Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War With no clear sign of victory in Vietnam, American military casualties helped stimulate opposition to the war by Americans. In their book "Manufacturing Consent", Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman challenge that traditional view of how the media influenced the war and propose that the media instead censored the more brutal images of the fighting and the death of millions of innocent people. The U.S. became polarized over the war. Many supporters of U.S. involvement argued for what was known as the domino theory, a theory that believed if one country fell to communism, then the bordering countries would be sure
Culture during the Cold War of historical materialism to the future, scorning Western nihilistic writings and predicting a peaceful transition to universal communism. Scientocratic visions of the future nevertheless implicitly critiqued the bureaucratically developed socialism of the present. Dissident science fiction writers emerged, such as the Strugatski brothers, Boris and Arkadi, with their "social fantasies," problematizing the role of intervention in the historical process, or Stanislaw Lem's tongue-in-cheek exposures of man's cognitive limitations. In addition to fears of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, during the Cold War, there were also fears of a direct, large scale conventional conflict between