From CIA-funded abstract expressionism to protest rock, from proxy wars to the cultural politics of the space race – how the Cold War made and remade the world we live in

The Cold War was never simply a military stand-off. It was a cultural one and a total competition between two systems for the loyalty of the world’s populations, conducted through the full range of human expression: art, music, literature, architecture, sport, cinema, fashion, food, and the design of everyday objects. Understanding the Cold War means understanding its cultural dimensions, because those dimensions shaped not only what was made and consumed in the decades between 1945 and 1991, but the entire landscape of ideas, values and possibilities within which those decades were lived.

The conflict was global in scope and local in its effects. It structured the domestic politics of every country on earth, determined the fate of dozens of governments, produced both the nuclear arsenals that could destroy the planet and the space race that first enabled human beings to leave it, and created the conditions, through the proxy wars fought on behalf of the superpowers for some of the most devastating conflicts of the twentieth century.

It was also, inescapably, a battle of stories: of competing accounts of what human life was for, what freedom meant, what history was tending toward. The artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals who lived through the Cold War did so in a cultural environment shaped by that battle, whether they knew it, whether they chose it, or whether they spent their careers trying to escape it.

For more writing on Resistance & Solidarity in art, culture and political struggle, read related articles across Pen vs Sword.

"The price of empire is terror"

Hannah Arendt

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Culture as cold war weapon – the CIA, Abstract Expressionism and the Congress for Cultural Freedom

The most extraordinary cultural intervention of the Cold War was one that remained secret for decades: the CIA’s covert funding of Western culture as a weapon against Soviet communism. Through the Congress for Cultural Freedom which was a front organisation that funded literary magazines, art exhibitions, music festivals and conferences across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, the CIA promoted a vision of Western cultural life that was diverse, individualistic, challenging and free, in deliberate contrast to the official culture of socialist realism that Soviet cultural policy enforced.

The most surprising beneficiary of this programme was Abstract Expressionism, the American art movement centred on Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning that the CIA promoted internationally as an expression of American freedom and individualism. The gesture of individual self-expression, the refusal of ideological content, the scale and ambition of American painting in the postwar period: all of this was read, by those who promoted it, as a cultural argument against Soviet collectivism. The irony that many of the Abstract Expressionists were themselves politically radical – Rothko had been a member of the Communist Party; Pollock had been briefly sympathetic to it, was carefully managed.

The use of art as propaganda is a theme that runs throughout Pen vs Sword. Our hub on Art and Power traces how visual culture has been used and misused by states and movements across history. The Cold War CIA programme represents one of its most sophisticated and most cynical applications: the co-option of genuine artistic freedom in the service of an ideological agenda that its beneficiaries were never told about.

Che Guevara and the revolutionary imagination

No figure of the Cold War era has been more thoroughly absorbed into global popular culture and more thoroughly misunderstood in the process than Che Guevara. The Argentine revolutionary who fought alongside Castro in Cuba, who became a symbol of anti-imperialism across the Global South, and who was executed in Bolivia in 1967 at the age of thirty-nine, has since been transformed into a commodity: his face on T-shirts, his image on posters, his story in Hollywood films. This transformation is itself a Cold War story and the story of how capitalism absorbs and neutralises radical challenge by turning it into a lifestyle choice.

Guevara’s actual politics were more complicated and more interesting than the myth. He was not simply a romantic revolutionary. He was a serious political thinker who developed a distinctive account of guerrilla warfare as a political strategy, who understood the relationship between cultural and economic liberation, and who broke with the Soviet model of communism precisely because he saw it as insufficiently revolutionary. His quarrel with both superpowers and his insistence that genuine liberation required something that neither American capitalism nor Soviet socialism could offer, was the most interesting political position of the Cold War era, and the one least likely to be represented accurately on a T-shirt.

Salvador Allende and the cultural politics of the Chilean road to socialism

Salvador Allende‘s election as President of Chile in 1970 represented something that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had planned for: a democratically elected socialist government that had come to power through electoral means, in a country with functioning democratic institutions, and that was pursuing a programme of radical economic transformation, nationalisation of copper mines, land reform, free school milk for children, all within the framework of constitutional democracy.

The Nixon administration’s response to Allende’s election was one of the Cold War’s most documented examples of US intervention in democratic processes. The CIA destabilised the Chilean economy, funded opposition parties and newspapers, and supported the military plotting that culminated in Pinochet’s coup on 11 September 1973, when the presidential palace was bombed and Allende died. The cultural dimensions of this intervention were significant: the US funded El Mercurio, Chile’s largest newspaper, to produce anti-Allende propaganda. The music, poetry and visual art that flourished under Allende including the nueva cancion movement and the political murals were suppressed under Pinochet with the same systematic thoroughness applied to political opposition.

*Youtube Video Taken From the Promises Project Film ‘Loved by Ghosts‘

Proxy wars and the Cold War’s human cost

The Cold War’s most devastating consequences were felt not in Europe, where the nuclear standoff kept direct military conflict impossible, but in the Global South, where the superpowers fought their ideological battle through local proxies. From Korea to Vietnam, from Angola to Mozambique, from Nicaragua to Afghanistan, the competition between American and Soviet interests produced conflicts that killed millions and destroyed societies.

Our account of proxy wars traces the political logic and the human consequences of this system: the way in which the lives of people in the Global South were treated as stakes in a game whose rules they had not agreed to and whose outcomes they could not influence.

The cultural consequences of these proxy wars were profound. Vietnam produced a body of American literary and cinematic work, from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now that has shaped how the United States understands itself and its relationship to military violence.

Angola’s civil war, sustained for decades by Cuban, Soviet and American intervention, produced a generation of writers, musicians and visual artists who documented the human cost of Cold War ideology from the inside. The music of liberation movements across southern Africa (from the freedom songs of the ANC to the work of Miriam Makeba), became the sonic form of anti-colonial politics.

"We will bury you."

Nikita Khrushchev 

*Youtube Video Taken From the Promises Project Film ‘Loved by Ghosts‘

Shock and Awe – the Cold War’s military legacy

The military doctrine of Shock and Awe was the overwhelming application of force designed to paralyse an adversary’s will to resist and emerged from the strategic culture of the Cold War, from the thinking of planners who had spent decades contemplating how to fight and win nuclear war. Its application in the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq represented the post-Cold War assertion of American military supremacy: the demonstration, through overwhelming conventional force, that the power which had won the Cold War could now enforce its will without the constraint of superpower competition.

The cultural politics of Shock and Awe were as deliberate as the military ones. The CNN coverage of the 1991 bombing of Baghdad such as the tracers crossing the night sky, the precision weapons striking their targets, the language of “surgical strikes” and “collateral damage” was a media event as much as a military one, designed to demonstrate American technological superiority and to make the violence it enacted seem clean, precise and almost humane. This media management of military action was a direct descendant of Cold War information warfare: the use of images and narratives to shape the perception of power rather than simply to exercise it.

Anarchy, dissent and the Cold War’s internal critics

The Cold War produced its own internal critics from within Western societies who refused the binary of American capitalism versus Soviet communism, and who developed alternative political traditions that challenged both. Anarchism, the tradition that rejects all forms of hierarchical authority, whether capitalist or socialist, was one of the most significant of these alternatives.

Its insistence that the state itself is a form of domination, that neither Washington nor Moscow had the interests of ordinary people at heart, and that genuine liberation required something that neither superpower could offer, was the most intellectually consistent critique of the Cold War from the inside.

Angela Davis‘s position, as a Black communist and feminist intellectual who was imprisoned by the American state during the Cold War represents another form of internal critique: the insistence that the American claim to be the champion of freedom was compromised, fundamentally and irredeemably, by the racial violence on which American society was built.

Her case, and the global movement that grew up in response to it, was itself a Cold War cultural phenomenon: the international solidarity that developed around her imprisonment was a demonstration that the Third World solidarity the US feared in socialist movements could be built around individual cases of injustice as much as around political programmes.

The Cold War’s cultural legacy – what it left behind

The Cold War ended officially in 1991, but its cultural legacy is still being worked out. The mental habits it produced and the binary thinking that divides the world into friend and enemy, the suspicion of any politics that challenges the existing order, the conflation of dissent with disloyalty, have persisted long after the specific antagonism that produced them has dissolved.

The surveillance infrastructure that the Cold War built – the intelligence agencies, the monitoring systems, the legal frameworks for domestic surveillance, has been repurposed for the war on terror and for the management of social movements that challenge existing power.

The Cold War also shaped the cultural imaginary of the future in ways that are still with us: the science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, produced in the shadow of nuclear annihilation, imagined futures that were either utopian or catastrophically dystopian, and rarely anything in between.

Read more of our full articles on Big tech and democracy – Silicon Valley reshaping power, History of activism – protests that shaped the world and language, media and truth – Cold War propaganda and the battle of narratives.

For the complete political and cultural context of the Cold War, explore our Resistance and Solidarity hub, our account of Che Guevara – revolutionary icon and Cold War symbol and our analysis of proxy wars – the Cold War fought by other people.

Pen vs Sword Books – Book Recommendations 

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1.  Who Paid the Piper? The Cultural Cold War  by Frances Stonor Saunders

   The definitive account of the CIA’s covert funding of Western culture – one of the most important revelations in Cold War history.

2.  The Motorcycle Diaries  by Ernesto Che Guevara

   Guevara’s account of his journey through South America – the book that explains how the Cold War’s most iconic figure was made.

3.  The Shock Doctrine  by Naomi Klein

   Klein’s account of how Cold War-era economic ideology was imposed on the world through crisis – essential for understanding the Cold War’s economic legacy.

4.  The Spy Who Came in from the Cold  by John le Carre

   The best novel ever written about the Cold War’s moral and cultural dimensions – and a devastating indictment of both sides.

5.  Manufacturing Consent  by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman

   The foundational analysis of how American media served Cold War ideology – as relevant to the present as when it was written.

6.  The Origins of Totalitarianism  by Hannah Arendt

   Arendt’s account of fascism and Stalinism – the philosophical framework that shaped Cold War liberal thought.

7.  The Wretched of the Earth  by Frantz Fanon

   Fanon’s account of colonialism and liberation – the text that shaped anti-colonial movements in the Global South throughout the Cold War.

8.  Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook  by Doris Lessing

   Lessing’s novel about politics, feminism and the Cold War left – the finest literary account of what it was like to live through the Cold War as a thinking person.

"Revolution is not a dinner party."

Mao Zedong

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