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The 's Policy Of National Security

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In the years spanning the two world wars, propaganda in the United States morphed according to urgencies of national security. Concerns of such did not become paramount until Pearl Harbor, which “shattered…[America’s] illusion of invulnerability” (McMahon 6). In the preceding period of relative safety, Americans had the privilege of viewing Soviets with a gentle condescension. Not yet a genuine threat, the seemingly contradictory ideologies of capitalism and communism posed a mere conflict. After Pearl Harbor, it was still unclear whether the US’s neoliberalistic goal to establish “a freer and more open international economic system” could coexist peacefully with the USSR’s policy of “security-through-expansion” (9, 12), but the predicament was made to fester while both superpowers united to subdue German forces. Far removed from the European continent, average US citizens relied on news networks and cinema, avenues which for these people acted as “interpretive experts to inform their citizenship” (Patrick 11). The mediums acted as “principal information source[s]” (30), but the information provided became increasingly slanted as was necessitated to ‘inform the citizenship’ of persons in such a way as to mobilize a great war effort. The pre-Pearl Harbor film Ninotchka represents an example of the US’s early platonic condescension of the USSR, whereas the 1943 film Mission to Moscow demonstrates the urgency later felt by political elites to mobilize citizens in a war effort

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