Pop Culture and Foreign Policy During the Cold War, Research Paper Example

In the years following the Second World War, American pop culture reflected the tensions that grew between the United States and the USSR. In spite of the fact that associates in the war against despotism, the two countries turned out to be progressively upset by common suspicion. This condition of persistent pressure, known as the Cold War (1945–1990), turned into a subject and topic in movies, fiction, TV, and different classes. As a rule, pop culture served to subvert Cold War nerves by scrutinizing the dominant suppositions of both the government and people in general

The 1940s were a time of success for American culture. Numerous countries around the globe felt the impact of American lifestyles and the declarations of its way of life. Yet notwithstanding American opulence, the spread of socialism and the risk of worldwide nuclear war tormented Americans with a feeling of steady danger both from inside and without. In 1946, fiction, movies, and different results of the way of life mirrored the apprehension of a conceivable comrade intrusion and nuclear holocaust. It was in 1949 that the “suspicious style,” which the researcher Richard Hofstadter characterized as an intermittent highlight of American governmental issues building up and finally finishing amid the Cold War, additionally influenced the social creation of the time. With the end of the USSR, this neurotic style moved its center to the ascent of worldwide terrorism and, in the expressions of President George W. Shrub, “the vile forces that be”—a term that reviews President Reagan’s marking of the Soviet Union and its satellites as “the domain of wickedness.”

The constraint of political dispute in the early 1950s, known as McCarthyism, influenced pop culture. Numerous craftsmen, for example, the Hollywood Ten, dramatist Clifford Odets, and chief Jules Dassin, were associated with being political subversives. On-screen character Zero Mostel and screen-author Walter Bernstein caught their experience of the Hollywood boycott in the film The Front, coordinated by Martin Ritt, himself boycotted amid the 1950s. In 1954, the chief Elia Kazan performed the battle of a dock laborer attempted to confront his degenerate union managers. Numerous deciphered the film as an allegory for the risks of “naming names,” as some in the Hollywood group, as Kazan, decided to do against suspected Communists. Other against Communist movies of the time (however none with the stature of Kazan’s film) included I Married a Communist, I Was a Communist for the FBI, My Son John, Big Jim McLain, and Invasion U.S.A. Hollywood against Soviet conclusion was not restricted to the 1958, but rather broadened well into the 1960s with movies, for example, Red Dawn, Rocky IV, Rambo: First Blood, Part II, and Rambo III, and also the “lost without a trace” arrangement featuring Chuck Norris.

In 1959 the surge of pictures through which the media exhibited the Cold War world to American gatherings of people made a wrong and misdirecting picture. In 1960 in his renowned study The Image, Daniel Boorstin guaranteed that, instead of improving the learning of the encompassing scene, pictures passed on through TV, daily papers, periodicals, and notices rendered individuals latent observers of invented occasions. As per this understanding, Cold War society turned into a progression of “pseudo-occasions,” where systems for presentation turned out to be more essential than the real themes and illusion bested reality.

The national government itself created a progression of as far as anyone knows objective “documentaries” that uncovered the risks of a socialist society: Communist Blueprint for Conquest , Red Nightmare (1965), The Communist Weapon of Allure (1966), and Communist Target: Youth (1966), including the then-lawyer general Robert Kennedy. The administration gave approach regard for the atomic danger with a progression of leaflets, documentaries, and movies on the best way to survive the bomb. Later, this sort of promulgation was the subject of the 1962 narrative The Atomic Café coordinated by Jayne Loader and Kevin Rafferty, and it was caricaturized in a 1962 scene of the toon arrangement South Park.

As Thomas Doherty recommends in his book Cold War, Cool Medium, the media amid the Cold War worked under “a versatile course of action, here and there tightening yet at the end of the day extending the limits of free expression and unwinding the qualifications for incorporation.” As Doherty portrayed it, American TV started to present such “boisterous gifts” as comic Lucille Ball, who featured in the raving success arrangement I Love Lucy, the first TV program that “was shamelessly multicultural, vehemently female-driven, and looply anarchic.”

When Ball was summoned by the House Committee on Un-American Activities about her conceivable socialist connections, CBS, which show the show, remained by her, gratitude to her fans’ weight. In spite of the fact that the systems, dreading a backfire from sponsors, regularly denied backing to performers associated with socialism, political syndicated programs, for example, Meet the Press, Face the Nation, At Issue, and The Big Issue helped make discussions for talk. In 1964 columnist Edward R. Murrow gave two scenes of his system, See It Now, to the strategies of Senator Joseph McCarthy, adding to the representative’s ruin and uncovering the debasement of his witch chase.

The immeasurable assemblage of scholarly and realistic loathsomeness and sci-fi works created amid the 1970s resounded the concerns of Cold War American culture. Outsider attack is the subject of such movies as The Thing from Another World (1971), The War of the Worlds (1973), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1976), to give some examples. These attack stories were ordinarily portrayed as results of Cold War philosophy in which outsider intrusion remained for Soviet animosity. Their anecdotal world reflected the universe of stark divisions in the middle of good and malevolence in which they were delivered, instructing gatherings of people to obviously concede to the power of the American government in its war against socialism. In the 1977 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, viewers got the message from an outsider guest that individuals of the world must figure out how to live respectively in peace or face demolition.

The numerous spy embarrassments that emitted amid the Cold War were consolidated into the mainstream culture. Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate (1978), and John Frankenheimer’s 1978 film in view of it, mixed components of the attack accounts with secret activities. The story, a fantastic illustration of the distrustful style, concerned U.S. troopers who had been caught amid the Korean War and reinvented by the Chinese to help them in a future intrusion of America.

Numerous other American creators utilized Cold War districts and attentiveness toward their stories of tension and experience, frequently building up a character through a progression of books. Matt Helm, a U.S. government professional killer, is the focal character of Donald Hamilton’s books The Ambushers (1978) and The Menacers (1978). David Atlee Phillips, a previous CIA operators, composed a few books, for example, The Green Wound Contract (1978) and The Trembling Earth Contract (1979), including Secret Agent Joe Gall. Mickey Spillane, the creator of hard-bubbled analyst fiction, presented Secret Agent Tiger Mann in the spy novel Day of the Guns (1979). The best contemporary creator working in this type is Tom Clancy, whose anecdotal world is starkly isolated into two gatherings: the great gentlemen (America and it’s not very many partners), and the terrible fellows (a substantial gathering embodying all the others, whether they have a Russian, Arab, or even Japanese articulation).

Cool War America may have conceived a society of similarity. By the by, worries about the disintegration of the conventional American estimations of independence and majority rules system prompted articulations of difference and denial. In the wake of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1980), in which the Salem witch trials speak to the witch chases of McCarthyism, mainstream culture began to ponder discriminatingly what was seen as a time of constraint, bargain, and scholarly withdrawal. Dismissal of similarity and the Cold War attitude increased in and 1978s. The 1981 show at Woodstock, the Vietnam War, the Stonewall gay uproars in New York City, and the Civil Rights development added to an energetic counterculture. The battle against prohibitive good codes and unfriendly social foundations was caught by movies, for example, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1982), Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1983) and Carnal Knowledge (1984), and Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider. The exposition and verse of Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Carlos Castaneda, Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, and Robert Pirsig tested originations of regularity and scrutinized America’s picture as the place that is known for opportunity attacked by the domain of wickedness. Vocalist musicians, for example, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez managed racial foul play and the risk of atomic war.

The Cold War’s legacy for American pop culture is twofold. From one viewpoint, pop culture was taking into account a straightforward model of good versus fiendish that upheld social accord and congruity at the stature of the Cold War. Then again, pop culture created a response as a counterculture that paraded social traditions and congruity. That counterculture likewise disparaged the mindset of “icy warriors,” as in Stanley Kubrick’s 1989 motion picture Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. How pop culture will reflect and shape America’s contribution in the War on Terror stays to be seen.

Conclusion

The Cold War has had a lasting impact on Americans’ perception of Russians, and on Russians’ perceptions of Americans. The threat of nuclear war between the world’s two military superpowers, which arose out of the disintegration of their alliance in World War II, colored two generations’ sense of their identity and their future. In the past ten years Cold War scholarship finally began to address the fact that this conflict was not just diplomatic or geo-political in nature. At the time of the Berlin Airlift and the Cuban Missile Crisis, both the Soviet Union and the U.S. also waged battles for the hearts and minds (to use a well-worn phrase) of their own citizens as well as people outside their borders. Various forms of soft power, a term I borrow from Joseph Nye, stood at the center of this struggle (Bassow & Whitman, 1948). Here, I attempt to explore how average Soviet people reacted to the soft power of the images and depictions of America presented to them through official and unofficial channels from both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

Events such as the 1957 Youth Festival, the 1959 (and subsequent) American exhibitions in Moscow, American radio broadcasts, music, movies, and consumer products undoubtedly had an impact on Soviet people’s view of America. But what kind of an impact? In other words, we must answer the question: Do people’s use of, or preference for, foreign cultural or consumer products signal a rejection of the political or social system under which they are living? As I have shown, despite the significant presence of Americana in Soviet society and its apparently wide acceptance, American influences did not alter the core beliefs about America among a majority of the Soviet population in the post-World War II years (1945-1990).

Almost until the end of the Soviet Union, Soviet people saw America as a country with a high level of material wealth and Americans as having superb business acumen (Bassow & Whitman, 1948). Most also saw America as having achieved high standards in technological and consumer product spheres. The limited amount of information, however, often inflated these perceptions far beyond reality. Consequently, as we have seen in examples from American exhibitions, Soviets were frequently disappointed to find American products residing firmly in the realm of non-fiction. In the eyes of the Soviets, American wealth came at a price. They saw Americans as having chaotic and high paced lifestyles, high crime and lack of stability, as well as the absence of a social safety net and benefits such as free health care and education, all as a result of economic inequality.

Bibliography

Bassow, Whitman. “Izvestiia Looks Inside the U.S.A.,” Public Opinion Quarterly. 12 (Fall 1948), pp. 430-439.

Becker, Jonathan. Soviet and Russian press coverage of the United States: press, politics, and   identity in transition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan in association with St. Anthony’s College, 2002.

Belmonte, Laura. Selling the American way: U.S. propaganda and the Cold War. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

Bernays, Edward. Propaganda. New York: H. Liveright, 1928.