with scholars’ and politicians’ exegesis.

Nevertheless, it’s impossible to escape Knappenberger’s final resolution. He wants us to understand that current events don’t exist in a vacuum; specifically, Putin chose war in Ukraine to reverse massive humiliations which the Cold War forced on Russia. The series’ final two episodes deep-dive into Putin personally, and how he views history through the humiliations which collapse of the Soviet Union forced on his people. Putin’s Ukraine invasion makes sense in that context.

In the final ten minutes, Knappenberger finally allows interview subjects to spell out his intended lesson: Putin’s military adventures aren’t unprecedented. America’s continued post-Cold War interventions in other nations provide political justification for Putin’s invasions in Ukraine, Georgia, and elsewhere. History didn’t happen only in the past, and contra conservative dogma, history didn’t end. Only when we know history, and use it proactively, can we prevent the disasters continuing around us.