Page 196 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 175

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBALISED WORLD
into, full-scale military conflict, or ‘hot war’. While the phrase is usually
applied to the period between the end of the Second World War and the era
of perestroika, ‘Cold War’ is an apt phrase for the pre-war decades too.
From the political communications perspective, the Cold War is an
interesting case for two reasons. First, it was a real conflict, fought over spheres
of economic and political influence which at times, such as the Cuban missile
crisis and the Korean Airlines disaster, could have led to the direct exchange of
fire between the US and the Soviet Union, with unthinkable consequences for
the entire world. Second, the Cold War furnished the US and other Western
governments, for most of this century, with an ‘enemy’. The ‘threat’ posed by
this enemy – expressed in military and moral terms – was frequently invoked
in the service of domestic politics, such as the undermining and eradication of
socialist parties, trade unions and, as late as the 1980s, anti-nuclear protest
movements. Symbols of the ‘communist’ or ‘Red’ threat were used to justify
resistance to, or refusal of, social welfare improvements, workers’ rights and
other ‘Left’ causes throughout the century. 1
There is a sense, of course, in which the 1917 Bolshevik revolution did
present a real threat to the Western capitalist powers. The revolution
occurred at a time when millions were dying in Europe over an imperialist
struggle for territory and resources. With the help of propaganda techniques
and atrocity stories, young men from Britain, France, Russia, and the US
were being persuaded to lay down their lives in the struggle against Germany.
As hundreds of thousands died in battles for a few metres of land here and
there, opposition to the war increased, spearheaded by the Bolsheviks and
their socialist allies in the Third International. When they took power in
Russia the Bolsheviks withdrew from the war and agitated for an inter-
national proletarian revolution to replace the imperialist conflict. This ‘export’
of revolution was a potent slogan, rightly perceived as threatening by the
custodians of the capitalist order in Europe and America.
Faced with this threat, and a rising tide of socialist opinion, the Western
powers, having defeated Germany, sanctioned the invasion of Soviet Russia
by a multinational expeditionary force including troops from Britain, France,
the US, and Japan. These forces entered the civil war then raging in Russia
on the side of the anti-Bolshevik ‘white’ forces. The intervention failed and
the Bolsheviks went on to consolidate their power in Russia, which was
eventually renamed the Soviet Union. However, the attack established a state
of mutual hostility between the Soviets and the capitalist powers which
continued virtually unaltered until the Gorbachev era.
In the early years of the East–West conflict the governments of the
capitalist powers engaged in diplomatic and economic sanctions against the
Soviets. They also undertook an intense campaign of propaganda directed at
their own populations in an effort to prevent them being ‘seduced’ by
Bolshevism, or by milder forms of socialism and social democracy. In the
early 1920s the British establishment manufactured the ‘Zinoviev letter’ in a

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