Propaganda ‘Worth an Army’: The Norwegian Labour Party, Haakon Lie and the transnational dissemination of Cold War propaganda, 1945–55

Abstract

The working class was the most important target for British and American propaganda in Norway during the early Cold War. The propagandists found eager allies in certain Norwegian Labour Party partisans, who wanted support in their struggle against communist and Soviet influence. Party Secretary Haakon Lie became their key contact. Soon after the war, he started propaganda cooperation with the British Labour Party, as well as the British and US Embassies in Oslo, mostly on his own initiative. New opportunities arose with the onset of the Cold War and the establishment of secret Western campaigns to influence public opinion abroad. From 1948 onward, anti-communist propaganda poured into Norway, reaching a peak during the Korean War. In the early 1950s the British Foreign Office, the US State Department and the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom were all cooperating with the Norwegian Labour Party. This article gives an overview of the transnational dissemination of propaganda through Labour’s party and union apparatus, arguing that the Western propagandists’ remarkable reach towards the Norwegian labour movement and working class was a cultural ‘empire by invitation’.