Conspiracy Theorists and Con Men

2021 ◽  
pp. 107-137
Author(s):  
Lewis A. Grossman
Keyword(s):  
Medical Devices ◽  
American History ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Freedom Of Choice ◽  
Government Health ◽  
Medical Establishment ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Right ◽  
Do The Right Thing

This chapter discusses the 1930s through the 1960s, an anomalous period of American history in which the people’s confidence in major national institutions was at its peak. Most people trusted government health regulators, the medical establishment, and pharmaceutical companies to do the right thing. Consequently, medical freedom of choice activism occurred mainly on society’s margins, voiced by peddlers of fraudulent products and right-wing cranks. The most persistent and cantankerous promoter of medical freedom during this period was the National Health Federation (NHF), the publisher of “Health Freedom News.” This organization, founded by manufacturers of dietary supplements and quack medical devices, resisted FDA regulation of alternative treatments, as well as the fluoridation of municipal water supplies. Although the NHF sometimes exemplified paranoid, Red-Scare politics, it also employed more conventional libertarian arguments of the sort that infused medical freedom rhetoric in other periods of American history.

“Why Hasn’t This Teacher Been Shot?” Moral-Sexual Panic, the Repressive Right, and Brazil’s National Security State

2012 ◽  
Vol 92 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Cowan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Military Government ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Far Right ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Right ◽  
National Security State ◽  
The Military

Abstract This article takes up the story of right-wing mobilization before and during Brazil’s military government of 1964–1985. Understanding the regime’s violent countersubversion requires analysis of the ideology that framed it. This ideology flourished among a long-neglected group of far-right intellectuals and organizations that had considerable influence in successive military administrations and worked to define subversion—the military state’s ever-invoked enemy—in terms chiefly moral and sexual. Scholars have noted that defense of “Western Christian civilization” peppered the vague rhetoric of Cold War autocrats throughout Latin America. Yet inattention to the Right per se and to those considered extremists has impeded our understanding of the specific values bound up in such visions of the West and hence of the centrality of morality and culture in countersubversive thought. This article argues that rightists, some of them radical, echoed past conservatisms by linking morality, sexuality, and subversion in ways that gained increasing influence in the 1960s and 1970s.

Men’s Action Fictions

2021 ◽  
pp. 165-189
Author(s):  
David L. Pike
Keyword(s):  
American History ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
White House ◽  
Harry Truman ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Right ◽  
Fallen World

No genre explored the escapist lure of apocalypse more fully than the new pulp genre of men’s action fiction, where the 1960s-style fallout shelter serves as a measure of the faith of the hero in the structure of government and authority and the society it underpins. The more elaborate the shelter and the accoutrements of survival that surround it, the more likely is nuclear war to have been a good war. For rightwing writers, the distinct probability of urban apocalypse afforded a new political equation for the 1980s: eliminating the densely packed blue-state populations, especially on the coasts, was a quick way to imagine changing the electoral balance. Nevertheless, men’s action fiction takes pains to frame its heroes’ choices in rational rather than ideological terms. The heroic protagonists recognizably follow in the hard-boiled noir tradition of antisocial guardians of society in a fallen world threatened by criminal nihilists from the right and ineffectual liberals from the left. The bunker fantasies of men’s action fiction, in the dialectic they stage between survival and survivalism, posit in pulp form the hard questions that had plagued policymakers since Harry Truman first made the decision to use the bomb. That their cartoonishly excessive qualities neatly mirror the extreme rhetoric of the Cold Warriors in the Reagan White House should also remind us that the contradictory impulses they so exuberantly narrativize remain deeply rooted in the contradictions of American identity and American history.

Nazistowski mord na Żydach w prasie polskich komunistów (1942–1944).

2006 ◽  
pp. 54-75
Author(s):  
Klaus Peter Friedrich
Keyword(s):  
Shared Responsibility ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
Polish Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Right

Facing the decisive struggle between Nazism and Soviet communism for dominance in Europe, in 1942/43 Polish communists sojourning in the USSR espoused anti-German concepts of the political right. Their aim was an ethnic Polish ‘national communism’. Meanwhile, the Polish Workers’ Party in the occupied country advocated a maximum intensification of civilian resistance and partisan struggle. In this context, commentaries on the Nazi judeocide were an important element in their endeavors to influence the prevailing mood in the country: The underground communist press often pointed to the fate of the murdered Jews as a warning in order to make it clear to the Polish population where a deficient lack of resistance could lead. However, an agreed, unconditional Polish and Jewish armed resistance did not come about. At the same time, the communist press constantly expanded its demagogic confrontation with Polish “reactionaries” and accused them of shared responsibility for the Nazi murder of the Jews, while the Polish government (in London) was attacked for its failure. This antagonism was intensified in the fierce dispute between the Polish and Soviet governments after the rift which followed revelations about the Katyn massacre. Now the communist propaganda image of the enemy came to the fore in respect to the government and its representatives in occupied Poland. It viewed the government-in-exile as being allied with the “reactionaries,” indifferent to the murder of the Jews, and thus acting ultimately on behalf of Nazi German policy. The communists denounced the real and supposed antisemitism of their adversaries more and more bluntly. In view of their political isolation, they coupled them together, in an undifferentiated manner, extending from the right-wing radical ONR to the social democrats and the other parties represented in the underground parliament loyal to the London based Polish government. Thereby communist propaganda tried to discredit their opponents and to justify the need for a new start in a post-war Poland whose fate should be shaped by the revolutionary left. They were thus paving the way for the ultimate communist takeover

The Politics of Repressed Guilt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Leeb
Keyword(s):  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Important Addition ◽  
Defensive Mechanisms ◽  
The Right

Through a critical appropriation of Hannah Arendt, and a more sympathetic engagement with Theodor W. Adorno and psychoanalysis, this book develops a new theoretical approach to understanding Austrians’ repression of their collaboration with National Socialist Germany. Drawing on original, extensive archival research, from court documents on Nazi perpetrators to public controversies on theater plays and museums, the book exposes the defensive mechanisms Austrians have used to repress individual and collective political guilt, which led to their failure to work through their past. It exposes the damaging psychological and political consequences such failure has had and continues to have for Austrian democracy today—such as the continuing electoral growth of the right-wing populist Freedom Party in Austria, which highlights the timeliness of the book. However, the theoretical concepts and practical suggestions the book introduces to counteract the repression of individual and collective political guilt are relevant beyond the Austrian context. It shows us that only when individuals and nations live up to guilt are they in a position to take responsibility for past crimes, show solidarity with the victims of crimes, and prevent the emergence of new crimes. Combining theoretical insights with historical analysis, The Politics of Repressed Guilt is an important addition to critical scholarship that explores the pathological implications of guilt repression for democratic political life.

: Do the Right Thing . Spike Lee.

1989 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Doherty
Keyword(s):  
Spike Lee ◽  
The Right ◽  
Do The Right Thing

The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Landon R. Y. Storrs
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
Loyalty Program ◽  
Federal Employee ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Policy Ideas ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Consumer Movements ◽  
The Right ◽  
The New Deal

The loyalty investigations triggered by the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s marginalized many talented women and men who had entered government service during the Great Depression seeking to promote social democracy as a means to economic reform. Their influence over New Deal policymaking and their alliances with progressive labor and consumer movements elicited a powerful reaction from conservatives, who accused them of being subversives. This book draws on newly declassified records of the federal employee loyalty program—created in response to fears that Communists were infiltrating the U.S. government—to reveal how disloyalty charges were used to silence these New Dealers and discredit their policies. Because loyalty investigators rarely distinguished between Communists and other leftists, many noncommunist leftists were forced to leave government or deny their political views. This book finds that loyalty defendants were more numerous at higher ranks of the civil service than previously thought, and that many were women, or men with accomplished leftist wives. Uncovering a forceful left-feminist presence in the New Deal, the book shows how opponents on the Right exploited popular hostility to powerful women and their “effeminate” spouses. The loyalty program not only destroyed many promising careers, it prohibited discussion of social democratic policy ideas in government circles, narrowing the scope of political discourse to this day. This book demonstrates how the Second Red Scare undermined the reform potential of the New Deal and crippled the American welfare state.

Jewish Question in the Ideology and Political Practice of Russian Monarchists in the Beginning of the 20th Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 232-261
Author(s):  
Igor V. Omeliyanchuk
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Population ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The Right ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
First World

The present article examines the place of the Jewish question in the ideology of the monarchist (right-wing, “black hundred”) parties. In spite of certain ideological differences in the right-wing camp (moderate Rights, Rights and extreme Right-Wing), anti-Semitism was characteristic of all monarchist parties to a certain extent, in any case before the First World War. That fact was reflected in the party documents, resolutions of the monarchist congresses, publications and speeches of the Right-Wing leaders. The suggestions of the monarchists in solving the Jewish questions added up to the preservation and strengthening of the existing restrictions with respect to the Jewish population in the Russian Empire. If in the beginning the restrictions were main in the economic, cultural and everyday life spheres, after the convocation of the State Duma the Rights strived after limiting also the political rights of the Jewish population of the Empire, seeing it as one of the primary guarantees for autocracy preservation in Russia, that was the main political goal of the conservatives.

Main Forms of Propagandistic Activities of the Right-Wing Parties (1904–1914)

2020 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 656-676
Author(s):  
Igor V. Omeliyanchuk
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Right ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The 19Th Century

The article examines the main forms and methods of agitation and propagandistic activities of monarchic parties in Russia in the beginning of the 20th century. Among them the author singles out such ones as periodical press, publication of books, brochures and flyers, organization of manifestations, religious processions, public prayers and funeral services, sending deputations to the monarch, organization of public lectures and readings for the people, as well as various philanthropic events. Using various forms of propagandistic activities the monarchists aspired to embrace all social groups and classes of the population in order to organize all-class and all-estate political movement in support of the autocracy. While they gained certain success in promoting their ideology, the Rights, nevertheless, lost to their adversaries from the radical opposition camp, as the monarchists constrained by their conservative ideology, could not promise immediate social and political changes to the population, and that fact was excessively used by their opponents. Moreover, the ideological paradigm of the Right camp expressed in the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” formula no longer agreed with the social and economic realities of Russia due to modernization processes that were underway in the country from the middle of the 19th century.

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