Member-only story
Nine Songs From the Cold War Era that Still Resonate Today
They go with a recent rant
Yesterday, I penned the uplifting rant “The World Has Always Been On Fire and It Always Will Be,” reflecting on the state of the world today and our reaction to it. In trying to move on to the next article this morning, I kept thinking about that rant and how I really should have put more music with it than just the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” at the end. I’m correcting that now; read the original rant and you’ll see that the musicians below, like the authors I mentioned in that previous piece, made the most of a bad situation.
For those of you born after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it may be hard to understand that for many of us who lived through the Cold War, our outrage over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is mixed with a sense of resignation. Somewhere deep in the recesses our “duck-and-cover” memories we knew the long waking nightmare wasn’t really over, the monster sleeping rather than dead. Depending on our age, we had seen Russian tanks in East Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968, and Poland in 1980. The horrific scenes from Kyiv today are all too familiar.
In all of those previous instances, the West reacted exactly as they are reacting today, with outrage and condemnation of Russia but with no intention of…
