Making Peaceful Revolution Impossible

2022 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-187
Author(s):  
Max Paul Friedman ◽  
Roberto García Ferreira

Abstract President John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress was intended to forestall Communist revolutions by fostering political and economic reform in Latin America. But Kennedy undermined his own goals by thwarting democratic, leftwing leaders seeking to carry out the kind of “peaceful revolution” his own analysis told him was necessary. This article reveals the Kennedy administration's role in overthrowing the Guatemalan government in 1963—until now only hinted at or even denied in the existing literature—to prevent the return to power of the country's first democratically elected president, Juan José Arévalo Bermejo. New archival evidence from Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Uruguay, the United Kingdom, and the United States sheds light on the transnational networks that supported Arévalo's attempt to run for the presidency in 1963, as well as the covert efforts of U.S. and Guatemalan officials to prevent “the most popular man in Guatemala” from taking office—a neglected Cold War milestone in Latin America.

Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier

This book provides a transnational history of Billy Graham’s revival work in the 1950s, zooming in on his revival meetings in London (1954), Berlin (1954/1960), and New York (1957). It shows how Graham’s international ministry took shape in the context of transatlantic debates about the place and future of religion in public life after the experiences of war and at the onset of the Cold War, and through a constant exchange of people, ideas, and practices. It explores the transnational nature of debates about the religious underpinnings of the “Free World” and sheds new light on the contested relationship between business, consumerism, and religion. In the context of Graham’s revival meetings, ordinary Christians, theologians, ministers, and church leaders in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom discussed, experienced, and came to terms with religious modernization and secular anxieties, Cold War culture, and the rise of consumerism. The transnational connectedness of their political, economic, and spiritual hopes and fears brings a narrative to life that complicates our understanding of the different secularization paths the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany embarked on in the 1950s. During Graham’s altar call in Europe, the contours of a transatlantic revival become visible, even if in the long run it was unable to develop a dynamism that could have sustained this moment in these different national and religious contexts.


2019 ◽  
pp. 82-117
Author(s):  
Geoffrey B. Robinson

This chapter examines the role of foreign powers in the October 1, 1965 incident. It argues that the wider international context, in particular the rhetoric and logic of the Cold War and anticolonial nationalism, affected the contours of Indonesian politics, making it more militant and polarized. In addition, that general atmosphere, together with the actions of major powers elsewhere in the region and beyond, contributed to political conditions inside Indonesia in which a seizure of power by the army was much more likely to occur. In creating this atmosphere of polarization and crisis, several major powers played some part, including China. Yet it was overwhelmingly the United States, the United Kingdom, and their closest allies that played the central roles.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier

The introduction embeds the revival meetings American evangelist Billy Graham organized in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany in the 1950s in the existing historiography of religious life in the 1950s, America’s spiritual Cold War, and the interplay between religion, consumers, and business culture. It contends that transnational phenomena such as Cold War culture, white middle-class economic aspiration and increasing prosperity, and religious revivalism blended in Graham’s spiritual and ideological offer and explain its attractiveness on both sides of the Atlantic. By introducing the concepts of everyday and lived religion, the introduction argues for a fresh interpretation of the status of religious life and the process of secularization in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States. In centering the voices and practices of ministers and ordinary Christians, this new approach makes the contours of a transatlantic revival visible.


2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-133
Author(s):  
Jennifer Luff

Why did domestic anticommunism convulse the United States of America during the early Cold War but barely ripple in the United Kingdom? Contemporaries and historians have puzzled over the dramatic difference in domestic politics between the USA and the UK, given the countries’ broad alignment on foreign policy toward Communism and the Soviet Union in that era. This article reflects upon the role played by trade unions in the USA and the UK in the development of each country's culture and politics of anticommunism during the interwar years. Trade unions were key sites of Communist organizing, and also of anticommunism, in both the USA and the UK, but their respective labor movements developed distinctively different political approaches to domestic and international communism. Comparing labor anticommunist politics in the interwar years helps explain sharp divergences in the politics of anticommunism in the USA and the UK during the Cold War.


2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 710-730 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Bernstein

In 1945 Europe was a vast graveyard. The diaspora of the dead was perhaps most prominent in Germany, where the dead of the four occupying forces were spread across the country. As the allies worked through the postwar settlement with Germany, they considered another pressing question: How to treat the dead? The case of occupied Germany highlights different approaches to commemoration. Soviet officials commemorated the war dead as symbols of the collective sacrifice of the USSR in Eastern Europe, while the western allies desired to identify and rebury fallen soldiers to meet the expectations of their domestic audiences. Despite these differences, the politics of the sacred surrounding the dead necessitated that the allies engage one another. As the occupation regimes of France, the United Kingdom and the United States of America embarked on their mission to retrieve their dead from the Soviet zone, USSR officials reacted with skepticism and hostility. But rather than rejecting what they viewed as attempts at espionage, Soviet officers traded the western dead for their own sacred mission – the chance to return living Soviet repatriates from the western zones of occupation. Even as animosity grew in the emerging Cold War, occupation officials made uneasy compromises across the iron curtain.


Author(s):  
Peter J. Schmelz

This chapter examines censorship in the Soviet Union during the Cold War by focusing on the experience of composer Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998). More specifically, it looks at Schnittke’s evolving interactions with Soviet political and aesthetic strictures, as well as the representation and interpretation of those interactions abroad, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. The chapter explores the increasingly complex, globalized musical economy in which late Soviet censorship played a key role. It also discusses the “harsh censorship” that Schnittke had to endure and how it gave him prominence, and ultimately prestige, with the help of various agents such as Gidon Kremer and the Kronos Quartet, the Soviet copyright agency VAAP (All-Union Agency for the Protection of Authors’ Rights), and the BIS record label. Finally, it highlights the actors (performers, producers, impresarios, critics, and listeners) who affect the way music is shaped and received, bought and sold.


Author(s):  
UROŠ TOVORNIK

POVZETEK Članek analizira geostrateške spremembe v današnji Evropi in svetu, ki smo jim priča od konca hladne vojne in predvsem od leta 2014 naprej. Klasična geopolitična dinamika se je vrnila in geopolitične teorije, kot sta osrčje in obrobje, so ponovno aktualne. Posledično se na svetovni oder vračajo tudi klasični geostrateški igralci. Članek analizira premike v treh evropskih državah in hkrati članicah Evropske unije, ki so v preteklih stoletjih krojile usodo Evrope, in sicer Francije, Nemčije in Združenega kraljestva. Geostrateške igre v Evropi so zmeraj imele globalne posledice, zato je bila v članku posebna pozornost namenjena tudi ZDA in Rusiji, njunim geopolitičnim interesom in geostrateškemu repozicioniranju. Sčasoma postaja jasno, da smo v tranziciji in na poti k oblikovanju nove evropske in svetovne strateške arhitekture. V tem smislu članek prepoznava nove porajajoče se geostrateške vektorje v Evropi. Ti lahko po eni strani opredeljujejo novo prihajajoče ravnotežje sil, po drugi strani pa možnost kolizije teh vektorjev. Pri slednjem smo lahko priče nepredvidljivim varnostnim posledicam tako za Evropo kakor tudi za ves svet. Ključne besede: geopolitika, geostrategija, Francija, Nemčija, Združeno kraljestvo, ZDA, Rusija. ABSTRACT This article shows how Europe and the world we are living in have changed drastically since the end of the Cold War, and especially since 2014. Classical geopolitical dynamics have resurfaced; theories, such as Heartland and Rimland, apply time and again. Consequently, classical players on the Europe and world stages are back in the game. The article analyses shifts in the following three traditional European powers and members of the European Union which have shaped the destiny of Europe during the last centuries: France, Germany and the United Kingdom. As strategic games in Europe have always had global dimensions, the United States and Russia’s influence and their geostrategic repositioning in Europe is also duly considered. The trend of a transition towards a new strategic architecture in Europe and in the world is ever more evident; the article thus also indicates the new emerging geostrategic vectors in Europe. On the one hand, they may indicate that a new balance is emerging, and on the other hand, that these vectors might collide. In case of the latter, we may face unprecedented security ramifications for Europe as well as for the entire world. Key words: geopolitics, geostrategy, France, Germany, United Kingdom, United States, Russia


Author(s):  
Ted R. Bromund

The Special Relationship is a term used to describe the close relations between the United States and the United Kingdom. It applies particularly to the governmental realms of foreign, defense, security, and intelligence policy, but it also captures a broader sense that both public and private relations between the United States and Britain are particularly deep and close. The Special Relationship is thus a term for a reality that came into being over time as the result of political leadership as well as ideas and events outside the formal arena of politics. After the political break of the American Revolution and in spite of sporadic cooperation in the 19th century, it was not until the Great Rapprochement of the 1890s that the idea that Britain and the United States had a special kind of relationship took hold. This decade, in turn, created the basis for the Special Relationship, a term first used by Winston Churchill in 1944. Churchill did the most to build the relationship, convinced as he was that close friendship between Britain and the United States was the cornerstone of world peace and prosperity. During and after the Second World War, many others on both sides of the Atlantic came to agree with Churchill. The post-1945 era witnessed a flowering of the relationship, which was cemented—not without many controversies and crises—by the emerging Cold War against the Soviet Union. After the end of the Cold War in 1989, the relationship remained close, though it was severely tested by further security crises, Britain’s declining defense spending, the evolving implications of Britain’s membership in the European Union, the relative decline of Europe, and an increasing U.S. interest in Asia. Yet on many public and private levels, relations between the United States and Britain continue to be particularly deep, and thus the Special Relationship endures.


Author(s):  
Melvyn P. Leffler

This chapter takes a look at U.S. war planning during the Cold War. Looking through Joint Chiefs of Staff records, the chapter shows that U.S. war planning, although crude, began in the early months of 1946. If war erupted, for whatever reasons, the war plans called for the United States to strike the Soviet Union (USSR). Expecting Soviet armies to overrun most of Europe very quickly, planners assumed that the United States would launch its attack primarily from bases in the United Kingdom and the British-controlled Cairo-Suez base in the Middle East. To protect the latter, it would be essential to slow down Soviet armies marching southward to conquer the Middle East. The United States needed the Turkish army to thwart Soviet military advances and required Turkish airfields to insure the success of the strategic offensive against targets inside the USSR.


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