as the deadly contagion that threatened the world. The other great wartime ally, China, was also shortly to join this demonology of the great Red Menace, when Mao Zedong took over in 1949. Most of Western propaganda for the next 40 years was dominated by this realisation of the mythic enemy that Orwell saw being developed and warned of in 1984 – the construction of fear that helps enslave a populace to its government’s will:
A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had no caption, and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four metres high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face and enormous boots, a sub-machine gun pointed from his hip. From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you.24
The Cold War
This personification of evil is one of the most persistent functions of propaganda, and by definition one that the visual media serves particularly well. The character of the enemy, the personalized threat, changes with the time – Nazi, Commie, IRA bomber, Muslim terrorist.
But one overarching function remains the same: to cow the populace into subservience and acquiescence. Terrorism, and particularly the attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001, has emboldened governments, particularly in the US and the UK, to enact ever more oppressive legislation under the guise of security. The UK Labour government had already extended the extension of detention permitted without charge to 28 days, and was narrowly thwarted by the House of Lords in its attempt to extend it to 42 days in October 2008, despite this not being sought by the police or security services, or justified by precedent. The international human rights organisation Amnesty had already reported on what it called the UK’s ‘Broken Promise’:
Since the early 1970s, when the UK authorities began introducing emergency measures in the context of the conflict in Northern Ireland, human rights have been sacrificed in the name of security. Among the serious abuses facilitated by emergency measures have been torture or other ill-treatment and unfair trials.25
The filmmaker is frequently co-opted in the vanguard of this propagandist role and the contribution has traditionally been framed as ‘public information’, what the post-War Labour
Prime Minister Clement Attlee called ‘an important and permanent part in the machinery of government’ when he set up the Central Office of Information in 1946. He said that ‘the public should be adequately informed about the many matters in which Government action directly impinges on their daily lives’.26Initially, with the upbeat hope instilled by a new welfare state, the COI produced one-minute films showing people how to use a handkerchief when combating the cold (Coughs and Sneezes, 1945 and Don’t Spread Germs, 1948), but the Cold War soon came to predominate. The Berlin Airlift (1949) – ‘the story of a great achieve-ment’,27when the West combined to defeat the Soviet blockade of Berlin – and Operation Hurricane (1953) – the building and testing of Britain’s first hydrogen bomb on an Australian island – were more indicative of the nuclear build-up that was becoming the dominant concern of the age. The final commentary, by Chester Wilmot, of Operation Hurricane captures the quite philosophical official British voice of the day:
That lethal cloud rising above Montebello marks the achievement of British science and industry in the development of atomic power, but it leaves unanswered the question of how shall this new-found power be used – for good or evil, for peace or war, for progress or destruction. The answer doesn’t lie with Britain alone, but we may have a greater voice in this great decision if we have the strength to defend ourselves and to deter aggression with complete commitment to the cause.28
Nonetheless, the object of the propaganda was to help deliver that complete commitment.
American propaganda of the time was less nuanced. Coronet Instructional Films’s Communism (1952) kicks off with the observation that ‘Russia today is regarded as a grave threat to our nation, to our freedom, to the peace of the world’,29and goes on to paint a very different picture of Russia from that seen in The Battle of Russia eight years earlier. A constant supply of films warning of communism’s implacable campaign for world domination, such as the US Navy’s Red Chinese Battle Plan (c. 1964), kept the US public in the fearful state of mind necessary to support massive military spending and eventually the Vietnam War.
The sense that this was not some distant conflict, but one that threatened every American homestead, was constantly reinforced by Civil Defense Administration films about the imminent nuclear threat and how to cope with nuclear fallout. A New Look at the H-Bomb (1957) has the awkward-looking Federal Civil Defense Administrator, Val Peterson, standing in an office set, giving the public instruction on the threat of nuclear fallout:
Now I’m not here to frighten you. As a matter of fact, Americans just don’t scare easily anyway – and it’s a good thing that they don’t in this atomic age. But it’s a part of my job, as Civil Defense Administrator, to give you the facts.30
The facts are, of course, incredibly grim, but soft pedalled here to suggest that a bit of pluck and preparation will see people through. The most famous of these film essays was the Civil Defense Administration’s Duck and Cover (1951), which showed schoolchildren how they could learn from the animated Bert the Turtle, who popped inside his shell to avoid explosions:
We all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous, and since it may be used against us, we must get ready for it . . . If you are not ready for it, it could hurt you in different ways.
It could knock you down hard, or throw you against a tree or a wall. It is such a big explosion it can smash in buildings and knock sign-boards over and break windows all over town! But, if you duck and cover like Bert, you will be much safer.31
So children were assured that slipping under their school desk or kitchen table, or crouching against a wall or even under a picnic cloth or newspaper, would help them survive the Bomb. Such palpable nonsense was merely one way of wedding children early to the cause – probably its most important line is ‘we must remember to obey the civil defense worker’ – and its association of nuclear defence with the fire service and traffic control is all part of an attempt to normalise the nuclear arms race. The Cuban missile crisis, in 1962, when the USA went head to head with the USSR over the presence of nuclear missiles pointing at America from nearby Cuba, was the nearest the world came to nuclear war and was apparently narrowly averted when the Russians agreed to withdraw. It gave a massive fillip to the nuclear arms industry and to the doom-mongers on either side of the Atlantic.
In Britain, as late as 1980, the UK civil defence programme produced a series of 20 short public information films and accompanying booklets under the umbrella title Protect and Survive, which also pedalled plans and provisions for a domestic nuclear fallout shelter underneath the table in your own home. Fortunately, no one has as yet had to try one out, so the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD for short) is deemed by some to have worked – because we are still here. To what extent that is attributable to propaganda remains a moot point but, at the time of writing in 2009, NATO generals are still arguing for a ‘grand strategy’ to include a nuclear ‘first strike’ to pre-empt threats from rogue nations with nuclear arms.32
No doubt films will be made which support this new instigation of fear, but much of traditional propaganda has foundered in the face of irony, as a more visually literate populace has learned to recognise when it is being sold a line. In 1982, a film that had taken five painstaking years to make, effectively eviscerated US Cold War propaganda. The Atomic Café drew on a wide range of such footage to reveal the manipulation and lies at its heart. As Stella Bruzzi writes:
Out of propaganda, The Atomic Café constructs ironic counter-propaganda; Out of compiled images from various sources it constructs a straightforward dialectic between the past and present. The Atomic Café operates a similar duality to that found in the majority of politically motivated compilation films, that the archive documents are respected on their own terms as ‘evidence’ at the same time as they are being reviewed and contradicted by their recontextualisation.33
This should remind us that the term ‘propaganda’ is relative; it is easy to spot propaganda for what it is when standing outside the time and culture for which it was made. Londoners dodging the bombs of the Blitz and taking mutual comfort in the cinema would not look at the patriotic films of the Crown Film Unit as attempts to manipulate their minds, but as stirring hymns to the common cause. As the documentary film historian Erik Barnouw writes: ‘The irony is that the term is invoked precisely when the film has failed as propaganda. When the choices please us we do not invoke it.’34Barnouw also points out that at one level, all documentary is propaganda, in that it presents evidence and testimony in the service of an idea, and yet, on another level, it is not a very effective medium for propaganda:
Documentary should be seen as a very difficult medium for propaganda, precisely because it confronts its subject matter openly. It announces its topic. It alerts our critical faculties. A more potent and persuasive form of propaganda is popular fiction, precisely because it is received as something else – entertainment, a word associated with relaxation.35