Post-war Violence in Italy: A Struggle for Memory

Modern Italy ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimo Storchi

The Resistance at the root of Italian democracy is still the object of political and often controversial debate, 60 years on. This is related to the various phases of political development in Italy: from the early post-war years, characterized by the conflict associated with the ideological clashes of the Cold War, to the 1960s and 1970s, afflicted by terrorism, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and then to the collapse of the party system. Diverse, sometimes conflicting memories of the Resistance have emerged, linked not only to the numerous forms characterizing the struggle against Nazi–Fascism, but also to the varying motives, ideals and politics which animated fighters on both sides. With the new bipolar political system and the rise of the Right, the Resistance has returned to being one of the most prominent features of political controversy. This manifests itself in editorial strategies and extensive media operations in which memories representing those people who are opposed to the ideals of the Resistance seem to have the upper hand.

Author(s):  
Laurence R. Jurdem

The strain of Black Nationalism that existed within the United Nations also worried conservatives as they monitored the evolution of events in Southern Africa. In their intense desire to rid the world of communism, other issues, such as race, were either marginalized or ignored. The chapter analyzes the three publications’ view of race as it relates to the issue of Rhodesia during the height of the Cold War. In ignoring the suppression of an entire race of people, Human Events and National Review contrasted what they perceived to be a stable, anticommunist, biracial society with the militarism and lawlessness that they argued defined the 1960s and 1970s. While the two conservative publications viewed Rhodesia as a model of biracial success, Commentary focused on the Carter administration’s dismissive attitude about the dangers of Soviet encroachment within the African hemisphere. The Right argued that the Carter White House, in its refusal to endorse Rhodesia’s 1979 parliamentary elections due to a lack of representation of militant nationalist groups, and its belief in the policy of détente, continued to send a message of American weakness and indifference to totalitarianism around the world.


Author(s):  
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr

The decades 1960–80 witnessed a seismic shift in modern drama. The rage that came to define, and fuel, much of the drama in the 1960s and 1970s is directed at the audience. ‘Absurdism, protest, and commitment’ shows it is a post-war rage stemming from many sources: the Vietnam War, the Cold War, a feeling of betrayal by government and politicians, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, gay rights, feminism, the growing gap between rich and poor, and ethnic oppression. It is all about denying the audience what it expects of a play, provoking it out of real or perceived complacency, startling, and offending it. The plays of Pinter, Shepard, Beckett, Stoppard, Friel, and Fugard are discussed.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Burton

Brainwashing assumed the proportions of a cultural fantasy during the Cold War period. The article examines the various political, scientific and cultural contexts of brainwashing, and proceeds to a consideration of the place of mind control in British spy dramas made for cinema and television in the 1960s and 1970s. Particular attention is given to the films The Mind Benders (1963) and The Ipcress File (1965), and to the television dramas Man in a Suitcase (1967–8), The Prisoner (1967–8) and Callan (1967–81), which gave expression to the anxieties surrounding thought-control. Attention is given to the scientific background to the representations of brainwashing, and the significance of spy scandals, treasons and treacheries as a distinct context to the appearance of brainwashing on British screens.


Author(s):  
Timur Gimadeev

The article deals with the history of celebrating the Liberation Day in Czechoslovakia organised by the state. Various aspects of the history of the holiday have been considered with the extensive use of audiovisual documents (materials from Czechoslovak newsreels and TV archives), which allowed for a detailed analysis of the propaganda representation of the holiday. As a result, it has been possible to identify the main stages of the historical evolution of the celebrations of Liberation Day, to discover the close interdependence between these stages and the country’s political development. The establishment of the holiday itself — its concept and the military parade as the main ritual — took place in the first post-war years, simultaneously with the consolidation of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Later, until the end of the 1960s, the celebrations gradually evolved along the political regime, acquiring new ritual forms (ceremonial meetings, and “guards of memory”). In 1968, at the same time as there was an attempt to rethink the entire socialist regime and the historical experience connected with it, an attempt was made to reconstruct Liberation Day. However, political “normalisation” led to the normalisation of the celebration itself, which played an important role in legitimising the Soviet presence in the country. At this stage, the role of ceremonial meetings and “guards of memory” increased, while inventions released in time for 9 May appeared and “May TV” was specially produced. The fall of the Communist regime in 1989 led to the fall of the concept of Liberation Day on 9 May, resulting in changes of the title, date and paradigm of the holiday, which became Victory Day and has been since celebrated on 8 May.


Author(s):  
Aled Davies

The aim of this book has been to evaluate the relationship between Britain’s financial sector, based in the City of London, and the social democratic economic strategy of post-war Britain. The central argument presented in the book was that changes to the City during the 1960s and 1970s undermined a number of the key post-war social democratic techniques designed to sustain and develop a modern industrial economy. Financial institutionalization weakened the state’s ability to influence investment, and the labour movement was unable successfully to integrate the institutionalized funds within a renewed social democratic economic agenda. The post-war settlement in banking came under strain in the 1960s as new banking and credit institutions developed that the state struggled to manage. This was exacerbated by the decision to introduce competition among the clearing banks in 1971, which further weakened the state’s capacity to control the provision and allocation of credit to the real economy. The resurrection of an unregulated global capital market, centred on London, overwhelmed the capacity of the state to pursue domestic-focused macroeconomic policies—a problem worsened by the concurrent collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system. Against this background, the fundamental social democratic assumption that national prosperity could be achieved only through industry-led growth and modernization was undermined by an effective campaign to reconceptualize Britain as a fundamentally financial and commercial nation with the City of London at its heart....


Author(s):  
Aled Davies

This chapter concerns the politics of managing the domestic banking system in post-war Britain. It examines the pressures brought to bear on the post-war settlement in banking during the 1960s and 1970s—in particular, the growth of new credit creating institutions and the political demand for more competition between banks. This undermined the social democratic model for managing credit established since the war. The chapter focuses in particular on how the Labour Party attempted in the 1970s to produce a banking system that was competitive, efficient, and able to channel credit to the struggling industrial economy.


Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson

The book proposes that the Cold War period saw a key debate about the future as singular or plural. Forms of Cold War science depicted the future as a closed sphere defined by delimited probabilities, but were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm with limits set only by human creativity. The Cold War was a struggle for temporality between the two different future visions of the two blocs, each armed with its set of predictive technologies, but these were rivaled, from the 1960s on, by future visions emerging from decolonization and the emergence of a set of alternative world futures. Futures research has reflected and enacted this debate. In so doing, it offers a window to the post-war history of the social sciences and of contemporary political ideologies of liberalism and neoliberalism, Marxism and revisionist Marxism, critical-systems thinking, ecologism, and postcolonialism.


2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 68-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aryo Makko

Traditionally, Sweden has been portrayed as an active bridge-builder in international politics in the 1960s and 1970s. The country advocated a “third way” toward democratic socialism and greater “justice” in international affairs, but these foreign policy prescriptions were never applied to European affairs. This article examines Sweden's relations with Europe by contrasting European integration with the Cold War. Negotiations on Swedish membership in the European Communities and Swedish policy at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe were influenced by a general Berührungsangst toward Europe, which persisted during the years of détente. Because Swedish decision-makers believed that heavy involvement in European affairs would constrict Sweden's freedom of action, Swedish leaders' moral proclamations were applied exclusively to distant Third World countries rather than the egregious abuses of human rights in the Soviet bloc.


2021 ◽  
pp. 272-290
Author(s):  
Evgenii V. Kodin

The post-war Belarusian emigration, both in Europe and in the United States, was divided into two main groups: the supporters of the President of the Belarusian Central Rada R. K. Ostrowski (Astrouski) and the Chairman of the BNR Rada N. S. Abramchyk. The declassified CIA documents indicate that this was not just a rivalry for the right to speak and act on behalf of the entire Belarusian emigration, but also to receive substantial dividends from close cooperation with the American intelligence agency in the implementation of plans to destabilize the situation in Belarus through the preparation of various kinds of espionage and subversive operations, up to the direct delivery of agents to the territory of the BSSR in the 1950s, as well as in information and propaganda work against the Soviet Belarus. This confrontation took various forms: from accusations of direct collaboration with the Nazis during the war (Ostrowski) to the self-appointment as the head of the Belarusian Folk Republic (Abramchyk). The visions of the future of free Belarus and its foreign policy between these actors differed, as well as the means and methods of struggle for the liberation of the Belarusian people from the communist system. At the same time, both Abramchyk and Ostrowski understood well that in order to strengthen their positions among the Belarusian emigration, close relations with those who built and financed the anti-Soviet policy of the West during the Cold War were important. First of all, it was about the American intelligent services. And here Abramchyk won an obvious victory, and Ostrowski’s main former comrades-in-arms were soon going to move to his camp.


2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-129
Author(s):  
Jason Reid

This article also examines how the decline of teen-oriented room décor expertise reflected significant changes in the way gender and class influenced teen room culture during the tail end of the Cold War. Earlier teen décor strategies were often aimed towards affluent women; by contrast, the child-centric, do-it-yourself approach, as an informal, inexpensive alternative, was better suited to grant boys and working class teens from both sexes a greater role in the room design discourse. This article evaluates how middle-class home décor experts during the early decades of the twentieth century re-envisioned the teen bedroom as a space that was to be designed and maintained almost exclusively by teens rather than parents. However, many of the experts who formulated this advice would eventually become victims of their own success. By the 1960s and 1970s, teens were expected to have near total control over their bedrooms, which, in turn, challenged the validity of top-down forms of expertise.


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