Rebecca West and the Double Agent

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 469-487
Author(s):  
Adam Piette
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Political ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Rebecca West ◽  
Intelligence Operations ◽  
Double Agent

This essay will explore the figure of the double agent as it tests notions of citizenship mid-century, specifically the clash or fusion of internationalist/nationalist definitions of citizen loyalty in the construction of the traitor ‘revolutionary’ citizen. It will be look at Kaminsky in Rebecca West's 1966 historical novel The Birds Fall Down as a late rewriting of the double agent, which West had theorized through her analyses of William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw’)’s wartime propaganda and Stephen Ward in the Profumo Affair of the early 1960s. West's thinking draws on Hannah Arendt's writings on the double agent in Origins of Totalitarianism. The essay will explore both the political Cold War contexts that motivated West's return to Tsarist Russia and the double agent, and the feminist light cast on treacherous intelligence operations as forms of patriarchal control over women's bodies and minds. West is shown to be revising the double agent trope of spy fiction, reimagining the mole traitor as totalitarian fanatic revealing the extremes of hostile patriarchy and of male political desire.

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.

State Failure and the Political Violence Phenomenon: A Comparative Analysis of Iraq and Syria Cases

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 170 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Eylem Özkaya Lassalle
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
State Failure ◽  
The Political ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

The concept of failed state came to the fore with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the USSR and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Political violence is central in these discussions on the definition of the concept or the determination of its dimensions (indicators). Specifically, the level of political violence, the type of political violence and intensity of political violence has been broached in the literature. An effective classification of political violence can lead us to a better understanding of state failure phenomenon. By using Tilly’s classification of collective violence which is based on extent of coordination among violent actors and salience of short-run damage, the role played by political violence in state failure can be understood clearly. In order to do this, two recent cases, Iraq and Syria will be examined.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Intangible Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Print Literacy

The section introduces Part II, which spans the period 1946 to 2014, by tracing the history of the debates about culture within UNESCO from 1947 to 2009. It considers the central part print literacy played in the early decades, and the gradual emergence of what came to be called ‘intangible heritage’; the political divisions of the Cold War that had a bearing not just on questions of the state and its role as a guardian of culture but on the idea of cultural expression as a commodity; the slow shift away from an exclusively intellectualist definition of culture to a more broadly anthropological one; and the realpolitik surrounding the debates about cultural diversity since the 1990s. The section concludes by showing how at the turn of the new millennium UNESCO caught up with the radical ways in which Tagore and Joyce thought about linguistic and cultural diversity.

Testimonio at 50

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
Guadalupe Escobar
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Indigenous Women ◽  
The Political ◽  
Extractive Industry ◽  
The Past ◽  
Colonial Capitalism ◽  
Revolutionary Period

A reassessment of the testimonio genre over the past five decades reveals continuities of state-sponsored violence from the revolutionary period to the present. An analysis of Pamela Yates’s 500 Years: Life in Resistance (2017) and Katia Lara’s Berta vive (Berta Lives, 2016) shows Cold War reverberations, unfolding deeper histories of dispossession and legacies of resistance. The first uncovers entangled issues of Guatemalan genocide disavowal and extractive industry while the second denounces the political feminicide of the Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres. Both testimonial documentaries mobilize an “archive effect” to contest the optic of colonial capitalism through the ecofeminist perspectives of indigenous women activists. Una reevaluación del género del testimonial durante las últimas cinco décadas revela la continuidad de la violencia estatal desde el período revolucionario hasta el presente. Un análisis de 500 Years: Life in Resistance (2017) de Pamela Yates y Berta vive (2016) de Katia Lara da cuenta de las reverberaciones de la Guerra Fría, desplegando historias más profundas de desposesión y legados de resistencia. La primera obra muestra los intrincados hilos en torno a la negación del genocidio guatemalteco y la industria extractiva, mientras que el segundo denuncia el feminicidio político de la activista ambiental hondureña Berta Cáceres. Ambos documentales testimoniales utilizan un “efecto de archivo” para impugnar la óptica del capitalismo colonial a través de las perspectivas ecofeministas de las activistas indígenas.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

Od politycznej współpracy do gospodarczej konkurencji – przemysł obronny krajów Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej po upadku ZSRR

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-98
Author(s):  
Mieczysław Szlachta ◽  
Andrzej Ciupiński
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Economic Recession ◽  
Defense Industry ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
Central Eastern Europe ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Cold War

The paper presents the scope and scale of transformation of the defense industries of Central Eastern Europe (CEE) countries after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR. The starting point is the role and position of the armaments economy sector (armaments economy environment), embedded in the realities of the centrally planned economy, and its submission to the politics of the USSR. The turn of the centuries was a period of political and economic transformation conducted during the conditions of a deep economic recession. The defense industry was one of the economic sectors most affected by the crisis. The economic and defense policy of CEE countries was aimed at preserving the capabilities of the armaments sector. Restructuring activities initiated and forced by the change of the political and economic environment have already brought noticeable effects, even though the process has not yet been completed. Defense industry enterprises have become entities operating on the same terms and conditions as other companies on the competitive market. The method of comparative analysis and a case study supplemented with elements of descriptive statistics were used to evaluate the course of the processes. The study has been focused on the analysis of the course of the changes and examination of effects of the analyzed phenomena for the economy and defense of the CEE countries, taking into account primarily their scale and scope.

HOPE AND MEMORY IN THE THOUGHT OF JUDITH SHKLAR

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 591-620 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATRINA FORRESTER
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
The Political ◽  
American Liberalism ◽  
Judith Shklar ◽  
Exclusive Focus

Current interpretations of the political theory of Judith Shklar focus to a disabling extent on her short, late article “The Liberalism of Fear” (1989); commentators take this late essay as representative of her work as a whole and thus characterize her as an anti-totalitarian, Cold War liberal. Other interpretations situate her political thought alongside followers of John Rawls and liberal political philosophy. Challenging the centrality of fear in Shklar's thought, this essay examines her writings on utopian and normative thought, the role of history in political thinking and her notions of ordinary cruelty and injustice. In particular, it shifts emphasis away from an exclusive focus on her late writings in order to consider works published throughout her long career at Harvard University, from 1950 until her death in 1992. By surveying the range of Shklar's critical standpoints and concerns, it suggests that postwar American liberalism was not as monolithic as many interpreters have assumed. Through an examination of her attitudes towards her forebears and contemporaries, it shows why the dominant interpretations of Shklar—as anti-totalitarian émigré thinker, or normative liberal theorist—are flawed. In fact, Shklar moved restlessly between these two categories, and drew from each tradition. By thinking about both hope and memory, she bridged the gap between two distinct strands of postwar American liberalism.

scholarly journals From Iron Curtain to Velvet Curtain? Peter Brook's Hamlet and the Origins of British–Soviet Cultural Relations during the Cold War

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 601-626 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH DAVIES
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Divide

The article assesses the significance of the Moscow tour of Peter Brook's Hamlet. It considers how far the tour succeeded in overcoming the symbolic iron curtain by examining what Hamlet meant for contemporaries on both sides of the political divide. It argues that the Hamlet tour served at once to perpetuate and undermine the divisions between East and West, confirming Iriye's observation that on one level the Cold War intensified antagonism between states, while on another it helped to foster the growth of internationalist sentiment.

scholarly journals The Red Machine: The Dehumanization of the Communist Enemy in American Cold War Cinema

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Oleg Riabov
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dual Model ◽  
Inanimate Object ◽  
Moral Exclusion ◽  
Human Creativity ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Materials Used

This article deals with the US Cold War cinematographic construction of the Soviet enemy. The researcher focuses on the means of dehumanising the communist enemy, external and internal, by equating it to a machine. The author applies Nick Haslam’s dual model of dehumanization (2006), according to which dehumanization is visible in two main forms: animalistic, by associating members of the out-group with animals, and mechanistic, by associating them with a soulless machine. The materials used consist of US films from the “Long Fifties”, in which Hollywood, equating the enemy to machines, developed three plots: the robotic existence of individuals in a totalitarian society; the transformation of Americans into zombies by communists by means of Soviet science; and the body snatching of Americans by an alien mind, an allegory of a future communist occupation of the USA. The article demonstrates that dehumanization was implemented by directly labeling the representatives of the communist world as robots and by attributing to them a lack of emotions, consciousness, will, individuality, initiative, warmth, love, friendship, creative abilities, and even the ability to smile. Such an image of the enemy implied a moral exclusion, treating them as an inanimate object unworthy of empathy, including in the event of their destruction. The author points out that the use of mechanistic dehumanization was very effective. Essentialization of the differences between “us” and “them” occurred: the symbolic border between them is presented as a boundary between living and nonliving. The image of mortal danger was created: the “Red Machine” is strong and merciless, it cannot be moved to pity, and so it is permissible to destroy it. This image contributed to the legitimation of power: the political opponents of the authorities are represented as internal enemies who are anxious to turn Americans into obedient executors of someone else’s will and to deprive them of humanity. At the same time, the machine also has weaknesses, and it is possible to defeat it: since it is devoid of human creativity, it is clearly inferior to the free human spirit embodied in America.

scholarly journals The politics of movement between Venezuela and Colombia. Myths, realities and conflicts.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuseppe De Corso
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
The Political ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
Transnational Migrants

This essay examines the intense flow and re-flow of transnational migrants between Venezuela and Colombia, applying the theory suggested by Thomas Nail in his work the Figure of the Migrant. We initially focus on the regimes of social motion, and how they link with the political figures of migrants and the strategies of expulsion. Then, we consider the demographic contribution of Colombian diaspora in Venezuela and the socio-political repercussion of their current migratory crisis reverse movement. In pursuing the latter goal, we use primary sources like interviews and discuss censuses and surveys from both countries. We concluded that the current migratory flood is shaped by decades of Colombian immigration to Venezuela and the much quoted exodus is part of a new Cold War narrative.

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