Rage (also known as frenzy or fury) is intense, uncontrolled anger that is an increased stage of hostile response to a perceived egregious injury or injustice.
Etymology
The word "rage" is from c.
1300, meaning "madness, insanity; a fit of frenzy; rashness,
foolhardiness, intense or violent emotion, anger, wrath; fierceness in
battle; violence" (of storms, fire, etc.); from the Old French rage or raige, meaning "spirit, passion, rage, fury, madness"; from 11th-century Medieval Latinrabia; from the Latin rabies, meaning "madness, rage, fury," which is related to the Latin rabere "be mad, rave."
Rage can sometimes lead to a state of mind where the individuals
experiencing it believe they can do, and often are capable of doing,
things that may normally seem physically impossible. Those experiencing
rage usually feel the effects of high adrenaline
levels in the body. This increase in adrenal output raises the physical
strength and endurance levels of the person and sharpens their senses,
while dulling the sensation of pain. High levels of adrenaline impair
memory. Temporal perspective is also affected: people in a rage have described experiencing events in slow-motion.
Rational thought and reasoning would inhibit an individual from acting
rapidly upon impulse. An older explanation of this "time dilation"
effect is that instead of actually slowing our perception of time, high
levels of adrenaline increase our ability to recall specific minutiae of
an event after it occurs. Since humans gauge time based on the number
of things they can remember, high-adrenaline events such as those
experienced during periods of rage seem to unfold more slowly.
A person in a state of rage may also lose much of their capacity for rational thought and reasoning, and may act, usually violently,
on their impulses to the point that they may attack until they
themselves have been incapacitated or the source of their rage has been
destroyed or otherwise removed. A person in rage may also experience tunnel vision, muffled hearing, increased heart rate, and hyperventilation.
Their vision may also become "rose-tinted" (hence "seeing red"). They
often focus only on the source of their anger. The large amounts of
adrenaline and oxygen in the bloodstream may cause a person's
extremities to shake. Psychiatrists consider rage to be at one end of
the spectrum of anger, and annoyance to be at the other side.
Nearly two decades later, more came to be known about the impacts
of high epinephrine. Studies suggest glucose, together with epinephrine
from the adrenal medulla have an effect on memory. Although high doses
of epinephrine have been proven to impair memory, moderate doses of
epinephrine actually enhance memory. This leads to questioning the role that epinephrine has played on the
evolution of the genus Homo as well as epinephrine's crucial role during
fits of rage. The crucial role that astrocytes play in the formation of
muscle memory may also shed light on the beneficial impact of
meditation and deep breathing as a method of managing and controlling
one's rage.
Health complications
Some
research suggests that an individual is more susceptible to having
feelings of depression and anxiety if he or she experiences rage on a
frequent basis. Health complications become much worse if an individual
represses feelings of rage. John E. Sarno believes that repressed rage in the subconscious leads to physical ailments. Cardiac stress and hypertension are other health complications that may occur when rage is experienced on a regular basis. Psychopathologies, such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) regularly present comorbidly with rage.
Treatment
Types of therapy
Evidence has shown that behavioral and cognitive therapy
techniques have assisted individuals that have difficulties controlling
their anger or rage. Role playing and personal study are the two main
techniques used to aid individuals with managing rage. Role playing is
utilized by angering an individual to the point of rage and then showing
them how to control it. Multi-modal cognitive therapy is another treatment used to help
individuals cope with anger. This therapy teaches individuals relaxation
techniques, problem solving skills, and techniques on response
disruption. This type of therapy has proven to be effective for
individuals that are highly stressed and are prone to rage.
An emerging business is the rage room, a place where people relieve their stress by destroying objects within a room.
Psychology
According to psychologists, rage is an in-born behavior that every person exhibits in some form. Rage is often used to denote hostile/affective/reactive aggression. Rage tends to be expressed when a person faces a threat to their pride,
position, self-deceptive beliefs, or socioeconomic status.
Cases in which rage is exhibited as a direct response to an
individual's deeply held religious beliefs, may directly be related to
cognitive dissonance in relation to an individual's ability to manage
the terror associated with death and dying. Many researchers have
questioned whether Hindu/Buddhist concepts, such as reincarnation and
nibbâna, help ease death anxieties. Coleman and Ka-Ying Hui (2012)
stated that "according to the Terror Management Theory, a religious
concept of an afterlife helps people manage their personal death
anxiety" (949). This suggests that rage, in relation to religious ideas, may stem from an inability to manage feelings of terror.
Some psychologists, however, such as Bushman and Anderson, argue
that the hostile/predatory dichotomy that is commonly employed in
psychology fails to define rage fully, since it is possible for anger to
motivate aggression, provoking vengeful behavior, without incorporating
the impulsive thinking that is characteristic of rage. They point to
individuals or groups such as Seung-Hui Cho in the Virginia Tech massacre or Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of the Columbine High School massacre,
all of whom clearly experienced intense anger and hate, but whose
planning (sometimes over periods of years), forethought, and lack of
impulsive behavior is readily observable.
The Cold War
was reflected in culture through music, movies, books, television, and
other media, as well as sports, social beliefs, and behavior. Major
elements of the Cold War included the perceived threat of communist
expansion, a nuclear war, and – connected to both – espionage. Many works use the Cold War as a backdrop or directly take part in a fictional conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. The period 1953–62 saw Cold War themes becoming mainstream as a public preoccupation.
Fiction
Spy stories
Cloak and dagger
stories became part of the popular culture of the Cold War in both East
and West, with innumerable novels and movies that showed how polarized
and dangerous the world was. Soviet audiences were thrilled by spy stories showing how their KGB
agents protected the motherland by foiling dirty work by the
intelligence agencies of the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel.
After 1963, Hollywood increasingly depicted the CIA as clowns (as in the
comedy TV series Get Smart) or villains (as in Oliver Stone's 1992 film JFK). Ian Fleming's infamous spy novels about the MI6 agent James Bond also referenced elements of the Cold War when being adapted into films. One example of this includes the first Bond film, Dr. No, which was released in 1962 and used the Cuban Missile Crisis as a plot base. However, Cuba was substituted for Jamaica in the film.
Books and other works
Atomsk by Paul Linebarger, published in 1949, is the first espionage novel of the Cold War.
The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
is a science fiction novel exploring the differences in culture and
philosophy between several alien societies, including that of an
anarcho-syndicalist planet where most of the novel is set.
Other Tom Clancy novels which are part of the Jack Ryan universe, most especially The Hunt for Red October and The Cardinal of the Kremlin, though all of his books from this era are featured against a background of east–west conflict. Later Red Rabbit narrates a "What-If" scenario of the Soviets being behind the 1981 assassination attempt on the Pope.
Frederick Forsyth's spy novels sold in the hundreds of thousands. The Fourth Protocol,
whose title refers to a series of conventions that, if broken, will
lead to nuclear war and that are now, of course, all broken except for
the fourth and last thread, was made into a major film starring British actor Michael Caine.
The Manchurian Candidate,
by Richard Condon, took a different approach and portrayed a Communist
conspiracy against the US acting not through leftists or pacifists but
through a thinly veiled allusion to Joseph McCarthy.
The logic of this was that if McCarthyists were accusing so many people
of being communist agents, it could only be to divert attention from
the real communists. The theme of collusion between international
communists and Western rightists would be picked up again by many movies
(Goldfinger, A View to a Kill) or television shows (episodes of MacGyver or Airwolf),
which would feature an alliance between power-hungry communists
attacking the free world from the outside and profit-driven capitalists
undermining it for financial gain.
The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick.
Originally published in 1958, this book tells the story of how the US
government handled foreign policy very poorly. The main character, Homer
Atkins, discovers this sad truth when he is dispatched to the
fictitious country of Sarkhan (in Southeast Asia.)
During
the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union each invested
heavily in propaganda designed to sway both domestic and foreign opinion
in the respective country's favor, especially using motion pictures.The quality gap between American and Soviet film gave the Americans a
distinct advantage over the Soviet Union; the United States was readily
prepared to utilize their cinematic superiority as a way to effectively
impact the public opinion in a way the Soviet Union could not. Americans
hoped that achievements in cinema would compensate for America's
failure to keep up with Soviet development of nuclear weapons and advancements in space technology. The use of film as an effective form of widespread propaganda
transformed cinema into another Cold War battlefront alongside the arms race and Space Race. Films from both the United States and Soviet Union can be seen as artifacts of propaganda as well as resistance.
US cinema
The
Americans took advantage of their pre-existing cinematic advantage over
the Soviet Union, using movies as another way to create the Communist
enemy. In the early years of the Cold War (between 1948 and 1953),
seventy explicitly anti-communist films were released. American films incorporated a wide scale of Cold War themes and issues
into all genres of film, which gave American motion pictures a
particular lead over Soviet film. Despite the audiences' lack of zeal
for Anti-Communist/Cold War related cinema, the films produced evidently
did serve as successful propaganda in both the United States and the
Soviet Union. The films released during this time received a response
from the Soviet Union, which subsequently released its own array of
films to combat the depiction of the Communist threat.
Several organizations played a key role in ensuring that Hollywood acted in the national best interest of the US, like the Catholic Legion of Decency and the Production Code Administration,
which acted as two conservative groups that controlled a great deal of
the national repertoire during the early stages of the Cold War. These
groups filtered out politically subversive or morally questionable
movies. More blatantly illustrating the shift from cinema as an art form
to cinema as a form of strategic weapon, the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals ensured that filmmakers adequately expressed their patriotism. Beyond these cinema-specific efforts, the FBI
played a surprisingly large role in the production of movies,
instituting a triangular-shaped film strategy: FBI set up a surveillance
operation in Hollywood, made efforts to pinpoint and blacklist
Communists, secretly laundered intelligence through HUAC,
and further helped in producing movies that "fostered [the FBI] image
as the protector of the American people." The FBI additionally endorsed
films, including Oscar winner The Hoaxters.
In the 1960s, Hollywood began using spy films
to create the enemy through film. Previously, the influence of the Cold
War could be seen in many, if not all, genres of American film. By the
1960s, spy films were effectively a "weapon of confrontation between the
two world systems." Both sides heightened paranoia and created a sense of constant unease
in viewers through the increased production of spy films. Film depicted
the enemy in a way that caused both sides to increase general suspicion
of foreign and domestic threat.
Soviet cinema
Between
1946 and 1954, the Soviet Union mimicked the US adoption of cinema as a
weapon. The Central United Film Studios and the Committee on Cinema
Affairs were committed to the Cold War battle. Under Stalin's
rule, movies could only be made within strict confines. Cinema and
government were, as it stood, inextricably linked. Many films were
banned for being insufficiently patriotic. Nonetheless, the Soviet Union
produced a plethora of movies with the aim to blatantly function as
negative propaganda.
In the same fashion as the United States, the Soviets were eager
to depict their enemy in the most unflattering light possible. Between
1946 and 1950, 45.6% of on-screen villains in Soviet films were either
American or British. Films addressed non-Soviet themes that emerged in American film in an
attempt to derail the criticism and paint the US as the enemy. Attacks
made by the United States against the Soviet Union were simply used as
material by Soviet filmmakers for their own attacks on the US. Soviet
cinema during this time took its liberty with history: "Did the Red Army
engage in the mass rapes of German women and pillage German art
treasures, factories, and forests? In Soviet cinema, the opposite was
true in [The Meeting on the Elbe]." This demonstrated the heightened paranoia of the Soviet Union.
Despite efforts made to elevate the status of cinema, such as
changing the Committee of Cinema Affairs to the Ministry of
Cinematography, cinema did not seem to work as invigorating propaganda
as was planned. Although the anti-American films were notably popular
with audiences, the Ministry did not feel the message had reached the
general public, perhaps due to the fact that the majority of moviegoers
seeing the films produced were, perhaps, the Soviets most likely to
admire American culture.
After Stalin's death, a Main Administration of Cinema Affairs
replaced the Ministry, allowing the filmmakers more freedom due to the
lack of direct government control. Many of the films released throughout
the late 1950s and 1960s focused on spreading a positive image of
Soviet life, intent to prove that Soviet life was indeed better than
American life.
Russian science fiction emerged from a prolonged period of
censorship in 1957, opened up by de-Stalinization and real Soviet
achievements in the space race, typified by Ivan Efremov's galactic
epic, Andromeda (1957). Official Communist science fiction
transposed the laws of historical materialism to the future, scorning
Western nihilistic writings and predicting a peaceful transition
to universal communism. Scientocratic visions of the future
nevertheless implicitly critiqued the bureaucratically developed
socialism of the present. Dissident science fiction writers emerged,
such as the Strugatski brothers, Boris and Arkadi, with their "social
fantasies," problematizing the role of intervention in the historical
process, or Stanislaw Lem's tongue-in-cheek exposures of man's cognitive
limitations.
Duck and Cover, a 1951 educational movie explaining what to do in the event of a nuclear attack.
Five,
a 1951 film about five survivors, one woman and four men, of an atomic
war that has wiped out the rest of the human race (while leaving all
infrastructure intact). The five come together at a remote, isolated
hillside house in Southern California, where they try to figure out how to survive while also being forced to face an unknown future.
On the Beach (1959) depicted a gradually dying, post-apocalyptic world in Australia that remained after a nuclear Third World War.
Ladybug Ladybug (1963) an elementary school nuclear bomb warning alarm sounds.
The War Game
(BBC, 1965; aired 1985) – Depicts the effects of a nuclear war in
Britain following a conventional war that escalates to nuclear war.
Damnation Alley (20th Century Fox, 1977) – Surprise ICBM attack launched on the United States, and the subsequent efforts of a small band of survivors from a missile silo in the Mojave Desert in California to reach another group of survivors in Albany, New York.
The Children's Story (1982) short film, which originally aired on TV's Mobil Showcase,
depicts the first day of indoctrination of an elementary school
classroom by a new teacher, representing a totalitarian government that
has taken over the United States. It is based on the 1960 short story of
the same name by James Clavell.
The Day After (1983) – This made-for-television-movie by ABC that depicts the consequences of a nuclear war in Lawrence, Kansas and the surrounding area.
WarGames (1983) – About a young computer hacker who unknowingly hacks into a defense computer and risks starting a nuclear war.
By Dawn's Early Light (HBO, 1990) – About rogue Soviet military officials framing NATO for a nuclear attack in order to spark a full-blown nuclear war.
Fail-Safe (CBS, 2000) – A remake of the 1964 film.
Films depicting a conventional United States–Soviet Union war
In
addition to fears of a nuclear war between the United States and the
Soviet Union, during the Cold War, there were also fears of a direct,
large scale conventional conflict between the two superpowers.
Red Nightmare, a 1962 government-sponsored short subject narrated by Jack Webb, imagined a Soviet-dominated United States as a result of the protagonist's negligence of his "all-American" duties.
World War III, a 1982 NBC miniseries about a Soviet invasion of Alaska.
Red Dawn
(1984) – presented a conventional Soviet attack with limited, strategic
Soviet nuclear strikes on the United States, aided by allies from Latin America, and the exploits of a group of high schoolers who form a guerrilla group to oppose them.
Invasion U.S.A.
(1985) – This film depicts a Soviet agent leading Latin American
Communist guerillas launching attacks in the United States, and an
ex-CIA agent played by Chuck Norris opposing him and his mercenaries.
Amerika (ABC, 1987), a peaceful takeover of the United States by the Soviet Union.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is a 1965 British Cold Warspy film based on the 1963 John le Carré novel. The film depicts a British agent's mission as a faux defector to East Germany to sow damaging disinformation about a powerful East German intelligence officer.
Firefox is a 1982 film based on a Craig Thomasnovel of the same name. The plot details an American plot to steal a highly advanced Soviet fighter aircraft (MiG-31 Firefox) which is capable of Mach 6, is invisible to radar, and carries weapons controlled by thought.
James Bond
first appeared in 1953. While the primary antagonists in the majority
of the novels were Soviet agents, the films were only vaguely based on
the Cold War. The Bond movies followed the political climate of the time
in their depictions of Soviets and "Red" Chinese. In the 1954 version of Casino Royale,
Bond was an American agent working with the British to destroy a
ruthless Soviet agent in France, but became more widely known as Agent
007, James Bond, of Her Majesty's Secret Service, who was played by Sean Connery
until 1971 and by several actors since. Although Bond films often used
the Cold War as a backdrop, the Soviet Union itself was almost never
Bond's enemy, that role being more often left to fictional and
apolitical criminal organizations (like the infamous SPECTRE). However, Red China was in league with Bond's enemies in the films Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice and The Man With the Golden Gun, while some later movies (Octopussy, The Living Daylights) featured a rogue Soviet general as the enemy.
TASS Upolnomochen Zayavit... (TASS is Authorized to Announce ... ) – a Soviet TV series based on Julian Semenov's novel. The plot of the movie is set around fictional African country Nagonia, where CIA
agents are preparing a military coup, while KGB agent Slavin is trying
to prevent it. Slavin succeeds by blackmailing the corrupt American spy
John Glebe.
Gotcha! (1985 film) is a film about a college student named Jonathan (Anthony Edwards)
who plays a game called Gotcha in which he hunts and is hunted by other
students with paint guns on campus. Jonathan goes to France on
vacation, meets a beautiful woman named Sasha (Linda Fiorentino), travels with her to East Germany, and unknowingly becomes involved in the spy game between the US and USSR.
Russian Roulette (1975) – A film starring George Segal about a Canadian Mounty attempting to stop a KGB plot to assassinate a Soviet premier in Vancouver.
The Return of Godzilla (1984) — In the 16th installment of the TohoGodzilla
franchise, a Soviet nuclear submarine is destroyed by the titular
creature, causing tensions between the Soviet Union & America until
it is proven by the Japanese government that Godzilla was responsible
for its destruction. Later in the movie, a Russian nuclear missile is
accidentally fired at Godzilla from a space satellite until an American
missile detonates it in the stratosphere long before it can strike
Godzilla in Tokyo.
Several episodes of Star Trek
featured a futuristic version of the Cold War, in terms of the United
Federation of Planets vs. The Klingon Empire and the Romulan Star
Empire, analogs for the United States, the Soviet Union, and the
People's Republic of China, respectively. "A Taste of Armageddon" also showed the concept of MAD in a war between opposing sides.
The Transformers (TV series), including the fact that the two first seasons take place during the latter years of the Cold War, an episode, Prime Target directly refers to an event of the episode as The highest point of tension between United States and Soviet Union, since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Television commercials
Wendy's Hamburger Chain ran a television commercial
showing a supposed "Soviet Fashion Show", which featured the same
large, unattractive woman wearing the same dowdy outfit in a variety of
situations, the only difference being the accessory she carried (for
example, a flashlight for 'nightwear' or a beach ball for 'swimwear').
This was supposedly a lampoon on how the Soviet society is characterised
with uniformity and standardisation, in contrast to the US
characterised with freedom of choice, as highlighted in the Wendy's
commercial.
Apple Computer's "1984"
ad, despite paying homage to George Orwell's novel of the same name,
follows a more serious yet ambitious take on the freedom vs.
totalitarianism theme evident between the US and Soviet societies at the
time.
Political commercials
Daisies and mushroom clouds
Daisy was the most famous campaign commercial of the Cold War. Aired only once, on 7 September 1964, it was a factor in Lyndon B. Johnson's defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. The contents of the commercial were controversial, and their emotional impact was searing.
The commercial opens with a very young girl standing in a meadow with chirping birds, slowly counting the petals of a daisy
as she picks them one by one. Her sweet innocence, along with mistakes
in her counting, endear her to the viewer. When she reaches "9", an
ominous-sounding male voice is suddenly heard intoning the countdown of a rocket launch. As the girl's eyes turn toward something she sees in the sky, the camera zooms
in until one of her pupils fills the screen, blacking it out. The
countdown reaches zero, and the blackness is instantly replaced by a
simultaneous bright flash and thunderous sound which is then followed by footage of a nuclear explosion, an explosion similar in appearance to the near surface burstTrinity test of 1945, followed by another cut to footage of a billowing mushroom cloud.
As the fireball ascends, an edit cut is made, this time to a close-up section of incandescence in the mushroom cloud, over which a voiceover
from Johnson is played, which states emphatically, "These are the
stakes! To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to
go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die."
Another voiceover then says, "Vote for President Johnson on November 3.
The stakes are too high for you to stay home." (Two months later,
Johnson won the election in an electoral landslide.)
Bear in the woods
Bear in the woods was a 1984 campaign advertisement endorsing Ronald Reagan for President
that depicted a brown bear (likely symbolizing the Soviet Union)
wandering through the woods. Despite the fact that the ad never
explicitly mentioned the Soviet Union, the Cold War or Walter Mondale, it thematically suggested that Reagan was more capable of dealing with the Soviets than his opponent.
The 1984 "We begin bombing in five minutes" incident is an example of cold war dark humor. It was a personal microphone gaffe
joke between Ronald Reagan, his White House staff and radio technicians
that was accidentally leaked to the US populace. At the time, Reagan
was well known before this incident for telling Soviet/Russian jokes in televised debates, many of which have now been uploaded to video hosting websites.
My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.
The joke was a parody of the opening line of that day's speech:
My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you that today I
signed legislation that will allow student religious groups to begin
enjoying a right they've too long been denied—the freedom to meet in
public high schools during non-school hours, just as other student
groups are allowed to do.
Following his trip to Los Angeles in 1959 and being refused entry into Disneyland, on security grounds, a dejected Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev joked, "...just now I was told that I could not go to Disneyland, I asked 'Why not?' What is it, do you have rocket launching pads there?" The only person more disappointed than Khrushchev was Walt Disney himself, who claimed he had been looking forward to showing off his 'submarine fleet', which was actually the Submarine Voyage ride.
The United States and the Soviet Union engaged in competition
vis-à-vis the arts. Cultural competition played out in Moscow, New York,
London, and Paris. In 1946 America opened an exhibition called
'Advancing American Art' which gained popularity with the aims of
expressing American art, in response the Soviets opened a respective
exhibition showcasing Soviet Realism. The Soviets excelled at ballet and chess, the Americans at jazz and abstract expressionist paintings. The US funded its own ballet troupes, and both used ballet as political
propaganda, using dance to reflect life style in the "battle for the
hearts and minds of men." The defection of a premier dancer became a
major coup.
Chess was inexpensive enough—and the Russians always won until America unleashed Bobby Fischer. Vastly more expensive was the Space Race, as a proxy for scientific supremacy (with a technology with obvious military uses). As well when it came to sports the two countries both competed in the
Olympics during the Cold War period which also created severe tension
when the West boycotted the first Russian Olympics in 1980.
Music
1940s
As President Franklin D. Roosevelt died and World War II concluded
with the detonation of nuclear weapons over Japan in 1945, the stage was
quickly set for the emergence of Cold War hostilities between the new
superpowers in 1946. Musicians concertizing in the United States during
this period were suddenly exposed to rapidly shifting diplomatic and
political circumstances.
In 1946 the US State Department assumed control of the cultural diplomacy initiatives in South America which were initiated in 1941 by President Roosevelt's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. At first, the State Department continued to encourage leading musicians to concertize and broadcast music in support of its Pan-Americanism policy in the region through its Office of International Broadcasting and Cultural Affairs. As a result, live radio broadcasts to South America by such musicians as Alfredo Antonini, Néstor Mesta Cháyres and John Serry Sr. on CBS's Viva América show continued into the first years of the cold war era. As the decade came to a close, however, the focal point for American
foreign policy shifted toward the superpower rivalry in Europe and such
cultural broadcasting to South America was gradually eliminated.
Van Cliburn was a pianist who was celebrated with a ticker tape parade after winning a musical competition in the Soviet Union.
From 1956 through the late 1970s, the US State Department sent
its finest jazz musicians to show off music that appealed to youth, to
demonstrate racial harmony at home, and to undergird freedom as jazz was
a democratic music form, free flowing and improvised. Jazz tours of the
Soviet Union were organized in 1956, and lasted through the 1970s.
In addition to jazz, the US State Department also supported the performance of classical music by noteworthy American orchestras and soloists as part of its cultural diplomacy initiatives during the cold war. During the 1950s, the bass-baritone William Warfield was recruited by the Department of State to perform in six separate European tours which featured productions of the opera Porgy and Bess . In 1961-1962 Howard Hanson's Eastman Philharmonia Orchestra at the Eastman School of Music
was selected to represent the nation on an international concert tour
which included thirty four cities and sixteen countries in Europe, the
Middle East and Russia.
The United States Seventh Army also played an integral role in supporting cultural diplomacy and strengthening international ties with Europe during the cold war. The Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra was founded by Corporal Samuel Adler
in Stuttgart, Germany as part of an effort by the US Army to
demonstrate the common cultural heritage which existed in the United
States, its European allies and the conquered nations in Europe during
the cold war period. The orchestra concertized extensively throughout
Europe from 1952 until 1961 and performed works from the classical
repertoire as well as contemporary compositions from the United States.
Listed among the ensemble's earliest "musical ambassadors" were several
young conductors including: John Ferritto, James Dixon, Kenneth Schermerhorn and Henry Lewis.
Many protest songs during the 1980s reflected general unease with escalating tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States brought on by Ronald Reagan's and Margaret Thatcher's
hard line against the Soviets. For example, various musical artists
wore military uniform-like costumes, as a reflection of the increased
feeling of militarism seen in the 1980s. Songs symbolically showed the
superpowers going to war, as in the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song "Two Tribes". This song's MTV music video featured caricatures of United States President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General SecretaryKonstantin Chernenko in a wrestling match.
Other songs expressed fear of World War III, as in the Sting song, "Russians",
with lyrics such as "I don't subscribe to his [Reagan's or
Khrushchev's] point of view" (that Reagan would protect Europe, or that Khrushchev would "bury" the West). Other examples include Sly Fox's "Let's go all the way", a song about "going all the way" to nuclear war, The Escape Club's "Wild Wild West" with its various references to the Cold War and Fischer-Z's album "Red Skies over Paradise". The Genesis song "Land of Confusion" expressed a desire to make some sense out of the world, especially in relation to nuclear war.
Probably the most famous of the 1980s songs against increased confrontation between the Soviets and the Americans was Nena's "99 Luftballons",
which described the events – ostensibly starting with the innocent
release of 99 (red) toy balloons – that could lead to a nuclear war.
The Swedish band Imperiet's "Coca Cola Cowboys" is rock song about how the world is divided by two super powers that both claim to represent justice.
Roman Palester, a classical music composer had his works banned and censored in Poland and the Soviet Union, as a result of his work for Radio Free Europe, even though he was thought to be Poland's greatest living composer at the time.
Theatre
Musicals and plays
Chess The game of chess was another mode of competition between the two superpowers, which the musical demonstrates.
Historians
debate whether the spread of American-style consumerism to Western
Europe (and Japan) was part of the Cold War. Steigerwald reviews the
debate by looking at the book Trams or Tailfins? Public and Private Prosperity in Postwar West Germany and the United States (2012) by Jan L. Logemann:
In arguing that West Germany was not "Americanized" after
the war, Logemann joins a long debate about American consumer
capitalism's power, sweep, and depth of influence in the developed world
through the second half of the twentieth century. In pointed contrast
to Reinhold Wagnleitner's Coca-colonization and the Cold War (1994) and Victoria de Grazia's Irresistible Empire
(2005), Logemann argues that, for all the noisy commentary, pro and
con, about postwar Americanization, West Germans shaped their version of
the affluent society according to deeply held and distinctly
un-American values. Rather than a sweeping homogenization of the
developed world, postwar affluence ran along "different paths to
consumer modernity" ... Instead of the "consumer-as-citizen" (whom
Lizabeth Cohen, in The Consumer's Republic [2003], defined as the
main social type in postwar America), West Germans promoted the social
consumer who practiced "public consumption," which Logemann defines as
"the provision of publicly funded alternatives to private consumer goods
and services in areas ranging from housing to transportation or
entertainment" (p. 5).
The Freakonomics Radio podcast episode "How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War (Ep. 386)" explores the impact that the supermarket
had and has on American culture, including the depth of policy
decisions by the US Government that impacted agriculture, as well as
serving a propaganda weapon against the Soviet Union. The role of makeup
and the consumption of makeup played a role in society and propaganda,
and in the conflict between capitalism and communism.
Sports
Cold
war tensions between the US and the USSR were the backdrop of sports
competitions, especially in ice hockey, basketball, chess and the
Olympic Games.
Playground equipment constructed during the Cold War was intended to foster children's curiosity and excitement about the Space Race. It was installed in both Communist and non-Communist countries throughout the Cold War.
Video games
Games
created during this time period often used a motif of nuclear war, as
was the threat at that time. Some of the games listed have been made
after the conclusion of the Cold War, but feature a central plot point
around the Cold War.
Anti-nuclear protests first emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the United Kingdom, the first Aldermaston March, organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, took place in 1958. In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, about 50,000 women brought together by Women Strike for Peace marched in 60 cities in the United States to demonstrate against nuclear weapons. In 1964, Peace Marches in several Australian capital cities featured "Ban the bomb" placards.
In the early 1980s, the revival of the nuclear arms race triggered large protests about nuclear weapons. In October 1981 half a million people took to the streets in several
cities in Italy, more than 250,000 people protested in Bonn, 250,000
demonstrated in London, and 100,000 marched in Brussels. The largest anti-nuclear protest was held on June 12, 1982, when one million people demonstrated in New York City against nuclear weapons.In October 1983, nearly 3 million people across western Europe
protested nuclear missile deployments and demanded an end to the arms
race; the largest crowd of almost one million people assembled in the Hague in the Netherlands. In Britain, 400,000 people participated in what was probably the largest demonstration in British history.
Other
Barbie—Barbie represented the American way of life, because she was the ultimate consumer.
New Math was a strong reaction to the launch of Sputnik, by changing the way mathematics was taught to school age children.
