“If We're Proud of Freud . . .”

2009 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 298-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marci Shore

This essay examines the vexed question of the relationship between Jews and communism. Drawing largely on archival material, I examine the experiences of several Polish-Jewish communists before, during and after the Second World War. I argue that “Judeo-Bolshevism” is perhaps best understood neither as a antisemitic stereotype or as a sociologically (over)determined proclivity but rather as biography, as epic human drama. A Freudian motif—in particular Oedipal rebellion—frames the essay, which begins and ends with the children and grandchildren of “Judeo-Bolshevism.”

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 358-382
Author(s):  
Inger L. Stole

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to analyze the increasingly congenial relationship between business and government that developed in the immediate post Second World War period. This study explores the subtle, but systematic, uses of advertising for propaganda purposes to secure American political and commercial world dominance. It locates the relationship between the US Government and the Advertising Council as key components in a strategy to blur the lines between political and commercial messages. In addition to study the relationship between the two stakeholders, the study identifies some of the implications for both. Design/methodology/approachScholarship on the government’s postwar relationships with other organizations is relatively scant and few other scholars have focused on the advertising industry’s role in this transformation. This paper draws on trade periodicals and newspaper accounts, and relies on archival material from the Arthur W Page and the Thomas D’Arcy Brophy collections at the Wisconsin State Historical Society and the Advertising Council’s papers at the University of Illinois. Charles W. Jackson papers, located at the Harry S. Truman Library, and the papers of Office of War Mobilization and Re-conversion, deposited at the National Archives, have also been consulted. FindingsThe Advertising Council’s “Peace” and “World Trade and Travel” demonstrate an acceleration of collaboration between business and government that continued into the postwar era. It shows the government’s willingness to trade on the Advertising Council’s goodwill and to blur the lines between political and commercial messages, in what can accurately be characterized as a duplicitous manner. Key conclusion includes a willingness among Washington’s policymakers to propagandize its own citizens, a strategy that it commonly, and disparagingly, ascribed to the Soviet Union, and a Council so willing to appease Washington, that it was putting its own reputation at considerable risk. Research limitations/implicationsThis paper is based on a study of two campaigns (“Peace” and “World Trade and Travel”) that the Advertising Council conducted in collaboration with the US State Department. While these were the first campaigns of this nature, they were not the only ones. Additional studies of similar campaigns may add new insights. Social implicationsRecent political events have brought propaganda and government collusion back on the public agenda. In an era of declining journalism credibility, rising social media and unprecedented government and commercial surveillance, it is argued that propaganda demands scholarly attention more than ever and that a historical study of how the US Government collaborated with private industry and used advertising as a propaganda smokescreen is particularly timely. Originality/valueThis study adds to the scholarship on advertising, PR and propaganda in several ways. First, it contributes to the understanding of the advertising industry’s important role in the planning of US international policy after the Second World War. Second, it demonstrates the increasingly congenial relationship between business and the US Government that emerged as a result. Third, it provides excellent insights into the Adverting Council’s transition from war to peacetime. The heavy reliance on archival material also brings originality and value to the study.


2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Finlay

AbstractHow do members of the general public come to regard some uses of violence as legitimate and others as illegitimate? And how do they learn to use widely recognised normative principles in doing so such as those encapsulated in the laws of war and debated by just war theorists? This article argues that popular cinema is likely to be a major source of influence especially through a subgenre that I call ‘Just War Cinema’. Since the 1950s, many films have addressed the moral drama at the centre of contemporary Just War Theory through the figure of the enemy in the Second World War, offering often explicit and sophisticated treatments of the relationship between thejus ad bellumand thejus in bellothat anticipate or echo the arguments of philosophers. But whereas Cold War-era films may have supported Just War Theory’s ambitions to shape public understanding, a strongly revisionary tendency in Just War Cinema since the late 1990s is just as likely to thwart them. The potential of Just War Cinema to vitiate efforts to shape wider attitudes is a matter that both moral philosophers and those concerned with disseminating the law of war ought to pay close attention to.


Author(s):  
Ivan Matkovskyy

The history of relations of the Sheptytskyj family and the Jewish people reaches back to those remote times when the representatives of the Sheptytskyi lineage held high and honorable secular and clerical posts, and the Jews, either upon invitation of King Danylo of Halych or King Casimir the Great, began to build up their own world in Halychyna. Throughout the whole life of Metropolitan Sheptytskyi and Blessed Martyr Klymentii, a thread of cooperation with the Jews is traceable. It should be noted that heroic deeds of the Sheptytskyi Brothers to save Jews during the Second World War were not purely circumstantial: they were preceded by a long-standing deep relationship with representatives of Jewish culture. In addition, the sense of responsibility of the Spiritual Pastor, as advocated by the Brothers, extended to all people of different religions and genesis with no exception. The world-view principles of Metropolitan Sheptytskyi are important for us in order to understand what was going on in the then society in attitude to the Jews. Also, of importance is the influence of the Metropolitan on Kasymyr Sheptytskyi, later Fr. Klymentii, because the Archbishop was not only his Brother, but also a church authority and the leader. And if from under the Metropolitan Sheptytskyi’s pen letters and pastorals were published, they were directives, instructions, edifications and explanations for the faithful and the clergy, and not at all, the products of His own reflections or personal experiences, which Archbishop Andrey wanted to share with the faithful. On the grounds of the available archive materials, an effort to reconstruct the chief moments of those relations was undertaken, aiming among others, to illustrate the fact that the saving of Jews during the Holocaust was not incidental, nor with any underlying reasons behind, but a natural manifestation of a good Christian tradition of «Love thy Neighbor», to which the Sheptytskyj were faithful. Keywords: Andrey Sheptytskyi, the Blessed Hieromartyr Klymentii Sheptytskyi, Jews, the Holocaust, Galicia, Righteous Among the Nations.


2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-116
Author(s):  
Paul Solomon

War frames our lives. We live, as Billy Bragg (1985) put it, “Between the Wars”; or we live during wars, or after wars; or we live in terror of the threat of war; or get passionately aroused into war. We may watch helplessly as TV news shows us events of horror and violence overseas; on 19th June this year New Zealanders watched video on TV3 News of Kiwi troops under fire in Afghanistan, recorded on a soldier’s helmet-cam. Recent events unfolded once more on TVNZ with gut-wrenching inevitability: I watched as two soldiers were killed, and four injured. The survivors probably will return home traumatised. My interest in reviewing The War Hotel was personal: my grandfather fought in the First World War, my father in the Second World War. I served in the Israeli Defense Force, 1965-1967, and soon felt appalled by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Some of my Jewish extended family perished in Poland during the Shoah. All humanity is touched by war, in varying degrees of separation.


Author(s):  
David Brydan

This chapter explores the relationship between Spain and the Axis powers during the Second World War. Spanish experts were involved in intensive exchange with Nazi Germany during the war. This formed part of a wider pattern of cooperation between Axis, Axis-aligned, and neutral states under the auspices of the Nazi ‘New Order’. This chapter argues that the scientific networks, conferences, and organizations promoted by Nazi Germany represented a form of ‘Axis internationalism’, which appropriated the language and practices of pre-war internationalism to promote the idea of collaborative continental order under Nazi leadership. Spanish experts, like many of their European counterparts, were willing to embrace Axis internationalism as a new, and in many ways improved, form of international cooperation. Their work highlights how internationalist structures and ideas, particularly within the ‘technical’ and humanitarian fields of health and medicine, could be appropriated by political projects from across the ideological spectrum.


Author(s):  
Sabine Lee

This chapter explores the relationship between soldiers and local women in various theatres of war during World War II, tracing in particular nationalistic and racial undercurrents in the development of national policies vis-à-vis,military-civilian relations. It traces in particular Nazi policies in both East and West with view to eugenics, as well as Allied policies in preparing for and implementing post-war occupations in Germany and Austria, including guidance for soldiers on relations with the (former) enemy. The final part of the chapter gives a voice to children born of war themselves. Using a variety of sources ranging from ego-documents including autobiographies and memoirs as well as interviews and narratives as well as contemporary media reports, it analyses the CBOW reflections on their lifecourses.


This chapter briefly discusses eleven volumes of archival material published by the Holy See’s Secretariat of State (external division) between 1965 and 1981. These volumes were entitled Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale (‘Records and Documents of the Holy See Relating to the Second World War’) and included very extensive correspondence, notes, and memoranda that throw much light on how the Vatican responded to the Holocaust, though this was not by any means the only theme dealt with in its pages. The documents were primarily in Italian, but also in French, German, English, and Latin. All the volumes except one had a separate introduction written in French. Though familiar to a small, select band of scholars, these volumes are not easily accessible to the general public or widely known.


Author(s):  
Gerard L. Weinberg

The enormous loss of life and physical destruction caused by the First World War led people to hope that there would never be another such catastrophe. How then did it come about that there was a Second World War causing twice the 30 million deaths and many times more destruction as had been caused in the previous conflict? The ‘Introduction’ poses several questions: why did this war start so soon after World War I? Why was it considered a world war and not just European? What triggered the involvement of various nations? How did the Allies win? These questions are considered in subsequent chapters.


2020 ◽  
pp. 001083672090438
Author(s):  
Arash Heydarian Pashakhanlou ◽  
Felix Berenskötter

This article scrutinizes the assumption that friends support each other in times of war. Picking up the notion that solidarity, or ‘other-help’, is a key feature of friendship between states, the article explores how states behave when a friend is attacked by an overwhelming enemy. It directs attention to the trade-off between solidarity and self-help that governments face in such a situation and makes the novel argument that the decision about whether and how to support the friend is significantly influenced by assessments of the distribution of material capabilities and the relationship the state has with the aggressor. This proposition is supported empirically in an examination of Sweden’s response to its Nordic friends’ need for help during the Second World War – to Finland during the 1939–1940 ‘Winter War’ with the Soviet Union, and to Norway following the invasion of Germany from 1940 to 1945.


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