scholarly journals The Conspiracy of Brainwashing: the Experiences of the First and the Second Cold War

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gintaras Aleknonis
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Information Security ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
The Other ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
The West ◽  
Potential Loss ◽  
Communist Countries ◽  
Political Understanding ◽  
Principle Objective

With the recent rise of a new confrontation between the East and the West, the convergence of different understandings of brainwashing emerges as a problem of political communication and poses a challenge for information security. The principle objective of this paper is to present a contemporary understanding of brainwashing, determine its propaganda potential, and provide educated guesses about successor concepts, which could be traced back to the origins of brainwashing. Therefore, the article describes the ‘classical’ Western understanding of brainwashing; looks for the potential equivalents of brainwashing on the other side of the Iron Curtain; reveals the rebirth and transformations of the concept in post-communist countries during the period of time, when brainwashing in the West had already came out of fashion; notes to the potential misunderstandings between the new and old democracies, which arise because of the different interpretation of brainwashing.The contemporary comprehension of brainwashing continues to alternate between instrumental and political understanding. The broadened concept becomes more blurred, although the lack of precision compensates the potential loss of mystery and allows the brainwashing to preserve an image of an almighty technique.

‘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.

An Ordinary Soviet Death

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-149
Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
The West ◽  
Rational Argument ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter describes the timing and motivations of the USSR's promotion of atheist doctrine. At the outset, it seems, the Soviets expected Orthodoxy to wither away, invalidated by rational argument and the regime's own record of socialist achievement. This did not happen, but Soviet officialdom did not take full cognizance of the fact until the 1950s and 1960s at the height of the Cold War. Then it was that the Soviet Union's confrontation with the West came to be recast in religious terms as an epic battle between atheist communism on the one hand and on the other that self-styled standard-bearer of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the United States. So, here indeed, in Soviet atheism, is a secular church militant—doctrinally armed, fortified by the concentrated power of the modern state, and, as many believed, with the wind of history at its back. It speaks the language of liberation, but what it delivers is something much darker. The chapter then considers the place of ritual in the Soviet secularist project.

Intricate relations between Western anthropologists and Eastern ethnologists

Focaal ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 (63) ◽  
pp. 20-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michał Buchowski
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Other ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Pecking Order ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Hierarchical Order ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
Communist Past

Western representations of the Other are criticized by anthropologists, but similar hegemonic classifications are present in the relationships between anthropologists who are living in the West and working on the (post-socialist) East, and those working and living in the (post-communist) East. In a hierarchical order of scholars and knowledge, post-socialist anthropologists are often perceived as relics of the communist past: folklorists, theoretically backward empiricists, and nationalists. These images replicate Cold War stereotypes, ignore long-lasting paradigm shifts as well as actual practices triggered by the transnationalization of scholarship. Post-socialist academics either approve of such hegemony or contest this pecking order of wisdom, and their reactions range from isolationism to uncritical attempts at “nesting intellectual backwardness“ in the local context (an effect that trickles down and reinforces hierarchies). Deterred communication harms anthropological studies on post-socialism, the prominence of which can hardly be compared to that of post-colonial studies.

scholarly journals Foucault: Madness and Surveillance in Warsaw

2018 ◽  
pp. 174-190
Author(s):  
Piotr Sobolczyk
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
The West ◽  
Biographical Data ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Polish Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Communist Countries

The paper revises the biographical data about Michel Foucault’s stay in Poland in 1958-1959. The main inspiration comes from the recent very well documented literary reportage book by Remigiusz Ryziński, Foucault in Warsaw. Ryziński’s aim is to present the data and tell the story, not to analyse the data within the context of Foucault’s work. This paper fulfills this demand by giving additional hypotheses as to why Polish authorities expelled Foucault from Poland and what the relation was between communism and homosexuality. The Polish experience, the paper compels, might have been inspiring for many of Foucault’s ideas in his Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality. On the other hand the author points to the fact that Foucault recognized the difference between the role of the intellectual in the West and in communist countries but did not elaborate on it. In this paper the main argument deals with the idea of sexual paranoia as decisive, which is missing in Foucault's works, although it is found in e.g. Guy Hocquenghem.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Feinberg
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The Other ◽  
Weight Of Evidence ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Asking Questions ◽  
The Cold War

Histories of the Cold War have often been preoccupied with issues of accountability and intent. Such histories have generally focused on leading political actors and concerned themselves with issues that implicitly or explicitly pitted one camp against another, asking questions such as: Who was responsible for starting the Cold War? Who made key decisions? Who won and who lost? This study has been motivated by a different set of concerns. Rather than setting one side against the other, it has examined the Cold War as a shared political environment and tried to illuminate some of the ways a political culture that relied on moral absolutes affected patterns of thought on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It has tried to expand the question of who knew what and when by shifting the focus to how knowledge about Eastern Europe was produced, showing how some experiences took on the weight of evidence, whereas others seemingly provoked little thought....

Limonov: vita e avventure di un teppista lirico

2012 ◽  
pp. 127-130
Author(s):  
Roberto Valle
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Event ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

Eduard Limonov, a maudit writer, idol of the Soviet and post-Soviet underground, is the Limonov's eponymous hero of Emmanuel Carrčre, a book that in France has been a literary and political event; a kind of anatomy of the innards of the thug that narrates the novelistic and dangerous life of a voyou, a rogue. From the adventurous life of Limonov you can take the narration of the not official but eccentric and infamous history of the Russia and the West by the Cold War to the rise of Putin. Limonov, National-Bolshevik thug, has joined the Other Russia, an heteroclite coalition, and considers Putin his sworn enemy to be destroyed by a revolution. But Limonov will forfeit the seizure of power and retire to Samarkand or like Rudin, superfluous man of Turgenev's novel, will be forced to die for a cause not his, for the hated democracy.

The Making of the West German Borderlands, 1945–1955

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-52
Author(s):  
Astrid M. Eckert
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
The West ◽  
Demarcation Line ◽  
Economic Miracle ◽  
Border Regions ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter explores the economic consequences of the early inter-German border and introduces the economic heterogeneity of the borderlands through snapshots of four localities along the demarcation line. As the tightening demarcation made itself felt, a coalition of borderland advocates pressured the federal government to help prevent their regions from turning into economic backwaters. These lobbying efforts revealed that borderland residents cared less about living in the shadow of the Iron Curtain than about living in the shadow of the “economic miracle” to their west. In their pitch for state aid, borderland advocates declared their regions to be economically, socially, and politically more vulnerable as a result of the Cold War than regions that had “merely” been damaged by the recent war. Their efforts yielded the “zonal borderland aid” program that soon became an integral part of the border regions’ economic and cultural life.

The Cold War in the Village

2020 ◽  
pp. 163-195
Author(s):  
Marcel Thomas
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The Other ◽  
Economic Recovery ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Village

This chapter examines in more detail how the inhabitants of the two villages engaged with the other Germany and the division of their nation. The Neukirchers and Ebersbachers lived far away from the inner-German border, but in their everyday lives they nonetheless were forced to confront the impact of division. By analysing everyday practices through which the villagers positioned themselves in the political landscape of the Cold War, the chapter sheds new light on the asymmetry of (be)longing and othering in the divided nation. It demonstrates how the Neukirchers and Ebersbachers constructed their own respective imaginary East and imaginary West shaped by local concerns and searches for identity. In Neukirch, the villagers increasingly built up the West as an object of longing in their attempts to deal with the daily struggles of life in a shortage economy. The Ebersbachers, on the other hand, used the East as a Cold War ‘other’ to express pride in their economic recovery and gain a stronger sense of their own identity in a divided nation. These distorted images of the other Germany led to widespread alienation and misunderstandings in the first German–German encounters in the reunified nation. It was difference, rather than a shared sense of national identity, that dominated the experiences of the Neukirchers and Ebersbachers when the inner-German border disappeared in 1990.

Hollywood Film behind the Iron Curtain: Cold War Nostalgias in Chuck Norris vs Communism (2015)

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
OANA GODEANU-KENWORTHY
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Black Market ◽  
The Other ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

This article focusses on the American reception of a British–Romanian documentary about the black market for VHS Hollywood films in 1980s Romania. The film uses two different registers of nostalgia. On the one hand, it functions as an ostalgic media product that engages Eastern European viewers by building upon a sense of continuity with the socialist past. On the other hand, its surprising success in the American conservative blogosphere reveals the endurance of Cold War exceptionalist tropes. My analysis expands current discussions of post-socialist nostalgia, arguing for the relevance of the concept of ostalgia for the field of American studies.

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