Computer Technology In Fail-Safe

Richard Matheson’s book I Am Legend falls under the genre of science fiction. Critics performing analysis of I Am Legend often say it is a metaphor for the spread of communism, especially since it was written during the height of the cold

The late 1940′s were a time when much change happened to the American society. As a result to the expanding threat of the Soviet Union, or its Communistic ideals, America took a stand that lead it to the Cold War.  Although the war didn’t involve fighting directly with Russia, it still affected the American society and domestic policy. The war affected America so much that it lead to a fear of livelihood; precisely when Joseph McCarthy began his “witch hunt”. The Cold war lead to an enlarged fear of nuclear war; as well, it affected many of the domestic policies.

It promotes posturing; encourages speculation; and creates hysteria. This theme permeated American politics and popular culture during the McCarthy era of the 1950s. As WWII ended, nations began to polarize. The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the leading economic and military states, and began competing for influence throughout the countries they now occupied upon liberation from Germany and Japan. Under the banner of their own brand of idealism, they individually sought geopolitical control and economic benefit. As the stakes increased, competition between the two powers spread to the atomic arena and the exploration of space. The result for the next 45 years is a saga of fear not only of the other side,

The Great Terror was one of the single greatest loss of lives in the history of the world. It was a crusade of political tyranny in the Soviet Union that transpired during the late 1930’s. The Terrors implicated a wide spread cleansing of the Communist Party and government officials, control of peasants and the Red Army headship, extensive police over watch, suspicion of saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries, and illogical slayings. Opportunely, some good did come from the terrors nonetheless. Two of those goods being Sofia Petrovna and Requiem. Both works allow history to peer back into the Stalin Era and bear witness to the travesties that came with it. Through the use of fictional story telling and thematic devises Sofia Petrovna and Requiem, respectively, paint a grim yet descriptive picture in a very efficient manner.

During the Cold War, America and the Soviet Union were competing to develop more sophisticated weaponry than each other. Because of this, Americans dreaded the Soviet Union. They also feared communism– which according to Achieve 3000’s passage,“Case Against Rosenberg Falls Apart”,“It is the political theory that the Soviet’s lived by” (1). Also according to Achieve 3000, “The Americans thought that the Soviet Union had spies that were in the midst of the American people” (1). This fear lead to many precautions that the government made to prevent the American people from fearing the Soviet Union which was called the “Red Scare”.

One of the Cold War’s most prominent is The Ugly American. Written in 1958, this book was a best seller, filled with different stories about why communism was winning and what must be done about it. The authors of the book The Ugly American used one main argument for its readers: “communism is a monolithic enemy whose fundamental values challenged those of the United States and whose ultimate goal was world domination.” (page 4) There stories were one of main forces driving people like Kennedy and Johnson to go and “save” Vietnam from

This hysteric continued to spread among the American people as seen in Document C, revealing how far the public’s anxiety went and the extent to which a family is huddled in a bomb shelter with bunkers and canned food supplies, shielding themselves from future nuclear bombs as the Soviet Union began to take advances in technology. Theses factors of establishing investigations, trials, accusations, and bombshells had only intensified the growing fear of communism that Eisenhower did little to obtain. However, Eisenhower had made some progress in improving the issue of the Soviet Union’s technological advance, but to an extent.

“McCarthyism” became an imprecation used to silence those who wanted to discuss the Communist penetration, including espionage, of American life. Richard Condon’s fantasy of a McCarthy-like demagogue in The Manchurian Candidate would capture the Wisconsin Senator’s effect: the ruthless demagogue who, by discrediting anti-Communism, insidiously advances the Communist cause. McCarthy was aided in his meteoric rise by the mendacious denial, on the part of the left, of the nature and success of a communist movement directed by Moscow in the United States. It was also true that his “reign of terror” would be greatly exaggerated by historians writing after his fall and on into the present time. They would use terms such as “The Great Fear” to characterize all anti-communism as a dark and destructive crusade that released the paranoia and nativism always threatening to burst through the surface of American

With the dust settling after the end of the Second World War two supers started to emerge. In the Western side of the globe with the power of industry, manufacturing and a free market, capitalist society the United States was growing at the fastest rate in modern times. As a polar opposite to the United States and their form or government almost as if suited for a fiction novel The Soviet Union with the power of a Communist Iron Fist Government was too emerging. Both wielding the power and never seen before destructive power of the atomic bomb squared off in a worldwide chess match using the globe and neighboring countries as their board game and pawns. Both countries tried to spread their form of

Vonnegut's antiwar fiction illustrates war machines and time machines that produce thoughtless machine-like humans. He considers the paranoid fear of cybernetic system that is responsible for distopia in which humanity is devalued. (Babaee, 2014, pg. 6)

John Gaddis is a professor at the University of Yale. Gaddis field of interest are the “U.S Cold War history; Historical methodology; Biography; Grand Strategy (Yale University." John Gaddis. http://history.yale.edu/people/john-gaddis). Since his field of interest is in the U.S Cold War history, he wrote a book about it by the name of The Cold War A New History. Gaddis’s book is written for his undergraduate Yale students that he lectures to every Monday and Wednesday afternoon. His real purpose in this book is to make his Yale undergraduates understand what the Cold War was since “hardly any of them remember any of the events I’m (he is) describing”(preface).

After World War II, the United States faced a malevolent philosophical dispute that had spread from within itself. Chapter nine in Thinking Through the Past is titled “Pop Culture as History: The War Comes Home” because it identifies America’s disposition over the subject of communism during the Cold War era. Historian Stephen J. Whitfield writes his secondary source entitled, “The Culture of the Cold War” which presents a detailed analysis pertaining to the lives of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum of anti-communism during the 1950s in United States. Questions arise that carry significance to cultural and social growth during the period: How was communism threatening the

Philip K. Dick wrote “Time Out of Joint” in 1959 expressing his criticism on the war and on the hysteria generated by the “Red Scare.” However, he could not directly criticize the government and had to recur to the use of literary devices such as symbolism, irony, parallels and, most importantly, a time shift between the author’s present and the setting of the novel. From 1949, when the Soviets tested their own atomic bomb, the tension between America and the USSR, accumulated since the aftermath of the World War, came to a peak. The economic and social differences between the two countries led people in America to associate Communism with the enemy, resulting in an increasing collective hysteria on the perceived threat posed by

Thesis: In the Cold War through the creation and improvement of surveillance technology such as satellite surveillance, nuclear submarines, and surveillance aircraft to give superior intelligence while being totally undetected or invulnerable from the enemy.

Our group’s reverse allegory comic features the computers as the new leaders of the society. We chose the computers as an allegory for Communism due to the fact that technology, in many people’s opinion, is the new hope for human race to prevent or find a solution for our world’s most critical crises. Communism also provided hope in both China and the Soviet Union in 1966 and 1917 respectively. Before Mao gained control of China, there was a century of