ABSTRACT
Writing in 1989, Britain’s leading historian of Government propaganda, Philip M.Taylor, described the Cold War as ‘the apogee of the twentieth-century struggle for hearts and minds…by its very nature a global propaganda conflict, the alternative to real war.’1 In the absence of military conflict, propaganda was one of the principal means by which protagonists on both sides of the Iron Curtain sought to project their power, and undermine their enemies. Propaganda was also a vital tool for the creation of domestic support for policies of military expansion which were costly, and with the development of atomic weapons, not without considerable risk to the population. Yet, as Taylor later observed, the role of propaganda as an instrument of national and foreign policy is often neglected in the mainstream historiography of the Cold War.2 This is particularly true in the case of the Western allies. In an important essay, W.Scott Lucas claims that the use of ideology as a driving force behind US Cold War strategy has been ignored, largely because ideology was always associated with the expansionist policies of the communist powers. Lucas suggests that, ‘if an eager student devoured the work of American historians on the Cold War’ he would have to be remarkably perceptive to obtain from them any examination of a US ideological campaign.3 Any student hoping to feast on the role of propaganda in British Cold War history, will find their diet similarly unsatisfying.
