The Cold War

Contents

• Beginnings of the Cold War
• Rhetorical Challenges and Resources to Fight the War
• The Rhetoric of American Anti-Communism
• The Rhetoric of the Cold War
• The Cold War Years
• End of the Cold War

Beginnings of the Cold War

Roots before World War II

• 1930s was a contest between three ideologies
  • Western multiparty democracy developing the welfare oriented state
  • Communism, a worker-justified centralized economic state, represented by the Soviet Union
  • Fascism, nationalistic justified military state, represented by the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan
• World War II destroyed fascism, leaving the other ideologies to contest the late 20th century. Initially, Germany signed a pact with Russia, leaving the West to oppose fascism as Hitler attacked France and England.France conquered and England having won the battle of Britain, Hitler attacked Russia. Thus formed the grand alliance of the West and Communist Russia against Fascist Germany, Japan, and Italy. Defeat left the West and the Communist Soviet Union with the dominant power in the world.
• The alliance of the West and the Soviet Union was an uneasy one. Churchill, leading England, distrusted Stalin, leading the Soviet Union. Roosevelt was wary of Stalin, but pragmatic in the welcoming the power of the Soviet Union in opposing the Axis powers

Planning for the end of World War II outlined expectations for postwar era

• Militaries to be withdrawn when government restored in Europe
• Elections to choose government in currently occupied nations
• Soviets to have influence in central and eastern Europe as buffer to Germany
• United Nations to be formed with triumphant Allies controlling Security Council
• Planning formalized at Yalta and Potsdam Conferences

In the postwar world these agreements were violated

• Armies remained in Europe
• To enforce their influence the Soviet Union constructed Communist Parties in central and eastern Europe to lead one-party states
• Indigenous Communist Parties also formed in other European countries. In Greece and Turkey these parties threatened to take over the states with the support of indigenous military movements .
• In 1949, Mao Zedong's Communist army and party took over China
• In 1950, the Communist North Koreans attacked the South beginning the Korean War

In the United States, isolationism struggled with anti-Communism

• Demobilization of the Army began immediately as the American tendency toward isolation began to be restored. People in the United States turned back to building a consumer society with modern technological goods and a welfare state to distribute economic power broadly. By 1948, defense spending had fallen from 83 billion dollars in 1945 to 9 billion.
• In 1947, the United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, wrote anonymously the "X" article describing Soviet intentions to spread Communism. Kennan proposed the policy known as "containment" that called for economic and social resistance to this Communist pressure.
• In 1947, President Harry Truman, following containment, proposed economic aid to Greece and Turkey, but added military assistance to the Greek government resisting indigenous military resistance supported by Soviet aid. This was followed by the Marshall Plan, in which the United States provided billions of dollars for European recovery. This aid was welcomed in Western Europe and refused in the Soviet sphere.
• When China became Communist in 1949, containment was obviously broken and the "Who lost China?" debate began in the United States. This search led to charges that Communists had infiltrated the United States government.
• In 1950, Communist North Korea attacked South Korea and the Korean War began as the typical Cold War hot war. The United States, authorized by the United Nations, sent troops and the first postwar national confrontation began. By the end of the year, China had entered Korea to resist United Nations' forces.
• The full dimensions of the Cold War were now in place.

Rhetorical Challenges and Resources to Fight the Cold War

There were many obstacles to overcome to motivate the Cold War

• War exhaustion. The society was tired after the four difficult years of World War II with 16 million troops in the armed forces and nearly a half million dead. Beyond that the economic commitment to total war had stopped the development of technological progress in the welfare economy.
• Fighting a former ally. The Soviet Union had been an ally during World War II with the United States providing aid to assist the war effort. Fighting a former ally seemed strange.
• No precipitating attack. There was no Pearl Harbor. Not even a Lusitania (the passenger ship sunk by the Germans during World War I). "The Oceans will protect us" isolationism seemed validated.

But there were also some characteristic beliefs that could serve as rhetorical resources

• Expansionist power was still vivid. The models of the fascist expansionism were still vivid in people's memories. Particularly strong was <appeasement>, the idea that Hitler could have been stopped if he would have been confronted earlier than he was. This yielded the idea that expansion needed to be resisted early and decisively.
• The United States had a history of opposing Communism. As early as the 1910s the United States government had arrested and imprisoned avowed Communists. The campaign against Communism existed prior to the Cold War, even if without intensity.
• The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Through fringe parties and even governmental policy at times, the notion that an unseen conspiracy by powerful people threatened peace and prosperity was an old American idea. It traced back the anti-Masonic movements of the 1800s, the radical opposition to the railroads after the Civil War, the fear of secret immigrant societies of the early 20th century.

The Rhetoric of American Anti-Communism

In opposing Communism, the American culture developed a characteristic rhetoric of opposition:

• Communism was in ultimate conflict with capitalism. The battle was seen as one between two economic systems. Because Communism flourished in poor societies, the contrast between American wealth and impoverished Communist societies was available as a constant theme of danger. Communism threatened to remove our dishwashers and television sets. Vice-president Richard Nixon debated Soviet Chairman Nikita Krushchev in an example of an American kitchen constructed as a display in Moscow in 1959. Krushchev's boast "We will bury you" was widely interpreted as a declaration of total war against capitalism.
• The conflict was a conflict of "systems." The Cold War was depicted as not being between governments but between systems. This positioned the governmental leaders as leaders of the entire society resisting the threat of Communism to our way of life.
• Communism was God-less. Marx had called religion the "opiate of the proletariat." This theme was built into a threat of Communism to faith and the worship of God. Anti-Communism became a common theme in the Catholic and Protestant Churches in the United States, proclaimed from the pulpit and invoked in prayer as a target for God's wrath.
• Communism would destroy our way of life. A byproduct of the conflict of systems, anti-Communism depicted differences in lifestyle in the United States and the Soviet Union as threats to our lifestyle. For example, one theme of anti-Communist rhetoric was that Communism was anti-family because Soviet women worked and placed their children in day care. In the American lifestyle of the time, women were to remain at home and care for their own children. The most important ideograph in opposing Communism was <freedom>, thus connecting the ideology to a basic American value.
• Communism was unitary. Communist movements anywhere in the world (including in the United States) were portrayed as directed from Moscow. This contrasted with our notions of individual choice, freedom of thought and action. It also made those in the United States who were characterized as expressing communist ideas automatically the stooges of Soviet Communism.
• The invisible enemy. Communism was portrayed as secretive. According to this theme, Communists were all around you undermining your society without your knowing. The efforts to suppress Communism did drive many communist sympathizers underground. In addition, charges that those with communist sympathies were in Hollywood or the State department became difficult to disprove. These smear campaigns and the suppression movement lent validity to the invisible enemy theme.

American popular culture developed and expanded on these themes including television series like "I Led Three Lives" about an FBI spy who infiltrated a Communist cell in the United States, and films such as "The Manchurian Candidate" which depicted a plot to brainwash an American for assassination.

The Rhetoric of the Cold War

Political Leaders drew on the rhetoric of anti-Communism to motivate the Cold War. Several characteristics shaped the motivational strategies:

• A two-valued rhetoric. Bipolar. Only two choices were offered: <freedom> or <Communism>. All people were forced to choose; all nations were forced to choose.
• Unity of direction. Within the bipolar logic, all actions by those who opposed <freedom> were said to be directed by the leaders of the Soviet government in Moscow. There was no valid independent thinking recognized in Communism. All was said to be directed from Moscow.
• Polemic. The two-valued logic set up an ultimate contest in which if "they won" life as we know it would end. Communism was all evil; <freedom> all good. The logic precluded compromise. Even in days when the Cold War was less dominant in discourse, the moment was known as "détente" which implied letting them live rather than compromising.
• War between systems. The Cold War was projected as rising above nations. This was a struggle between ways of life, between systems. Thus it was fought in ways other than military, as well as by arms. It also meant that the War rose above national identity to involve defense of the way of life, even of religion.
• The Invisible Enemy. Suspicion of one's neighbor became a part of the Cold War. Communists were depicted as operating secretly within the American society. This gave great political weight to revealing the secret Communists in our midst. This gave rise to McCarthyism.
• Mutual Terror. One of the key strategies of the Cold War was MAD (mutually assured destruction). This doctrine said that nuclear war could only be avoided by the ability of one side to totally annihilate the other with nuclear bombs. Only when war was unthinkable could it be avoided. Thus, mutual nuclear terror drove the motivations of both sides in the Cold War. In the two-valued, polemic rhetoric, THEY not only wanted to destroy our way of life, they wanted to destroy us; and only our ability to destroy them kept them at bay.

Where the rhetoric of anti-Communism prospered throughout the culture, the rhetoric of the Cold War dominated the speeches of leaders.

The Cold War Years

The Cold War lasted from 1946-47 through 1989-90. Several characteristics mark these years.

• The Cold War was total war, but cold. It infused itself throughout the consciousness of the people. It was the society's central commitment. It diverted the resources of the nation into its service. For example, the following table indicates the rise of the Cold War:

	Military Budget of US Government	Percent of total Budget
1945	$83 Billion	89 percent
1946	$43 Billion	78 percent
1947	$12 Billion	35 percent
1948	$9 Billion	30 percent
1950	$15 Billion	37.5 percent
1955	$40 Billion	64.5 percent

This chart also reflects that the distortions of the economy were less total than during World War II, but significantly diminished the nonmilitary uses of resources.

At the same time, actual military action was sporadic rather than constant. The total commitment spawned national confrontations and military diplomacy, but left periods when military deaths were insignificant overall.

• The period was marked by episodic hot wars and proxy wars. The Korean War and the Vietnam War killed nearly a 100,000 Americans. Fought in the service of containment, these wars ended in stalemate and loss for the United States. The better strategy was proxy wars in which the United States and the Soviet Union sponsored sides in wars that devastated particular nations but did not involve significant military losses by the two superpowers. Examples were the Greek Civil War, the Chinese Civil War, the Indochinese War (precursor to the Vietnam War), the Angolan Civil War.
• The period was marked by the terror of nuclear war. MAD rationalized the threat of nuclear war as essential to peace. The thick record of nuclear devastation documented at Hiroshima was generally suppressed, but the vision of nuclear devastation that took its place lay over everyone's day-to-day life.
• The period left a heavily ordered society. The two-valued and polemic nature of the Cold War meant that there was a strong pressure toward conformity. At the same time, the motivational power of this conformity was strong. The interstate highway system was built as the "National Defense Highway Act" with provisions in the law giving priority to military traffic and assuring exits at military installations. After the Soviets placed the satellite Sputnik in orbit in 1957, the "National Defense Education Act" provided low interest loans to students to compete with Soviet technological knowledge and advancement.

The fight against Communism attained nearly the status in the American consciousness that the settlement of the West had had as a dominant motivational structure in the 1800s.

The End of the Cold War

• Began in the postwar period: 1946-47.  Brought to an end in 1989-90 by collapse of the Soviet Union.
• Important changes in 1970s:
  • Period of less intensity known as détente.
  • End of citizen army
  • End of bipolarity.  The strategy of triangulation exploited the split between the Soviety Union and China
• The final intensification of the Cold War occurred during the Reagan administration in the 1980s. Known for decades as an ardent anti-Communist, Reagan renewed the idea of the Soviet Union as an "Evil Empire." Reagan escalated the arms race and threatened to imbalance MAD. The resulting spending on arms nearly destroyed both the US and Soviet economies, but in the end the pressure of the arms race forced tensions in the Soviet system to the surface. The emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev was a last effort to save the Soviet system but failed. Communist dominance of central and eastern Europe ended in the Velvet Revolution and its accompanying relatively peaceful revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990. George Kennan's prediction in the "X" article, that the Soviet Union had inherent contradictions that would ultimately destroy it from internal pressure, had proven true.