Seeing the Present, Remembering the Past: Terror’s Representation as an Exercise in Collective Memory

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbie Zelizer
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
The Past ◽  
Media Events ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Current Representation

This article argues that media events can be fruitfully understood as an exercise in collective memory. It considers how coverage of the so-called war on terror draws from a deep memory of the Cold War. In drawing from that mnemonic scheme, terror’s current representation as an ideological war prosecuted patiently across time assures its seeming success even when its main media events underscore the war’s failure.

scholarly journals National Trauma on a Foreign Stage

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 26-39
Author(s):  
Pirkko Koski
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Trauma ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Traumatic History ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Cold War

This article surveys the performance of the play Departure (Lähtö in Finnish, Minek in Estonian) by Estonian Rein Saluri at the Finnish National Theatre in 1988 during the last few years of the Cold War. The play depicts the deportation of an Estonian family to Siberia in the fall of 1946. The Finnish National Theatre invited Estonian Mati Unt to act as the director. The actors were Finnish, as were the audience, apart from a few individual spectators and during a short visit when Departure was performed in Estonia. The aim is to analyze how a theatre performance connected with an aspect of Estonian traumatic history and national memory was understood and felt by a country with a different historical and contemporary background. The performances of Departure show the ways in which repetition, memory, and re-appearance work and function in the theatre. Departure as theatre had power over history in its ability to reshape the image of the past through physical presence and affection. It increased in Finland the knowledge of and empathy toward Estonia and the presence of Estonian culture before the great political upheavals. However, the Finnish audience constructed the meanings of the play without the interaction between the collective memory, that is, the Finnish “memory” was historical and theatrical. Concerning national collective memory, it was not possible to cross the border.

Memory Wars in the ‘New Europe’

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Stone
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
World War ◽  
Memory Politics ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Cold War

Seventy years after the start of World War II, revisionists across Europe are arguing that Joseph Stalin was as much to blame for starting the war as was Adolf Hitler. As Adam Krzeminski rightly says, World War II is still being fought. This article sees ‘collective memory’ as a set of representations of the past that are constructed by a given social group (be it a nation, a family, a religious community, or other) through a process of invention, appropriation, and selection, and which have bearings on relationships of power within society. ‘Memory’ here refers not only to the academic study of memory but primarily to the various manifestations of ‘memory politics’ that have characterised Europe since the end of the Cold War. It is worth situating these European memory wars in a broader context, since they occur worldwide, especially in societies scarred by civil war, genocide, and authoritarianism, such as post-apartheid South Africa, Rwanda, Guatemala, and Argentina.

Inglorious Judgment

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Nadolny
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Cold War

It almost sounds like the beginning of a joke, to ask what Stanley Kramer’s 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg and Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious Basterds have in common. One film is a lengthy black and white, Oscar‐winning courtroom drama, the other a recently released, blood‐soaked World War II fantasy. Yet in an essay for a Law and Literature seminar with Dr. Scott last semester, I sought to explore the similarities between these two films in light of their approaches to themes of justice and legality. Despite initial appearances the two films are remarkably alike. Both Kramer and Tarantino use casting in noteworthy ways ‐ choosing their actors not only for their considerable talents but also theircultural cache. Judgment and Basterds also use the framework of Germany and the war to comment not only on the past, but also on the present; Kramer makes an interesting commentary on the dangers of McCarthyism, and Tarantino carefully allies his audience with a character whose actions clearly can be seen as terrorism. Kramer and Tarantino further highlight their views on justice by using language in interesting, and revealing ways.  By looking at a film from the past, as well as the present, this essay examines the ways in which filmmakers combine historical events with aspects of the present to raise questions about important current issues; specifically, imposed justice and legality within the context ofboth the Cold War and the War on Terror.

Land of Blue Helmets

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Arab World ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Member States ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Mediation

Born in 1945, the United Nations (UN) came to life in the Arab world. It was there that the UN dealt with early diplomatic challenges that helped shape its institutions such as peacekeeping and political mediation. It was also there that the UN found itself trapped in, and sometimes part of, confounding geopolitical tensions in key international conflicts in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, such as hostilities between Palestine and Iraq and between Libya and Syria. Much has changed over the past seven decades, but what has not changed is the central role played by the UN. This book's claim is that the UN is a constant site of struggle in the Arab world and equally that the Arab world serves as a location for the UN to define itself against the shifting politics of its age. Looking at the UN from the standpoint of the Arab world, this volume includes chapters on the potential and the problems of a UN that is framed by both the promises of its Charter and the contradictions of its member states.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex J. Bellamy
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Cold War

Until recently, East Asia was a boiling pot of massacre and blood-letting. Yet, almost unnoticed by the wider world, it has achieved relative peace over the past three decades.1 At the height of the Cold War, East Asia accounted for around 80 percent of the world’s mass atrocities. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, it accounted for less than 5 percent....

Vietnamese Historical Writing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Pelley
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Asian ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Southern State ◽  
The Past ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
Political Function ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
North Vietnam

This chapter demonstrates how the process of decolonization and the ensuing separation of Vietnam into a northern and southern state as part of the Cold War in Asia led to different types of history-writing. In both Vietnamese regimes, the writing of history had to serve the state, and in both countries historians emphasized its political function. Whereas North Vietnam located itself in an East Asian and Marxist context, historians of South Vietnam positioned it within a Southeast Asian setting and took a determinedly anti-communist position. After 1986—over a decade after reunification—with past tensions now relaxed, the past could be revaluated more openly under a reformist Vietnamese government that now also permitted much greater interaction with foreign historians.

scholarly journals The Right to Survival in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jiyoung Song
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Confucian Tradition ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
North Korean Defectors ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Over Time

AbstractFor the past decade, the author has examined North Korean primary public documents and concludes that there have been changes of identities and ideas in the public discourse of human rights in the DPRK: from strong post-colonialism to Marxism-Leninism, from there to the creation of Juche as the state ideology and finally 'our style' socialism. This paper explains the background to Kim Jong Il's 'our style' human rights in North Korea: his broader framework, 'our style' socialism, with its two supporting ideational mechanisms, named 'virtuous politics' and 'military-first politics'. It analyses how some of these characteristics have disappeared while others have been reinforced over time. Marxism has significantly withered away since the end of the Cold War, and communism was finally deleted from the latest 2009 amended Socialist Constitution, whereas the concept of sovereignty has been strengthened and the language of duties has been actively employed by the authority almost as a relapse to the feudal Confucian tradition. The paper also includes some first-hand accounts from North Korean defectors interviewed in South Korea in October–December 2008. They show the perception of ordinary North Koreans on the ideas of human rights.

Geopolitics of a Divided Europe

2015 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 531-540 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell A. Orenstein
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
The European Union ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Russian President ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Two Sides

Europe is again a divided continent. When it comes to governance, political economy, or values, two contrasting poles have emerged: one Western, liberal, and democratic, another Eastern, statist, and autocratic. The dividing line between them has become ever sharper, threatening to separate Europe into two distinct worlds. This new divide in Europe arises from a clash between two geopolitical concepts for the continent: One is the Western project of a “Europe whole and free,” an enlarging zone of economic cooperation, political interdependency, and democratic values. The other is the Russian project of a “Eurasian Union” to rival the European Union. This article shows how these two sides of Europe have grown further apart in their conceptions of the European space, their values, governance, and economic models. It explores the reasons for the belated Western responses to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s program to divide Europe. The Russo-Georgian war was a turning point, but the West took a long time to recognize the full implications of Putin’s policy. The current confrontation between Russia and the West is not exactly like the Cold War. Russia’s position is weaker. And the battle will be fought out primarily with economic instruments. However, it is clear that this conflict places Central and Eastern Europe back on the front lines of a divided Europe, raising any number of demons from the past.

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