Response to Comments: /Politics/Chomsky.html

It's possible that you are hung up on the Stalin thing because you define the cold war as a (partially reasonable) response by the U.S. to the dangerous moves by Stalin. Chomsky sees the cold war as a species of domestic propaganda necessary to rediscipline a population that had become organized in the 1930s and had to be conditioned to accept a pliant side roll in American politics while the "power elite" consolidated its hold on much of the world left in ruins by the war. These folks wanted to enjoy their new position without being bothered by demands for silly reforms from the lower orders. So, in order to enjoy this vast booty, the upper echelons would need a plausable foe to terrify the public in the latest in a long line of "red scares" aimed at the domestic population. The stick man Stalin became a convenient boogy-man with which to frighten the public. The fact that he was a tyrant ruling over a shattered empire almost erased from the face of the earth and barely able to extend his reach to the domains granted him by Roosevelt and Churchill, without hope of conceivably threatening the mighty U.S. needn't stand in the way of his usefulness as a propaganda device. Meanwhile the domestic agenda of discrediting the New Deal and purging the CIO and the militant industrial unions (labeled communists)could proceed. Stalin just isn't central to the cold war in this sense, just as the Kaiser wasn't central to the Red Scare of 1918.

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