ABSTRACT
In his State of the Union Address for 8 January 1951, President Truman declared: ‘Our men are fighting alongside their United Nations allies, because they know, as we do, that the aggression in Korea is part of the attempt of the Russian Communist dictatorship to take over the world, step by step.’1 This totalizing rhetoric is typical of the discourse of the Cold War, in which no individual conflict can be separated from the worldwide struggle, and which repeatedly exploits polar duality, stark oppositions between us and them, West and East. The ‘battle for men’s minds’, as the Cold War was repeatedly called, was waged through words, through key metaphors and oppositions. As Martin J. Medhurst has explained, ‘The currency of Cold War combat – the tokens used in the contest – is rhetorical discourse: discourse intentionally designed to achieve a particular goal with one or more specific audience [. . .]. Cold War weapons are words, images, symbolic actions, and, on occasion, physical actions undertaken by covert means.’2 Medhurst’s argument is specifically applied to the discourse of politicians, which he describes as calculated, end-directed verbal performances. If we extend his approach beyond this material to commentary on the Cold War generally – fictional and non-fictional – we will find the same rhetoric operating. For instance, the repeated references in the 1950s to the ‘loss’ of China to communism presumes both prior possession and a ‘twoworld’ ideology which found its expression in many contexts, including that of commerce. In 1959 there appeared a report on Western commerce sensationally entitled The Third World War. The text opens with a stark warning: ‘In every inhabited part of the world the forces of Communism and Democracy are locked together in combat. In this struggle there are no neutral territories.’3 The notion of warfare is totalized here into a worldwide condition where there are only two ideological positions available.
