RATIONAL HYSTERIA
American anticommunism did not suddenly emerge as a response to the “Soviet threat” but has existed since at least the first great industrial struggles of the nineteenth century—before the advent of a single communist state. There was no evidence that the immigrant union organizers and agitators who were deported during the Red scare of 1920 were anywhere close to taking over the Republic. There was no evidence that subversives had infiltrated the State Department or other branches of government or that the CIO was plotting revolution or that the Russians were getting ready to march on Paris or drop an atomic bomb on Washington. Yet these fantasies were cultivated as realities by the US press.
The Red scare of 1920, McCarthyism, the cold war, and anticommunism in general were not products of a mass hysteria that gripped the populace like some strange mania from the Dark Ages. Anticommunism was consciously and strenuously propagated by government leaders, business representatives, and the business-owned news media. No doubt large numbers of people were enough influenced by the propaganda to provide an additional momentum and feedback to the various anticommunist campaigns. Yet the evidence suggests that when the propaganda subsided so did popular fears about the Red Menace. And when the propaganda intensified so did the fears. Although it probably never worked that automatically, the important point is that such campaigns were generated mostly from above, more in the service of elite interests than in response to popular passions.
The Red Menace was not a foolish fantasy or hysteria of the opinion makers and officials who propagated it—although its central aim was to produce fantasy and hysteria. While anticommunism may manipulate irrational images and play on irrational feelings, it, itself, is not a product of irrational politics. It serves a very real and rational purpose. It creates a climate of opinion and a political atmosphere that makes it easier to discredit and repress labor militancy and progressive and anticapitalist viewpoints at home and abroad. So much of politics is the rational use of irrational symbols, and this is what media-created anticommunism is. Because the propaganda proves to be ill-founded, and therefore foolish-sounding when refuted, does not mean the propagandists are fools. Because arguments and alarms, charges and headlines, are false does not mean the purveyors don’t know what they are doing. Because the anticommunist opinion makers are misleading, does not mean they are themselves hopelessly misled.
Time and again the Red Peril theme propagated by the governmental-industrial-media complex played an effective part in (1) setting back or limiting the struggles and gains of labor; (2) distracting popular attention from the recessions and crises of capitalism by directing grievances toward interior or alien foes; and (3) marshaling public support for huge military budgets, cold war policies and—as we shall see in more detail—Third World interventions to make the world safe for corporate investment and profits.
Did the corporate, political, and media elites believe what they said about the Red Menace? There is evidence to suggest that in some cases, anticommunist opinion leaders were consciously and deliberately manipulative. Certainly Joe McCarthy’s entire career was a monument to a self-serving, mendacious, and totally cynical anticommunism. We’ve already noted how U.S. News & World Report cynically remarked to its business readership that cold war attitudes could be turned on and off like a spigot to coincide with the dictates of the defense budget and the profit needs of the economy. In the 1964 electoral campaign, when Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater attempted to revive the “communists in the government” charge against the Democrats, he indicated that if it did not catch on, he would drop it—which he did, apparently untroubled that the country had not been alerted to the latest and most passing Red Peril. In politics, as in advertising, truth is often purely instrumental: if it sells, it’s true; if it doesn’t sell, it isn’t true.
Yet there is no doubt that many elites believed what they said about the Red Menace and were themselves gripped by anticommunist fears, sometimes even pathologically so. One of the foremost architects of the cold war, Defense Secretary James V. Forrestal was tirelessly obsessed with the communist threat and thought of little else right up until the day he jumped to his death from the window of a hospital to which he had committed himself. Most corporate-political-media elites hated and feared communism as the enemy to their own class privileges and powers. This itself may have been enough to convince them there was truth in all they said about the imminent dangers of the Red Menace. That a belief serves an ulterior class interest does not mean it is insincerely held. If anything, the congruence between material interest and ideology makes the ideology much easier to embrace wholeheartedly.
In any case, a belief does not gain or lose merit depending on whether its advocates are sincere. Even many fascists are sincere in their views, but this says little about the merits of their beliefs. Whether the propagators of the dominant ideology believe in their own arguments is not the point, sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. The important thing is that they are able to mass distribute these images and realities, thereby preempting the symbolic environment and severely limiting political discourse and consciousness.
TWISTS AND TURNS
To justify military intervention in places like Vietnam and Laos, the United States found another Great Red Menace to go along with the USSR, now accusing the People’s Republic of China of being the purveyor of something called “Asian communism.” By the 1960s the word was out: “Red China,” an awesome giant, armed with nuclear weapons and bent on regional and world domination, was US public enemy number one.29 This image was fortified by pronouncements emanating from Peking itself. While Soviet leaders tirelessly advocated peaceful coexistence and said relatively little about Third World revolutions, China called for “wars of national liberation” and denounced the United States as an “imperialist paper tiger.”
In lockstep with official policy, the US news media began depicting China as a menacing “extremist” nation populated by hundreds of millions of communist fanatics. By the early 1960s newspaper political cartoons no longer caricatured Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev as a threatening figure but as a pudgy almost benign personage overshadowed by an awesome slanty-eyed giant labeled “Red China.”30
In the mid-1970s, after suffering setbacks in Indochina, Angola, and Mozambique, and confronted with a deepening recession at home, US policy-makers once more began to portray the Soviet Union as a growing menace to US security and as a purveyor of Third World revolutions. While the actual material assistance the Soviets gave to liberation struggles was (with the exception of Vietnam) not all that great and in some cases nonexistent, Moscow did offer political and moral support, and did aid nations like Cuba which, in turn, directly assisted leftist insurgents in places like Angola. In contrast, the Chinese attacked the Soviet Union for being the great aggressor and instigator of “social imperialism.” At the same time Peking cultivated sympathetic relations with reactionary governments and counterrevolutionary forces in various countries.
The US media again mirrored the shift in official policy, discovering that China was no longer a menacing giant nor a mindless ant-hill but was inhabited by human beings who liked to play ping-pong, sip soda, and even fall in love and do a turn on the dance floor. The “fanatical Asian communists” were now described as “moderate.” According to Newsweek, Peking’s post-Maoist leaders were putting “China’s house in order” and presiding “over a strongly entrenched and resolutely pragmatic government.”31 In 1978 Peking’s top-man, Vice Premier Deng, appeared in a cover portrait as Time magazine’s “Man of the Year.”
Press reports also talked of mass discontent, poverty, instability, lagging production and other “signs of political and economic disarray” in China.32 As a national entity, China was accorded a more favorable representation in the US media, but Chinese socialism was still described in essentially negative terms. The American public was not to mistake the improvement in Sino-US relations as a sign of approval for China’s e
conomic system.
In contrast, the Soviet Union was once more the Red Menace. Almost on cue, alarmist stories appeared in the news media about the superiority of Soviet military capabilities. During this period Soviet advisers were kicked out of Egypt and Somalia; a massive country like China seemingly switched over to the Western camp; Poland experienced widespread unrest; and the revolutionary government in Afghanistan proved so unstable as to cause the Soviets to commit themselves to a politically and militarily costly intervention. Yet the USSR was portrayed in the press as an inexorably successful foe winning victory after victory, posing a mounting threat to US security.
The accession of Ronald Reagan to the White House brought with it a confrontational belligerency not displayed by American policy-makers since the 1950s. In his first press conference as president, Reagan declared that the Soviet Union’s goal was to impose “a one-world Socialist or Communist state” over the entire globe. “They commit any crime; to lie, to cheat, in order to obtain that.” The United States, Reagan observed, had no choice but to counter the USSR’s aggrandizing moves wherever possible.33
As if on cue, the national media took up the cry. The press seldom mentioned Moscow’s calls for rapprochement; instead references were to “Soviet global expansionism” by a “totalitarian” Soviet system that “poses the most serious military threat and political challenge facing the West.”34 The news media revived cold war stereotypes that had been dormant for over a decade of detente. Soviet concerns were now “Soviet designs.” The Soviet Union was again the “Soviet empire.” “Soviet defenses” were now “Soviet attack capabilities.” Soviet leaders were once more “ruthless Kremlin powerbrokers” whose main interest in life was “power for power’s sake.”35
Media pundits and columnists speculated with chilling calm about the likelihood of nuclear war with the Russians. Within a short period during 1981, officialdom and the press put World War III back on the agenda, treating the public to a steady diet of “delivery systems,” “civil defense evacuations,” “throw weight,” and “retaliatory capability.”36 All the grotesque Dr. Strangelove imagery that had been considered an aberration of the nuclear-minded 1950s again became part of the mainstream media’s vocabulary.
As in the 1950s, so in the 1980s: The Red Menace theme so saturated the media and the opinion climate that even left-leaning and progressive publications felt obliged to lay down an anti-Soviet barrage of a kind they had not found necessary during detente. Skittish liberal and leftist intellectuals, concerned above all with their credibility, once more shifted with the prevailing tide and flashed their anti-Soviet (or antiMarxist, anticommunist, or even just anti-class analysis) credentials, sometimes in articles or reviews, more often in parenthetical almost casual asides, just enough to cover themselves.
The ploy is a familiar one, dating back to the McCarthy era, when one sought to establish one’s political respectability by anticommunist and anti-Soviet genuflection. However, this outpouring only strengthened the very cold war mania and anticommunist orthodoxy that intellectuals ostensibly opposed. Rather than creating more space for themselves, they created less. Those who refused to play this game were called “hardliners,” “orthodox Marxists,” “Soviet apologists,” and the <. like, and were treated as pariahs within the left itself. Though many of them were actually critical of features within Soviet society, their sin was that they had the temerity also to see positive attributes. This was something the me-too anticommunist leftists would not tolerate. The “hardliners” had failed the legitimacy test.
In the early 1980s the Soviets (1) asked for another round of arms limitation agreements, (2) unilaterally supported a no-first-use nuclear pledge and repeatedly invited the United States to do likewise, (3) offered to reduce the number of their medium-range missiles in Europe from 600 to 162, (4) unilaterally put a freeze on any further deployment of their updated medium-range SS20 missiles, (5) urged the Americans to refrain from deploying their more advanced Pershing 2 and cruise missiles, (6) called for a ban of all weapons in outer space, and (7) proposed a 25 percent cutback in intercontinental strategic missiles. These kinds of conciliatory gestures were either ignored by the press or dismissed as “initiatives” in “a propaganda war.”37
While the Soviets were calling for arms cutbacks, U.S. News & World Report (Nov. 22, 1982) was alerting its readers to “an unremitting Soviet arms buildup.” A CIA report released in December 1982 contradicted the “arms buildup” charge, noting that the share of Soviet GNP devoted to the military had “increased slightly since 1965.” But this datum went largely unreported in the press. On December 22, 1982, both the Supreme Soviet and the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party unanimously approved a nuclear weapons freeze resolution virtually identical to the version that had been passed by numerous municipalities and states throughout the United States—an action that went unreported by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, the major networks, and just about all the US media.
The campaign against the Red Menace was not exclusively a media creation but reflected the interests of the dominant corporate-political class of which the media is a part. The twists and turns of media anticommunist alarmism largely paralleled similar shifts in an official policy that was and still is dedicated to making life safe for corporate capitalism at home and abroad. It is not enough to denounce this anticommunist policy as a product of wrong thinking. We must also try to understand why it has been so functional to the interests that nurture it.
In truth, the real threat to the “American Way of Life” has come not from without the system but from within, in the form of poverty, unemployment, a decline in real wages, inequitable tax burdens, urban blight, and environmental devastation and attacks on our civil liberties. With economic crises and material injustices there often come popular unrest, strikes, demonstrations, riots, sit-ins, and a threatened disruption of class order. The Red Menace image propagated by government and media repeatedly attempted to direct popular discontent away from domestic realities and toward imaginary foes. Not the capitalist system but those who criticized it were made the problem. The crisis within the system was transformed into an external threat against it. Just as Hitler sought to blame Germany’s misery on the Jews, so US political leaders, with the help of media opinion-makers, targeted the Reds.
Holding the Red Menace at bay became the preoccupation of our national leaders and national media. It also served as justification for a US global military machine, armed interventions abroad, a nuclear arms race, a gargantuan military budget, and a highly profitable armaments industry.
Throughout the superpowers negotiations of the 1980s, the media continued to portray the White House as ready for improved relations and the Soviets as recalcitrant and belligerent. When President Reagan declared he was going to abrogate the SALT II treaty that limited nuclear arms, CBS’s Dan Rather announced (May 27, 1986): “President Reagan prodded Moscow again on arms control.” A few weeks later (June 19), Rather described another of the president’s talks as “prodding the Soviets. He prodded them both on arms control and a new summit meeting.”
Soviet attempts to cap the arms race and develop better East-West relations were regularly dismissed as manipulative “public relations campaigns,” “propaganda ploys,” and “posturing.”38 An ABC newscaster (July 16, 1989), discussing the Soviet offer of a comprehensive test ban on nuclear weapons, reduced it to “the Kremlin’s smile campaign” designed to influence the Western allies. The offer, he added, represented a tactical departure from previously unsuccessful “strongarm methods.” He did not specify what those methods were. The implicit conclusion was that the Soviet proposal was inherently suspect because it came from the Soviets.
In the news coverage of the 1988 Moscow summit, the only American views publicized were those of the White House and ultraconservative US critics who were even further to the right than President Reagan. The media gave generous coverage to these critics who were displeased with
the prospect of friendlier relations with Moscow. The public was left with the impression that the conservative Ronald Reagan represented the only alternative American perspective on USSoviet affairs. Progressive views were virtually shut out, including criticisms of the US government’s pursuit of space weaponry (Star Wars), its unwillingness to agree to a ban on underground nuclear bomb tests offered by the Soviets, and its failure to note the human rights abuses within US-supported client-states, while harping on Soviet violations.39
When US peace activists spoke in Moscow the 'Washington Post declared on its front page: “Disgruntled U.S. peaceniks participate in Soviet leadership’s counteroffensive.” Using the stale pejorative “peaceniks” three times, the Post labored to portray these American dissidents as tools of the Kremlin.40
At the president’s news conference in Moscow, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell asked how the president felt about the fact that Soviet officials kept dossiers on dissidents. But neither she nor anyone else made any mention of the FBI’s extensive maintenance of dossiers on US protestors and dissenters.41
CELEBRATING THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM
For decades, coincident with the view enunciated by US leaders, the press portrayed the communist nations of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as immutable and totalitarian, wielding an all-permeating, monolithic power over their hapless citizens. When most of these same states swiftly collapsed with a minimum loss of life in 1989-91 in the face of peaceful demonstrations, the US news media gave the historic events months-long saturation coverage. Demonstrations in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania and various other places were accorded favorable and generous exposure of a kind not given to mass demonstrations by dissenters in the United States. The US press celebrated the demise of one-party state communism and the emergence of political democracy, with its independent parties, opposition newspapers, and competitive elections.
Inventing Reality Page 17