Taking Books to the World: American Publishers and the Cultural Cold War

2019 ◽  
Vol 106 (1) ◽  
pp. 250-251
Author(s):  
Steven Biel
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Cold War

From Anti‐Communism to Anti‐totalitarianism: The Radical Potential of Democracy

2002 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 551-572 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dick Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Political Opposition ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Cold War ◽  
The Right ◽  
Domestic Support ◽  
Personal Interests

The Very Nature Of Democracy Makes Its Defence Difficult. In a democracy, the majority has the right to be wrong and the opportunity to make public its private passions while acting on its personal interests. What is more, democratic tolerance of pluralism and legitimation of social conf lict ensure that democracy will be characterized above all by self-criticism. As a result, when it is threatened, its enemies will find at least some domestic support from those who despair of democracy, or at least of this democracy, and who convince themselves that a better, more substantial or less superficial, democracy can be brought into being. Such critics of the really existing democracy are convinced that they are acting in the name of real democracy. So it was, for example, that the American Communist Party could claim to incarnate ‘twentieth-century Americanism’ following the same logic used by Marx a century earlier to criticize the ‘merely formal’ nature of bourgeois democracy. But so it was too when the CIA took it upon itself to finance not only political opposition to Soviet inf luence but also to support and encourage what Francis Stonor Saunders's recent study of The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters revealed. The shared logic of the CIA and the communists turns out, as the saying goes, to be no accident.

Hearts and Minds: The Unconventional Cold War

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth A. Osgood
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Radio Waves ◽  
The World ◽  
Psychological Pressure ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
Cultural Cold War ◽  
Government Records ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Throughout the Cold War the task of winning “hearts and minds” around the world was of great importance to Soviet and American leaders. Both sides fought a cultural Cold War via radio waves, television transmissions, propa-ganda, and other forms of psychological pressure. A number of recent books that draw on declassified U.S. government records have provided valuable in-sights into the American side of the cultural Cold War. The U.S. government employed military, political, diplomatic, and cultural means to influence for-eign and domestic opinion. The study of this phenomenon requires interdis-ciplinary methodological approaches. Diplomatic historians need to integrate the cultural and propaganda issues into their narratives, and cultural histori-ans need to pay greater heed to the themes raised in diplomatic historical accounts.

New walls to keep the bad out: populism and the totalitarian psyche

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-130
Author(s):  
Coline Covington
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Group Solidarity ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
Psychological Understanding ◽  
Psychic Development ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War

The Berlin Wall came down on 9 November 1989 and marked the end of the Cold War. As old antagonisms thawed a new landscape emerged of unification and tolerance. Censorship was no longer the principal means of ensuring group solidarity. The crumbling bricks brought not only freedom of movement but freedom of thought. Now, nearly thirty years later, globalisation has created a new balance of power, disrupting borders and economies across the world. The groups that thought they were in power no longer have much of a say and are anxious about their future. As protest grows, we are beginning to see that the old antagonisms have not disappeared but are, in fact, resurfacing. This article will start by looking at the dissembling of a marriage in which the wall that had peacefully maintained coexistence disintegrates and leads to a psychic development that uncannily mirrors that of populism today. The individual vignette leads to a broader psychological understanding of the totalitarian dynamic that underlies populism and threatens once again to imprison us within its walls.

1989

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elise Sarotte
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Building Permits ◽  
The World

This book explores the momentous events following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the effects they have had on the world ever since. Based on documents, interviews, and television broadcasts from Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, and a dozen other locations, the book describes how Germany unified, NATO expansion began, and Russia got left on the periphery of the new Europe. Chapters cover changes in the Summer and Autumn of 1989, including the stepping back of Americans and rise in East German's confidence; the restoration of the rights of the Four Powers, including the night of November 9 and the Portugalov Push; heroic aspirations in 1990, including the emerging controversy over reparations and NATO; security, political and economic solutions; the securing of building permits, including money and NATO reform; and the legacy of 1989 and 1990. This updated edition contains a new afterword with the most recent evidence on the 1990 origins of NATO's post-Cold War expansion.

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