Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 245-248
Author(s):  
John Mulqueen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Department Of Justice ◽  
The West ◽  
Peace Activists ◽  
Republican Movement

‘Military neutrality’ and ‘political neutrality’ are not the same. The Irish authorities did not allow the state’s non-aligned status to prevent them joining the crusade in the West against communism. They had a Cold War agenda. In the 1950s, leading officials such as Colonel Dan Bryan in G2, the Irish army intelligence directorate, believed that Ireland should assist the NATO powers in their global struggle. So, too, did Peter Berry, the Department of Justice secretary in Dublin. They supplied detailed information on the tiny communist organisation to the ‘hypersensitive’ Americans, for example, and provided intelligence on ‘peace’ activists to the British. Details on suspect activists ended up in the files of the Church’s ‘vigilance’ committee – a clear breach of the separation of Church and State. As functionaries in what Berry termed the ‘communist international’, Michael O’Riordan in Dublin and Desmond Greaves in London were seen to be taking directions from the British communist party, the CPGB. The communists had their own Cold War agenda to follow, with ‘world peace’ Moscow’s priority. But this issue did not capture the imagination of the working class, as a frustrated Roy Johnston discovered. Nevertheless, orders were orders for Ireland’s ‘fifth column’. Some communist-led organisations, however, were believed to have recruitment potential. Could the CPGB-directed Connolly Association, and its equivalent in New York – both ‘dangerous’ in Bryan’s view – convert Irish exiles by highlighting issues related to Northern Ireland? Was there any possibility that communists could succeed in infiltrating the Irish republican movement?...

Words as Weapons

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connal Parr
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Literary Heritage ◽  
Republican Movement ◽  
Artistic Merit

‘Culture wars’ in Northern Ireland are literary and rest upon the misperception—and political claim—that Ulster Protestants lack a culture aside from Orangeism. Unionist politicians and Republican writers have accordingly cultivated the myth that Ulster Protestants lack literary heritage and have never been involved in the theatre. The community has internalized a post-conflict ‘defeatism’ and a conviction that it has produced little or nothing of artistic merit. This has been fortified by the individualist, splintered nature of the Protestant community as opposed to the more cohesive and communally robust Catholic equivalent. The Republican movement and its associated writers mainly view literature as an arm of the struggle, which is shown to be important in bringing about an end to conflict, but has led to a derogation of working-class Protestants. The chapter also considers Ulster Loyalist engagement with poetry and drama.

‘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.

Marxist Literary Resistance to the Cold War

Prospects ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 479-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Wald
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Literary Resistance ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Private Homes ◽  
Smith Act ◽  
The U.S

On the morning of June 20, 1951, a hundred FBI agents poured out of the Foley Square Federal Building in Manhattan at dawn, buttoned up their gray trenchcoats, and bounded into a fleet of waiting Buicks. Spreading throughout New York City in a well-orchestrated operation, they surrounded twenty private homes, burst into bedrooms, and dragged sixteen Communist Party leaders off to jail under the Smith Act charge of conspiring to teach the overthrow of the U.S. government. This was the second group of top Party functionaries to be arrested under the Act.

Patriot Games

2019 ◽  
pp. 45-81
Author(s):  
Wen-Qing Ngoei
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Relative Stability ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The West ◽  
Ethnic Chinese ◽  
Malayan Emergency ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter analyzes American responses to Britain’s nation-building policies in Malaya during the British campaign against the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), a struggle that London dubbed the Malayan Emergency. It shows that as U.S. policymakers cast about for how to deal with the challenges of decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, they drew special inspiration from the British nation-building colonialism. To preserve its imperial influence in Southeast Asia, Britain had cultivated Malaya’s anticommunist nationalists and together they forged a popular multiracial political alliance that undermined the mostly Chinese MCP’s appeal to Malaya’s hundreds and thousands of ethnic Chinese. When Malaya gained independence in 1957, its relative stability and leaders’ determination to side with the West was received by U.S. leaders as a notch on the belt.

‘Fae nae hair te grey hair they answered the call’: International Brigade Volunteers from the West Central Belt of Scotland in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–9

2015 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-114
Author(s):  
Fraser Raeburn
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Political Connections ◽  
The West ◽  
Central Belt ◽  
West Central ◽  
Political Communities

Despite making up over ten per cent of the British volunteers in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War (1936-9), Scots from Glasgow and the surrounding districts have been overlooked in many accounts of the British involvement in the conflict. In seeking to explain the disproportionate numbers of volunteers from this region, the influence of factors such as economic conditions, political structures and institutions, ideology and community are examined with reference to individuals’ decisions to volunteer in Spain. It is argued that as well as the more severe impact of the inter-war slump in the region, it was Glasgow's distinctive working-class cultures, which placed great importance on grassroots political communities, with an emphasis on social as well as political connections, that led to Communist Party recruitment efforts being especially successful.

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