3. The Enemy, the Secret, and the Catastrophe

Inventing the Cold War Enemy

The construction of this necessary anti-Communist knowledge was mostly driven by the ideological figure of the enemy, and it gave rise to what we could call the political theology of American nationalism in the Cold War. We are well accustomed to speaking of the structure of Cold War enmity as a highly moralized “Manichean” discourse that defines political conflict in terms of absolute good and absolute evil. This symmetrical opposition, however, was based on a crucial lack of symmetry. According to this asymmetrical definition of Cold War enmity, the fundamental conflict was not between two rival ideologies, but between an evil ideology and the neutralized universal concept of human nature and a generalized concept of freedom. For anti-Communist liberalism, “ideological politics” represented one of the most odious developments of modernity. Consequently, political opposition to Communism meant the rejection of ideology as such.¹

The naturalization of anti-Communist politics, however, functioned as the foundation of the theologization of Cold War enmity. This move toward the religious register found an exemplary expression in Whittaker Chambers’s sentimental account of his break with Communism. Chambers relates the story of a domestic conversion. As he is contemplating his daughter’s delicate body, he deduces the existence of God from the complexity of his creation:

One thing most ex-Communists could agree upon: they broke because they wanted to be free. They do not all mean the same thing by “free.” Freedom is a need of the soul, and nothing else. It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible.… Hence every sincere break with Communism is religious experience, though the Communist fail to identify its true nature, though he fail to go to the end of the experience. His break is the political expression of the perpetual need of the soul whose first faint stirring he has felt within him, years, months or days before he breaks. A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between irreconcilable opposites—God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.²

Chambers demonstrates a crucial aspect of early Cold War anti-Communism: for popular anti-Communism, freedom is a religious rather than a political concept. As freedom is transposed to the register of the “soul,” it is depoliticized in the sense that it becomes the apolitical foundation of all correct politics.

It appears, then, that the political concept of truth is only the “expression” of religious truth in a specialized language. As a matter of fact, Chamber suggests that the agents of these political actions do not even have to know that they are participating in a “religious experience.” Consciousness of the religious content of anti-Communist politics is not necessary for the propagation of its truth. This is why, discussing the “internal nature of Soviet power,” George F. Kennan had to explain to his readers that, contrary to Western beliefs, for the Communists truth is a political concept: “This means that truth is not a constant but is actually created, for all intents and purposes, by the Soviet leaders themselves. It may vary from week to week, from month to month. It is nothing absolute and immutable—nothing which flows from objective reality.”³

This distinction between a religious and a political definition of truth is essential, since anti-Communism fights Communist totalitarianism. As Hoover explains, “Communism wants the total man, hence it is totalitarian.”⁴ In other words, the fallacy of totalitarianism is the total politicization of man and society. As opposed to totalitarianism, therefore, anti-Communism must find the legitimate boundaries of politicization, so that the totality of man or of society will never be completely politicized. And, partly for historical reasons, this is why the apolitical foundation of anti-Communism must be religion. Since Communism is an atheistic totalitarianism, as long as there is religion, the totalization of politics within society is impossible. The role of religion is precisely to provide an alternative politics, a logic of social organization that is not politics. But the question of legitimacy remains important. What could be the legitimate limits of democratic politics? How can you limit democracy in a democratic fashion? Or at least in a way that does not violate the spirit of democracy?

This theologized definition of political enmity, however, functioned as a source of two separate sources of cultural anxiety: imitation by the enemy and the imitation of the enemy. One of the central concerns of anti-Communist ideology is the negotiation of the contradiction between the two. In order to maintain ideological consistency, anti-Communism had to renounce not only the enemy but the methods of the enemy as well. A basic problem of anti-Communist politics had long been the fact that Communists use democracy in order to destroy it. As Hoover put it: “The Red Fascists have long followed the practice of making full use of democratic liberties: elections, lawful agitation and propaganda, and free speech, press, and assembly. Their basic premise: Reap every advantage possible. However, if it will help, don’t hesitate to use illegal methods, such as underground operations, terrorism, espionage, sabotage, lying, cheating.”⁵ The problem is that Communists use the freedoms provided by a democratic society in order to reach totalitarian aims. The major method of this Communist pseudo-democratic take-over is the imitation of democratic ideals.

On the other hand, George F. Kennan warned his fellow policymakers of the Cold War in the following terms: “Finally, we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”⁶ At the same time, Clinton Rossiter, discussing “constitutional dictatorship,” spoke of American democracy during World War II in the following terms: “At the very moment when the people of the United States were shouting about the differences between democracy and dictatorship, they were admitting in practice the necessity of conforming their own government more closely to the dictatorial pattern! The wartime inadequacies of their constitutional government were remedied in most instances by an unconscious but nonetheless real imitation of the autocratic methods of their enemies.”⁷

Rossiter’s description calls attention to a significant complication: the conscious vilification of totalitarian politics can coincide with an unintentional but real imitation of the enemy. In a similar manner, while the fear of imitating the enemy was a genuine concern of the early Cold War, a number of later scholars came to see it as an ambiguous wish-fulfillment. In his classic 1963 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter writes: “This enemy seems to be on many counts a projection of the self: both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy.”⁸ In other words, within the paranoid mode, the imitation of the enemy is no longer a strategy to be avoided—it is actually unavoidable, since it is a structural paradox. Michael Rogin took this line of argument one step further when he argued that the demonology of countersubversion is not a marginal but a central component of American politics: “Countersubversive politics—in its Manichean division of the world; its war on local and partial loyalties; its attachment to secret, hierarchical orders; its invasiveness and fear of boundary invasion; its fascination with violence; and its desire to subordinate political variety to a dominant authority—imitates the subversion it attacks.”⁹ Thus, on the one hand, imitation by the enemy was defined as a limit of representation. It is a politics that undermines the apolitical presupposition of representative democracy itself and is supposedly the dark source of evil enjoyment. On the other hand, imitation of the enemy was imagined as a necessary limit of democratic politics itself. It was the democratic suspension of democratic politics that also functioned as a source of narcissistic wish-fulfillment. A central complication of early Cold War anti-Communism was precisely the fact that the preservation of the democratic framework by nondemocratic means coincides with the imitation of the totalitarian enemy.

The Russian Communist

As Peter H. Buckingham pointed out, during World War II the American government tried to encourage the public to accept the wartime alliance with Soviet Russia by disseminating a more positive image of this otherwise inimical nation. This strategy led to the coexistence of a general hostility toward domestic Communism and a more positive representation of Soviet Russia.¹⁰ With the onset of the Cold War, however, this positive representation came to an abrupt end.¹¹ The Russians suddenly became the exact opposites of everything American.

In order to illustrate the way national identity comes to complement ideological enmity, let us briefly examine one of the most important documents of containment: Kennan’s so-called “Long Telegram” from Moscow, February 22, 1946.¹² Kennan gives us a brief historical background for the paranoid-authoritarian nature of all Russian leaders. This is essentially the same narrative that will form an integral part of his famous Mr. X article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published in Foreign Affairs in 1947. In the latter article, the argument is structured by the basic thesis that Soviet politics has to be understood on the basis of a double determination: one is historical, the other is ideological. This split allows Kennan to separate the Russian people, who are essentially good and “great,” from their Soviet Communist leaders. But Soviet ideology is understood by Kennan to be merely a “highly convenient rationalization” of the “Russian-Asiatic” historical experience.¹³ In other words, ideology has a secondary function in relation to national identity, since the ultimate source of the political conflict is Russian insecurity as a national trait. In the words of the Long Telegram: “At the bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.”¹⁴

As a result of this double determination (both historical and ideological), the Russian leader is depicted by Kennan as being by definition paranoid. This thesis is heavily underlined in the closing paragraph of the second section where everything, all hard facts, are dissolved in the Russians’ paranoid political fantasies:

Finally we have the unsolved mystery as to who, if anyone, in this great land actually receives accurate and unbiased information about outside world. In an atmosphere of Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy which pervades this Government, possibilities for distorting or poisoning sources and currents of information are infinite. The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth—indeed, their disbelief in its existence—leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another. There is good reason to suspect that this Government is actually a conspiracy within a conspiracy; and I for one am reluctant to believe that Stalin himself receives anything like an objective picture of outside world. Here there is ample scope for the type of subtle intrigue at which Russians are past masters.¹⁵

The crucial point is that Kennan relies on a language that evokes Russian national identity. Thus, the religious foundations of truth in American politics can be opposed to the lack of truth in Russia as a national instinct, and this lack of objective truth is the source of a purely political definition of truth. Ultimately, Soviet politics is anchored in Russian national identity.

The potentially redemptive split between the Russian people and the Soviet leaders has to be interpreted in the same terms. Kennan insists on the difference and antagonism between the people and the leaders, and considers the split between the two to be one of the ultimate guarantees of the success of containment. But rather than a clear-cut separation of what is evil and what is good in Russian national identity, this division only leaves us with further contradictions: on the one hand, Russian national identity is the historical condition of Soviet politics; on the other hand, it is precisely the split between the Russian and the Soviet that is the basis of a successful anti-Communist politics.

After reading Kennan’s telegram, one is tempted to ask: To what extent is the politics of containment dependent on a particular definition of Russian national identity? What is more dangerous to American national security, Russian national identity or Communism? The enemy in Kennan’s narrative is explicitly pathologized as a paranoid/authoritarian personality. Since this pathological aberration is inscribed into a larger historical scheme, however, the Communist Russian is simply the contemporary manifestation of what forms the real problem. It seems as if the Russians would be at war with the Western world even without this particular totalitarian ideology, which simply provides them a “comfortable” dogmatic framework. So the real enemy is primarily the pathological national identity and not just the totalitarian ideology that it sustains.

Alan Nadel, who reads containment as a rhetorical and political strategy that attempts to overcome the internal contradictions of American culture by constructing a coherent national narrative, speaks of the “dual nature” of the Cold War enemy. Discussing Kennan’s “psychological realism,” Nadel writes:

This unquestioned need to counter the Soviets motivates Kennan’s analysis, one that shows this political analysand to be full of contradictions: flexible and intransigent, impetuous but patient; monomaniacal and monolithic but filled with enough hidden rivalries and disagreements to doom it; committed to ideology above pragmatics but also using ideology as a mere excuse for practical actions; part of the long-term political landscape but also likely to collapse with the first transition of power.¹⁶

What Nadel’s analysis brings to light so precisely is the overdetermination of the figure of the enemy. Overdetermination, however, does not simply mean that one can keep hurling all imaginable insults at an unlucky scapegoat. As Nadel’s words already indicate, the issue is that the “unquestioned need” to determine the enemy inevitably leads to an excess of determinations. Therefore, every attempt to ground this enmity in a discourse external to the actual antagonism (capitalism vs. Communism) produces inconsistencies. In Kennan’s text, Russian national identity functions as such a nodal point of overdeterminations, since it becomes the name that, while not exempt from inconsistencies, “contains” all other contradictions by grounding them in an identity.

By way of a quick detour, let me briefly illustrate here the power of the image of the “Russian Communist” with an example taken from the other end of the political spectrum. National identity was equally important not only for the politics of containment but also for the American Communists who worked against it. In his autobiography, Whittaker Chambers narrates the curious fact that for a while people involved in the Washington apparatus of the Communist underground believed that Chambers was one of “them”—that is, that he was a Russian: “I do not remember whether the word Russian was actually used. But, if not, that was the unspoken word that made possible this strange self-deception. Carl [Chambers’ underground pseudonym] was one of ‘them.’”¹⁷ Chambers argues that there is a necessary self-deception involved in the Communist conspiracy that allows the revolutionary to suffer the banality of dull conspiracy. The alienating nature of conspiracy can only be suffered if one maintains the illusion of authenticity—the conspirator needs to have direct access to the “subject supposed to know.”

For example, this is how Chambers writes about Alger Hiss: “A curious kind of snobbery was playing a part in the delusion. Alger Hiss wanted to be one of those who were in direct touch with the real revolution, with the Workers’ Fatherland. I sensed, too, that he felt more confidence in dealing with a Russian than he would have in dealing with the most trusted American Communist.”¹⁸ Let me quote Chambers at length because he gives us a very useful account of how to pass for a Russian:

Word quickly spread through the underground that Carl was a Russian.… I myself quickly began to play the part assigned me. At first, it was amusing as any charade. Soon it became another of the underground nuisances. It was not difficult. The great thing was not to overdo it. I had only to appear, not as a man with an accent, but as a man who is trying to purge his voice of any trace of accent. In part, the illusion was possible because every language implies a special logic of thought. I had only, once in a while, to think out loud like a German, though in unaccented English, to create the effect. An occasional European intonation, perfectly natural to someone who speaks another language, and the trick of never saying Russia, or the Soviet Union, but always saying “home,” completed the illusion. But in fact it was scarcely necessary for me to do anything at all. Once the idea had been fixed, it was less anything I did than what they wanted to believe that made the illusion possible.… [T]here was almost nothing that the underground Communists in Washington would not gladly do for me as a Russian.¹⁹

According to this account, revolutionary activity is authenticated by an act of self-deception that projects the figure of the “real revolution” onto the surface of Russian national identity. This self-deception is necessary for conspiratorial politics, since without such an illusion the revolution would appear in its naked reality as mere treason. In fact, the implication is that Chambers broke with Communism precisely because he managed to free himself from such illusions.²⁰

As Chambers explains, since this self-deception is a “necessary illusion” for conspiratorial activities, his part in the deception was actually minimal. He simply had to provide the screen for the projection of an illusion. To do so, he did not have to imitate being a Russian, he had to imitate trying not to be a Russian. As the reference to “the trick of never saying Russia” illustrates, the most important element of the deception was actually creating the absent center of authenticity by avoiding all direct reference to Russia. In Chambers’s performance, the center of authenticity must be either completely absent or only the traces of its obliteration must remain visible. This absence is necessary for the illusion, since it allows for the reversal of logic in this deception: “it was less anything I did than what they wanted to believe that made the illusion possible.” Russian national identity thus becomes the screen of a wish fulfillment.

Discussing the strange world of conspiracy, Chambers adds: “This story will seem perfectly incredible to anyone who has had no experience of the underground and cannot imagine its strange atmosphere and emotions.”²¹ He seems to suggest here that it might be strange for outsiders to realize the extent to which the reality of conspiracy is sustained by fantasy. Of course, what is missing here is the reverse, a discussion of how the fantasy of conspiracy sustains the reality of anti-Communist ideology: that is, when Chambers appears in public as a Communist defector, he is actually playing a role similar to the one played by “Carl” as the Russian. In both cases, as a Russian Communist and as a patriotic ex-Communist, Chambers found himself in the position of the guarantor of authenticity. As his comments about Hiss demonstrate, the reality of the “revolution” is unbearable without the fantasy of the “real revolution.” But the fight against Communism is equally unbearable without the fantasy of “the real conspiracy.”

Thus, in both Kennan’s and Chambers’s case, we see that political enmity has to be propped up by a certain fantasy of national identity that authenticates the political opposition. In the case of the political and ideological conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States, the cause of enmity was displaced from the ideological to the national terrain. In the case of conspiracy, however, the “real revolution” was removed from the here and now (the mundane, unexciting revolution) to an elsewhere signified by Russian national identity. Due to the asymmetrical definition of enmity, the conflict of the Cold War is not ideological but “natural,” since ideology is opposed to the apolitical essence of man. National identity naturalizes the ideological and political conflicts, since according to this definition the Russian and the American cannot help but be enemies. At this point, it becomes clear that the purely ideological definition of enmity (Communists against capitalists) was instable, since the figure of the enemy was overdetermined and carried a number of different and contradictory traits.

The Domestic Communist

But if the representation of ideological enmity relies on a nationalist supplement, the figure of the “domestic Communist” comes to indicate an internal complication of this nationalism. For the very existence of the domestic Communist provoked a disturbing question: How is it possible for an American to become un-American? What is it in American identity that makes such a conversion possible? Why isn’t an American an anti-Communist by nature? Hoover essentially reduces the figure of the “American Communist” to a contradiction in terms when he writes: “Communists are not American. The Communist Party, USA, endeavors, in every possible way, to convince this country that it is American.… Communism stands for everything America abhors: slave camps, rigged elections, purges, dictatorship.”²² On a practical level, the basis of this claim is, of course, the fact that every single Communist is supposed to follow the party line set down in Moscow. Therefore, every single Communist is a Soviet agent and not a loyal American citizen. On a more abstract level, however, Hoover also posits an incompatibility between Communist and American ideals which indicates that “being American” is not merely a fact of citizenship but an active participation in a set of shared ideas. Therefore, national identity implies a necessary ideological identification that is independent from the mere fact of citizenship. While in the case of the constitution of the “Russian Communist” political ideology needed a national supplement, this time national identity is in need of an ideological supplement.

In his I Led Three Lives: Citizen, “Communist”, Counterspy (first published in 1952 and soon turned into a television show that ran between 1953 and 1956), Herbert Philbrick, commenting on his experiences as he is drawn further into the Communist organizations that he is trying to penetrate for the FBI, writes the following:

But the most difficult task facing me was also the most essential.… Where communism is concerned, there is no one who can be trusted. Anyone can be a Communist. Anyone can suddenly appear in a meeting as a Communist party member—close friend, brother, employee or even employer, leading citizen, trusted public servant. Now I could understand the instructions of the party leaders when I first joined: “Your membership will be secret.… Don’t separate yourself from the masses.… Maintain your normal ties and lead a perfectly normal life.” Anyone can do that, I reflected. No one is safe. No one can be trusted. There is no way to distinguish a Communist from a non-Communist.²³

Philbrick’s amazement here is, of course, an explicit expression of the general anxiety concerning the legibility of the enemy. The shocking discovery is that the most trusted people can turn out to be Communists: “close friend, brother, employee or even employer, leading citizen, trusted public servant.” Communism infiltrates the private sphere (friends and family) as well as the public sphere (work and politics). The impossibility of “distinguish[ing] a Communist from a non-Communist” rests upon a perfect imitation of a “perfectly normal life.” But, since the perfectly normal can always turn out to be abnormal, and the perfectly American may reveal itself to be wholly un-American, we encounter here a limit of American identity itself.

As contemporary sociologists worried, and we could cite here Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd as a primary example, perfectly normal American life might itself be a performance or simply an “imitation of life.”²⁴ On the basis of Riesman’s study, one could conclude that if the norm itself is a performance, as in the case of the “other-directed” personality, this lack of essence marks a limit of the very norm itself. There must be a necessary imitation of the norm (the American way of life) which is essential to maintaining the norm itself. This imitation, however, should be distinguished from an evil imitation that is simply infiltration. Nevertheless, in this context imitation itself emerges as the instance that makes American life possible, but it also makes infiltration by the enemy possible. In other words, we encounter here two different displacements of an internal antagonism: while the Russian Communist functions as an external obstacle to the American way of life, the domestic Communist represents a limit that inhibits American identity and threatens it from the inside.

We have already discussed the important role Russian national identity played in Kennan’s definition of containment. Let us now briefly examine his views on American national identity as they relate to the very same policies. In spite of his famously optimistic conclusion to his Mr. X. article which celebrated the Cold War as a providential chance for America to prove herself to be worthy of her destiny, Kennan himself had a rather harsh judgment on contemporary America.²⁵ In one of the chapters of his memoirs, entitled “Re-encounter with America,” Kennan describes a few of his trips through the country after 1950.²⁶ Having lived his whole life in diplomatic isolation from the realities of everyday America, the experience proved to be a disturbing revelation. Kennan describes three separate trips: one was a train ride from Washington D. C. to Mexico City (a trip that he repeatedly refers to as “a trip to Latin America”); the other was a trip to Chicago where he delivered his lectures later collected in American Diplomacy 1900–1950; while the third trip took him to Southern California.²⁷ For Kennan, the three destinations—Latin America, the Middle West, and California—form the basic locales of a symbolic topography of the fate of the United States. While the mid-West is supposedly the source of genuine American character, its failings give way to a certain “Californization” of the American way of life, which eventually threatens to lead to the “Latin Americanization” of American democracy.

Describing his trip to Chicago, Kennan quotes his diary at length and narrates the events of a day when practically at every corner in the city another disappointment ambushed him: “So I shuffled back to the hotel, in the depression born of hunger plus an overpowering sense of lack of confidence in my surroundings; and a small inward voice said, gleefully and melodramatically: ‘You have despaired of yourself; now despair of your country!’”²⁸ The depressing experience, however, is framed by an apologetic ode to his native region:

I believed then deeply in the Middle West, and I still do—in its essential decency, its moral earnestness, its latent emotional freshness. I viewed it, and view it now, as the heart of the moral strength of the United States. This was precisely why I was so sensitive to its imperfections. Increasingly, under the impressions of this and other visits in midcentury, I came to see this native region as a great slatternly mother, sterile when left to herself, yet immensely fruitful and creative when touched by anything outside herself.²⁹

The failures of the moral center of America are exacerbated by the cultural tendencies already clearly at work in California, which Kennan considered to be just like “the rest of America, but sooner and more so.”³⁰ His final judgment is clear: “In this sense, Southern California, together with all that tendency of American life which it typifies, is childhood without the promise of maturity.”³¹ At the same time, Kennan speaks of a “‘latinization’ of political life”: “Southern California will become politically, as it already is climatically, a Latin American country. And if any democracy survives it will be, as in Latin America, a romantic-Garibaldi type of democracy, founded on the interaction of an emotional populace and a stirring, heroic type of popular leader.” Contemplating the prospect of such a cultural transformation, Kennan asks: “Will it not operate to subvert our basic political tradition? And if so, what will happen to our whole urbanized, industrialized society, so vulnerable to regimentation and centralized control?”³² The unspoken conclusion is that totalitarianism might actually be the direct outcome of the internal development of American identity.

Thus, Kennan’s reflections on Russian and American identity both foundered on the same stumbling block: overdetermination. Due to the inherent split in this anti-Communist discourse between national and ideological determinations, the “dual nature” of the enemy had to be complemented by the “dual nature” of America itself. The attempt to derive the truth of anti-Communism from the mere (pre-ideological) fact of national identity repeatedly ran into the necessity of giving an ideological content to this national identity. As a result, while foreign policy demanded an unequivocally and exuberantly positive image of national identity, domestic politics increasingly relied on the rhetoric of crisis that was seriously aggravated by the moral and social failures of American society.³³

The Third World Communist

Discussions of the category of race in Cold War studies tend to endorse one of two extreme positions. Some argue that the requirements of Cold War foreign policy actually had a positive effect on domestic race relations, as the Cold War accelerated the civil rights movement by providing an international (rather than a strictly domestic) framework that could be used to force the United States government simultaneously to preach and practice democracy.³⁴ At the same time, others claim the opposite, emphasizing the fact that the Cold War institutionalized an environment hostile to any kind of social change and, therefore, it had a detrimental effect on domestic race relations.³⁵

In order to illustrate the logic behind these two positions, I will quote two contemporaneous statements. The first is by Albert Canwell, chairman of the Washington State Legislative Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, which illustrates how the externalization of racial conflict through its projection onto the Communist threat can stifle social demands: “If someone insists that there is discrimination against Negroes in this country, or that there is inequality of wealth, there is every reason to believe that person is a Communist.”³⁶ In other words, as we have seen in the previous chapter, the interests of African Americans will not be represented, since the Communist enemy has managed to turn the very process of representation into the enemy of democracy (and, therefore, representing those interests would actually mean representing Communist interests).

On the other hand, the logic of the “externalization” of racial conflict found another surface of inscription: the anti-colonial struggles of Third World countries. For example, civil rights activist Charles Hamilton Houston argued that “a national policy of the U. S. which permits the disfranchisement of colored people in the South is just as much an international issue as the question of free elections in Poland or the denial of domestic rights in Franco Spain.”³⁷ In other words, institutional racism within the United States is in direct conflict with the ideology that legitimizes American foreign policy. But Houston’s statement shows that the internationalization of the problem of racism can also mobilize the rhetoric of international anti-Communism: the inclusion of race in an international rather than a merely domestic political agenda also made it possible to turn racial reform into a chief necessity of the anti-Communist cause. Thus, while on the domestic scene the problem of racial oppression could be neutralized by anti-Communist politics, on the international scene it had to be one of the prime causes championed by anti-Communism.

My central concern here is that “race” emerges in this context as the category that problematizes the very division of foreign and domestic politics. The question whether race was primarily an issue of domestic or foreign policy was itself turned into a political question. To be more precise, the category of race entered the field of politics in the 1940s not only as a controversial issue, but also as the category in which domestic and foreign policy justified by the same political ideology (that is, anti-Communism) actually ended up contradicting each other.³⁸ The question of racial equality, thus, caused an internal split within anti-Communist discourse: on the one hand, the suppression of the civil rights movement could be perceived by some (especially Southern Democrats) as serving the cause of anti-Communism by maintaining internal order; on the other hand, an increasing number of State Department employees concluded that it was precisely an end to segregation that served the cause of anti-Communism in an international struggle for the hearts and minds of a world whose population was about two-thirds “colored.”

At the heart of this contradiction we find the problem of “national sovereignty” in an increasingly “globalized” politics: while the United States waged war in the name of a universalized concept of freedom (whose political equivalent was democracy), this very “universality” came to threaten the particularity of American national identity. On the one hand, in this new global environment domestic and foreign affairs are no longer clearly separable, but the principle of reorganization of their relationship still demands the primacy of the foreign over the domestic. On the other hand, according to the logic of a certain American “exceptionalism,” the United States could remain an exception to the very rule it strove to establish as an international order founded on the universal concept of human freedom.³⁹

Thus, in the early Cold War context, the civil rights movement was a success to the degree that it could inscribe its goals within a broader anti-Communist framework. This inscription of domestic race relations in an anti-Communist foreign policy, however, was not without its consequences: the gain on the domestic front was paid for by a loss in foreign policy. In order to critique domestic relations, foreign policy (and its primacy) had to be affirmed: internal reform was achieved by renouncing critical attitudes toward American foreign policy. As Penny von Eschen argued, the internationalization of racial struggle was endemic to African-American politics long before the Cold War. By the 1940s, an important link was established between the anti-colonial movements of the world and the struggles of African Americans. But the successful inscription of the category of race in anti-Communist foreign policy, as von Eschen claims, resulted in a “domestication” of anticolonialism.⁴⁰ Although anticolonialism was still the official program of the U.S. government, it had to assume the only legitimate form: it was acceptable anticolonialism only when it restricted all political choices to the bipolar division of power characteristic of the Cold War.

We have to interpret anti-Communist politics as it relates to the Third World in this particular context. The orchestrated effort at managing information was so much the more interesting, as it veiled a negative assessment of the international political situation. Kennan, for example, held a rather pessimistic view of American prospects in Asia. In a 1948 Policy Planning Staff document (PPS 23), he wrote: “It is urgently necessary that we recognize our own limitations as a moral and ideological force among Asiatic peoples.”⁴¹ In relation to Asia, Kennan renounced all “idealistic slogans” and recommended that the United States deal with Asia in “straight power concepts” and restrict American involvement to military and economic influence. As Kennan observed, “we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population,” a situation that inevitably leads to “envy and resentment.”⁴² But what the political realism of containment demands is precisely the maintenance of this disparity:

Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.⁴³

What concerns us most in the negative assessment of the fate of Asia is that, just like the dual determination of the sources of Soviet Communism (ideological and historical) that anchored enmity in a national identity, the political prospects of Asia were anchored in an “Asiatic” identity. In NSC 34, for example, we read the following assessment of the fate of China: “The political alternatives which this vicious cycle will permit for China’s future are chaos or authoritarianism. Democracy cannot take root in so harsh an environment.”⁴⁴ Due to historical and national traditions, the two imaginable political alternatives in Asia are either absolute lack of order (chaos) or absolute authority (totalitarianism). The third option, democracy, is understood to be impossible to implement: under the present circumstances, it is simply not a realistic option.

But the impossibility of Asian democracy is not only an unfortunate coincidence of conditions. It is actually part of Asian character: “In estimating the degree of political pressure that the USSR may exert from its present position in Asia, it should be remembered that its proteges deal with Asiatic peoples who are traditionally submissive to power when effectively applied and habituated to authoritarian government and the suppression of the individual.”⁴⁵ In PPS 39/1, his elaboration of the conclusions of NSC 34, Kennan adds: “It must be emphasized that this state of affairs [the instability of Chinese government] stems not only from national traits of long standing but also and predominantly from a pervasive and organic weakness which no sudden reform measures or personal leadership could overcome.”⁴⁶

If we connect the two sides of the argument presented here, the following scenario emerges: on the one hand, security implies the concentration of global wealth in U.S. hands; on the other hand, the United States needs to fight Communism on a continent where the rejection of Western influence and democracy has such deep historical roots that it actually became a character trait. Thus, one of the central problems of American policy concerning Asia was to implement a certain post-colonial hegemony: concentrate global power in America in such a way that Third World countries still remain pro-American and anti-Soviet. And this is where the category of “race” gained special significance.

As Christina Klein argued, “The United States thus became the only Western nation that sought to legitimate its world-ordering ambitions by championing the idea (if not always the practice) of racial equality.”⁴⁷ We should not forget that the official policy of the United States was anticolonial. Decolonization, however, had a number of components: it had to be measured against the Soviet threat, the interests of America’s colonizer allies, the independence of colonized nations, and the economic and political interests of the United States. The difficulty of the American position was that the United States found itself between two potential allies and an enemy. On the one hand, as a strategic move, the dual division of the Cold War allowed America to depict Soviet Communism as a form of imperialism and Soviet rule as “slavery,” so that America could assume the role of the anticolonial, anti-Communist champion of freedom. But, on the other hand, the rest of the free world—which was to be wooed and transformed by the “American way of life”—was still divided between colonizer and colonized nations. The goal was to invent a vocabulary of international anti-Communism that could simultaneously attract the old European colonial powers and their ex-colonies, and still serve American interests in the long run.

In NSC 48/1, for example, we read the following assessment of Soviet influence: “In any event, colonial nationalist conflict provides a fertile field for subversive communist activities, and it is now clear that southeast Asia is the target of a coordinated offensive directed by the Kremlin.”⁴⁸ This threat implies that Third World nations must be given their freedom so that they will not consider Western democracy an essentially exploitative system. But the problem with decolonization is that it works against the interests of America’s Western allies. Furthermore, decolonization can also serve American economic interests as well. Therefore, the United States has to try to please both colonizers and the colonized in order to serve the demands of security: “The United States should continue to use its influence in Asia toward resolving the colonial-nationalist conflict in such a way as to satisfy the fundamental demands of the nationalist movement while at the same time minimizing the strain on the colonial powers who are our Western allies.”⁴⁹ Anti-Communist anticolonialism implies the inclusion of Third World nations in an international system of free-market economy in order to keep them in the American geopolitical sphere of influence.

Whereas the Russian Communist was an external and the domestic Communist an internal problem, in the category of race the two fields not only overlapped but actually came to contradict each other. Since pure ideological enmity (Communism vs. capitalism) turned out to be an instable construct due to the overdetermination of the figure of the enemy, it appeared that the definition of enmity based on nationality (American vs. Russian) could potentially sustain a manageable division of outside and inside. But as soon as the category of race was introduced, purely nationalistic enmity was no longer imaginable either. Racial conflict turned out to be the internal antagonism that makes the national definition of enmity inconsistent—if not impossible.

Thus, we can now present the schematic outline of the political theology of anti-Communist nationalism which consists of four components: religion, politics, nationalism, and race. First, truth itself was placed in a religious register. This is how we moved from religion to politics: politics is the mere expression of this religious truth in a particular form. Anti-Communist politics is therefore fundamentally an attempt to limit the total politicization of the social in the name of religion. But, as a next step, we found that the radical opposition of enemies did not provide a consistent discourse, and it had to be supplemented by the discourse of nationalism. As result, political enmity was placed on a “naturalized” national foundation. Finally, however, this national foundation was undermined by the conflict between the rhetoric of universalism and the problem of racism. Race emerged as a category that disturbed these ideologically constructed forms of American nationalisms.

The Joys and Torments of Secrecy: Conspiracy and the Secrets of Democracy

In the early Cold War context, the discourse on secrecy was characterized by an essential split between two basic forms. On the one hand, we have a positive form of secrecy, the secrets of American democracy that are essential to its identity. The most important example of such a secret was the atomic bomb which, while it was an American monopoly, served as the guarantor of American military supremacy. On the other hand, we have the negative form of secrecy exemplified by subversive conspiracies. In the case of the former, we encounter the problem of the democratic distribution of knowledge as the secrets of American democracy must be kept secret from its own citizens as well; in the case of the latter, we come across the ideological fantasy of what is often referred to as a “theft of enjoyment.” In other words, the early Cold War discourse on secrecy elaborated the necessary limitations on knowledge and enjoyment essential for anti-Communist democracy.

The Cold War represented an important stage in the history of official secrecy, since it sanctioned the full-blown institutionalization of political secrecy. Patrick Moynihan, for example, argues that “Secrecy is a form of regulation. There are many such forms, but a general division can be made between those dealing with domestic affairs and those dealing with foreign affairs. In the first category, it is generally the case that government prescribes what the citizen may do. In the second category, it is generally the case that government prescribes what the citizen may know.”⁵⁰ Thus, due to the primacy of foreign policy in the early Cold War context, secrecy was removed from the sphere of foreign policy and became a general component of politics. When Moynihan claims that during the Cold War “secrecy had become the norm,” he also shows how a supposedly exceptional measure could be turned into a permanent solution.⁵¹

The reorganization of American democracy around these secrets and the concomitant concern with security, however, raised a number of predictable questions. To put it bluntly, the relation of secrecy to democracy itself became a problem: Can democracy have secrets at all? Harold D. Lasswell referred to this complication in his National Security and Individual Freedom (1950) in the following terms: “As the first head of the Atomic Energy Commission said, ‘Democracy and secrecy are incompatible.’”⁵² Very early on in the Cold War it became apparent that secrecy is in direct opposition to the principle of publicity believed to be one of the foundational pillars of American democracy. Government secrecy, even if it is allegedly serving the common good, withdraws politics from the sphere of public scrutiny. In the words of Herbert S. Marks, such politics might lead to “public administration without public debate.”⁵³

David E. Lilienthal, chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, devoted a whole campaign to this issue. In his article, “Democracy and the Atom” (published in 1948), he argued for a program of public education about all matters atomic, since in the atomic age it is public knowledge that can save American democracy from itself: “Unless the American people as a whole do become informed, so that they can chart the course of their own destiny in the atomic age, then democracy in its very essentials is doomed to perish, not by the action of a foreign foe but by default by our own hands.”⁵⁴ The secret of the atom marks an internal limit of democracy: it is the force that can lead to the internal collapse of American democracy by turning it into a totalitarian system in the name of the security of democracy. The very same instance that is supposed to guarantee the security of democracy might actually lead to its destruction. The apparent contradiction of the politics of security centered on secrecy is clear: American democracy has to be based on a secret in order to be secure, but if the politics of secrecy is in conflict with basic democratic principles, it must be admitted that the very democratic framework of politics can only be secured by an essentially undemocratic politics.⁵⁵

The most important critique of the politics of secrecy coming from a Cold War liberal was Edward A. Shils’s The Torment of Secrecy (1956). Shils’s work is significant because his critique of official secrecy is based on a particular definition of democratic politics. According to Shils, the essence of democratic politics is the necessary delimitation of the field of politics. Democracy can only function properly if the limits separating politics and society are clearly drawn: “Democracy requires the occasional political participation of most of its citizenry some of the time, and a moderate and dim perceptiveness—as if from the corner of the eye—the rest of the time. It could not function if politics and the state of social order were always on everyone’s mind.”⁵⁶ Here we encounter two necessary limits: a temporal and a social. Democracy has to be a part-time concern for only a certain segment of society. In fact, Shils goes further and argues that the essence of pluralistic politics is a “lukewarm ‘politicization.’” Politicians “must also be concerned with objects other than political objects and they must look at them from a nonpolitical point of view.”⁵⁷ In other words, properly democratic politics must move beyond the political and must find room for a certain concern with the nonpolitical. Democracy can only maintain itself as a genuine democracy if depoliticization (which prevents the total politicization of society) is a structural part of its organization.

As a correlative of the politics of depoliticization, the foundational civic virtue of democracy, rather than the “demand for extreme solidarity,” is actually indifference—an affective limit on social organization: “Without the willingness to disregard much of what our fellow citizens do—a disregard based on indifference and principle—there could be no freedom.”⁵⁸ That is, apart from the necessary move beyond politics, rather than an excessive concern with the fate of our neighbors, democracy “requires from its practitioners a spread of interest beyond the range of politics; it also prohibits emotional intensity, especially emotional excitement continuing over long stretches of time or running on without intermission.”⁵⁹ If pluralistic politics is the maintenance of democracy by the containment of emotions in the name of the all-inclusive imperative of moderation, “extremism” is the unjustified introduction of an affective dimension to the field of politics in the form of “base passions.”⁶⁰ Liberal democracy is predicated upon the prohibition of emotional intensity: democratic passion is a contradiction in terms. To be in a democratic mood means to guard the limits of politics and society (by introducing an apolitical limit to the field of politics) with the moderate passions of a cool-headed liberal. Anti-Communism, if managed with moderate emotional intensity, is liberalism; if reveled in through base passions and enjoyed, it is extremism.

The central point of Shils’s argument, however, is that democracy must be based on an equilibrium of publicity, privacy, and secrecy. Moderation means that none of the three should reach a degree of excess over the others: “Privacy is the voluntary withholding of information reinforced by a willing indifference. Secrecy is the compulsory withholding of knowledge, reinforced by the prospect of sanctions for disclosure. Both are the enemies, in principle, of publicity.”⁶¹ Thus, one way of imagining the relationship of the three spheres is that privacy and secrecy represent two different limits of publicity. For Shils, privacy is the terrain of the citizen as it willingly withdraws itself from publicity; and secrecy is the terrain of the state as it compulsively withholds information from the public sphere. Privacy should be the “secret” that no one wants to know, whereas secrecy is public information that no one is allowed to know.

Shils’s objective is, therefore, to locate at the heart of democracy a structural secrecy without enjoyment. Such a distribution of spheres already shows that it is insufficient to theorize the rise of modern democracy merely in terms of the public and the private spheres. Their supplement is the sphere of secrecy that is a constitutive component of modern political theory and practice: “The principles of privacy, secrecy and publicity are not harmonious among themselves. The existence of each rests on a self-restrictive tendency in each of the others.”⁶² In Shils’s historical account, modern democracy is actually a reaction against the arcana imperium of absolute monarchy. Democracy is the very demand that politics belong to the public sphere rather than to that of aristocratic secrecy. This transformation of the structure of politics, however, is an impossible project: “At least as important, however, in the limitation of the total triumph of the dual pattern of publicity and privacy, was the recognition that the tasks of government and the obligations of society did not require or allow their complete fulfillment.”⁶³ The dual demand for the publicity of politics and the privatization of republican citizenship founders on a structural impossibility: the historical process of democratization (as the move from aristocratic secrecy to democratic publicity) is truly democratic only if it is impossible, if it cannot be fully accomplished. Secrecy is, therefore, unavoidable.

This legitimation of secrecy by Cold War liberals found its mirror image in the necessary renunciation of extremism and conspiracies. In this context, the question of enjoyment surfaced again as a central problem. While Shils speaks of the illegitimate enjoyment of extreme anti-Communist politics, Arthur Schlesinger, discussing the existential appeals of totalitarian systems explains the flight from the burden of freedom in the following way: “Outsiders sometimes wonder how Communists can endure strict party discipline. How foolish a speculation! Members of a totalitarian party enjoy the discipline, they revel in the release of individual responsibility, in the affirmation of comradeship in organized mass solidarity.”⁶⁴ Here Schlesinger recycles the common existentialist theme, popularized in America by Eric Fromm, that “freedom” results in a state of anxiety. Therefore, there is something in our very being that can only be endured by an escape from freedom. The seduction of totalitarian enjoyment is that it offers a means of escape from the responsibilities of freedom and, thus, from democratic anxiety.

Contrary to Schlesinger, however, Whittaker Chambers purges the mystique of conspiracy of all enjoyment with the authority of the ex-Communist:

For conspiracy is itself dull work. Its mysteries quickly become a bore, its secrecy a burden and its involved way of doing things a nuisance. Its object is never to provide excitement, but to avoid it. Thrills mean that something has gone wrong. The mysterious character of underground work is merely a tedious daily labor to keep thrills from happening. I have never known a good conspirator who enjoyed conspiracy.⁶⁵

Chambers describes for us the alienated revolutionary: this is what happens to the professional conspirator when the revolution (instead of liberating us from work) is itself reinscribed into the logic of “dull work.” Chambers demystifies the supposition of evil enjoyment projected onto the figure of the enemy and redefines conspiracy on the basis of the lack of enjoyment. To be more precise, Chambers not only claims that conspiracy is devoid of thrills because it is work; he goes as far as saying that it is precisely the kind of work whose objective is to do away with enjoyment. If it were enjoyed, it would not be real conspiracy.

Similarly, Hoover describes conspiracy as the most unpleasant experience: “That’s why the underground is a nightmare of deceit, fear, and tension, where one has to tell falsehoods, fabricate a background, adopt a new name, and live in fear of being recognized by old friends or acquaintances.”⁶⁶ In this context, Hoover quotes Harry Gold: “Mom was certain that I was carrying on a series of clandestine love affairs.… It was drudgery…anyone who had an idea this work was glamorous and exciting was very wrong indeed—nothing could have been more dreary.”⁶⁷ While Mom believes the son’s clandestine escapades to be a sequence of promiscuous adventures full of enjoyment, for the son subversion is the exact opposite: no smut, only dreary work and mere drudgery. The joys of conspiracy are mere illusions that are substituted by the image of alienating labor: to conspire here primarily means to work hard to avoid all thrills.

But when FBI plant Herbert Philbrick discusses the “professional revolutionary,” he uses enjoyment to exonerate himself as the counter-intelligence agent merely posing as a conspirator: “[the Communist] will work long hours, pass days or even months away from family, alienate his friends, betray non-Communists who trust him, even go to jail. Whereas the Communist seems to find some enjoyment from all of this, I found none.”⁶⁸ That is, in a situation where the distinctions between performance and reality seem to be rather blurry, determination in the last instance belongs to enjoyment. For example, expressing his anxieties concerning his role, Philbrick writes:

This was the beginning of what I ultimately recognized as a manufactured schizophrenia. I was sinking so deep that it was no longer possible for me to “play” the role of a spy. I could no longer simply make believe that I was a Marxist. Like an experienced actor, who must sublimate himself to his part and immerse himself in the playwright’s creation, whenever I walked into the stage setting of a cell meeting, I had to be a young Communist. The costume alone was not enough. No disguise would have been adequate.⁶⁹

If disguise is no longer adequate, the counterintelligence agent has to be a Communist even if he is really an anti-Communist. As we can see, Philbrick’s only way of distinguishing his performance from a complete identification with the enemy is by reference to enjoyment: although the two identities are really difficult to separate, what distinguishes the real Communist from the undercover anti-Communist is that the latter does not enjoy performing his role. Thus, in Philbrick’s case, in direct opposition to Chambers, the evil pleasures of conspiracy still need to be maintained.

Thus the question remains, who enjoys politics according to anti-Communist propaganda? As we have seen, Shils identified the self-serving enjoyment of secrecy with extremist anti-Communism. According to the same logic, proper anti-Communism is devoid of all base passions. Even Chambers, discussing his anti-Communist duty to his country, expresses the same attitude toward the joys of anti-Communism: “I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die within me. I inform without pleasure because it is necessary.”⁷⁰ As it appears, for Chambers there was no joy either in conspiracy or informing. Conspiracy is not a thrill but dull work, while anti-Communism is not a joy but a necessity or a duty. Similarly, Hoover advises his readers about proper anti-Communist action in the following manner: “Wage the fight in a democratic manner. Emotion should never replace reason as a weapon. To pursue extralegal methods is simply to injure your case. Fight hard, but fight according to the rules.”⁷¹ As Hoover right away places “emotion” on the same level as the renounced “extralegal methods,” it is clear that emotion cannot be a democratic weapon. Properly democratic politics is understood to be devoid of enjoyment, as if the latter marked the political limit of the former.

As we can see, therefore, the anti-Communist discourse on secrecy is defined by necessary restrictions on knowledge and enjoyment: certain things must remain secrets, but the protection of secrets should not be the source of excessive enjoyment. To be more precise, within the field of knowledge, anti-Communism imposes a double imperative: on the one hand, it is essential for democracy that its citizens know certain things in order to be able to participate in this democracy; on the other hand, the democratic framework itself can only be maintained through the restriction of knowledge with reference to vital secrets. Similarly, in the case of enjoyment we encounter a double movement: it is important to depict totalitarianism as a state of suffering and, simultaneously, explain its seductive force as the enjoyment yielded by the escape from existential anxiety. And as a symmetrical counterpart of this double determination of totalitarian joy and suffering, anti-Communism itself has to be defined as a duty rather than a source of enjoyment. Anti-Communist duty could be interpreted as the disavowed enjoyment of anti-Communist politics. And maybe this is where we encounter the ultimate horizon of anti-Communist politics, the point where anti-democratic exclusion in the name of democracy coincides with the disavowed pleasures of anti-Communist duty in the discourse on secrecy. Hence the reserved poise of the Cold War liberal: he acknowledges and accepts the necessary limitations on democracy, but refuses to enjoy them.

Preparing for Catastrophe: Civil Defense and Its Vicissitudes

Beside secrecy, the atomic bomb introduced another motive to politics: the real possibility of absolute catastrophe. In the immediate aftermath of the war, two basic solutions were offered to this predicament. The first was the internationalist position that argued for the necessity of “outlawing” war in the age of atomic weapons through the institution of a global authority. This position represented a certain “universalistic” stance that tried to neutralize the most threatening political antagonisms by displacing them to a global level. The second solution, which eventually won out over the other, was the “particularistic” position that proposed the strengthening of national sovereignty in the name of spreading a global pax Americana. Thus, in order to avoid the blurring of essential distinctions within the national framework, the mobilization of the home front under the heading of civilian defense was primarily concerned with the establishment of proper lines of demarcations and necessary limits. Accordingly, the main concern of anti-Communist propaganda was to convince Americans that a nuclear war with Soviet Union was imminent but survivable.

The history of Cold War civil defense reflects the same developments that we have been discussing so far. To a large extent, the institution of a nationwide civil defense program was dependent on the domestication of psychological warfare methods. Its primary function was to achieve a certain militarization of American society. The American civilian population had to reorganize its life according to standards of survival in case of nuclear warfare. “Preparedness” demanded that every family become a vigilant tactical unit ready to be mobilized in case of war. As a consequence, the American way of life had to be organized around a necessary fiction or an illusion. Although it never actually took place, nuclear catastrophe had to be represented constantly. In order to be prepared for it, life had to be lived as if the catastrophe had already happened, as if life were already survival of what might come in the future. In the words of Norman Cousins: “total destruction…must be dramatized.”⁷² Just as in the case of secrecy, the problem of publicity led to a discussion of the necessary limits of public knowledge about atomic war and the proper affective response to this knowledge.

During the period we are concerned with here (1945–1963), there were two major waves of nuclear fear in America. The first was a reaction to the birth of the atomic age and was set off by the bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It saw the loss of American atomic monopoly in 1949 and settled down to a troublesome coexistence. The second wave hit the country during the mid-1950s as a reaction to the hydrogen bomb. This time, the nuclear test ban debate focused the nation’s attention on the problem of radioactive fallout. This period reached its peak with the Cuban missile crisis, after which, beginning with 1963, the question of the atom suddenly dropped out of sight for a while.⁷³

The first stage of the atomic age was riddled by guilt caused by the American use of weapons of mass destruction to end a glorious war. The most immediate cultural debate was primarily concerned with the ethical implications of such an act and the prospects for the future in the new age. Hiroshima loomed large in the nation’s consciousness and left the majority of the population with guilt over the recent past and anxiety about the immediate future. This period saw the rise and fall of the short-lived but influential world government movement, the so-called scientists’ movement, and an attempt to bring nuclear power under international control. The early reactions to the power of the atom were so despairing, so apocalyptic in magnitude, that the government soon realized that it had to intervene to counteract atomic hysteria—partly fueled by the fear tactic exploited by activist scientists. This intervention assumed the form of a consciously devised propaganda effort to promote the peaceful use and the positive side of the atom. By the end of the forties, public interest in the dangers of the atomic age quickly dropped. As early as 1946, responding to the general disappointment among the American public about the Bikini tests, Norman Cousins was speaking of the “standardization of catastrophe.”⁷⁴ It is characteristic of this kind of positive propaganda that, as Paul Boyer observed, the promotion of a more positive thinking coincides with the recognition by government officials that such positive effects lay much further in the distant future than had previously been believed.⁷⁵ Boyer calls this propaganda tactic “secrecy and soft soap”: secrecy about the government’s nuclear programs and the dissemination of a positive image of the uses of atomic power.⁷⁶

The second wave of atomic fear was mainly concerned with fallout. The roots of the controversy concerning radioactivity and its effects go back to the very origins of the atomic age. Nevertheless, it was primarily the 1954 BRAVO test—and the unfortunate fate of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon, which received a fair amount of radioactive ash—that called the world’s attention to the dangers of fallout. What proved to be rather confusing for the general public, however, was that government secrecy was this time accompanied by an admitted lack of scientific knowledge about the effects of radioactivity. This combination of official secrecy about what is known and the public admission of the lack of essential knowledge helped raise the issue of fallout as a crucial political question. It was in this climate that the nuclear test ban debate became a pressing issue for the second half of the fifties, as it gained some momentum during the 1956 election when Adlai Stevenson attempted to make the test ban into an important part of his campaign against Eisenhower. For proponents of the ban, it was not merely World War III that meant catastrophe. As they argued, the preparation for nuclear war in the form of nuclear testing was already producing such an excess of radiation that the annihilation of the human race was already underway as an invisible and slow process. A common response of their opponents was that it was in the best interests of national security to continue testing, since the vague threat of the long-term effects of radiation did not compare with the threat of an actual nuclear war with the USSR.

What became immediately obvious in this debate, however, was that fallout is a worldwide rather than just a national concern of the nuclear powers. Like the issue of race, world opinion again became a point of contention for national politics. In a 1957 article of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, Eugene Rabinowitch wrote: “Whether this danger is great or small, the most important thing is that it is universal and compulsory.”⁷⁷ Similarly, a New Republic editorial of the same year spoke of “the age of ‘radiation without representation.’”⁷⁸ As the reference to the revolutionary slogan makes it clear, the political conflict created by the problem of radiation was that secret decisions can affect the whole population of the country or even the whole globe, whose opinion is not reflected in those decisions.

In this context, it is not surprising that one of the most salient features of postwar American culture was the historical consciousness of having entered a new age. Therefore, most of the early responses that considered the political impact of the bomb assumed a virulently revolutionary rhetoric.⁷⁹ As early as August 7, 1945, the New York Times argued in an editorial that “Civilization and humanity can now survive only if there is a revolution in mankind’s political thinking.”⁸⁰ Similarly, Harold D. Lasswell spoke of “the world revolution of our time” and claimed that “Ours is an epoch of changes profound enough to be called revolutionary and of sufficient scope to cover the globe.”⁸¹ While the list of examples could run much longer, we should simply note here that the rhetoric of revolutionary change is combined with a certain thought of universality (indicated by the expressions “human race” and “global scope”), as if global politics itself had reached a new phase of its history with the atomic age. As opposed to a mere “abstract” universality, to many the essence of this revolution appears to have been that technological development produced a “real” universality in the form of the global interconnectedness of the human race: the universal threat of global annihilation can make humanity politically one. To be more precise, the choice was quite often presented in absolute terms. In the words of Philip Wylie, this new “universality” meant either “doom or deliverance.”⁸²

The discussion of the universalization of politics in this global revolution automatically led to the general concern with the end of national sovereignty. In this respect, one of the most influential documents of the era is Norman Cousins’s manifesto calling for world government, Modern Man Is Obsolete (1945). Without going into detail concerning Cousins’s argument and the response it provoked, I want to highlight here the position of national sovereignty in his text. As Cousins bluntly states, we “will have to recognize the flat truth that the greatest obsolescence of all in the Atomic Age is national sovereignty.”⁸³ He adds that humanity has already proven to be a “world warrior” in the twentieth century; the new task is to become “world citizens.” This move involves a “transformation or adjustment from national to world man.”⁸⁴ Therefore, “common security” has to be balanced off against “common cataclysm” by setting up a world sovereignty that does not amount to the establishment of a dictatorial world state, as it leaves room for national jurisdiction and only concerns itself with global foreign policy.⁸⁵ When Cousins briefly discusses the feasibility of such a project, he claims that although “strictly speaking, no precise guide to the present is to be found anywhere,” the failure of Greek democracy should be contrasted with the success of American democracy.⁸⁶ In other words, even for Cousins’s internationalism, the model of world government is the American federal government as it regulates the states. Thus, although it is never stated explicitly by Cousins, ultimately we could conclude that the global end of national sovereignty had to be modeled on American national sovereignty.

As Boyer argued, “The limited evidence available suggests that in this period when the shock of Hiroshima and the fear of atomic war were most intense, the idea [of world government] won at least passive support from a third to a half of the American people.”⁸⁷ In spite of this relatively wide support, the movement proved to be rather ephemeral, since there was an essential conflict (if not an outright contradiction) at the heart of the American people’s support for the world government movement. On the one hand, the world government movement was partly predicated upon the critique of nationalism that gained popularity during World War II. On the other hand, as Boyer adds, “when specifics were offered as to aspects of national sovereignty that might actually have to be surrendered, [pollsters] noted, support for world government dropped sharply.”⁸⁸ Not surprisingly, this meant that Americans were ready to criticize nationalism but only if it did not involve surrendering their own national sovereignty. The seeming contradiction of atomic universality was its foundation in a critique of nationalism in the name of American national sovereignty.

Thus, early on in the history of the atomic age it was settled that global anti-Communism had to serve the interests of American national sovereignty. The universal concept of freedom had to be anchored in American national sovereignty. Consequently, as the politics of national security came to be defined by the policy of “deterrence” on the international level, on the domestic front security meant the installation of a national civil defense program based on what administrators called “national morale” and “national will.” According to Guy Oakes, this civil defense program was predicated upon four premises: first, survival is possible; second, if it is possible, it is based on personal responsibility (that is, it is modeled on “self-help” skills); third, this self-help, however, is only workable if it is fortified by self-control (what Oakes discusses under the heading of “emotion management”); and finally, it had to be demonstrated that this kind of civil defense is basically a form of American traditionalism, that it is a revival of American virtues from the past.⁸⁹ Oakes’s conclusion, however, is that civil defense “was a necessary illusion: indispensable to the moral underpinning of national security, but ultimately irrelevant to survival under atomic attack.”⁹⁰

Oakes’s analysis allows us to speak of the complications of anti-Communist propaganda in terms of two contradictions: one concerns the relationship of knowledge and affect in politics, the other the relationship of the norm and the crisis. First, the official assumption was that without publicly available information, the fear of the unknown will grasp the souls of the nation with “nuclear terror.” Accordingly, the role of civil defense would be to enlighten the public. But, as Oakes argues, the conclusion appeared to be that civil defense “would magnify public fears by confirming that they had a sound basis in reality.”⁹¹ As a result, the fundamental dilemma of civil defense emerged in rather clear terms: “In the absence of civil defense, the public would be gripped by nuclear terror. But once civil defense had done its work, the public would be even more terrified.”⁹²

The paradox of nuclear crisis management followed the same logic. In order to deal with crisis, one must normalize it. In other words, life must be restructured as if it were already the survival of crisis. But the ultimate result of such normalization is that the distinction between the crisis and the norm disappears:

The collapse of the distinction between crisis and normality is a definitive feature of the Cold War conception of nuclear reality. It means that when the nuclear emergency occurs, nothing extraordinary or unexpected can happen. A nuclear attack is not a horrible and barely conceivable anomaly, but a problem, immensely challenging, of course, although still amenable to solution by means of standard methods and strategies indigenous to American culture.⁹³

Thus, the ideological fantasy at the root of civil defense mobilization was the conviction that the norm can be maintained in crisis if the distinctions between the two are collapsed. But the fact appeared to be that in order to be effective at all, civil defense already needs as a given what it actually aims to restore. Thus, Oakes concludes his book with the following judgment: “Paradoxically, if civil defense was necessary, then it was impossible. If it was possible, then it was not necessary.”⁹⁴

Just like the category of race, therefore, atomic catastrophe introduced a new kind of universality to politics. This universality turned Cold War politics into a truly global politics. The problem, however, was that according to the political theology of Cold War anti-Communism, national sovereignty was a necessary limit on this universality. As a result, anti-Communist nationalism had to maintain its affective foundation by reference to a set of “necessary illusions”: it had to constantly dramatize a global catastrophe that never actually happened, and it had to maintain the illusion that it is possible to survive such a catastrophe. The ultimate consequence of the official propagation of this institutionalized illusion, however, was the collapse of the distinction between crisis and norm. The necessary illusions of anti-Communist politics became justifications of a permanent crisis.

Cold War Anti-Communism and the Paradoxes of Security

Taken to its extreme, the paradox of security demands sacrifices of the very thing it sets out to secure. Thus, the logic of security implies that we make sacrifices of the very thing we want to protect as we supplant it by another object without being able to guarantee its absolute security. Simply put, security changes the very thing it tries to secure: its essence is not mere conservation but the unavoidable transformation of an identity. So the identity that the politics of security claims to protect is not the same as the identity produced by this politics.

This is where we encountered some of the constitutive paradoxes of the propagation of anti-Communist truth. First, in the case of the representation of the enemy, we have seen that this overdetermined ideological figure marked the internal limits of democratic representation by introducing the logic of the simulacrum to the sphere of politics. Second, in the case of secrecy, we found that democracy depends on structural secrecy that withdraws some of its vital conditions from the sphere of public representation. Finally, in the case of catastrophe, we found that the public representation of a necessary illusion organized the everyday reality of a permanent crisis. Yet the basic contradiction of civil defense turned out to be that it institutionalized and normalized the very crisis that it allegedly prepared for. While in the different figures of the Communist we encountered figures of the representation of the unrepresentable antagonism that constitutes radical enmity, in the figure of the secret we found the unrepresentable conditions of democracy itself (and if certain secrets are necessary to maintain security—that is, the very democratic framework of democratic politics—this figure also functions as a nodal point of the disavowed enjoyment of a foundational exclusion). In the case of catastrophe, we encountered the other side of the same argument: the end of the nation, the end of democracy, and the end of the world all function as the inverse images of the very condition of democracy. The catastrophe, in this sense, is the reverse image of the secret: a confrontation with the very condition of democracy as a condition of impossibility.

Thus, what is common to all three of the ideological figures examined here (enemy, secret, catastrophe) is that they all participated in the same political project: they legitimated the expansion of the logic of the exception in the name of security. In this sense, they were the key figures of the postwar transformation of American political life. The “enemy” justified the expansion of a politics that increasingly relied on nondemocratic measures in the name of democracy. The “secret” allowed the withdrawal of executive power from the sphere of pubic deliberation. And the “catastrophe” institutionalized the rhetoric of “permanent crisis” that legitimated the militarization of civilian life. As the exception became the norm, war was turned into the standard mode of politics; secrecy became the standard terrain of sovereign power; and crisis became the standard of civilian life.