Page 199 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 178

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
overturn the negative images of the preceding two decades. A new, more
positive picture emerged of the Soviet Union as a welcoming, friendly place
inhabited by noble, hard-working proletarians, honest communists and
peace-loving armies. Stalin became ‘Uncle Joe’, as Western populations were
exhorted to donate food and money to the starving Russians in the siege of
Leningrad.
All of these positive images were included in Warner Brothers’ 1943
movie Mission to Moscow, in which Hollywood star Walter Huston played
the part of the real-life US ambassador to Moscow. The film gave an
‘account’ of events in the Soviet Union leading up to the outbreak of war,
including lengthy courtroom scenes in which state prosecutor Vyshinsky dealt
firmly but fairly with Bukharin, Radek and other ‘Trotskyite’ conspirators.
Vyshinsky, Soviet President Kalinin, even Stalin himself, were all depicted in
the film as kindly, sympathetic figures, for whom no sacrifice would be too
great for the cause of humanity. In the US, as in Britain and other countries,
the media were given the task of building an international political environ-
ment in which, contrary to the pre-1939 period, Nazism was the enemy and
Bolshevism the friend of the West. 2

The Cold War

The Second World War ended in 1945, and with it this brief period of East–
West harmony. Little changed in the Soviet Union (Stalin remained firmly in
control, as he had done since 1934) but its image in the Western media
quickly reverted to that of the earlier ‘Red Scare’ phase. The US had emerged
from the war as the dominant global power, and wished to extend its
economic and military influence throughout the world. In this regard the
notions of ‘Soviet expansionism’ and ‘communist subversion’ were found
to be useful pretexts with which to justify sending military forces at vari-
ous times in the post-war period to South-East Asia (Korea, Vietnam,
Cambodia), central America (the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El
Salvador), the Middle East (Lebanon), and the Caribbean (Cuba, Grenada).
Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman have described the close relationship
between post-war US economic and military interests and the development
of the concept of the ‘Soviet threat’ in its various manifestations (1988). For
these authors, in a pattern which was repeated in the Gulf War of the 1990s,
the concept served chiefly as a device for the mobilisation of public support
behind what might otherwise have appeared to the American people as
costly and unnecessary military adventurism. To intervene abroad the US (in
some cases accompanied by key allies like Britain) required an enemy.
Although the Soviet Union was never in a position to pose the threat
suggested by Cold War propagandists (even assuming that it wished to do
so) the secretive, posturing nature of its Communist government made it a
convenient object for such propaganda.

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