Terrorism has replaced Communism as the arch enemy of the United States, except it’s not red. Since the Soviet Union collapsed, we have no more “Red Threat,” as President Kennedy called it during the Cuban missile crisis. In the geo-political world
of board games, the Soviets played Risk while the United States played Monopoly. In the end, the commies ran out of money just about the time that President Reagan famously said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” At least the Communists had faces, terrorists not so much.
We had become used to arch enemies during WWII, especially the Nazis. At the conclusion of the war, we were left with the face of Josef Stalin, Russian dictator of the Soviet Union and of Communism, for the enemy’s name. His face was known because of newsreel and newspaper coverage at Yalta where he was featured with the benign despots Churchill and Roosevelt. But soon, two other events changed the face of Communism: the Cold War and television.
President Harry S. Truman set up a loyalty program for federal employees and expected all federal workers to demonstrate "complete and unswerving loyalty" to the United States. Anything less, he declared, "constitutes a threat to our democratic processes." Truman also asked the Justice Department to compile an official list of 78 subversive organizations. That set both Senator Joseph McCarthy’s star and cast communism as our arch enemy and national threat.
Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) coined the term of an era in a speech he gave in Wheeling, West Virginia, February 9, 1950. He said, “…for this is not a period of peace. This is a time of ‘the cold war.’” Later, Senator McCarthy became the face of anti-communism gone overboard when Edward R. Murrow went after him on CBS television. Television began to feature Communists as villains until the Berlin Wall began to fall and the era of Communist villainy fell with it.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Glenn Contrarian
Tommy -
Perhaps it would be President Ahmadinejad of Iran...but I suspect most Republicans would say it's President Obama.
2 - Clavos
Not even I (though again, I am not a Republican) would say that, Glenn, that's a bit over the top even for me, sitting as I do, to the right of Attila.
3 - Glenn Contrarian
Clavos -
You know, I could make the case that the level of irrational spite against Obama is the worst I've seen in my life...but then I have to think back to what was going on in the sixties. While the Vietnam war was very wrong, the level of 'irrational spite' had to be as bad or worse than today's. So I'll back off and try to engage my brain next time before giving an off-the-cuff remark like that.
That said, who then will be the next bogeyman? Ahmadinejad? Chavez? Kim? I suspect we won't really have one until the next major terrorist attack...or until we have someone in the White House who doesn't understand diplomacy.
4 - Clavos
My money's on Chavez, I hate what he's doing to one of my favorite countries, but it'll probably be Kim or one of the Middle Easterners.
5 - Glenn Contrarian
What is he doing and to whom?
Personally, I think it will be Kim or his son that's poised to take over. It will either be during the turnover, or - if the one-and-only story I've seen about him has any credence, the son will do something really stupid in order to 'prove' himself.
6 - Tommy Mack
My hay stack is ready for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s picture poster. He gets my vote not only for his stated “Death to Israel” position, but because he is a flaming populist, a lame duck and religious zealot in a business suit. Earlier today Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, tried to put they guy in his place by endorsing him. Supreme leader clerics do that kind of thing and nothing good can come of it.
I think Glenn got the jump on the Obama-haters, too, but it's early.
Tommy
7 - Leroy
This fellow says that Ecologists are the new commies (at least to the Bush/Obama security system):
Green is the new red.
Didn't Bush say that "eco-terrorists are our worst threat"?
8 - Cannonshop
Ya got it wrong, the new Archenemy is going to be Conservatives. you have to remember who makes the movies and the teevee shows, it's already largely started, it's just a short step forward along the same path.
9 - Baronius
When were communists the bad guys on TV? I remember Indians, then white Southerners, then corporations.
I remember when The Hunt For Red October came out, and people were calling it the last Cold War movie. National Review called it "damn near the first". So many Cold War era movies featured a corporation or cabal as villain, whom the Russians and Americans had to team up to beat. That was the basis for most of James Bond's movies. If there was an evil ideology in Cold War movies, it was neo-Nazism.
And if Islamic terror is the new arch enemy, where are the TV shows about it? They were sometimes the bad guys on 24 and The Unit, but as often as not the real bad guys behind it all would be the CIA or some other clandestine intelligence service within the US government. And movies: in Rendition, Green Zone, Redacted, Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, and several others, the bad guy is the US.
10 - Glenn Contrarian
Baronius -
Maybe communism was not vilified on television, but certainly on the big screen. Remember "Red Dawn"? Or any of the Rambo movies? And "Rocky !V"? And let's not forget Chuck Norris....
But notice that all these came during the Reagan era, back when he - to his credit - was bring our military back from its post-Vietnam malaise. Those movies were not his doing, but were a byproduct of increased nationalism during the early Reagan years.
11 - Baronius
The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July....
As often as not, the US military was the bad guy in Cold War era US war movies. Remember that the Americans were just as guilty as the communists in Rambo II (and the Missing In Action movies, I think) for allowing the POW's to remain in Vietnam, forgotten. And in the first Rambo movie, the villain was a small-town sheriff.
12 - handyguy
Maybe there are more ambiguous or even anti-US movies from the late sixties and the seventies, but in the 1950s and early 60s, that was rarely the case. Even satires like Dr Strangelove and Billy Wilder's One Two Three had plenty of anti-Soviet zingers.
Baronius makes a vast and false generalization, then ignores the exceptions. And by the way, James Bond certainly fought Russian villains [SMERSH] as well as international supervillains. Even the title of one of the Bond films refers to the Cold War: From Russia with Love.
13 - Baronius
Also, remember the spy novels of the Cold War era? Robert Ludlum and Frederick Forsyth? At best, both sides were equally evil, but the focus was on the nasty things that the CIA or other Free World spies did. And the granddaddy of Cold War spy novels, The Manchurian Candidate, portrayed the anti-communists as stupid and evil.
14 - Glenn Contrarian
And is it bad to occasionally cast the U.S. military as the bad guy? Certainly not! There's not a single president I know of who doesn't have innocent blood on his hands courtesy of our military.
But the military's job is (among other things) killing, and the president's job is to accept responsibility for what our military does.
15 - Tommy Mack
My context was news not entertainment regarding the personae given to represent our arch enemies. My opinion is that entertainment follows news topics but its production leads news presentation. The Communists granted interviews. The terrorists produce videos.
Tommy
16 - Glenn Contrarian
Baronius -
And the granddaddy of Cold War spy novels, The Manchurian Candidate, portrayed the anti-communists as stupid and evil.
Um, Joe McCarthy was evil. Maybe stupid too, but certainly evil.
Among our presidents, JFK was an anti-communist, too - and while he did allow us to get embroiled in the Vietnam war, he also got the Soviets to blink and to remove their missiles from Cuba.
But then Nixon - who was as evil as any of our presidents - was not necessarily an ardent anti-Communist, for he allowed his pragmatism to overcome his dogma, and opened up China as a result.
But there's one anti-communist that I hold to be one of our best presidents - Eisenhower. But we've no one even on the political horizon that could bring what Eisenhower did. Colin Powell could have, but he chose family over power...which says a great deal (in a positive light) about him.
17 - Baronius
Handy - I'm in my mid-40's. I've heard the claim that Hollywood made pro-American films before my time, and for all I know the era I grew up in was a legitimate reaction to the propaganda that came before. I just don't remember that. I don't think that any of the anti-communist films carried the weight of a Platoon or a Coming Home, or I would have heard of them. The movies from the 1950's that I remember were WWII and cowboy movies, Hitchcock and noir.
There's always variety within our culture, and exceptions can be found to every rule. It's nonsense to claim that Hollywood was consistently anti-communist in the 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's as Tommy did. We can argue about which trend was more dominant and lasted longer, but no one can claim that the mid-1960's through the fall of the Berlin Wall saw a steady stream of pro-US films from Hollywood.
18 - Baronius
Tommy - I misunderstood the article. I didn't mean to get us off on a tangent.
19 - handyguy
Most Hollywood movies from all eras are escapist fantasy [even the Bond films with SMERSH as the villain].
Coming Home and Platoon may have their pluses and minuses as art, but I wouldn't class them as leftist propaganda. They were attempts to deal with the pain the Vietnam war caused. Jane Fonda's and Oliver Stone's personal political beliefs are a different matter. [And Stone's Born on the Fourth of July and JFK are indeed propagandistic, but more raving loon than hard left.]
20 - Tommy Mack
The tangent, my dear cardinal, is fine. Let me suggest that the 1982 Richard Brooks film "Wrong Is Right" starred Sean Connery and did not do well in the box office. Perhaps it was because the topics of media bias, reality television, government conspiracy, and Islamic terrorism were slightly ahead of their time. I would not have thought about it otherwise.
Tommy
21 - El Bicho
"When were communists the bad guys on TV?"
While they weren't as pervasive for as long as Tommy suggests, did you not see a single spy series from the '60s?
"the Russians and Americans had to team up to beat. That was the basis for most of James Bond's movies."
Bond was British, so what film was it where Russians and Americans teamed up? I've seen almost all of them, so I am surprised I overlooked that plot point occurring in most of the films.
Here are some anticommunist films: The Red Menace (1949), I Married a Communist (1950), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), Walk East on Beacon (1952), My Son John (1952), Big Jim McClain (1952), and Trial (1955).
If you think there were no pro-American films, I seriously doubt you were looking.
22 - Baronius
El B - At least once in my rantings, I did use the better terminology of Free World vs. Communists, instead of Americans vs. Russians. I suppose I could have said NATO vs. Warsaw Pact. You know what I meant, though.
Of the movies you mentioned, how many had the cultural impact of, for example, The Deer Hunter?
23 - El Bicho
Actually, I had no idea what you meant. You made so many statements, a few of which showed you had no idea what you were talking about like American James Bond and his frequent teaming up with the Russians, or misreading Apocalypse Now to think that the US was the bad guy when the story was much larger than that, I wouldn't presume anything.
What was the cultural impact of The Deer Hunter other than it won a few meaningless awards? All people remember nowadays is the Russian roulette scene.
24 - Baronius
El B - Can I get you to go so far out on a limb as to speculate that a person could watch Apocalpyse Now and not come away with a feeling of confidence in the American military with regard to the Vietnam War? Or that The Deer Hunter had a bigger impact on society than Walk East on Beacon?
Handy - I think that the point of From Russia With Love was that the West and the USSR were equally innocent dupes of SPECTRE. In the end, the Russian agent and Bond got together and killed the SPECTRE assassin.
25 - Dr Dreadful
El B, it's worth remembering that although the character James Bond was British, the person hugely responsible for the success of the Bond movie series was Cubby Broccoli - an American.
Except for perhaps the first two or three, the Bond movies have a very American outlook. M, Q and Moneypenny aside, Bond's most trusted sidekick is also an American - Felix Leiter of the CIA.