Mind-Munitions

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Propaganda in the Age of Total War and Cold War
accent. Fear of nuclear war was exploited by such various front
organizations as the World Peace Council, founded in 1949, which
supported the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950
and was also responsible for disseminating fabricated charges of US
germ warfare in that conflict. Other ‘agents of influence’ such as sympathetic
journalists, academics and even intelligence officers operating
in the West were cultivated by Moscow while massive disinformation
campaigns were also launched by the KGB to disguise the real
strength of the Soviet armed forces while exaggerating the threat
posed by the West. It was a ‘divide and rule’ approach designed to
divert attention from Soviet intentions. According to some estimates,
by 1960 the Soviets were spending the equivalent of $2 billion
dollars on communist propaganda world-wide.
To counter this onslaught, the Americans responded vigorously
on two fronts that were closely connected: the domestic and the international.
In 1948, the Smith-Mundt Act revitalized the American
post-war information services ‘to promote a better understanding
of the United States in other countries, and to increase mutual
understanding between the people of the United States and the
people of other countries’. This statement in fact resonates of
‘cultural propaganda’ – or ‘cultural diplomacy’ as the British and
French prefer to call it; the Americans prefer ‘public diplomacy’.
Usually, such activity involves the dissemination of literature and
other cultural products such as visiting speakers, films, travelling
theatre groups and orchestras, the promotion of language teaching
and other ‘educational’ activities such as student exchange
schemes. All are designed to create over time ‘goodwill’ towards
the country subsidizing the activity. The Europeans had already
been engaged in this type of ‘national self-advertisement’ for some
50 years, with the British entering the field relatively late in the day
with the formation of the British Council in 1934. The Americans,
however, tended to leave this type of activity to private ‘philanthropic’
or commercial concerns, and when one bears in mind the
universal attractiveness of such American products as Coca-Cola,
Levi jeans or McDonalds, or Hollywood films and American
music, it is an approach which commanded its supporters. As
Walter Wanger pointed out in 1950, Hollywood represented a
‘Marshall Plan of Ideas’ in 115 countries around the world where
72 per cent of the films being shown were of American origin.
Hence, in the context of the Cold War, such cultural activity was