Focusing on the years 1940–early 1946, this thesis argues that American policy makers used rhetorical figures such as the Munich analogy, the totalitarianism schema, and Nazi-Soviet comparison to see the USSR through a cognitive filter which supported an ever more assertive policy toward the wartime ally. During the war, events – mainly the wartime alliance and the bold Soviet effort to defeat Nazism – worked against these rhetorical figures. After the war events and the Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe supported the figures and thereby nurtured the growing American suspicion against the USSR. This constellation helped to shape what would later become known as Containment as the Cold War developed.
The ‘lesson’ that Americans seemed to have learned from Munich was that ‘aggression unchecked is aggression unleashed.’ All three rhetorical figures brought the USSR and Nazi Germany in relation and thereby served to transfer the image of Nazi aggressive expansionism onto the USSR. This finding is supported by several studies in cognitive science which analyze how we use analogies and schemas.
Before and during the Hitler-Stalin pact the Nazi-Soviet comparison was used frequently in the public press and among policy makers. After Hitler’s invasion of the USSR and later in the war, when the USA was in an alliance with the USSR to defeat Nazi Germany, the Munich analogy, totalitarianism schema, and Nazi-Soviet comparison almost disappeared from public discussion of the Communist ally. Only some (mostly Christian) conservatives and isolationists used the figures to argue against cooperation with the Soviets. After the war, these rhetorical figures strongly reemerged and helped to identify the USSR as similar to the Nazi threat which had just been defeated. At the same time the lesson implicit in the Munich analogy began to shape the American policy toward the USSR. By early 1946 Americans were quite comfortable with seeing the USSR as similar to Nazi Germany and used this argument to justify a ‘tough stand’ against the former ally. Thus analogy, schema, and comparison helped Americans to categorize the events of the postwar world and act according to what they thought to have learned from history.