British Fiction and the Cold War

A. Hammond

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137274854
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book offers a unique analysis of the wide-ranging responses of British novelists to the East-West conflict. Hammond analyses the treatment of such geopolitical currents as communism, nuclearism, clandestinity, decolonisation and US superpowerdom, and explores the literary forms which writers developed to capture the complexities of the age.

1

Literary Containment

Amongst the key features of the Cold War were the political acts of censorship, propaganda and psychological warfare. Although professionalised during the Second World War, the techniques of public persuasion were rapidly extended after 1945 into an integral part of domestic and international policy, neither of which were deemed viable without the manufactured consent of domestic populations. As Martin Medhurst argues, ‘[a] Cold War is, by definition, a rhetorical war, a war fought with words, speeches, pamphlets, public information (or disinformation) campaigns, slogans, gestures [and] symbolic actions’.¹ In scholarship, the importance of propaganda was recognised by Wayne Brockriede and Robert L. Scott’s Moments in the Rhetoric of the Cold War (1970), which helped to generate a rhetorical studies approach to the history of the period. This has combined a traditional focus on political, military and economic strategies with an analysis of how these were shadowed by government efforts to control public responses at home and abroad. Although it has had little to say about the propagandistic qualities of literature, the subject of this chapter, the approach has uncovered a vast discursive framework that permeated government statement, print media, newsreel, radio, film and especially television, whose expansion coincided with the ‘red scare’ of the 1950s, and that even impacted on the academic disciplines of psychology, historiography and cultural theory. For Medhurst and others, the weapons mobilised in the battle for hearts and minds established propaganda both as ‘a generative principle of Cold War politics’ and as ‘an integral part of the modern world’.²

Understandably, much of the study has focused on US propaganda and its links to containment, the diplomatic-military objective of limiting Soviet power and influence in the world. The origins of containment are found in George F. Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ (1946), an examination of the likely course of Soviet policy written during Kennan’s time as the US chargé d’affaires in Moscow. The telegram depicted communism as a tyrannical and expansionist creed, ‘a malignant parasite’ intent on undermining the ‘influence of Western powers over colonial, backward, or dependent peoples’ and on establishing ‘Soviet-dominated puppet political machines’.³ In Kennan’s later article, ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’ (1947), the motif of contagion was merged with that of radical Protestantism, viewing Americans as a chosen people that should thank ‘Providence’ for giving them ‘the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intends them to bear’.⁴ The Messianic flavour of Kennan’s rhetoric, structured around an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil, helped to formulate free-world or containment discourse and to define Washington’s role in global affairs. The Truman administration, for example, would expand on his views in a series of policy statements and National Security Council directives. In the Truman Doctrine (1947), which promised US assistance to nations endangered by communism, two ‘alternative ways of life’ are presented: the democratic way based upon ‘individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression’, and the communist way based ‘upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms’.⁵ In order to further the discourse and practice of containment, a number of institutions were established in the late 1940s and 1950s. These included Truman’s Psychological Strategy Board and Eisenhower’s Operation Coordinating Board and United States Information Agency, as well as the Voice of America and the CIA-funded Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation, set up to broadcast into the eastern bloc. The ideological offensive did not lessen as the ‘first Cold War’ moved towards détente: the Kremlin remained a ‘ruthless, godless tyranny’ (Kennedy), a ‘surging blood-red tide’ (Johnson) and a hotbed of ‘plotting, scheming [and] fighting’ (Nixon).⁶ In the late 1970s, Carter’s attempts to scale down hostilities raised fears amongst neo-conservatives that the US had wavered in its commitment to national security. The result was Reagan’s sustained assault on Soviet internationalism, ‘a gaggle of bogus prophecies and petty superstitions’, as he termed it, that counters ‘the stirrings of liberty with brute force, killings [and] mass arrests’.⁷ The dichotomisation of East and West peaked in a speech delivered in Florida to the National Association of Evangelicals (1983), in which Reagan asked his audience to

pray for the salvation of all those who live in that totalitarian darkness – pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do … I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority. I urge you to beware the temptation … to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire … ⁸

With Reagan’s announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative coming only two weeks later, the function of such rhetoric was clear. Since the late 1940s, Washington had used free-world discourse to justify its escalation of defence expenditure, its destablisation of communist regimes and its securing of foreign markets and trading areas. In terms of the domestic audience, the strategy often met with remarkable success. In various surveys conducted amongst Americans in the 1980s, 84 per cent of interviewees viewed the Soviets as antagonists, 28 per cent thought that the Soviet Union had opposed the US in the Second World War and 24 per cent believed that the Soviets had first invented atomic weaponry.⁹

The analysis of US free-world discourse, while expanding knowledge of the discourse’s significance, has nevertheless concealed the real scale of the propaganda war. For example, Anders Stephanson’s notion that the 1945–89 conflict was ‘a specifically “American” one’, that containment expressed something ‘about the United States and its self-conception’ which explains why ‘the Cold War turned out to be “the American way”’, ignores the many other strands of the rhetorical conflict.¹⁰ Amongst these, Britain’s longstanding suspicion of Russian designs on the Near and Middle East may locate one of the sources of the East–West divide in European imperial rivalries of the nineteenth century. In the 1810s, British commentators were already warning that the Russians, feeling themselves ‘destined to be rulers of the world’, had raised ‘the sceptre of universal domination’.¹¹ By the time of the Crimean War, Lord Palmerston feared that an expanded Russia would be ‘dangerous to the liberties of Europe’ and Bulwer-Lytton called for an armed response to ‘barbarian tribes that … menace the liberty and civilisation of races yet unborn’.¹² The central tenet of Victorian Russophobia, that of western freedom imperilled by eastern autocracy, has obvious affinities to free-world discourse. Speaking of the geopolitical shifts of the mid-1940s, William Pietz posits that the rapid ‘acceptance of cold war discourse [may] be explained in part by its appropriation of ideologically familiar elements from the earlier discourse of Western colonialism’ and particularly by ‘its adoption of Orientalist stereotypes’.¹³ It was certainly the case that, during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Allied ‘Intervention’ of 1918–20, imperialism and anti-communism were both factors in British hostility to Moscow’s ‘Oriental despotism’, as Kennan would term it.¹⁴ This hostility was rekindled by fears of Soviet interference during the General Strike and by indignation at the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, with the War Cabinet having serious misgivings even after Operation Barbarossa turned Stalin into a much-lauded ally (‘if Hitler invaded Hell’, Churchill commented in 1941, ‘I would find something complimentary to say about the Devil’).¹⁵ After 1945, ‘it was Britain, in Moscow’s eyes, who seemed bent on recruiting a reluctant America … for a containment system aimed at placing obstacles in Russia’s way’.¹⁶

The perspective was entirely justified. Although Attlee’s Labour Party had trumpeted its ability to establish good relations with Moscow, using the slogan ‘Left understands Left’ at the 1945 party conference, it retained the wartime suspicion of Stalin’s intentions in central and eastern Europe.¹⁷ For the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, who had developed an abhorrence of communism during his time as a trade union leader in the 1930s, the dispatches reaching Whitehall from diplomats stationed on the continent confirmed the worst. In March 1946, the British chargé d’affaires in Moscow, Frank Roberts, warned that as far as Soviet foreign policy was concerned Britain, ‘as the home of capitalism, imperialism and now of social democracy, is a main target’.¹⁸ A month later, the head of the FO’s Northern Department was convinced that, because ‘the Soviet[s] have decided upon an aggressive policy, based upon militant communism and Russian chauvinism’, ‘we must at once organise and coordinate our defences’.¹⁹ As John Lewis Gaddis has argued, these feverish British prophecies ‘revealed an assessment of the Soviet threat more sweeping in character and apocalyptic in tone than anything in the record of private or public statements by major American officials at the time’.²⁰ As a case in point, Churchill had delivered a speech in March 1946 – at Fulton, Missouri – that not only defined the geopolitical co-ordinates of the new Cold War, but also introduced many of the conflict’s structural motifs. After proclaiming that, ‘[f]rom Stettin in the Baltic to Triest in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’, Churchill turned to ‘other causes for anxiety’:

in a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center. Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States, where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilisation.²¹

Many of Churchill’s listeners were shocked at the level of antagonism shown to a recent ally, as Churchill had no doubt foreseen. Although Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ had arrived in Washington a month before, the US government was still uncertain about the correct response to the Soviet Union, oscillating from belligerence to conciliation of a country that had, after all, been severely weakened by World War Two.²² The sense that the US underestimated the Soviet threat to Europe and the western European colonies was increased by the victory in the congressional elections of the Republican Party, which favoured a return to isolationism. For an economically drained Britain, it was essential that the US played a role in the new balance of power, and, determined to ‘get rid of the Good Old Uncle Joe myth built up during the war’, its diplomats and statesmen were inclined to exaggerate, even invent, the dangers of Soviet expansionism.²³ It was no doubt rhetorical events like the Fulton speech which, by 1947, helped to inspire the Truman Doctrine and US deployment in Greece and Turkey.

The British role in containment did not end there. Alongside the promotion of the Brussels Pact (1948), which Antonio Varsori has termed Britain’s ‘declaration of Cold War’, work was begun on a long-term strategy towards the communist bloc.²⁴ The fact that this required a campaign of public persuasion was recognised by the Russia Committee, a planning body set up in April 1946 to coordinate British Cold War policy. Responding to the mounting tensions on the continent, including the dispute over the future of Germany and Soviet involvement in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Russia Committee assisted in the creation of a propaganda bureau, the Information Research Department (IRD), which was linked to MI6 and grounded in the techniques of censorship and disinformation fostered by the Special Operations Executive and the Political Warfare Executive.²⁵ Between 1948 and 1977, this ‘secret Ministry of Cold War’, in Saunders’s phrase, railed against Soviet-led world communism and, at least initially, advocated the rival ideology of liberal-Christian civilisation.²⁶ Its main task was the production of briefing papers for politicians, diplomats, journalists, labour leaders, academics, colonial missions and foreign media, in the expectation that they would be recycled without attribution. The material circulated internationally via a network of MI6-subsidised radio stations, Third World newspapers and news agencies, which at their height employed 600 staff across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, gaining an influence over global media discourse – and by extension global opinion and perception – that far outweighed Britain’s standing in the world.²⁷ It also found an outlet in the BBC’s Overseas Service, whose broadcasts into eastern Europe were deemed more effective than those of the American stations.²⁸ On those occasions when the ‘war of words’ passed to military operations, the IRD’s propaganda machine ground into action, supporting early Cold War ventures in India, Malaya and Albania, and going on to condition responses to the Korean War, the coup against Iran’s Mohammed Mossadeq, the invasion of Suez and the overthrow of Indonesia’s President Sukarno, amongst other events. Although the primary targets were sensitive regions in the Third World, there is no doubt that material found its way to home audiences. The IRD courted opinion formers within the domestic media and, by the mid-1970s, had built up a circulation list of 92 journalistic contacts on such papers as the Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Telegraph and Sunday Express. It also established a publishing front, Ampersand Limited, as well as collaborative projects with Batchwood Press, Phoenix House, Allen & Unwin and Bodley Head, in which it would select favourable subjects and authors and subsidise publication through bulk order, much of which was then distributed in the Third World. It was through such publish...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Literary Containment
• 2 The Nuclear Debate
• 3 An Age of Espionage
• 4 From Socialism to Postmodernism
• 5 The End of Empire
• 6 The American Age
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index