The possibility of change: The Caroline Benn Memorial Lecture 2020

FORUM ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-43
Author(s):  
Ken Jones
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Education Association ◽  
The Right ◽  
Further Development

This is an edited transcript of the Caroline Benn Memorial Lecture, given by Ken Jones, at the request of the Socialist Education Association, in November 2020. The lecture situates Caroline's work in the context of the 'Long Revolution' of twentieth-century Britain. The lecture discusses the meaning of that revolution for education; it charts the course of the right-wing reaction to it from 1976 onwards, and the growth of managerial cultures at the level of the school which have blocked its further development. The effects within education of the Black Lives Matter and the Covid pandemic have revived, in both practical and ideational ways, some of the themes of the Long Revolution. The lecture argues that this is a change of historical significance. The possibility of change as a collective democratic project has been reawakened.

The Spanish Church and The Revolutionary Republican Movement, 1930–1931

1962 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 430-439
Author(s):  
José M. Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Nineteen Thirties ◽  
Republican Movement ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
The Church

Few subjects in recent history have lent themselves to such heated polemical writing and debate as that concerning the Spanish Church and its relationship to the abortive Spanish revolution of 1931–1939. Throughout this tragic era and especially during the Civil War, it was commonplace to find the Church labelled as reactionary, completely and unalterably opposed to progress, and out of touch with the political realities of the twentieth century.1 In the minds of many whose views were colored by the highly partisan reports of events in Spain during the nineteen thirties, the Church has been pictured as an integral member of the Unholy Triumvirate— Bishops, Landlords, and enerals—which has always conspired to impede Spanish progress. Recent historical scholarship has begun to dispel some of the notions about the right-wing groups,2 but there has been little research on the role of the clergy. Even more important, there has been little understanding of the Church's response to the radical revolutionary movements in Spain.

Karl Renner and the Politics of Accommodation: Moderation versus Revenge

1991 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 35-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Loewenberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
World War ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
First Republic ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right

Karl Renner's political life encompasses the history of Austria's empire and her two twentieth-century republics, making him the foremost leader of Austrian democratic politics. Renner was also the most innovative theoretician on the nationalities question which plagued the Habsburg monarchy and the twentieth-century world. He was chancellor of Austria's first republic, leader of the right-wing Social Democrats, and president of the post-World War II Second Republic. A study of his life and politics offers a perspective on the origins of the moderate, adaptive, political personality and on the tension between ideology and accommodation to the point where it is difficult to determine what core of principle remained.

Metamathematics and Dogmatic Theology

1976 ◽  
Vol 29 (6) ◽  
pp. 501-516
Author(s):  
John R. Carnes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
The Right ◽  
Evangelical Theology

Critics of the right wing of twentieth-century Protestant theology, most notably Neo-orthodoxy and more specifically the theology of Karl Barth, tend to be troubled by the central role given to what Barth calls the ‘science of dogmatics’. Their problem is twofold. (1) Dogmatics, at least in the Barthian conception of that science, appears to be exclusivist, accessible only to those who are already among the initiate, obscurantist, arrogant and even irrational. (2) Dogmatics is represented as the sole means of entry into theology: Barth uncompromisingly and aggressively rejects any other avenues. He is disdainful of philosophy, of philosophical theology, and even of ‘natural theology’ (see his treatment of Brunner in the early book, Natural Theology and his critique of Tillich in his very last book, Evangelical Theology).

The Press and the Labour Movement

2020 ◽  
pp. 502-516
Author(s):  
Thomas Dowling ◽  
Adrian Bingham
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Mass Communications ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Communications Media ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the dynamic relationship between the labour movement and the press. It argues that recognition of the need to negotiate or counter the growing pre-eminence of the press and other forms of mass-communications media compelled some of the twentieth-century labour movement’s most original intellectual and strategic advances. Equally, at other moments, a tendency on the part of beleaguered labour leaders to overestimate the hegemonic reach of the ‘right-wing’ or ‘capitalist’ press served to mask shortcomings and lacunae in the movement’s own ideological and strategic perspectives. Rather than approaching the relationship between labour and the press as one of essential conflict and antagonism, the chapter seeks to understand them as two aspects of the same ongoing historical process.

Nazistowski mord na Żydach w prasie polskich komunistów (1942–1944).

2006 ◽  
pp. 54-75
Author(s):  
Klaus Peter Friedrich
Keyword(s):  
Shared Responsibility ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
Polish Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Right

Facing the decisive struggle between Nazism and Soviet communism for dominance in Europe, in 1942/43 Polish communists sojourning in the USSR espoused anti-German concepts of the political right. Their aim was an ethnic Polish ‘national communism’. Meanwhile, the Polish Workers’ Party in the occupied country advocated a maximum intensification of civilian resistance and partisan struggle. In this context, commentaries on the Nazi judeocide were an important element in their endeavors to influence the prevailing mood in the country: The underground communist press often pointed to the fate of the murdered Jews as a warning in order to make it clear to the Polish population where a deficient lack of resistance could lead. However, an agreed, unconditional Polish and Jewish armed resistance did not come about. At the same time, the communist press constantly expanded its demagogic confrontation with Polish “reactionaries” and accused them of shared responsibility for the Nazi murder of the Jews, while the Polish government (in London) was attacked for its failure. This antagonism was intensified in the fierce dispute between the Polish and Soviet governments after the rift which followed revelations about the Katyn massacre. Now the communist propaganda image of the enemy came to the fore in respect to the government and its representatives in occupied Poland. It viewed the government-in-exile as being allied with the “reactionaries,” indifferent to the murder of the Jews, and thus acting ultimately on behalf of Nazi German policy. The communists denounced the real and supposed antisemitism of their adversaries more and more bluntly. In view of their political isolation, they coupled them together, in an undifferentiated manner, extending from the right-wing radical ONR to the social democrats and the other parties represented in the underground parliament loyal to the London based Polish government. Thereby communist propaganda tried to discredit their opponents and to justify the need for a new start in a post-war Poland whose fate should be shaped by the revolutionary left. They were thus paving the way for the ultimate communist takeover

The Politics of Repressed Guilt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Leeb
Keyword(s):  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Important Addition ◽  
Defensive Mechanisms ◽  
The Right

Through a critical appropriation of Hannah Arendt, and a more sympathetic engagement with Theodor W. Adorno and psychoanalysis, this book develops a new theoretical approach to understanding Austrians’ repression of their collaboration with National Socialist Germany. Drawing on original, extensive archival research, from court documents on Nazi perpetrators to public controversies on theater plays and museums, the book exposes the defensive mechanisms Austrians have used to repress individual and collective political guilt, which led to their failure to work through their past. It exposes the damaging psychological and political consequences such failure has had and continues to have for Austrian democracy today—such as the continuing electoral growth of the right-wing populist Freedom Party in Austria, which highlights the timeliness of the book. However, the theoretical concepts and practical suggestions the book introduces to counteract the repression of individual and collective political guilt are relevant beyond the Austrian context. It shows us that only when individuals and nations live up to guilt are they in a position to take responsibility for past crimes, show solidarity with the victims of crimes, and prevent the emergence of new crimes. Combining theoretical insights with historical analysis, The Politics of Repressed Guilt is an important addition to critical scholarship that explores the pathological implications of guilt repression for democratic political life.

Jewish Question in the Ideology and Political Practice of Russian Monarchists in the Beginning of the 20th Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 232-261
Author(s):  
Igor V. Omeliyanchuk
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Population ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The Right ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
First World

The present article examines the place of the Jewish question in the ideology of the monarchist (right-wing, “black hundred”) parties. In spite of certain ideological differences in the right-wing camp (moderate Rights, Rights and extreme Right-Wing), anti-Semitism was characteristic of all monarchist parties to a certain extent, in any case before the First World War. That fact was reflected in the party documents, resolutions of the monarchist congresses, publications and speeches of the Right-Wing leaders. The suggestions of the monarchists in solving the Jewish questions added up to the preservation and strengthening of the existing restrictions with respect to the Jewish population in the Russian Empire. If in the beginning the restrictions were main in the economic, cultural and everyday life spheres, after the convocation of the State Duma the Rights strived after limiting also the political rights of the Jewish population of the Empire, seeing it as one of the primary guarantees for autocracy preservation in Russia, that was the main political goal of the conservatives.

Main Forms of Propagandistic Activities of the Right-Wing Parties (1904–1914)

2020 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 656-676
Author(s):  
Igor V. Omeliyanchuk
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Right ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The 19Th Century

The article examines the main forms and methods of agitation and propagandistic activities of monarchic parties in Russia in the beginning of the 20th century. Among them the author singles out such ones as periodical press, publication of books, brochures and flyers, organization of manifestations, religious processions, public prayers and funeral services, sending deputations to the monarch, organization of public lectures and readings for the people, as well as various philanthropic events. Using various forms of propagandistic activities the monarchists aspired to embrace all social groups and classes of the population in order to organize all-class and all-estate political movement in support of the autocracy. While they gained certain success in promoting their ideology, the Rights, nevertheless, lost to their adversaries from the radical opposition camp, as the monarchists constrained by their conservative ideology, could not promise immediate social and political changes to the population, and that fact was excessively used by their opponents. Moreover, the ideological paradigm of the Right camp expressed in the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” formula no longer agreed with the social and economic realities of Russia due to modernization processes that were underway in the country from the middle of the 19th century.

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