The Nation of Islam and the Cold War Liberal Consensus

2019 ◽  
pp. 34-55
Author(s):  
Edward E. Curtis
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Nation Of Islam ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Muslim American ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Political Dissent ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter reveals the moment when a Muslim American political vision first became consequential in national politics. Known for its radical resistance to white supremacy, US foreign policy, black Christianity, and the liberal dream of racial integration, the Nation of Islam was perceived as a threat to the ideological foundations of US liberalism, which rested on (1) anticommunism and the suppression of political dissent both at home and abroad, (2) on the rhetoric of equal rights under the law and sometimes racial integration, and (3) on federal welfare programs. This chapter also shows how the Nation of Islam’s leadership assimilated to other modes of Cold War liberalism: it policed its members’ sexuality; it embraced the dream of black capitalism and encouraged entrepreneurship; it used the US courts to argue for freedom of religion and framed its activities as the exercise of that freedom; and it forbade its members from engaging in violent revolution or even nonviolent political resistance against many of the very liberal institutions that it identified as a religious evil.

The Political Meanings of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam

2017 ◽  
pp. 263-280
Author(s):  
Edward E. Curtis
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation Of Islam ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Political Dissent ◽  
The Us ◽  
Prime Target

Known for its radical resistance to white supremacy, US foreign policy, black Christianity and the liberal dream of racial integration, Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam (NOI) was a prime target of US governmental surveillance and repression. Its very presence was perceived as a threat to the ideological foundations of 1960s US liberalism, which rested on anti-communism and the suppression of political dissent both at home and abroad, on the rhetoric of equal rights under the law and sometimes racial integration, and on federal welfare programs. At the same time, the Nation of Islam’s leadership appropriated and furthered what were at the time several other modes of liberalism: it policed its members’ middle-class, straight sexuality; it embraced the dream of black capitalism and encouraged entrepreneurship; it used the US courts to argue for freedom of religion and framed its activities as such; and it forbade its members from engaging in violent revolution or even nonviolent political resistance against many of the very liberal institutions that it identified as a religious evil.

The Development of the United Nations Law Concerning Peace-Keeping Operations

1992 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-281
Author(s):  
Robert Siekmann
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Central America ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
New Thinking ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Cold War

Especially as a consequence of the termination of the Cold War, the détente in the relations between East en West (Gorbachev's ‘new thinking’ in foreign policy matters) and, finally, the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the number of UN peace-keeping operations substantially increased in recent years. One could even speak of a ‘proliferation’. Until 1988 the number of operations was twelve (seven peace-keeping forces: UNEF ‘I’ and ‘II’, ONUC, UNHCYP, UNSF (West New Guinea), UNDOF AND UNIFIL; and five military observer missions: UNTSO, UNMOGIP, UNOGIL, UNYOM and UNIPOM). Now, three forces and seven observer missions can be added. The forces are MINURSO (West Sahara), UNTAC (Cambodia) and UNPROFOR (Yugoslavia); the observer groups: UNGOMAP (Afghanistan/Pakistan), UNIIMOG (Iran/Iraq), UNAVEM ‘I’ and ‘II’ (Angola), ONUCA (Central America), UNIKOM (Iraq/Kuwait) and ONUSAL (El Salvador). UNTAG (Namibia), which was established in 1978, could not become operational until 1989 as a result of the new political circumstances in the world. So, a total of twenty-three operations have been undertaken, of which almost fifty percent was established in the last five years, whereas the other half was the result of decisions taken by the United Nations in the preceding forty years (UNTSO dates back to 1949). In the meantime, some ‘classic’ operations are being continued (UNTSO, UNMOGIP, UNFICYP, UNDOF, and UNIFIL), whereas some ‘modern’ operations already have been terminated as planned (UNTAG, UNGOMAP, UNIIMOG, UNAVEM ‘I’ and ‘II’, and ONUCA). At the moment (July 1992) eleven operations are in action – the greatest number in the UN history ever.

Cold War, Bottom-up: The 1956 Catholicos Election

2020 ◽  
pp. 126-166
Author(s):  
Tsolin Nalbantian
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Top Down ◽  
War Powers ◽  
Internal Politics ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

Chapter 3 examines the 1956 Catholicos election in Lebanon.While the excitement and success of the repatriation movement was a public relations victory for the USSR supported by local Armenian institutions and assisted by Lebanese and Syrian governments, this election became a site of contestation by Cold War powers and by their state and non-state allies and proxies in the Middle East. This analysis allows us to look at the Cold War in the Middle East not from the top down, through the eyes of Washington or Moscow (or Lebanon’s or Egypt’s state authorities, for that matter) during flash points like the 1958 U.S. intervention in Lebanon or the U.S. and Soviet reactions to the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt in 1956. Rather, in that election, Armenians made use of Cold War tensions to designate a leader of the Armenian Church who was seen to suit the community’s interests. That story also expands our understanding of Lebanon’s Armenians: from refugees and outsiders in national politics to true participants, whose own internal politics, moreover, were of interest to Lebanon’s authorities and who by now felt free to invade and use public spaces beyond their own neighborhoods to make political statements.

Wallace Stegner's Arabian Discovery: Imperial Blind Spots in a Continental Vision

2007 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 405-438
Author(s):  
ROBERT VITALIS
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The West ◽  
Western History ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Oil Company ◽  
Blind Spots

In 1956 Wallace Stegner wrote a history of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), but it was only published fifteen years later——in Beirut. The book complicates the view of Stegner as a destroyer of American western myths and a forerunner of the social and environmental turn in western history. Stegner shared with those who bought his services some problematic ideas about American identity and history in the context of the Cold War. His forgotten history of oil exploration in Saudi Arabia reveals the blind spots in his ““continental vision,”” an inability or unwillingness to see the moment as part of the long, unbroken past of the U.S. West. Stegner's journey, from chronicler of the despoiling of the West by eastern oil and copper barons to defender of cultural diversity and the collective commons, stopped, as it has for many other Americanists, at the water's edge.

Development: Reflections from Bolivia

1997 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Jones
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Budget Cuts ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Daunting Task ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Mental Constructs

The results of development are now widely thought to have betrayed expectations. Using illustrations from Bolivia, this essay argues that these dispiriting results often owe to distortions that render development something other than what it pretends to be, or is usually understood to be. The distortions derive from the use of inappropriate mental constructs, from links to foreign policy, from "expert" ignorance, and from weak sensitivity by development agencies to how their interventions are construed by local economic and power elites. While these agencies have formal mechanisms to correct some of the distortions, the mechanisms too often fail to work. Correcting these distortions is a daunting task, rooted as they are deep in national institutions and conceptions of national interest. The end of the Cold War nonetheless affords an auspicious moment for doing so. Indeed, not to is to risk turmoil in regions like Latin America. Yet international capitalist powers and local elites are not seizing the moment; exulting in victory, they continue down old paths. Further alarming is the anti-aid sentiment in the United States and Europe, with consequent political advocacy ranging from abolishment to varying degrees of reform under large budget cuts.

Hofstadter's The Age of Reform and the Crucible of the Fifties

2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillis Harp
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Senate ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
Political Dissent ◽  
Federal Civil Service ◽  
The Cold War

In December 1954, the United States Senate voted 67-22 to censure the junior senator from Wisconsin. Joe McCarthy had been drawing increasing criticism for his bullying tactics in ferreting out alleged communists and communist sympathizers within the federal civil service and elsewhere. In the wake of the Army-McCarthy hearings of the preceding spring (and especially after the dramatic televised confrontation with Army counsel Joseph Welch), the tide of public opinion finally turned against McCarthy. Still, his demagogic campaign had ruined the careers of scores of American citizens, from civil servants to artists, and had raised disturbing questions about room for political dissent within a democracy during the height of the Cold War.

From Subversion to Liberation: Homosexuals and the Immigration Act 1952–1977.

1987 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Girard
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Sex Roles ◽  
Political Dissent ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Cold War

Historians of the Cold War have tended to focus on the repression of political dissidents during that period, but only recently has attention been shifted to the simultaneous suppression of other types of non-conformity, such as sexual variance and non-traditional gender roles. Parallel to the repression of internal political dissent which accompanied the international Cold War, another, more subtle, campaign was proceeding. This was the attempt to re-establish the social order, based on family life and traditional sex roles, which the war had tended to undermine.

US imperialism after Iraq

Race & Class ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Harris
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Us Imperialism ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Cold War

The failure of its occupation of Iraq has provoked deep divisions among the US ruling elite over the future of foreign policy. The unilateralism promoted by the neoconservatives has been discredited, yet it is unclear whether the post-Bush era will be dominated by the `realists' or the `globalists', each of whom advocate different pathways for US imperialism. The `realists' — long the dominant trend in US foreign policy thinking — aim to maintain US leadership of the pro-western alliance formed during the cold war, whereas the `globalists', whose economic interests are those of transnational capital, seek to rethink US power within the context of an emerging polycentric world system, the parameters of which remain to be fully articulated. For the moment, there is a disconnect between the transnational economics of globalisation and the nationalist politics of the US ruling class, which remains committed to its belief that America has been uniquely chosen by history, culture and God to lead the world.

The Symbolism of Subversion: Notes on Some Cold War Icons

1972 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Weinstein
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Cold War

‘Ours is an era of “cases”,’ Diana Trilling wrote several years ago, ‘starting with the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the 1920s, proceeding through the Hiss and Oppenheimer cases to the Rosenberg case, the Chessman case, the Eichmann case, and [the subject of Mrs Trilling's essay]…culminating…in the Profumo case.’ We could add several since then, of course, and her chronology is misleading – the Rosenbergs having followed Hiss but preceded Oppenheimer – but Mrs Trilling's point, that such cases and others provoked within their society basic ‘confrontation(s) between opposing social principles’, remains valid. The Hiss, Rosenberg and Oppenheimer episodes were American society's most controversial post-World War II security cases. Each in turn dramatized the political and cultural impact of the Cold War for large numbers of Americans. They serve as useful paradigms, when examined together, for studying the process by which complex problems of evidence are reduced to compelling images of an event. Almost from the moment the ‘facts’ emerged in each case they congealed, first into partisan accounts and then into minor mythologies, in which each case became the subject-matter for a simple morality tale. Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Robert Oppenheimer, and the supporting caste in each drama achieved, in their own time, the status of icons in the demonologies and hagiographies of the opposing camps. Looking recently through the dreary record of trials and hearings connected with security problems during the Truman-Eisenhower era, I found certain continuities in the appraisal by intellectuals and politicians of these three otherwise singular episodes.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document