Page 214 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

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 inter-
national political environment 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
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 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.
In the 1940s the notion of the Soviet Union as a global threat
to freedom and democracy was complemented by the ‘threat’ of

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