Cold War Ideology Research Articles

The Cage-iness of Abstract Expressionism

Through a consideration of the exchanges between John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist painters at Black Mountain College and The Club in the early 1950s, this article suggests a new reading of Abstract Expressionism that jettisons stylistic designations and typical postwar divisions to reveal the artists’ deep social concerns and critique of Cold War ideology. A shared interest in vitalism and Zen, evident in weekly discussions at The Club and in Harold Rosenberg’s definition of Action Painting, reveals the artists’ commitment to breaking down the barriers between art and life, a defining condition of postwar radicality more typically signaled by the work of Cage and Robert Rauschenberg.

The American Empire in the Congo: The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba

The American Empire in the Congo: The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba By Nicholas Langer A merican Cold War Imperialism spanned the globe, crossing oceans and continents to enforce the iron will of the United States. Following the Second World War, Africa and Asia were seeking to dislodge the influence of Imperialism. In the case of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh’s rebels were sadly mistaken in believing that the United States would support their bid for independence from the French. The United States had overthrown the democratically elected president of Guatemala, along with Mohammed Mosadegh in Iran, and had inserted 15,000 advisors in support of the Diem puppet government in Vietnam by the time of the Congo Crisis in the early 1960’s. 1 So, American intervention in the affairs of Third World countries was far from unprecedented by the time that Patrice Lumumba took power in the Congo and sought to extricate the country from the shadow of European colonialism. It is my argument that American involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba followed the pattern of intervention which was well established in Latin America and elsewhere. The Congo Crisis of 1960 represented the beginning of widespread western involvement in the newly independent Congo. In analyzing the Congo crisis we can see the final death throes of Belgian imperialism and the beginning of American involvement in the region, as well as the role that the United Nations would play in decolonization and the Cold War. The orthodox view argues that the United States maintained purely altruistic motives of decolonization and anti- communism in the Congo and that any unrest was the result of factors which the United States was unable to control. The revisionist standpoint argues the opposite: that the United States actively intervened in the Congo and promoted its own interests. These arguments introduce the general narrative of the Congo Crisis and the Cold War ideology of the United States in addition to validating the revisionist line of argument. America in the Congo in Two Accounts: The Orthodox and the Revisionist The article “The United States, Belgium, and the Congo Crisis of 1960,” written by Lawrence Kaplan and published in The Review of Politics in 1967, represents a summation of the orthodox view of American involvement in the Congo Crisis. 2 The article was written well before the Church Committee hearing—a Senate committee which investigated American covert actions during the Cold War and which published their findings in 1975—that would confirm active American involvement in a plot to kill Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, and thus its arguments relied heavily on the official policy statements and news material that was available at the time. The main objective of Kaplan’s argument seems to be an effort to apologize for American dedication to anti-colonialism to an imagined Belgian audience. In doing so, Kaplan paints American intentions as purely chivalrous and rejects any argument that the United States was acting on ulterior motives. He further washes America’s hands of involvement in the breakdown of authority and places that blame back on the Belgians, who act as a foil to Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, “Vietnamese Decolonization and the Origins of US Involvement 1960” (Lecture, US Foreign Relations, 1945-1991, University of California Merced, Merced, CA, September 26, 2013). Kaplan, Lawrence S. “The United States, Belgium, and the Congo Crisis of 1960,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Apr., 1967), 239-256.

British Justice in Western Germany, 1949-55

Britain did not release its final two prisoners from the prison it administered in West Germany until July 1957, eight years after the formation of the Federal Republic and the formal ending of its military rule. By 1949, Germany, once the enemy of Europe assumed greater strategic significance in the minds of western politicians seeking its reintegration within a new European family of nations to forestall fears of Soviet hegemony, not least because it now wanted to re-arm West Germany. The continuing incarceration of German war criminals had become a lesser priority in the battleground of Cold War ideologies. The Adenauer government pressurised Britain to honour its pledge to review the sentences for the hundreds of detainees who remained in custody following the Nuremberg trials. Britain’s moral mandate to govern Germany from 1945 was underpinned by its claims to be exporting democratic liberal values but, as this article explains, was exposed in its illiberal handling of the war criminals issue which ran counter to the new moves towards reconciliation.

Remaking Chinese cinema: through the prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood

From melodrama to Cantonese opera, from silents to 3D animated film, Remaking Cinema traces cross-Pacific film remaking over the last eight decades. Through the refractive prism of Hollywood, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Yiman Wang revolutionises our understanding of cinema as national cinema. Against the diffusion model of national cinema spreading from a central point--Shanghai in the case--she argues for a multi-local process of co-constitution and reconstitution. In this spirit, Wang analyses how southern cinema ( huanan dianying ) morphed into Hong Kong cinema through trans-regional and trans-national interactions that also produced a vision of cinema. Among the book's highlights are a rereading of The Goddess --one of the best-known silent films in the West--from the perspective of its wartime Mandarin-Cantonese remake; the excavation of a hybrid genre (the Western costume Cantonese opera film) inspired by Hollywood's fantasy films of the 1930s and produced in Hong Kong well into the mid-twentieth century; and a rumination on Hollywood's remake of Hong Kong's Infernal Affairs and the wholesale incorporation of Chinese elements in Kung Fu Panda 2. Positing a structural analogy between the utopic vision, the national cinema, and the location-specific collective subject position, the author traces their shared urge to infinitesimally approach, but never fully and finitely reach a projected goal. This energy precipitates the ongoing processes of cross-Pacific film remaking, which constitute a crucial site for imagining and enacting (without absolving) issues of national and regional border politics. These issues unfold in relation to global formations such as colonialism, Cold War ideology, and postcolonial, postsocialist globalisation. As such, Remaking Cinema contributes to the ongoing debate on (trans-)national cinema from the unique perspective of century-long border-crossing film remaking.

Southeast Asia's New Nationalism: Causes and Significance

AbstractThis paper explains the post-Cold War surge of nationalism in Southeast Asia and discusses its significance for regional peace and cooperation. As argued, the growth of nationalism as a form of mass politics has different causes in each Southeast Asian context where it occurs, but at the regional level the phenomenon can be explained by three factors: the failure of earlier nationalist movements to fully deliver their promises; a shift in the international and regional order (the end of the Cold War and the rise of China); and a change in domestic order (political liberalisation and democratisation) that was also occurring across many countries in the region. While the main mission of the new nationalism is the defence of national territory, the movements have the unintended impact of bringing together national communities once divided by Cold War ideologies. The phenomenon also poses some serious risks to regional peace and cooperation.

Dealing with the King's Enemies: The Drafting of the Communist Party Dissolution Bill 1950

The lawyers called upon to draft a Bill which, if enacted, could validly give effect to the promise of the successful Liberal–Country Party coalition in the 1949 federal election to outlaw the Communist Party of Australia, faced a difficult assignment. Their political instructors faced a dilemma: should the new government take a less confrontational approach to communist disruption of the economy and risk undermining the government's popular support, or should it press ahead with the promised ban and risk having the High Court of Australia invalidate it? In a process in which the politics of pragmatism gave way to Cold War ideology, the choice of the latter path led to failure.

Foreign Policy in Transition: The ANC's Search for a Foreign Policy Direction during South Africa's Transition, 1990–1994

At the beginning of the transition from apartheid to democracy, the African National Congress (ANC) was unprepared for foreign policy discussion, a lack of readiness magnified by the collapse of international Communism and the Cold War ideology. President De Klerk and the National Party controlled foreign policy in the early years of the transition and began the process of reintegration with the international community, The ANC initially struggled to adapt to the new international situation, whereas De Klerk was successful in wooing the international community. In the later stages of transition, the ANC developed a greater sense of direction and substance in foreign relations, although there were differences of opinion among and between the leadership and the rank and file. Already in 1994 there was evidence of tension between idealism and pragmatism. Post-apartheid foreign policy under Mandela was riddled with inconsistencies, which stemmed from the events of South Africa's transition

"Defector," "Refugee," or "Migrant"? North Korean Settlers in South Korea's Changing Social Discourse

IntroductionOn February 27, 2012, following lawmaker Park Sun-young's2 eleven-day hunger strike highlighting the human rights issue relating to Korean repatriation, the South Korean Parliament passed a resolution urging China to discontinue the practice of returning Korean border crossers. This action has triggered intensified international attention toward the human rights of Koreans, with the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs subsequently approving the extension of the Korean Human Rights Act, last reauthorized in 2008, until 2017. The British deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, also applied symbolic pressure on Korea and China by meeting Korean settlers during a visit to South Korea for the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit in March. Given the climate in South Korea as it faces two major elections amidst growing uncertainty across East Asia in the wake of the emergence of the Kim Jong-un regime following the death of Kim Jong-il in December 2011, it is perhaps not surprising that the Korea issue is being revisited in 2012. In the bitter competition between the two opposite camps (conservative versus democratic) in the run-up to the two elections in the South, the renewed attention to the Korean issue has been used to reframe existing indicators that distinguished positions within the remnants of the Cold War legacy-especially those that capitalized on fostering anti-North Korean sentiments. Aligning with domestic circumstances, the United States has added its voice by pressuring Korea and China in the language of human rights, foregrounding humanitarian imperialism, the salient feature of Western discourse in international affairs and post-Cold War policy,3 as a prominent component in the geopolitical matrix of East Asia. Consequently, contrary to the dominant tendency of previous years, 2012 sees Korean border crossers and arrivals in the South reconstructed as purely victims of human rights violations and political refugees. This paper brings this changing understanding and naming of Korean arrivals within the transient social discourse of South Korea into question, and argues that specific eras separate and interpellate Korean arrivals through different names and roles depending on the particular and interests of the time. Such interpellation instrumentalizes the figure of the migrant in the process of stabilizing South Korean society.North Korean arrivals to the South have been defined and understood in various ways over time: from heroic figures to economic migrants. Given the systematic and ideological confrontation following the 1953 separation, strong Cold War ideology governed the two Koreas and produced those people that, to either side, would be labeled as defectors. The number of Korean arrivals to the South was 607 for the period between 1953 and 1989, resulting in their rarity being highly valued and fully utilized by the South Korean government in the ideological war. However, the number has dramatically increased since the mid-1990s, coinciding with the gradual replacement of the Cold War era by a post-Cold War ideology across the Korean Peninsula. From 1990 to 1993, only 34 Koreans came to the South, but the next five years (1994-1998) saw 306 new arrivals, with the figure radically increasing over the subsequent three years, reaching 1,043. From 2001 onward, more than 1,000 Koreans arrived each year, with the total number peaking at 23,000 in 2011.4 This circumstantial change has led to their redefinition from the North's soldier to a variety of different names such as defected ethnic Korean, North Korean refugee, defected Korean resident, and more recently North Korean migrant.5Following the trajectory of this name giving, this article identifies three different historical stages in the processes of situating the Korean arrivals' position in South Korean social discourse. …

Leon Rosenfeld: physics, philosophy, and politics in the twentieth century

Physicist of the Second Quantum Generation Postdoc in Paris, Gottingen, and Zurich Rosenfeld in Copenhagen Intellectual Leftist in the 1930s Surviving the War in Utreght Cold War Ideology and the Politics of Science Bohr's Warrior.

The City of Man, European Émigrés, and the Genesis of Postwar Conservative Thought

This article explores the forgotten manifesto The City of Man: A Declaration on World Democracy, which was composed in 1940 by a group of prominent American and European anti-isolationist intellectuals, including Thomas Mann, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hermann Broch. Written in response to the victories of Nazi Germany, the manifesto declared that the United States had a new global responsibility not only to lead the war against fascism and Marxism, but also to establish a global order of peace and democracy under U.S. hegemony. Moreover, the authors of the manifesto claimed that such an order would have to be based on the rejuvenation of conservative values; in their view, the collapse of Western democracies under the weight of totalitarian aggression was the consequence of inner moral and intellectual degeneration. The City of Man therefore called on the United States to lead the spiritual transformation of democracy into a modern political religion, which would bring about the intellectual and political unity of humanity under one state and one creed. This article analyzes the manifesto as a rare window into the difficulty intellectuals faced as they tried to conceptualize the totalitarian challenge prior to the United States’ entry into the war. Moreover, it claims that The City of Man expressed the emergence of postwar conservatism and Cold War ideology, as well as the unique role played by European émigrés in this process.

“A Saga of Democracy”: Toy Len Goon, American Mother of the Year, and the Cultural Cold War

In 1952 Toy Len Goon, an unknown Chinese immigrant, a widowed mother of eight, and a laundry shop owner, was selected to be Maine Mother of the Year and later won the national title as American Mother of the Year. The news was circulated widely in domestic media, propaganda abroad, the Chinese American press, and newspapers in Taiwan. This article examines the meaning of how a self-employed Chinese mother, against the dominant discourse of white, middle-class domesticity, was promoted as a rhetorical tool domestically and globally in the Cold War ideology of containment and integration. The Goon case illustrates the complexity of the cultural Cold War and indexes the ways that multiple layers of power and resistance operated under the banner of containment.

The lost children: reconstructing Europe's families after World War II

During the Second World War, an unprecedented number of families were torn apart. As the Nazi empire crumbled, millions roamed the continent in search of their loved ones. The Lost Children tells the story of these families, and of the struggle to determine their fate. We see how the reconstruction of families quickly became synonymous with the survival of European civilization itself. Even as Allied officials and humanitarian organizations proclaimed a new era of individualist and internationalist values, Tara Zahra demonstrates that they defined the best interests of children in nationalist terms. Sovereign nations and families were seen as the key to the psychological rehabilitation of traumatized individuals and the peace and stability of Europe. Based on original research in German, French, Czech, Polish, and American archives, The Lost Children is a heartbreaking and mesmerizing story. It brings together the histories of eastern and western Europe, and traces the efforts of everyone--from Jewish Holocaust survivors to German refugees, from Communist officials to American social workers--to rebuild the lives of displaced children. It reveals that many seemingly timeless ideals of the family were actually conceived in the concentration camps, orphanages, and refugee camps of the Second World War, and shows how the process of reconstruction shaped Cold War ideologies and ideas about childhood and national identity. This riveting tale of families destroyed by war reverberates in the lost children of today's wars and in the compelling issues of international adoption, human rights and humanitarianism, and refugee policies.

Framing the 1970s

If the contemporary is a practice located within horizontal-synchronic references to the present and social contexts, and the vertical-diachronic autonomy of artistic discourse as it unfolds over time, the 1970s might be a productive point from which to begin discussion. This article highlights the critical practices taking place in Southeast Asia during the 1970s, a time when the idea of a Southeast Asia was rising amidst prevailing discourses of international politics, in particular with Cold War ideologies and the project of decolonisation after World War II, which emphasised the rhetoric of the independent nation-state. Increased access to Euro-American artistic models and the eventual shift towards ‘internationalism’ in the 1950s and 1960s played an equally important role in this process, acting both as examples of what a universal, cross-national artistic idiom might look like, and as forms of expression subject to the objectives of the state.

Paper dresses in the country of peasants and workers: pop fashion in the German Democratic Republic

Despite its critique of Pop Art and western consumerism, the former GDR briefly promoted the “paper dress” as an attractive, fashion novelty for its youth, consistent with the tenets of “socialist fashion.” This essay explores the phenomenon of the paper dress, putting it in the context of GDR youth policy, the growing youth culture in the country, and Cold War ideology. It argues that the GDR’s brief embrace of the paper dress, after severe state restrictions on the importation of western youth culture, was part of a gradual liberalization of GDR society.

The Need for West: Hans Kohn and the North Atlantic Community

In the writing of historian Hans Kohn (1891—1971) East and West were never geographic locations, but rather geographic metaphors. They were ideas, which served as his major tool of analysis throughout his career: in Habsburg Prague as a young spiritual Zionist; in Jerusalem in the 1920s as a ‘bi-national Zionist’; as comparative historian of nationalism as of the second world war; and finally as an American Cold Warrior. This article situates the evolution of Kohn’s notions of East and West in a primarily Jewish context, and toward a Cold War horizon. It also seeks to illuminate the genealogy of the ideas he propagated as a notable purveyor of Cold War ideology, particularly the need for a ‘New West’.

Star and National Myths in Cold War Allegories: Marlene Dietrich’s Star Persona and the Western in Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952)1

Fritz Lang’s film Rancho Notorious offered Lang himself the chance to direct a western in which he could develop a double focus, contrasting indigenous American against foreign influences. He was helped in this by Marlene Dietrich, who had begun her career as a symbol of modernization and consumer culture. Lang used Dietrich in the film to comment on aspects of modernity and, at the same time, to offer an allegorical reading of American nationalism of the McCarthy era. Through Dietrich’s character, Altar, the boss of the Chuck-a-Luck ranch and the criminal world it embodied, Lang critiqued the emerging Cold War ideology of the man as patriarchal figure and bread-winner. At the same time, by moving Dietrich progressively towards the centre of the film, he produced an amalgam of the women’s film and the Western genre that suggested the pointlessness of the male aggression the Western itself had traditionally embodied.

Upstaging the Cold War: American dissent and cultural diplomacy, 1940-1960

Traditional interpretations of the 1950s have emphasised how American anti-communists deployed censorship and the blacklist to silence dissent, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. Yet those efforts at repression did not always succeed. Throughout the early years of the Cold War, a significant number of writers and performers continued to express controversial views about international relations in Hollywood films, through the new medium of television, on the Broadway stage, and from behind the scenes. By promoting superpower co-operation, decolonisation, nuclear disarmament, and other taboo causes, dissident artists such as Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Rod Serling, Dalton Trumbo, Reginald Rose, and Paddy Chayefsky managed both to stretch the boundaries of Cold War ideology and to undermine some of its basic assumptions. Working at times under assumed names and in some cases outside the United States, they took on the role of informal diplomats who competed with Washington in representing America to the world. Ironically, the dissidents' international appeal eventually persuaded the U.S. foreign policy establishment that their unconventional views could be an asset in the Cold War contest for hearts and minds, and their artistic work an effective means to sell American values and culture abroad. By the end of the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration not only appropriated the work of these talented artists but enlisted some of them to serve as official voices of Cold War cultural diplomacy.

Atoms for Sale?: Cold War Institution-Building and the South Korean Atomic Energy Project, 1945–1965

The Atoms for Peace program has typically been read as primarily a project of American Cold War ideology, supplying very little in the way of substantive materials and training to participating partner nations. This article challenges this position by bringing in the additional perspective of the recipient as an actor, in this case South Korea during the early stages of its post–Korean War reconstruction (1953– ). As Atoms for Peace arrived in Seoul in the late 1950s, a complex set of actors—on the American side, representatives of the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project, and on the Korean side, representatives of the Ministry of Education—came together on these issues, with the Koreans seeking to gain maximum advantage from their sponsors. While the question of what Atoms for Peace supplied in material terms remains highly relevant, ideologically the program helped to transform the colonial Korean participants into "free world" post-colonial scientists. Moreover, the program also served as a form of subsidy through the early 1960s, allowing South Korea to retain many of its scientists, who would otherwise have likely gone abroad.

Cultural Education as Containment of Communism: The Ambivalent Position of American NGOs in Hong Kong in the 1950s

This article discusses the ambivalent role of U.S. non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in shaping Hong Kong's institutions of higher education in the 1950s. Cold War concerns about Communist expansion induced the NGOs to pursue ideological goals that were not part of their main mission, even as they continued policy directions that superseded and sometimes unintentionally counteracted Cold War thinking and strategies. Hong Kong, as a site important but marginal to both China and Britain, had strategic value in the Cold War and as such impelled many different forces to contest it. By examining how U.S. NGO educational work in Hong Kong both reinforced and destabilized Cold War ideology, one gains a clearer picture not only of Hong Kong's cultural significance in Cold War politics but also the ambiguity of Cold War intellectual paradigms of culture and education.

Ideology and the philosophy of science: an American misunderstanding

There are significant flaws in recent claims that Thomas Kuhn's work was an apology for American Cold War ideology and a manifestation of the transformation of logical positivism from a politically motivated philosophy to an apolitical account of the logic of science. These arguments present an inaccurate account of important aspects of the European origins of positivism and its post-emigration career in the United States, and they misinterpret the character and impact of Kuhn's work. Although significant elements of the image of science that Kuhn criticized originated in positivist philosophy of science, that image most distinctly took shape in peripheral fields such as political science where it was appropriated as part of a conservative defence against an attack, by another wave of émigré scholars, on the traditional American commitment to science and liberalism. In the end, it was Kuhn's work that provided the most significant basis for challenging the image of science that dominated the Cold War era. History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed. Thomas Kuhn