The Struggle of the Male Self: A New Left Activist and His 1961 Diary

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 898-925 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celia Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Urban Youth ◽  
Male Subject ◽  
New Left ◽  
Nuclear Disarmament ◽  
Parental Home ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Party Family ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractThis article examines the 1961 diary of a new left young activist to explore his fractured sense of personal and political self. At the height of the Cold War, John Hoyland was an undergraduate at London's University College, living with his Communist Party family and active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). His intensely political world notwithstanding, Hoyland's diary reveals that interior life troubled his every day and shaped much of his thinking. Hoyland's self-conscious narrative illuminates self-making, male heterosexuality, generation, and relationships and cultures in the early 1960s British Left. He experienced himself as fragmented and struggled to negotiate his conflicting identities. He felt torn between older models of socialist identity and morality, his hedonism associated with the beatnik metropolitan scene, and his project of personal self-improvement. His diary offers rare insight into the intimate thoughts and feelings of one New Left young man at a time when political, social, and sexual codes and cultures were in transition before the emergence of feminist sexual politics. The article examines the identities Hoyland held as a socialist, sexual, and domestic male subject; it considers how his emotional world and relationships were shaped by his metropolitan landscapes, consisting of CND marches, Communist Party meetings, urban youth spaces, and the parental home; and it discusses Hoyland as a writer and the sense of selfhood the diary helped to make possible.

The Myth of Triumphalism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth A. Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Moral Leadership ◽  
Nuclear Disarmament ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Us Military ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Insight Into

Virtually no one anticipated the ending of the Cold War. Understanding how this long-standing conflict was peacefully resolved can give us insight into how to conclude other seemingly intractable conflicts. Triumphalists believe that President Ronald Reagan “won” the Cold War by building up US military power and threatening the USSR. His hard-line policies forced Moscow to reduce its arsenal, adopt democratic reforms, withdraw from its war in Afghanistan, and ultimately collapse. Triumphalists assert that contemporary leaders should follow Reagan’s example bycompelling adversaries into submission. However, triumphalism is a myth, a series of falsehoods about Reagan’s intentions, his policies, and the impact his administration had on the USSR.Drawing upon American and Soviet sources,this book demonstrates that Reagan’s initial hard-line policies brought the superpowers to the brink of war and made it more difficult for Moscow to disarm and reform. Compellence failed miserably. The Cold War was resolved through diplomacy, not threats. President Reagan eventually engaged in dialogue so as to ease Moscow’s security concerns, build trust, and focus on the superpowers’ mutual interest in eliminating nuclear arms. For his part, Mikhail Gorbachev sought to end the arms race so as to divert resources to democratization. He too sought dialogue and trust. The ending of the Cold War demonstrates the importance of moral leadership. Reagan and Gorbachev both rose above their differences and introduced radical new ideas about nuclear disarmament. Consequently, both encountered domestic opposition. Each persevered, however, leading their nations toward a safer, more humane future.

The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War

1973 ◽  
Vol 1 (9) ◽  
pp. 196-197
Author(s):  
Richard H. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
New Left ◽  
The Cold War

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War

1977 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Whittle Johnston ◽  
Robert James Maddox
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
New Left ◽  
The Cold War

The Politics of Culture in Cold War America

Prospects ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 451-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Sugrue
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
National Security State ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

In march, 1994, the University of Pennsylvania held a conference to celebrate the opening of the Howard Fast papers at the university's library. To commemorate Fast's remarkable sixty-year career, a group of historians and literary critics gathered to reconsider the intellectual and cultural milieu of the United States in the early years of the Cold War. During the eventful years, from 1945 to 1960, Fast emerged as a leading Communist activist and a major literary figure who achieved great popular success. Fast, an unabashed member of the Communist Party, like many other oppositional writers of the era, clashed with the national security state. He faced harassment, blacklisting, and marginalization for his refusal to cooperate with federal authorities who were committed to silencing cultural and political voices from the Left. Like other stalwarts of the Communist Party, Fast was often doctrinaire. As a reporter for the Daily Worker and an occasional partisan polemicist, Fast was often stiflingly orthodox. But Fast's Communism was a distinctively American variant, mediated by New York's Jewish radicalism, deeply concerned with the American dilemma of racial inequality.

Protest and survive

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacquelyn Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Nuclear Disarmament ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Public ◽  
Defence Policy ◽  
Civil Defence ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Groups

This chapter offers a critical investigation into the ways in which the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) sought to undermine the official narrative of nuclear weapons and civil defence policy of successive British governments during the last two decades of the Cold War.  The first part of the chapter explores the ways in which CND used the tools of propaganda and parody to turn government advice and publicity surrounding policies of public protection against itself. The second part of the chapter investigates to what extent CND’s activism presented a threat to the process of policy making and to what effect the co-ordinated anti-nuclear campaign by CND and related groups was a cause of anxiety for civil defence planners and policy makers. It asks whether, by offering both the public and political groups of the left alternative politics which sought to challenge the official version of Cold War defence, CND could be said to have contributed to either non-compliance with, or early termination of, civil defence policy.

‘Dionysian Socialism?’: The Korčula Summer School as Kurort of the New Left

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-493
Author(s):  
Kaitlyn Tucker Sorenson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Summer School ◽  
New Left ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Central European ◽  
Cultural Spaces ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Social Orders

Abstract This article explores and analyses several remarkable parallels between two unique cultural spaces, namely, that of the Korčula Summer School and that of the Kurorte – the Grand Spas of Central Europe. Though distinct from one another with respect to their historical as well as topographical locations within Europe, it is as cultural spaces that the two share their least apparent – but perhaps most significant – points of affinity. Just as Baden-Baden had served as the ‘summer capital of Europe’ for one set of cultural elites across political, linguistic and national boundaries, so did Korčula offer a space for cultural and intellectual exchange for philosophers from both sides of the Cold War. The article demonstrates how both of these spaces were marked by their shared internationalism, their political engagement, their privilege, their respective distance from daily social orders, and their intellectual intensity. Thus, it is suggested that Central-European Kurort culture – commonly considered a belle-époque phenomenon – did indeed survive the Great Wars, and found new expressions in a post-war, socialist context.

The Passion of William F. Buckley: Academic Freedom, Conspiratorial Conservatism, and the Rise of the Postwar Right

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-350
Author(s):  
JULIAN NEMETH
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Academic Freedom ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Cold War

In the early years of the Cold War, as universities expelled scholars with ties to the Communist Party, it became an article of faith among conservatives that the only targets of an ideological purge were people like themselves. William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, the most important exponent of this view, argued that “academic freedom” was a “superstition” designed to promote liberal indoctrination. Buckley's work tweaked, and mainstreamed, claims that a subversive conspiracy had overtaken the nation's schools and colleges. The correspondence the book generated demonstrates how attacks on academic freedom, and claims of victimhood, mobilized the postwar right.

scholarly journals The “Cuban Question” and the Cold War in Latin America, 1959–1964

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 114-151
Author(s):  
Tanya Harmer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cuban Revolution ◽  
Cuban Missile Crisis ◽  
American System ◽  
American States ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Insight Into

This article explains how Latin American governments responded to the Cuban revolution and how the “Cuban question” played out in the inter-American system in the first five years of Fidel Castro's regime, from 1959 to 1964, when the Organization of American States imposed sanctions against the island. Drawing on recently declassified sources from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, and the United States, the article complicates U.S.-centric accounts of the inter-American system. It also adds to our understanding of how the Cold War was perceived within the region. The article makes clear that U.S. policymakers were not the only ones who feared Castro's triumph, the prospect of greater Soviet intervention, and the Cuban missile crisis. By seeking to understand why local states opposed Castro's ascendance and what they wanted to do to counter his regime, the account here offers new insight into the Cuban revolution's international impact and allows us to evaluate U.S. influence in the region during key years of the Cold War.

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