Page 200 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

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 United States 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
various 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 United States (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.
In the 1940s the notion of the Soviet Union as a global threat to
freedom and democracy was complemented by the ‘threat’ of internal
communist subversion. In 1948 the US Congress established the
House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate alleged
communist infiltration of the US political, military and cultural
establishment. The committee hearings developed into ‘witchhunts’,
led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and supported by Hollywood stars
such as Ronald Reagan, James Stewart, John Wayne and Bing Crosby,
who lent their reputations and artistic resources to the anti-communist
cause.
These were the years of the ‘Cold War’ proper. Stalin died in 1953,
to be replaced by Nikita Krushchev, while John F.Kennedy became
President of the United States. Kennedy continued the anti-communist

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