It was the age of Rambo, Red Dawn, and Tom Cruise chasing bogeys at full throttle in Top Gun: the 1980s were a maelstrom of post-imperial paranoia where fear of nuclear annihilation spawned the laughable folly of Britain's "nuclear free zones" and passive acceptance, even gratitude, for the US military presence in Europe.
In such a depressing milieu, British teenagers sought escape from the gray existence of unemployment in pop subcultures that included the tiny ballads of the New Romantics to the guttural anarchy of Punk Rock.
And yet, pop itself from Kate Bush's 'Breathing' to Iron Maiden's '2 Minutes to Midnight' were marbled with Cold War induced anguish.
In Britain, Frankie Goes to Hollywood's 'Two Tribes' explicitly referenced the pointlessness of conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. The song opened with an eerie air raid siren that had the unnerving ability to sound all too real after a few drinks.
West Germany's Nena sang of a nuclear exchange sparked by nothing more sinister than a boy and a girl innocently releasing some red balloons into the sky. NATO's response was to go nuclear in a dirty tide of joy: 'The war machine springs to life, opens up one eager eye, focusing it on the sky- where 99 red balloons go by.'
Now, as we enter 2017, once again, relations between the West and Russia have sunk to an all time low. And yet things are not the same.
NATO, which was seen as a necessity in the 1980s, is now viewed by many as a dinosaur hell-bent on plodding into Russia's backyard for no reason other than it thinks it can. Patriots, disgusted with the artificially created migrant crisis and tired of Obama's smug meddling, now view NATO in a way that was inconceivable 30 years ago.
Liberal sponsored Russophobia, the McCarthyite inquisition, EU censorship, the MSM barrage of fake news, and NATO warmongering on Russia's very borders have now created a class of ordinary citizens in the West who are no longer prepared to simply escape into pop music to hide their fears. These people, now in their late 40s and 50s, came of age in the Cold War and understand that the Russian Federation is no implacable enemy.
Instead, millions ponder the EU's migrant chaos, the sense of burning national humiliation that must be endured for the sake of NATO protection, and the insecurity that is imploding societies from within and realize that they have been played: Those alienated millions who have seen their country sold from right under their feet are unlikely to fight for the globalist order that has waged all out war on their identity and smirked at their misfortune from the ivory towers of Brussels and the DC beltway.
If the liberal elites and their globalist neoconservative allies plunge the West into a new cold war with Russia they must understand that the 1980s have come and gone and that when the music stops — they will be the ones left without a chair.
Or let's put it another way: the British people, who would have understood why the British Army of the Rhine would have had to stand its ground at the Fulda Gap in 1985, will now no longer support NATO's reckless incursions into the Russian geo-cultural sphere. One can only assume that the millions who voted for Donald Trump feel much the same way.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.
