Aversion and Erasure

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn J. Dean
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Democratic Societies ◽  
Scholarly Attention

This book offers a bold account of how the Holocaust's status as humanity's most terrible example of evil has shaped contemporary discourses about victims in the West. Popular and scholarly attention to the Holocaust has led some observers to conclude that a “surfeit of Jewish memory” is obscuring the suffering of other peoples. The text explores the pervasive idea that suffering and trauma in the United States and Western Europe have become central to identity, with victims competing for recognition by displaying their collective wounds. It argues that this notion has never been examined systematically even though it now possesses the force of self-evidence. It developed in nascent form after World War II, when the near-annihilation of European Jewry began to transform patriotic mourning into a slogan of “Never Again”: as the Holocaust demonstrated, all people might become victims because of their ethnicity, race, gender, or sexuality—because of who they are. The recent concept that suffering is central to identity and that Jewish suffering under Nazism is iconic of modern evil has dominated public discourse since the 1980s. The book also argues that we believe that the rational contestation of grievances in democratic societies is being replaced by the proclamation of injury and the desire to be a victim. Such dramatic and yet culturally powerful assertions, however, cast suspicion on victims and define their credibility in new ways that require analysis.

Realignment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Osborne
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
The Great Depression

The later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed arguments from social reformers and artists and economists that the new, spontaneously evolving society was deficient. It worsened poverty, and it impoverished the soul. The tool of political regulation, exercised in the growing political power of the emerging organization known as the nation, was called in to polish the rough edges of the self-regulating society. As time went on, political regulation gradually came to be seen as the default, and self-regulation needed to be justified. The chapter particularly emphasizes the growth in such thinking among socialists and progressives in the United States and Western Europe. The catastrophe of the Great Depression, combined with admiration for a Soviet Union, Italy, and Germany, where political regulators said they were rationally designing a better society, meant that by the onset of World War II, this presumption was firmly in place throughout the West.

Secret Peace Overtures, the Holocaust, and Allied Strategy vis-à-vis Germany: Hungary in the Vortex of World War II

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
László Borhi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The U.S

This article explores how the U.S. and British governments' wartime strategy against Germany affected their policies toward Hungary, a country that had allied itself with Germany when World War II began. U.S. and British leaders wanted to facilitate an Allied landing on the French coast by diverting German troops to other theaters, thinning them out as much as possible. To this end, the United States and Britain were cool toward Hungary's peace overtures in 1943 and were willing to brook Germany's military incursions into Hungary and Romania in 1944 because German troops operating there could not be quickly redeployed to the west. Germany's occupation of those two countries led to the destruction of what remained of the once-large Jewish communities there, a tragic price that Allied leaders were ultimately willing to risk. The failure of Hungary's secret peace overtures also contributed to the later Soviet occupation of Hungary and the grim fate that befell the country after the war.

Choice in the West

1953 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-167
Author(s):  
S. Bernard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Working Out

The advent of a new administration in the United States and the passage of seven years since the end of World War II make it appropriate to review the political situation which has developed in Europe during that period and to ask what choices now are open to the West in its relations with the Soviet Union.The end of World War II found Europe torn between conflicting conceptions of international politics and of the goals that its members should seek. The democratic powers, led by the United States, viewed the world in traditional, Western, terms. The major problem, as they saw it, was one of working out a moral and legal order to which all powers could subscribe, and in which they would live. Quite independently of the environment, they assumed that one political order was both more practicable and more desirable than some other, and that their policies should be directed toward its attainment.

Contemporary Fascism’s de-Judified Homo Sacer

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Hong Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Relationship

This article argues that representations in popular culture of the Holocaust of World War II are being used to reframe issues of racism in the United States. It critically examines three major discourse formations: contemporary Western thought on fascism, critical scholarship on the US collective memory of the Holocaust, and popular culture’s use of the Holocaust for racial instruction. The Americanization and de-Judification of the Holocaust shows how fascist racism is constructed through institutional discourses and practices and functions as an archetype for understanding race and racism in the United States. Exploring the emergence of Holocaust references in US public culture following Barack Obama’s election, this article proposes that the analogy gains its efficacy because the Americanization of the Holocaust articulates the relationship between institutional practices and race for racist whites.

The End of Pax Americana

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naoki Sakai
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Young People ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
Intellectual Influence ◽  
Political Economic

In The End of Pax Americana, Naoki Sakai focuses on U.S. hegemony's long history in East Asia and the effects of its decline on contemporary conceptions of internationality. Engaging with themes of nationality in conjunction with internationality, the civilizational construction of differences between East and West, and empire and decolonization, Sakai focuses on the formation of a nationalism of hikikomori, or “reclusive withdrawal”—Japan’s increasingly inward-looking tendency since the late 1990s, named for the phenomenon of the nation’s young people sequestering themselves from public life. Sakai argues that the exhaustion of Pax Americana and the post--World War II international order—under which Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and China experienced rapid modernization through consumer capitalism and a media revolution—signals neither the “decline of the West” nor the rise of the East, but, rather a dislocation and decentering of European and North American political, economic, diplomatic, and intellectual influence. This decentering is symbolized by the sense of the loss of old colonial empires such as those of Japan, Britain, and the United States.

Corporate Influence and World War II: Resolving the New Deal Political Stalemate

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Waddell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
State Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
The New Deal

Since many scholars focus on the New Deal as the foundation for modern U.S. governance, it is widely assumed that the United States is characterized by a weak state as compared to the welfare states of Western Europe. Yet, in the wake of World War II, the United States established a national security “warfare state” that rivaled the welfare states of Western Europe in scope of authority and operations and in its isolation from popular forces. The wartime redirection of U.S. state power also resolved the political stalemate stemming from the executive-congressional and business-government tensions roused during the New Deal. In fact, the course of wartime statebuilding was in many ways a response to the political tensions of the New Deal and to the expectation that the organization of wartime mobilization would indelibly define the postwar organization of U.S. state power. As this article argues, wartime mobilization resolved the New Deal political stalemate in large part by granting various segments of the corporate community the opportunity to influence the shape of U.S. national state power.

The United States, Italy, and the Opening to the Left, 1953–1963

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 36-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leopoldo Nuti
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Test Case ◽  
World War ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Cold War

Drawing on newly declassified U.S. and Italian documentation, this article as-sesses U.S. policy toward Italy under the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations and uses this test case to draw some general conclusions about the nature of U.S. -Italian relations during the Cold War. The first part of the article focuses on issues that have been neglected or misinterpreted in the existing literature on the subject, and the second part presents some of the lessons that can be learned from the study of U.S. -Italian relations in the 1950s and 1960s. The aim is to cast broader light on the current debate about the role and influence of the United States in Western Europe after World War II.

The Political Geometry of the Gulf War

1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-209
Author(s):  
Theodore Caplow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gulf War ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union

In the course of World War II, the seven great powers of 1939 – Germany, the Soviet Union. Britain. France, Italy, Japan and the United States – were temporarily reduced to two. each commanding awesome strength, and each posing a realistic threat of world domination. The huge forces of the Soviet Union at the edge of western Europe were positioned to move all the way to the Atlantic, thus achieving the control of the Eurasian heartland that, according to geopolitical doctrine, would confer world domination. There were fifth columns prepared to assist them within most European and Asiatic nations.

Two Concepts of Liberty: U.S. Cold War Grand Strategies and the Liberal Tradition

2012 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan Rittenhouse Green
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Grand Strategies ◽  
Buck Passing

Contrary to conventional accounts, the United States did not immediately adopt a set of sweeping commitments to Europe after World War II. Instead, it pursued a buck-passing strategy until the early 1960s that sought to craft Western Europe into an independent pole of power capable of balancing the Soviet Union largely without the assistance of the United States, thereby facilitating the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the continent. Only under President John F. Kennedy did the United States adopt a balancing strategy, making permanent forward commitments to the defense of Europe. A new theory of liberal ideas and foreign policy explains this shift. “Negative liberals,” who see freedom in terms of opportunity and minimal state intervention, adopted a buck-passing strategy to pass the costs of foreign policy to other actors and minimize state intrusion at home. “Positive liberals,” who see freedom as the exercise of capabilities and often welcome state intervention, had no such compunctions. Starting with Kennedy, positive liberals welcomed firmer balancing commitments in part as a measure to protect the liberal regimes that had emerged in Western Europe after World War II.

scholarly journals Theological Studies Eighty Years Ago

2020 ◽  
Vol 81 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-25
Author(s):  
David G. Schultenover
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of

At the outbreak of World War II, the synchronicity between the history of the Society of Jesus and the history of the West led to the founding of Theological Studies. This article, based on archival records, narrates the backstory of the journal’s founding. In so doing, it answers the questions faced by the founding figures: Was a professional theological journal in English needed at this moment in history? Should and could the Jesuits rather than some other institution in the United States publish such a journal and maintain it at the scholarly level required?

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