The Culture of the Cold War

 

US Media Culture and Empire 1947-1971

 

            The roots of the Cold War are inextricably linked to the history of the US Empire. After the final defeat of the Axis powers in 1945, the US became the dominant industrial, financial, military and technological power of the world – an Empire in all but name. This completed a process begun all the way back in the early 19th century, when a thriving US imperialism displaced its erstwhile British mentor and created the world’s first continental-sized marketplace. Yet unlike its classic predecessor, the British Empire, the US Empire was founded primarily on abstract economic power and technological prowess, rather than settler colonies or territorial acquisition. US imperialism was mostly limited to the North American continent until 1898 and the war on Spain (even then, it preferred to rule the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico by proxy, instead of transforming them into US states, as in the case of Hawaii).

            Throughout most of the early 20th century, Britain had reigned over the world-system, but had not really ruled. The British economy had been eclipsed by the US, and the economic interests of US big business had slowly but steadily expanded to encompass more and more of the world. Following the watershed of WW II, the US took Britain’s place as the hegemon of the world-system. The US dollar became a world reserve currency, and the anchor of the Bretton Woods accords, which fixed exchange rates between the world’s major economies. While US troops occupied Italy, West Germany and Japan, the Marshall Plan helped to reconstruct Western Europe. Meanwhile US soldiers advertised the wonders of Hollywood, bubble gum and Coca Cola around the world.

            As the storm-winds of post-WW II decolonization began to blow, the elite managers of the US Empire became increasingly enamored of stability for stability’s sake, and worried about potential challengers – first the Soviet Union, which rigorously pursued its own agenda of autarkic development, and later revolutionary China. From our own perspective, it seems amazing that US elites could be so foolish. The USSR had lost 20 million of its citizens in a terrible war, and semi-feudal China was barely capable of feeding its own population. Yet there was a method to the madness of Empire: the short-term commercial interests of the US Empire were indeed opposed to the long-term developmental interests of many Third World anti-colonial movements. When France refused to grant Indochina its independence in 1945, touching off a bitter guerilla war, the US stepped in to assist the French. By 1947, the US officially launched the Cold War – a sustained, fifty-year program of military Keynesianism and intervention, designed to ensure the rule of the US Empire against an enemy which was more imaginary than real.

            

 

I. Secrets and Agents


In order to understand why the Cold War happened, it’s necessary to step back for a moment and consider why and how the US became an Empire – namely, the specific structures of US monopoly capitalism, combined with the military mobilization of WW II and the astonishing dominance of the US economy in the immediate post-1945 period. The US economy grew by leaps and bounds during WW II, and by 1945, the US produced probably half the total economic output of Planet Earth.

 

Media

Fascism: Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will (1935)

Stalinism: Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky (1938)

Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of WW II”

Godzilla Inoshiro Honda (1954) (excerpts)

The Bond narratives: Dr. No (1960)

 

Texts

Dupont: Behind the Nylon Curtain Gerard Colby Zilg

Summary of New Deal legislation and social transformation

Cold War America Lawrence S. Wittner (US) 1974. Good sociological survey

Alger Hiss and Rosenberg trials: paranoia and typewriters

Minima Moralia Theodor Adorno (Germany) 1945

How military-industrial Keynesianism powered the world economy for thirty years: statistics, data, industrial policy, the Bretton Woods accords, US financial and industrial hegemony

Ed. Athan Theoharris. From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover. (1991)

 

 

II. Monsters from the Id

 

            The costs of the Cold War were immense. The US expended almost ten percent of its annual national wealth on weapons systems over a period of forty years – a key factor in its subsequent economic decline. More to the point, US overt and covert interventions destabilized or destroyed democratic governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), Argentina (1973), and Chile (1973). US troops and airplanes dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped on all of Germany and Japan during WW II, killing at least three million citizens of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The US had Congo’s Patrice Lumumba murdered and tried unsuccessfully to assassinate Fidel Castro. The US sponsored murderous dictators everywhere from Cuba’s Batista to Korea’s Park Chung Hee, and underwrote the nightmarish atrocities of Angola’s UNITA, the Afghani muhahideen (including the youthful Osama Bin Laden), El Salvador’s death squads and the Nicaraguan contras.

            This is not to gloss over the sins of the USSR, which imposed brutish neo-Stalinist regimes on East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania (though not Yugoslavia or Greece) after WW II. Soviet tanks crushed democratic uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan, killing at least a million Afghanis. Still, all the Soviet interventions combined never amounted to a tiny fraction of the violence inflicted by the rich and powerful US on some of the poorest countries of the Earth.

            Perhaps the world will forgive the US someday. But they will never forget.

 

Media

The Day the Earth Stood Still Robert Wise (US) 1951

On the Beach Stanley Kramer (US) 1959

Dr. Strangelove Stanley Kubrick (US) 1964

Forbidden Planet Fred Wilcox (US) 1954

Duck Dodgers in the 24 and 1/2 century

Goldfinger Guy Hamilton (1964)

Ten Lessons for Life: The Life of Robert McNamara Errol Morris (US) 199? (Excerpt on strategic bombing campaign and application in Vietnam)

 

Texts

J.P. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (intro)

Reinhold Wagnleiter, Hollywood and the Cold War, in: Rethinking Marxism Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring 1994)

Documentary on McCarthyism

Andrei Sakharov (essays)

Ludmilla Alexeyeva, The Thaw Generation

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Moti Nissani, Lives in the Balance (1992) Cutting critique of US Cold War foreign policy

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

 



Part 3. Spawning Globalization

 

The Cold War ultimately generated the social forces which would transcend it – in particular, the East Asian and EU multinational capitalisms which would ultimately topple their former mentor, US monopoly capitalism. Interestingly, this process began all the way back in the late 1960s, when Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner sublated the Bond thrillers into one of the founding documents of the multinational video culture. However, the process accelerated dramatically in the mid-1990s, particularly in the confines of the videogame culture.

 

Media

Atomic Café (documentary)

The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express William S. Burroughs (US) 1960-1964

You Only Live Twice (1968)

The Prisoner Patrick McGoohan (UK) 1967

Half Life Valve Software (US) 1998

 

Texts

Articles: “Cold War and American Science”, S. Leslie

The Closed World Paul Edwards

Targeting the Computer Kenneth Flamm

Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb Richard Rhodes (US) 1995