Page 198 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 177

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBALISED WORLD
Despite the lack of empirical foundation for the Red Scare of 1918–20,
its success as a public relations campaign may be judged by the fact that by
1923 one million workers had left the American trade union movement, and
that by 1920 the American Communist Party’s membership had fallen from
70,000 to 16,000. More significantly, perhaps, the Red Scare established
‘militant anti-communism’ as ‘a core American idea. . . . The idea that the
ultimate aim of the USSR was, and always would be, the violent overthrow
of the American government took root at this time’ (ibid., p. 89). Robert
Murray asserts that ‘the net result [of the campaign] was the implantation of
the Bolsheviks in the American mind as the epitome of all that was evil’
(1955, p. 16).
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s this ‘core’ idea was reflected in the
output of Hollywood’s ‘dream factory’. Films such as Comrade X and
Ninotchka advanced a picture of Soviet Russia as inferior, morally and
economically, to the US. Bolshevik characters were stereotyped as cold,
austere ideologues who, in Greta Garbo’s case, needed nothing more than a
firm hand to loosen them up and awaken them to the joys of American
capitalism. These films complemented journalistic accounts of Bolshevik
atrocities and contributed to the consolidation of anti-Bolshevik, anti-Left
ideology at the heart of American culture and politics.

The grand alliance
By the 1930s, of course, Stalinism had been established in the Soviet Union
and the atrocity stories of earlier years had acquired a degree of substance.
Show trials, famine and mass executions of political dissidents led to
millions of Soviet casualties between 1934 and the outbreak of the Second
World War. It is not without irony, then, that precisely when the evils of
Soviet communism were becoming evident even to socialists, the content of
Western media images of the country began to change in accordance with
changing perceptions of political and military requirements.
Between 1939 and 1941, while the Soviet Union maintained an uneasy
distance from the war with Nazi Germany, anti-Bolshevism remained highly
visible in the Western capitalist countries. Following Hitler’s Operation
Saragossa and Russia’s entry into the war on the Western allies’ side, it
became necessary for governments to mobilise public opinion behind the war
effort in general, and that of the Soviet Union in particular, locked as it now
was in a fight to the death with Germany. From being the pre-eminent enemy
of and threat to capitalism the Soviet Union was recast in the Western media
as a valued and brave friend and ally. Philosophical and political disagree-
ments with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were placed on one side
in the interests of defeating a common and far more dangerous enemy.
The political objective of mobilising support for the Soviet Union was
achieved by a propaganda and public relations campaign designed to

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