“A Star Is Born”: Gender, Soft Power and Biopics in the Cold War Romanian Cinema Darclée (1961)

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Romanian Cinema

"“A Star Is Born”: Gender, Soft Power and Biopics in Cold-War Romanian Cinema (Darclée, 1961) Obsessively interested in life writing from the periods of 20th-century dictatorships, Romanian post-communist culture has been dominated, with very few exceptions, by male authors. However, shyly, yet steadily, in this large-scale attempt to retrace and understand the traumatic past, there has been an opening in recent years towards women authors. Although few by comparison, these personal narratives are memorable. In terms of biographical novels and biopics, the most striking feature is the absence of such female representations. Departing from this context of gender oblivion and inequality, and considering the specificities of the life writing genre and its filmic representations, the current paper focuses on Darclée (Mihai Iacob, 1961), one of the very few biopics in Romanian cinema that revolves around a famous woman. Aside from being a rare, female-centered exception among Romanian biopics, the film is also noteworthy for its politicized content and therefore interesting to discuss in relation to the political context, the totalitarian regime present at the time in Romania and its cultural discourse. Despite dealing with a-turn-of-the-century figure of aristocratic and bourgeois origins, the film (with the wife of a communist leader in the leading role) is politically appropriated by the communist regime and announces National Communism in Romanian culture. The analysis will thus consider the political discourse employed in Darclée, with its unexpected nationalist emphasis, as well as the film’s strategies of representation as it covers, in a rare occasion, a female figure. Keywords: life writing, gender, Romanian cinema, Cold War biopic, musical film "

The Escape to Turkey. Ways and Methods of Illegal Border Crossings into Turkey from the perspective of SSI documents (1945-1948)

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-134
Author(s):  
Daniela Popescu
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Secret Police ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Police Services ◽  
The Cold War

"The Escape to Turkey. Ways and Methods of Illegal Border Crossings into Turkey from the perspective of SSI documents (1945-1948). Romania`s first years after the communist regime took political power in Romania, concurrent with the onset of the Cold War, meant a reshuffle of the state institutions at first and later a dramatic impact on people`s lives. The political and institutional purges were the first signal that soon repression and terror will follow, thus prompting numerous Romanian citizens to leave the country. Yet, due to the strict surveillance of the Secret Police Services which did not easily allow traveling to Western countries, the only way to escape was through illicit border crossings. One of the most common destinations was Turkey, with documents issued between 1945 and 1948 by the Secret police services revealing an impressive number of such cases. Keywords: Illegal border crossings, escape, communism, Romania, Turkey. "

Part 1 The Cold War Era (1945–89), 13 The Intervention in Czechoslovakia—1968

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hafner Gerhard
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Law ◽  
Political System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Valid Consent ◽  
The Cold War

This contribution discusses the intervention of five member states of the Warsaw Pact Organization under the leading role of the Soviet Union in the CSSR in August 1968, which terminated the “Prague Spring” in a forceful manner. After presenting the facts of this intervention and its reasons, it describes the legal positions of the protagonists of this intervention as well as that of the states condemning it, as presented in particular in the Security Council. It then examines the legality of this intervention against general international law and the particular views of the Soviet doctrine existing at that time, defending some sort of socialist (regional) international law. This case stresses the requirement of valid consent for the presence of foreign troops in a country and denies the legality of any justification solely based on the necessity to maintain the political system within a state.

Just Hierarchy between Citizens

2020 ◽  
pp. 66-105
Author(s):  
Daniel A. Bell ◽  
Wang Pei
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
Political System ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Willingness To Serve ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
Political Meritocracy ◽  
China Today

This chapter turns to just hierarchies between citizens—mainly strangers to one another—in modern large-scale political communities. It argues that hierarchies between rulers and ruled in such communities are justified if the political system selects and promotes public officials with above-average ability and a willingness to serve the political community over and above their own private and family interests. The chapter demonstrates that this kind of ideal—the “political meritocracy”—helped to inspire the imperial political system in China's past and Chinese political reformers in the early twentieth century, and may help to justify the political system in China today. However, the meritocratic system needs to be accompanied by democratic mechanisms short of competitive elections at the top that allow citizens to show that they trust their rulers and provide a measure of accountability at different levels of government. In the Chinese context, however, there is a large gap between the ideal and the reality. Thus, this chapter recommends that a judicious mixture of Confucian-style “soft power” combined with democratic openness, Maoist-style mass line, and Daoist-style skepticism about the whole political system can help to reinvigorate political meritocracy in China.

“Traditions” from Folklore Studies to Media Product and the Beginnings of Broadcasting in Romania

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-38
Author(s):  
Corina Iosif
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Media Communication ◽  
Folklore Studies ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Large Audience ◽  
The Media ◽  
Entire Society ◽  
Radio Programs

The rhetorical logic of the discourse which is currently building the image of the junction between tradition and nation (and of the concepts thus required) is also due to processing this discourse in the media. That is to say that the connection between media communication and the political instrumentalization of traditions as a domain of national constructs has offered proper soil for shaping the political and ideological narratives based on nation. The use of some concepts, such as nation, national culture, traditions and folklore in the first decades of the 20th century, and their instrumentalization as radio products, created the premises and particularly the pattern of some specific discursive constructions regarding the nation- state. These were meant to be integrated, embraced and, especially, reproduced on a large scale. Therefore, the discourse focused on national identity – with all its constitutive elements (the state, the language, the history and traditions) – could disseminate a unique hypostasis, shaped under political control, which thus legitimated it. From 1928, the year when the first radio programs were broadcast, until directly after the 1950s, when the recording of the radio programs on magnetic tape was a common professional practice, the only documents that could be considered today are the written texts of the radio programs (conferences, educational or informative programs, political, agricultural news, etc.). Between 1925, when The Romanian Society of Radiotelephony was established, and 1948, the year when the communist regime officially came into power, Romanian radio programs broadcast discourses on a broad range of topics and for a large audience. The present study focuses on the ethnological one. We are interested in how the ethnological discourse rooted in the aforementioned time period also built a media hypostasis for addressing the entire society, and in how programs dedicated to “traditions” bear the signs of this structuring process.

scholarly journals MANIPULATIVE DISCOURSE IN GEORGE ORWEL’S ANIMAL FARM

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-88
Author(s):  
Edi Pujo Basuki
Keyword(s):  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
Animal Farm ◽  
Global And Local

Animal Farm has been called George Orwell’s most ferocious propaganda (Voorhees, 1961 quoted in Jasim, M. H. and Aziz, Fatimah H). This novel is a satire referring to a communist regime persistently utilizing the kind of hypocritical propaganda merely for the purpose of keeping its totalitarian regime in power.. Animal Farm demonstrates more of such manipulative discourse, and this will be the focus of the study. The contribution of this study is that understanding manipulative discourse and its strategies gives a view of manipulative mechanism and thereby help people recognizing any hegemony form by those in power. The framework of the study applied Cognitive Pragmatics for Manipulative Discourse and Relevance Theory. The result of the study describes the characters that represent manipulative discourse as well as the types of the employed strategies (both global and local, both linguistic and non-linguistic ones). Manipulative discourses employed in the novel are produced or reproduced for two main general purposes. Firstly, the political discourses produced by Old Major is to convince all the animals of the necessity to fight against the human being for the freedom of the animals. The ideology exercised by the animals is anti-human ideology. Secondly, the manipulative discourses produced and reproduced by the pigs are to exercise their domination over the rest of the animals. The ideology of the pigs’ racism is exercised to gain more power, more privilege, and more access to the farm resources.

scholarly journals Examining the ‘age of apology’: Insights from the Political Apology database

2021 ◽  
pp. 002234332110246
Author(s):  
Marieke Zoodsma ◽  
Juliette Schaafsma
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

It is often assumed that we are currently living in an ‘age of apology’, whereby countries increasingly seek to redress human rights violations by offering apologies. Although much has been written about why this may occur, the phenomenon itself has never been examined through a large-scale review of the apologies that have been offered. To fill this gap, we created a database of political apologies that have been offered for human rights violations across the world. We found 329 political apologies offered by 74 countries, and cross-nationally mapped and compared these apologies. Our data reveal that apologies have increasingly been offered since the end of the Cold War, and that this trend has accelerated in the last 20 years. They have been offered across the globe, be it that they seem to have been embraced by consolidated liberal democracies and by countries transitioning to liberal democracies in particular. Most apologies have been offered for human rights violations that were related to or took place in the context of a (civil) war, but there appears to be some selectivity as to the specific human rights violations that countries actually mention in the apologies. On average, it takes more than a generation before political apologies are offered.

Demilitarization in the Contemporary World

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
World History ◽  
The United States ◽  
General Assumption ◽  
The Political ◽  
Security Risks ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Regional Conflicts ◽  
Global Cold War

Contemporary world history has highlighted militarization in many ways, from the global Cold War and numerous regional conflicts to the general assumption that nationhood implies a significant and growing military. Yet the twentieth century also offers notable examples of large-scale demilitarization, both imposed and voluntary. This book fills a key gap in current historical understanding by examining demilitarization programs in Germany, Japan, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Costa Rica. The chapters outline each nation's demilitarization choices and how they were made. The book investigates factors such as military defeat, border security risks, economic pressures, and the development of strong peace cultures among citizenry. Also at center stage is the influence of the United States, which fills a paradoxical role as both an enabler of demilitarization and a leader in steadily accelerating militarization. The book explores what true demilitarization means and how it impacts a society at all levels, military and civilian, political and private. The examples chosen reveal that successful demilitarization must go beyond mere troop demobilization or arms reduction to generate significant political and even psychological shifts in the culture at large. Exemplifying the political difficulties of demilitarization in both its failures and successes, it provides a possible roadmap for future policies and practices.

Responding to ‘Order Without Life’? Living Under Communism

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Stone
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Structural Defects ◽  
The Political ◽  
Contributory Factor ◽  
State Security ◽  
Long Period ◽  
East German ◽  
Collapse Of Communism ◽  
The Cold War

Both during the Cold War, with the 1950s theories of ‘red fascism’ and ‘totalitarianism’, and after 1989, when debates have been no less emotive, scholars and other political commentators have condemned communism for its bloody murderousness. However, the long period of communist rule in Europe cannot be summarised as no more than sustained and untrammelled violence. It helps to explain why communism collapsed, in a way that an emphasis solely on state security and terror cannot. One way that the communist regime tried to legitimise itself was through encouraging consumerism, particularly after the death of Joseph Stalin and the East German uprising of June 1953. Consumerism in Eastern Europe meant consumerism controlled by the Communist Party for the purpose of developing communism. It is often assumed that nationalism emerged after 1989 to fill the political vacuum opened up by the demise of communism. In fact, the opposite is the case: nationalism did not cause the collapse of communism (which owed more to structural defects in the system), but it was one contributory factor.

Jenö Varga, The Hungarian Soviet Republic and the Development of Psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union

2001 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christfried Tögel
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Soviet Republic ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude ◽  
Soviet Russia

The paper explores – on the basis of archival sources, memoirs and interviews – the strange career of the economist Jenö Varga (1879–1964), an early Hungarian sympathizer of psychoanalysis. Varga became a member of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Association in 1918 and, in 1919, was appointed People's Commissar for Finances during the Hungarian Councils' Republic, the first Communist regime in the country. After the failure of the Commune, he emigrated to Soviet Russia. In the 1920s, he worked at the Soviet commercial mission in Berlin, and maintained contact with Freud until the late 1920s. Later, he became one of the leading economists of the Soviet Union, an expert on the political economy of capitalism. Though he never publicly opposed Stalinism, an ambivalent attitude toward the totalitarian regime can be reconstructed from his memoirs as well as from interviews with family members and friends.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

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