Communists: Ireland’s ‘Fifth Column’?

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-46
Author(s):  
John Mulqueen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter discusses perceptions of Moscow’s ‘fifth column’ in the Irish state. While the communist party amounted to little more than an insignificant cult, not all communists declared themselves openly. Significantly, other political strands, particularly the IRA, were seen to be susceptible to communist manipulation. During the Cold War this gave rise to exaggerated fears about communism and its agents. Dublin officials co-operated with the British, and the Americans, in combating communists and their left-wing republican allies. In Northern Ireland, the Communist Party (CPNI) remained extremely weak, but retained influence of some significance within trade union officialdom. And, in Britain, the Connolly Association attempted to organise Irish exiles under the tutelage of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). The US embassy in Dublin was sensitive to any suggestion of communist activity; Irish and American officials placed intelligence co-operation on a formal footing in 1954.

scholarly journals ‘Gamekeeper Turned Poacher’: Frank Chapple, Anti-Communism, and Soviet Human Rights Violations1

2021 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 313-337
Author(s):  
Mark Hurst
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Union Leader ◽  
British Trade ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

The inclusion of the British trade union leader Frank Chapple on the panel of the 1985 Sakharov hearings, an event designed to hold the Soviet authorities to account for their violation of human rights, raises questions about the workings of the broader network of activists highlighting Soviet abuses. This article assesses Chapple’s support for human rights in the Soviet Union, arguing that because of his historic membership of the Communist Party and subsequent anti-communist leadership of the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) in Britain, his support for victims of Soviet persecution was multifaceted in the Cold War context.

scholarly journals Anthropological adventures with Romania's Wizard of Oz, 1973-1989

Focaal ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 2004 (43) ◽  
pp. 134-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Verdery
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The State ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Wizard Of Oz ◽  
New Model ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War

Throughout the Cold War, most people in the US saw the communist party-states of the Soviet bloc as all-powerful regimes imposing their will on their populations. The author, a child of the Cold War, began her fieldwork in Romania in the 1970s in this belief. The present essay describes how her experiences in Romania between 1973 and 1989 gradually forced her to see things differently, bringing her to realize that centralization was only one face of a system of rule pervaded by barely controlled anarchy and parasitism on the state. It was not simply that the regime had failed to change people's consciousness; rather, the system's operation was actively producing something quite different. These insights contributed to the author's developing a new model of the workings of socialism.

Jürgen Kuczynski and the Search for a (Non-Existent) Western Spy Ring in the East German Communist Party in 1953

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW STIBBE
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Strategic Bombing ◽  
Party Control ◽  
The Us ◽  
East German ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Labour History ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractJürgen Kuczynski, the East German Marxist intellectual and economic historian, is best known for his numerous publications on labour history. Far less has been written about his role as a leading figure in the German Communist Party in Britain between 1936 and 1944, and his work for the US Strategic Bombing Survey in 1944–5, activities which later came back to haunt him when he was the subject of a major inquiry launched by the Central Party Control Commission in 1953. Using newly available documents in London and Berlin, this article examines the investigation into Kuczynski as a case study for the inter-relationship between party purges, spy scares and the manipulation of individual biographies during one of the most volatile periods of the cold war.

scholarly journals China in 2020

Asian Survey ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
Min Ye
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The State ◽  
Bilateral Relations ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War

The COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on China, causing tremendous losses. It also accelerated the trend of power concentration, both within the state and inside the Communist Party. With tensions between the US and China mounting in more areas, bilateral relations dropped to the lowest point since the end of the Cold War. On its periphery, China also saw crises of varying intensity over Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Uyghurs, and the disputed border with India.

The Unassailable Self: Freud's Image Among Post-war American Intellectuals

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Jenness
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
External Force ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Human Being ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Way

This paper explores the way American intellectuals depicted Sigmund Freud during the peak of popularity and prestige of psychoanalysis in the US, roughly the decade and a half following World War II. These intellectuals insisted upon the unassailability of Freud's mind and personality. He was depicted as unsusceptible to any external force or influence, a trait which was thought to account for Freud's admirable comportment as a scientist, colleague and human being. This post-war image of Freud was shaped in part by the Cold War anxiety that modern individuality was imperilled by totalitarian forces, which could only be resisted by the most rugged of selves. It was also shaped by the unique situation of the intellectuals themselves, who were eager to position themselves, like the Freud they imagined, as steadfastly independent and critical thinkers who would, through the very clarity of their thought, lead America to a more robust democracy.

Reluctant Cold Warriors

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladimir Kontorovich
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Soviet Economy ◽  
Accurate Analysis ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Us ◽  
Comprehensive Survey ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

The academic study of the Soviet economy in the US was created to help fight the Cold War, part of a broader mobilization of the social sciences for national security needs. The Soviet strategic challenge rested on the ability of its economy to produce large numbers of sophisticated weapons. The military sector was the dominant part of the economy, and the most successful one. However, a comprehensive survey of scholarship on the Soviet economy from 1948-1991 shows that it paid little attention to the military sector, compared to other less important parts of the economy. Soviet secrecy does not explain this pattern of neglect. Western scholars developed strained civilian interpretations for several aspects of the economy which the Soviets themselves acknowledged to have military significance. A close reading of the economic literature, combined with insights from other disciplines, suggest three complementary explanations for civilianization of the Soviet economy. Soviet studies was a peripheral field in economics, and its practitioners sought recognition by pursuing the agenda of the mainstream discipline, however ill-fitting their subject. The Soviet economy was supposed to be about socialism, and the military sector appeared to be unrelated to that. By stressing the militarization, one risked being viewed as a Cold War monger. The conflict identified in this book between the incentives of academia and the demands of policy makers (to say nothing of accurate analysis) has broad relevance for national security uses of social science.

Peaceful Change in Northeast Asia: Maintaining the “Minimal Peace”

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bhubhindar Singh
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Northeast Asia ◽  
Institutional Structure ◽  
Economic Interdependence ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Liberal Internationalism ◽  
The Us ◽  
Regional Order ◽  
The Cold War

Northeast Asia is usually associated with conflict and war. Out of the five regional order transitions from the Sinocentric order to the present post–Cold War period, only one was peaceful, the Cold War to post–Cold War transition. In fact, the peaceful transition led to a state of minimal peace in post–Cold War Northeast Asia. As the chapter discusses, this was due to three realist-liberal factors: America’s hegemonic role, strong economic interdependence, and a stable institutional structure. These factors not only ensured development and prosperity but also mitigated the negative effects of political and strategic tensions between states. However, this minimal peace is in danger of unraveling. Since 2010, the region is arguably in the early stages of another transition fueled by the worsening Sino-US competition. While the organizing ideas of liberal internationalism—economic interdependence and institutional building—will remain resilient, whether or not minimal peace is sustainable will be determined by the outcome of the US-China competition.

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