Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 263-280
Author(s):  
David L. Pike
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Number Of Individuals

The world after 1989 was not necessarily less likely to suffer cataclysmic destruction; however, the imagination of that destruction had moved to new hopes and fears. These new sites of imagination were not only filtered through and generated from the half century of nuclearity that had preceded them; they dwelt in its physical and fictional ruins. Far from receding into the past along with the Cold War that birthed it, the affordances of nuclear apocalypse have proliferated in the new millennium. And as their atomic origins continue to mutate, the process appears less as novelty or aberration than as an everyday matter of course. Dwelling in a permanently bunkered and postapocalyptic condition affords several insights that clinging to the fantasy of a preapocalyptic way of life surviving under the nuclear condition does not afford. Recognized as ontological, the bunker fantasy ceases to operate exclusively as a powerful tool for legitimating surveillance, separation barriers, and enclosure in the name of enhanced security. It can also help to understand the spatio-cultural history of the security imaginary that makes these measures welcome to some, tolerable to some, and abhorrent to others. It enables us to recognize apocalypse not solely as the cataclysmic, unique, and always deferred rupture in time that a nuclear war surely would be, but as an ongoing historical condition always affecting a certain—and substantial—number of individuals and groups within unequal societies, affecting them unequally, and affecting them in intersecting but not always commensurate ways.

Thirty years from Tiananmen: China, Hong Kong, and the ongoing experiment to preserve liberal values in an authoritarian state

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cora Chan
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
World History ◽  
Tiananmen Square ◽  
Authoritarian State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract The 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre marked China out as an exception in the chapter of world history that saw the fall of international communism. The massacre crystalized the mistrust between China and Hong Kong into an open ideological conflict—Leninist authoritarianism versus liberal democracy—that has colored relations between the two since then. This article tracks the hold that authoritarianism has gained over liberal values in Hong Kong in the past thirty years and reflects on what needs to be done in the next thirty years for the balance to be re-tilted and sustained beyond 2047, when China’s fifty-year commitment to preserving Hong Kong’s autonomy expires. Still surviving (just) as a largely liberal (though by no means fully democratic) jurisdiction after two decades of Chinese rule, Hong Kong is a testing ground for whether China can respect liberal values, how resilient such values are to the alternative authoritarian vision offered by an economic superpower, and the potential for establishing a liberal-democratic pocket within an authoritarian state. The territory’s everyday wrestle with Chinese pressures speaks to the liberal struggles against authoritarian challenges (in their various guises) that continue to plague the world thirty years after the end of the Cold War.​

Telling Lies, Making Truth

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Feinberg
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
East European ◽  
Political Function ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter analyzes the political function of show trials in Eastern Europe. It argues that while show trials told lies, their primary purpose was to reveal new truths about the Cold War world to their East European audiences. Show trials described a world where the peace-loving socialist East was continually menaced by the imperialist West, which sent spies and saboteurs to wreck its economic development and plotted to destroy it in a nuclear war. These political plays told East Europeans how they should see the world and clarified the consequences of non-compliance. This chapter also examines how people around the region were required to voice their condemnation of the traitors on trial and dedicate themselves to the search for hidden enemies.

The politics of phosphorus-32: A cold war fable based on fact

2005 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN KRIGE
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Atomic Energy Commission ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Foreign Countries ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S

ABSTRACT In July 1949, and again in January 1950 the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission shipped useful amounts of the short-lived isotope phosphorus-32 to a sanatorium in Trieste, Italy. They were used to treat a patient who had a particularly malignant kind of brain tumor. This distribution of isotopes abroad for medical and research purposes was hotly contested by Commissioner Lewis Strauss, and led to a bruising confrontation between him and J. Robert Oppenheimer. This paper describes the debates surrounding the foreign isotope program inside the Commission and in the U.S. Congress. In parallel, it presents an imagined, but factually-based story of the impact of isotope therapy on the patient and his doctor in Trieste, a city on the Italian-Yugoslavian border that was at the heart of the cold war struggle for influence between the U.S. and the USSR. It weaves together the history of science, institutional history, diplomatic history, and cultural history into a fable that draws attention to the importance of the peaceful atom for winning hearts and minds for the West. The polemics surrounding the distribution of isotopes to foreign countries may have irreversibly soured relationships between Oppenheimer and Strauss, and played into the scientist's loss of his security clearance. But, as those who supported the program argued, it was an important instrument for projecting a positive image of America among a scientifc elite abroad, and for consolidating its alliance with friendly nations in the early years of the cold war——or so the fable goes.

A Brief Survey of the Russian Historiography of Russian America of Recent Years

2010 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrei. V. Grinëëv ◽  
Richard L. Bland
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Archives ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biographical Sketches ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Russian America

Many people have written about the history of the Russian-American Company (RAC), some for scholars, others for a lay audience. Numerous writers have been Americans and Europeans who have had access to the records of the RAC that are held in the U.S. National Archives. But more records-preserved in Russia-were rarely accessible to Western scholars until the end of the Cold War. Dr. Andrei V. Grinëëv is one of the leading authorities on the history of Russian America. In the past two decades he has published two monographs, ten chapters in the three-volume Istoriya Russkoi Ameriki [The History of Russian America], and seventy-five articles in Russian, English, and Japanese. He writes not just about the Europeans who settled in Russia's transoceanic territories but also about Native Americans. Many of his works are unique in that he draws on both the ethnography and history of Native Americans. With regard to Russian America, he deals not only with the policies of governments and companies but with individuals as well. In pursuit of this task, Grinëëv has now written a book about everyone who had connections with Russian America. It contains more than 5,800 biographical sketches and was published in 2009. In the work below, he analyzes the writings of scholars who have tried to unravel historical details about individuals, companies, and governments that related to the Russian-American Company. This article was translated from Russian. Since a great deal of Russian literature is cited, it is important to understand the form of transliteration used with these titles. For a detailed description of the transliteration, please see the Translator's Note in the appendix.

scholarly journals Thinking Across Hemispheres: Further notes on Oversights and Blind Spots in Disciplinary African Studies

Afrika Focus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-22
Author(s):  
Premesh Lalu
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nationalist Sentiment ◽  
Sustained Effort ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Blind Spots

In the midst of ever-hardening nationalist sentiment across the world, the humanities may need to recall its long history of thinking across hemispheres. In such balkanised times, we may have to rethink the work that a hermeneutics of suspicion performs for a critical humanities as well as how Africa is bound to particular configurations of area studies that emerge out of the geopolitical distributions of knowledge during the Cold War. To the extent that we might develop a history of a critical humanities across hemispheres, this paper asks what it might mean to return to a concept of freedom formed through a sustained effort at reckoning with the worldliness specific to the anti-colonial struggles in Africa. There, a critical humanities may discover the sources of a creative work in which Africa is not merely bound to the binary of blind spots and oversights, but functions as that supplement which gives itself over to a liveable future.

Minimizing the Danger of Nuclear Weapons

2018 ◽  
pp. 45-50
Author(s):  
Steven P. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Disarmament ◽  
Nuclear Deterrence ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Security Dilemma ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Attack ◽  
Global Peace ◽  
The Cold War

Many of those concerned about global peace advocate a policy of nuclear disarmament in order to eliminate the danger posed by these weapons. The logic is that eliminating the weapons would eliminate the danger they pose. But I argue that these are separate goals, that eliminating the weapons would not eliminate the danger, and in fact might make it worse. After the cold war, many thought that it was finally possible to rid the world of nuclear weapons, but since 1991, the world has not moved substantially towards this goal. The reason is that nuclear weapons create a security dilemma in which efforts to use them to make societies safer, through the practice of nuclear deterrence, end up making them less safe. This is because efforts (through minimum deterrence) to use them to avoid a deliberate nuclear attack create risk of nuclear war by escalation, and efforts (through counterforce deterrence) to minimize the risk of nuclear war by escalation, create the risk of deliberate nuclear attack. The way out of this dilemma is through delegitimization of nuclear weapons.

scholarly journals Emerging trends: Ethics, intimidation, and the Cold War

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Kenneth Ward Church ◽  
Valia Kordoni
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Care Needs ◽  
Checks And Balances ◽  
The Past ◽  
Emerging Trends ◽  
New Process ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractThere are well-meaning efforts to address ethics that will likely make the world a better place, but care needs to be taken to avoid repeating mistakes of the past. In particular, ACL has recently introduced a new process where there are special reviews of some papers for ethics. We would be more comfortable with the new ethics process if there were more checks and balances, due process and transparency. Otherwise, there is a risk that the process could intimidate authors in ways that are not that dissimilar from the ways that academics were intimidated during the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

scholarly journals Ideological Clichés and Myths as an Instrument of the U.S. Foreign Policy

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-19
Author(s):  
V I Yakunin
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

The article deals with the analysis of the myths and ideological clichés as the fundamental elements of U.S. foreign policy. The author emphasizes the necessity to study the discourses formed by political elites around the main problems and directions of the state’s foreign policy. At the same time, in the article an attempt is made to integrate the achievements of Western and Russian political science related to ideological clichés and myths. Particular attention is paid to the role of myths and ideological clichés in the legitimization of the government’s foreign policy actions in the eyes of the electorate. The author shows the history of the formation of the basic myths and clichés of the U.S. foreign policy, their implementation during and after the Cold War. The article contains a detailed analysis of the concept of American exclusivity as well as the foreign policy guidelines that follow from it. In conclusion, the author shows how the world has adopted to such an approach for conducting foreign policy by the hegemonic state and what methods it uses to counteract it.

Icons of Dissent

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Prestholdt
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Transnational Relations ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Osama Bin Laden ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Che Guevara

The global icon is an omnipresent but poorly understood element of mass culture. This book asks why audiences around the world have embraced particular iconic figures, how perceptions of these figures have changed, and what this tells us about transnational relations since the Cold War era. Prestholdt addresses these questions by examining one type of icon: the anti-establishment figure. As symbols that represent sentiments, ideals, or something else recognizable to a wide audience, icons of dissent have been integrated into diverse political and consumer cultures, and global audiences have reinterpreted them over time. To illustrate these points the book examines four of the most evocative and controversial figures of the past fifty years: Che Guevara, Bob Marley, Tupac Shakur, and Osama bin Laden. Each has embodied a convergence of dissent, cultural politics, and consumerism, yet popular perceptions of each reveal the dissonance between shared, global references and locally contingent interpretations. By examining four very different figures, Icons of Dissent offers new insights into global symbolic idioms, the mutability of common references, and the commodification of political sentiment in the contemporary world.

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