Managing public fears: Cold War sorcerers

Abstract

For citation: Sinyutin M. V. Managing public fears: Cold War sorcerers. Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Sociology, 2019, vol. 12, issue 1, pp. 102–108. https://doi.org/10.21638/spbu12.2019.108 10.21638/spbu12.2019.108 The danger of the Cold War is at the public agenda again. Economic crisis at the early years of the 21st century had launched the return of Cold War public attitudes. One can find through the media about the starting stage of the Second Cold War. Under capitalism, the politicized media image is replicated like any other commodity — it is important to design a new shell and the stereotyped product will be easier bought and consumed. American social thinkers, who are specialists on US military policy and the anti-war movement, Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano wrote a book that echoes the growing public concern of potential danger in case if new Cold War begins. The book is not about the Cold War itself, but on the American role in it, how it was designed and had been processed by the U.S. elite. The major focus of the book pointed on the Cold War project as a domestic American product constructed for internal consumption at the market of public policy. “It is designed to deflect public attention from our domestic ills by scapegoating a foreign nation” (171). Historically the Cold War project was rooted at the times of a Big Deal, and unprecedented success of American labor, left and social democracy movement, that occurred during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. We know from the history of the Soviet Union how militarization hits the democracy under a socialist system, but an example of the United States shows further reaching outcomes. Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano show through the pages of the book how “anti-Communist paranoia resulted in the spread of political repression” (167). American arms producers have aimed to maintain high military spending by means of lobbying, hired-gun think tanks professional experts and corporate media. Sociologist C. Wright Mills stressed in 1958 that American economic prosperity was underpinned by a war economy. With the high unemployment rate, political elite could only increase military expenditures, which needed to get somehow justified. This need met the corporate capitalist interest to violate the Big Deal. Internal class rival which pursued the left ideology was blamed as a provider of “external danger” falsely imputed to the state that firstly claimed itself to be socialist. Political battles in the USSR could be presented for ignorant Americans as an inevitable upshot of socialism to lack public freedoms.