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.

‘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.

scholarly journals The origins of the Asian Cold War: Malaya 1948

2009 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 471-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl Hack
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Local Factors ◽  
United Front ◽  
Malayan Emergency ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Local Levels

From the 1970s most scholars have rejected the Cold War orthodoxy that the Malayan Emergency (1948–60) was a result of instructions from Moscow, translated into action by the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). They have instead argued that local factors precipitated violence, and that the MCP was relatively unprepared when the Emergency was declared. This article puts the international element back into the picture. It shows that the change from a ‘united front’ to a ‘two camp’ international communist line from 1947 played a significant role in deciding local debates in favour of revolt. It also demonstrates how the MCP had plans for a graduated build-up to armed revolt before an Emergency was declared. This article therefore offers a model for a dynamic, two-way relationship between the international and local levels of Cold War.

4. Nations

2018 ◽  
pp. 76-103
Author(s):  
James R. Rush
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
World War ◽  
Southeast Asians ◽  
Almost Everywhere ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact

Most of Southeast Asia’s colonies had been created by conquest and coercion. Almost everywhere, Southeast Asians attempted to fend off European rule in every way possible. “Nations” describes the processes of resistance to colonial powers, growing nationalism, and new movements for political reform and independence. Japan’s entry to World War II changed everything. The impact of the war on Southeast Asia is explained along with the move to independence and nation-building that followed. It also outlines the effects of the Cold War, the signing of the ground-breaking Treaty of Amity and Cooperation by the ASEAN members, and the financial booms and crashes of the 1990s and 2000s.

The origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia: Pre-Second World War Siamese cooperation with foreign powers against communism

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Alexandre Barthel ◽  
Wasana Wongsurawat
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Colonial Order ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

The origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia are most often located in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, in the late 1940s. Historians sometimes trace its origins to Japan's expansionist phase in the 1930s, which accelerated the decline of the European and American colonial order in this part of Asia. However, the necessity of the fight against communism appeared very clearly in the minds of the leaders of the major colonial powers well before the 1930s. Focused on the case of Siam, this article aims to show that the origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia dated back to as early as the 1920s with the emergence of international cooperation in the fight against communism and the Thai elite's manipulation of imperialist powers to further their own political agenda and support their dominance in the domestic political arena. The Cold War in Southeast Asia was not only about the postwar fight against the spread of communism, but also closely intertwined with the decolonisation and nation-building efforts of every country in the region — including of the so-called un-colonised Thailand.

Islam and the West: Coexistence or Clash?

2012 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 363-374
Author(s):  
Noor Mohammad Osmani ◽  
Tawfique Al-Mubarak
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Peaceful Coexistence ◽  
The West ◽  
Comprehensive Review ◽  
The World ◽  
Islamic Civilization ◽  
The Cold War

Samuel Huntington (1927-2008) claimed that there would be seven eight civilizations ruling over the world in the coming centuries, thus resulting a possible clash among them. The West faces the greatest challenge from the Islamic civilization, as he claimed. Beginning from the Cold-War, the Western civilization became dominant in reality over other cultures creating an invisible division between the West and the rest. The main purpose of this research is to examine the perceived clash between the Western and Islamic Civilization and the criteria that lead a civilization to precede others. The research would conduct a comprehensive review of available literatures from both Islamic and Western perspectives, analyze historical facts and data and provide a critical evaluation. This paper argues that there is no such a strong reason that should lead to any clash between the West and Islam; rather, there are many good reasons that may lead to a peaceful coexistence and cultural tolerance among civilizations

Global Britain's strategic problem East of Suez

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
William D. James
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Military Bases ◽  
Political Incentives ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Permanent Presence

Abstract Why did Britain withdraw from its military bases in the Arabian Peninsula and Southeast Asia midway through the Cold War? Existing accounts tend to focus on Britain's weak economic position, as well as the domestic political incentives of retrenchment for the ruling Labour Party. This article offers an alternative explanation: the strategic rationale for retaining a permanent presence East of Suez dissolved during the 1960s, as policymakers realised that these military bases were consuming more security than they could generate. These findings have resonance for British officials charting a return East of Suez today under the banner of ‘Global Britain’.

Western welfare states watched from the East during the Cold War: condemnation, competition, and creative learning

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomasz Inglot
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
The West ◽  
Creative Learning ◽  
The Cold War

This paper examines international influences of the Western welfare state on social policy ideas, institutions and reforms in the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. It identifies three types of Eastern reactions to or interactions with the West: “condemnation” of various “bourgeois” conceptions of social welfare; “competition” or increased attention to redistribution and social needs of the population stemming from the demonstrable successes of Western welfare states; and “creative learning” or implicit acknowledgment that every industrial society, including the Soviet style centrally planned economies, had to adopt at least some elements of modernized social welfare models or policy originally developed in the West. Paradoxically, first the explicit and later more implicit rejection of the Western welfare state, including the social-democratic and various “third way” models, eventually led to the rise of neoliberal and anti-welfare attitudes among many Eastern social policy reformers during the last decade of communist rule and beyond, after 1989.

The Politics of Culture in Cold War America

Prospects ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 451-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Sugrue
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
National Security State ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

In march, 1994, the University of Pennsylvania held a conference to celebrate the opening of the Howard Fast papers at the university's library. To commemorate Fast's remarkable sixty-year career, a group of historians and literary critics gathered to reconsider the intellectual and cultural milieu of the United States in the early years of the Cold War. During the eventful years, from 1945 to 1960, Fast emerged as a leading Communist activist and a major literary figure who achieved great popular success. Fast, an unabashed member of the Communist Party, like many other oppositional writers of the era, clashed with the national security state. He faced harassment, blacklisting, and marginalization for his refusal to cooperate with federal authorities who were committed to silencing cultural and political voices from the Left. Like other stalwarts of the Communist Party, Fast was often doctrinaire. As a reporter for the Daily Worker and an occasional partisan polemicist, Fast was often stiflingly orthodox. But Fast's Communism was a distinctively American variant, mediated by New York's Jewish radicalism, deeply concerned with the American dilemma of racial inequality.

Monumental Attack: The Visual Tools of the German Counter-Monument in Two Works by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, and Horst Hoheisel

Images ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-139
Author(s):  
Kristine Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The West ◽  
Visual Tool ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Negative Form

This essay argues that iconoclasm serves as the visual tool of choice for Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz in their Memorial Against Fascism (1986) and for Horst Hoheisel in his Negative Form (1987). The West German historians’ debate of the late 1980s established an image prohibition by framing the representation of the Holocaust as an unimaginable and sacred event. The Counter-Monuments rely on this ban on images. They attack monumentality and visibility as both fascist and capitalist characteristics, designated as such during the Cold War. The essay argues that the formal choices inherent in conceptualizing these two Counter-Monuments comprise familiar historical modes of iconoclasm. It ultimately questions the need to rely on iconoclasm in the Counter-Monuments and contemporary German memorialization of the Holocaust.

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