International Perspective by Stas
The issue of race, particularly the treatment of African Americans in the United States has been a source of much social, economic, political - and even at times military - conflict. Though the Reconstruction in theory created equal political representation for blacks and gave the black population equal rights (under the eyes of the law), the reality did not follow the legal construct. In reality, black people all over the United States, but especially in the American South were systemically segregated and discriminated against. This was done not just on an interpersonal or business level, but reaching as high as the state and national courts as well as state legislatures and governors. Many rights that the black populace theoretically possessed were in fact routinely denied to them, without any legal recourse to this. Though officially against racism and committed to fighting for the equality of all the races, United States federal government frequently found itself at odds with its message of equality and liberty for all. The Soviet Union – locked in a long-running political struggle against the United States – used this contradiction to its own ends, for rich propaganda capital. The primary message of the Soviet Union to the world was --according to the Soviet Politburo -- that “racism was the inevitable concomitant of capitalism and its highest stage, imperialism.” [1]
As the Second World War drew to a close, many high-level American statesmen and some generals, such as Eisenhower who later became the President, realised that the American problem of racism was not just a internal liability, but an international one. Racism morphed (at the highest levels of government) from a civil rights issue into an issue of Cold War propaganda race. Everything in the Cold War was a race – atomic bombs, missiles, client states, economic growth, athletic prowess, spacefaring achievements – as the film Dr. Strangelove humourously commented, during certain scenarios even mine-shafts can become a race as some fearmongering American politicians bring up fictitious gaps, such as in that case the mine-shaft gap! Therefore it should not be a surprise to anyone that race issues became a race in themselves as both countries’ propaganda machines sought to tar and feather the other nation with as much ignominy as possible in order to damage their international standing. As early as 1941 the historian Justin Hart notes that the relationship between racism and foreign policy should be considered through “the global, multiracial context of decolonization, rather than solely through the black-white binary of the African-American civil rights narrative.” [2]
Soviet Union possessed its ideology of a global socialist revolution leading to an eventual communist utopia world of equality of all the classes and races, which formed the official propaganda line justifying its foreign interventions. Meanwhile the United States had to create its own exportable brand of thinking despite lacking a succinct, coherent way to distill the “American Way” into something resembling the quality of an ideology. Over time, America adapted its message in the form of a direct demonstration of its own quality of life and the commitment to democratic-egalitarian principles. While USSR touted its military might, US stressed its consumer abundance, implying that nations that sought its alliance would in turn become benefactors of such material and social benefits. The economic and social inequity as exemplified by American racism had the power to dash the display of American well-being into pieces, particularly in the eyes of the non-aligned fledgling nations of Africa and Asia. African and Indian newspapers in particular [3] took a very personal interest in the minutiae of each and every major racist incident in the United States, as in it they saw a parallel with the brutal imperialist-colonial regimes which dominated their society until the 1950-60s and created similar hierarchies based on the shade of a person’s skin. The US Department of State attempted to contain this, but ran into problems as they struggled with the sheer volume of American news reporting. Andrew H. Berding, a United States Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs noted in an entire chapter of his personal book (The Making of the Foreign Policy) that newspaper editors are not covering the progress that was made in the United States and thus taking the contemporary racism out of context – and in response the US Department of State made such works as “The Negro In American Life” to ‘educate’ the peoples abroad of all of the milestones of black rights.
The Soviet Union made very heavy use of propaganda both international and domestic in character to use the racism of America as either a screen for its own internal issues with treatment of minorities such as most notably the Jews (especially during the last years of Stalin and in a much lesser degree until the famous 1981 speech by Brezhnev explicitly denouncing anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union [4]) – or in other cases, as a way to redirect anger at the foreign policy adventures such as the invasion of Hungary which coincided with the crisis with the state of segregation in Little Rock, AR. As the Soviet Union was a centralised federation of fourteen distinct republics, each with its own national language and its own structure staffed primarily with native communist party members, Soviet Union could claim that it maintained a higher degree of ethnic harmony than the United States. Further compounding this perception was the strictness of censorship of the news within the USSR, which is contrasted with the freedom of press in the United States. Whatever Soviet failings related to racism that happened in the USSR generally stayed in the USSR. The lack of direct control over the citizens that US could exercise also hampered its mission, as the NAACP UN petition demonstrated, which the USSR gleefully supported and paraded all over the world [5]. For domestic consumption (as well as for the foreign observers inside USSR to see) the Soviet Union made many films, theatrical plays and books promoting multiculturalism and tolerance.
Due to all of this international pressure, the Congress as well as especially Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Johnson took significant domestic measures to promote various legislative measures that would seek to heal and equalise the rift between the state of the white and black populations in the United States, which is where Britanny comes in with her overview of domestic policy.
CITATIONS:
[1] Johnson, “Urban Ghetto Riots”, pg 36
[2] Hart, Justin “Making Democracy Safe: Race, Propaganda and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy during WWII”, pg 52.
[3] International Press Institute, “The Flow of the News: A Study”, pgs 173–179.
[4] "Russia". Encyclopaedia Judaica #17, pgs 531–553.
[5] Dudziak, Mary “Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy”, pg 45.
“This website was created for Dr. John Lemza’s History 391-901 class at Virginia Commonwealth University, Fall 2016.”
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