Mind-Munitions

250
Propaganda in the Age of Total War and Cold War
that it had triumphed in the end despite the Battle of Britain and
Pearl Harbour was itself presented as an indicator of its inherent
moral supremacy. Democracies, after all, tend not to wage open war
against other democracies. The democratic aspirations of peace,
equality, liberty and fraternity were embedded in important new
international documents such as the Charter of the United Nations
and the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. The problem, of
course, was that the war had not just been won by Britain and the
United States. Victory had only been achieved with considerable
help from an ally in the form of the Soviet Union whose soldiers
may have fought heroically but whose rulers were more than
willing to deny their people the kind of freedoms in the name of
which the war had been justified in the West. Freedom of
movement, freedom of thought, freedom of religion and freedom
to vote lay at the heart of the Atlantic Charter from which the
Russians had been excluded. And so, with the defeat of the Axis
powers, the cement that had bound together the Anglo-American-
Soviet alliance crumbled. And with the removal of the common
enemy, Churchill’s ‘pact with the devil’ became redundant. In the
years following the Potsdam and Yalta conferences at the end of
the war, deep-rooted ideological differences resurfaced following
from the occupation and suppression of Eastern Europe by the Red
Army and the Americanization of Western Europe through the
Marshall Plan. Worse still was to come with the victory of Mao’s
Communist forces in the Chinese civil war by 1949, the year in
which the Soviets first tested their own atomic bomb.
With the rapid deterioration of wartime allegiances into what
came to be known as the Cold War, a new type of conflict emerged.
This was a war on the mind, a contest of ideologies, a battle of
nerves which, for the next forty years or so, was to divide the
planet into a bi-polar competition that was characterized more by
a war of words and the threatened use of nuclear weapons rather
than their actual use. It was a conflict in which the idea of nuclear
war was constantly on the mind of international public opinion.
Periodically threatening to erupt into ‘Hot War’, as in 1948-9 with
the Berlin Blockade or in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet-
American relations became the focal point around which post-war
thoughts of war and peace came to revolve. The erection of the
Berlin Wall in 1961 was to become the perfect symbol of a divided
world separated by the ‘Iron Curtain’ described by Churchill fifteen