Communist Agent Research Articles

Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front by Charles R. Gallagher

Reviewed by: Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front by Charles R. Gallagher Sean Brennan Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front. By Charles R. Gallagher. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. 313 pp. $29.95. During the years leading to and during the Second World War while the U.S. military engaged in combat with the Axis powers, within American society there was also the threat of far-right organizations who were sympathetic to—if not openly supportive of—Hitler’s regime, its aspirations of European conquest, its desire to defeat, and the threat of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” This is the subject of Charles Gallagher’s impeccably researched study of the activities of the Christian Front from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s, in New York City and Boston, two of the centers of their activities. While the temptations to make constant comparisons between the supporters of this organization and more recent historical events, Gallagher, for the most part, maintains his focus on the historical context of this organization, avoiding the easy trap of presentism. Gallagher spends his first two chapters establishing the historical and theological foundations of the Christian Front, how its name [End Page 91] emerged in opposition to the Popular Front governments in Mexico in the 1920s and Spain in the 1930s, the communist members of which were notorious for their persecutions of the Catholic Church, as well as the specter of the militantly atheistic Soviet regime. He then provides a deeper explanation of the theology of the Mystical Body of Christ, which argued that persecution of Christians anywhere was an assault on Christians everywhere, as well as the idea of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” a form of anti-Semitism that viewed Jews in America and Europe as inherent supporters of Communism, a view that led some to advocate and even prepare for the overthrow of the American government to purge it of Jewish and Communist agents, who were often viewed as one and the same. While he is not the main figure of the book, the notorious Detroit-based radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin, with his message of anti-Semitism, anticommunism, social justice, and hatred of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, was an enormous spiritual inspiration to many of the unsavory yet complex figures depicted by Gallagher. The author convincingly demonstrates how the insular Irish Catholic communities of New York and Boston were fertile ground for recruitment into the Christian Front’s various organizations, not only due to the belief of many in “Judeo-Bolshevism” but also a hatred of Great Britain for its long and cruel rule of Ireland. In later sections of the book, Gallagher discusses how the Christian Front expanded its supporters to include Protestants, women, and even some African Americans. Nor does he reduce the support of Catholic clergy for the Christian Front to just Coughlin, pointing at numerous members of the Catholic clerical hierarchy were openly sympathetic to its goals and worked to protect its most notorious members when they could. The main figure in the first third of the book is John Cassidy, a failed applicant to the FBI who then turned to transform the Committee of American Christians Against Communism, which he led, into a paramilitary organization with recruits and weapons from the New York National Guard. Although Cassidy’s organization was eventually raided by the FBI and he and other leaders were placed on trial, their acquittal following the suspiciously botched prosecution gave second life to the cause of the Christian Front. The focus of the book then shifts to Boston and a failed businessman named Francis Moran, who became a disciple and then agent of Father Coughlin’s Union Party, which attempted in 1936 to challenge both the Republican and Democrat parties for the loyalty of American voters. While rejecting the paramilitary tactics of Cassidy, Moran became a constant propagandist throughout Boston and the northeastern United States advocating American neutrality in any future European conflict, and eventually a tacit alliance with Hitler against the Communist threat. This led to a relationship with a sinister character named [End Page 92] Herbert Scholz, an SS officer who served as the director of the...

The United States, Iran’s Revolution, and the USSR Communist Phantom: The Linchpins that Triggered the Emergence of the Moroccan “Modern” Armed Forces from 1979 to 1982?

The ghost of the USSR was one of the most important weapons used throughout the Cold War. This phantom made the US act almost immediately, helping his allies or to outmanoeuvring his political opponents. In the case of Iran, it made the US try to solve a deep social/economic problem by showering Iran with military and economic aid, which would prove to be fatal.Moroccan king Hassan II, an expert and savvy political manipulator, would use his position as a US proxy agent to manoeuvre in the shadows within the Arab-speaking world and Africa. This position came to be in full effect when Morocco invaded Western Sahara, with the confidence that it would be a short affair. This proved to be difficult, almost impossible, as a short war became a long one. However, when in 1979, Iran, a stable political ally of the US, plummeted there were a shift in the US politics. The very public rhetoric branding Polisario as a communist agent proved to be a stepping stone into reverting an almost lost war into a stalemate. The US, not wanting a replication of what happened in Iran to happen in Morocco, changed its policies. Polisario was now seen as a threat to the Moroccan Regime. Therefore, trying to prevent possible proxy problems such as internal un-ruling and uprises that could lead to the fall of the kingdom, the US used the Iranian solution: military and economic aid.

The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History by Petra Goedde

Reviewed by: The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History by Petra Goedde Martijn Lak The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History. By petra goedde. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 307 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-537083-6. $35.00 (hardcover and ebook). The historiography of the Cold War has predominantly focused on war, or the lack thereof between the two superpowers. One of the main points of focus is the in all ways absurd nuclear arms race, which resulted in the United States and the Soviet Union (SU) combined having tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. For decades, people lived in the shadow of "the bomb," fearing that even a small mistake or the action of some lunatic general might result in nuclear Armageddon, so vividly portrayed in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. However, the Cold War was also very much about preserving peace, perhaps especially in the realization that an all-out war between the United States and Soviet Union would mean the destruction of civilization. It is precisely the emerging politics of peace that is central to Petra Goedde's thought-provoking The Politics of Peace. A Global Cold War History. As stated by the author: "The history of the Cold War cannot be written without an understanding of the competing definitions of peace that existed on both sides of the Iron Curtain […] The Cold War was both more ubiquitous and less territorial than previously assumed" (p. 4). Using an impressive and very broad range of primary sources, Goedde does an excellent job in showing how the politics of peace were used by the various actors in the Cold War. At first, the United States rejected peace as a public strategy, in contrast to the SU. For Moscow, the promotion of peace was an integral part of its propaganda campaign. Washington and its European allies, on the other hand, "regularly accused activists of being communist agents or naïve idealists who had become tools of an international conspiracy […] By associating peace with communism, the Western world was left aligning its own liberal democratic capitalist system with war" (p. 13). This would only change at the beginning of the 1950s, as the Americans began to understand that dismissing peace advocacy damaged the United States' international reputation. This was articulated, for example, by W. Averell Harriman, special assistant to President Truman and former ambassador in Moscow, who stated that "it is essential for this government to recapture the peace mantle from the Russians." In the words of Goedde: "Over the course of the 1950s, Harriman's advice became US policy" (p. 23). [End Page 828] Writing in an accessible style, Goedde presents a plethora of organizations and people, both East and West, that advocated peace. She also makes very clear that "the left," traditionally associated more with peace than "the right," by no means presented a united front. There was a strong division between what Goedde refers to as the "Old Left" and the "New Left." The latter, "disillusioned with the empty rhetoric and internal contradictions of Soviet-dominated communism […] developed an alternative political agenda that championed peace, freedom from oppression, nonviolence, and participatory democracy" (p. 39). A united left proved largely illusory. Goedde also shows that there was considerable difference in the women's movement. Traditionally, war and national security were associated with masculinity and strength. Peace was seen as weak and feminine. However, "it did not follow logically that men advocated for the former while women sought the latter" (p. 131). Goedde also makes convincingly clear that women had considerable influence on the course of the Cold War, at least on lowering tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. This became clear, for example, in the Détente of the 1960s and 1970s, although it is a fact that the thaw in international relations had a number of causes: "Détente should be understood as a gradual process that unfolded over the course of the 1960s, emanating from multiple sources and shaped by a diverse set of actors" (p. 189). Chief among them were, Goedde points out convincingly, the growing peace and anti-war movements, above all in the United States...

Postavanhardyzm Viktara Žybulia by I. S. Skarapanava (review)

SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 546 Then there are the variations on familiar themes, slightly altered. For example, the lepidopteral metaphor, which here recalls Nabokov’s time at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology: ‘Plots have a way of breeding — of living in sneaky little labs. Then they break out of their cocoons and I have to mop up the mess’ (p. 60); or the way he perceives the function of his art and his intended audience: ‘I write for myself, and hope for hundreds of little Nabokovs’ (p. 35); or his religious stance: ‘I can only explain God’s popularity by an atheist’s panic’ (p. 158). As for Russia, his opinions on the Soviet regime are well documented, so it is no surprise that he found it hard to laugh when William F. Buckley Jr, former CIA agent, conservative libertarian and founder of The National Review joked with him about a new spy novel he was writing — ‘you’re in it. […] You and Véra are in it. You have a daughter, and she becomes a Communist agent. He is more amused by this than Véra, but not all that amused’ (p. 226). What is less well documented is the Russia Nabokov depicted to Edmund Wilson in 1948 — the ‘unchanging black abyss of oppression and terror’ (The NabokovWilson Letters, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2001, p. 223) — reiterated here in an interview for The Washington Star: ‘Russia, he mused, was the same as he had left it, the same muzhik flailing the same horse, all bones, with the same whip’ (p. 216). This collection, therefore, not only extends the range of material available to readers and researchers, but also offers fresh insights into how Nabokov engaged with the press, dispelling the conventional sense of him as exacting and aloof, and instead revealing a generous and eccentric character driven by boundless and eclectic curiosity, and an unfailingly mischievous sense of humour. UCL SSEES Barbara Wyllie Skarapanava, I. S. Postavanhardyzm Viktara Žybulia. IVC Minfina, Minsk, 2018. 98 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. BYR7.00 (paperback). Belarusian literature is far from ailing, despite official attempts to create an atmosphere of hostility or, at least, indifference. Viktar Źybuĺ (b. 1978) is a prominent and original young writer who played a significant role in the Bum-Bam-Lit group at the end of the twentieth century, showing a particular fluency in the creation of palindromes. For her monograph on this writer Professor Skarapanava has leapfrogged the much disputed concepts of avantgarde and postmodernism with her categorization of post-avant-gardism. The book consists of ten sections, of which the first, ‘V. Žybul and the topical art of the 1990s’ (pp. 4–11), comprises a description of the frequently improvised REVIEWS 547 performances and other actions of Bum-Bam-Lit and particularly Žybul, aimed at shocking the public out of its apathy towards literature, and challenging the official critics who had been brought up on politicized Soviet writing. This writer in life is very polite and quiet, but his writing and actions create a quite different impression, partly because of the many masks he dons. This chapter is illustrated by some of Žybuĺ’s deliberately primitive drawings, the only exception being a self-portrait at the age of eighteen. The second chapter (pp. 12–21) is entitled ‘Žybuĺ’s translogism’, and discusses particularly the period after Bum-Bam-Lit, which was succeeded by the Second Front of Art and Schmerzwerk, whose aim was to remove ideology from literature and to renew the language by the creation of new words and images; Źybuĺ combines these elements with the schizo-realism and neofuturism of the original group. Skarapanava emphasizes that her subject was from the start a technically very competent poet, illustrating this by a virtuosic poem of 1995, ‘Stereahrama’ (Stereogram), which in its shape forms the word sintez (synthesis); here, as elsewhere, her analysis is both clear and perceptive. A palindrome, ‘Meta tem’, the manuscript of which is one of the many textual illustrations here, reminds the critic of hieroglyphics. After listing some of his neologisms, which she characterizes as mostly humorous, she turns to the rejection of the falsity of the modern world and...

Notes on a Century of Surveillance

The formation of Greater Romania in December 1918 entailed building up its intelligence apparatus, both foreign and internal—a development crucial to its survival in the twentieth‐century system of national states. Events during the war and provisions of the peace treaty lent special urgency to this development, for the rise of the communist movement in Russia posed grave problems for Romania’s eastern border (regularly breached by both refugees and communist agents), and revisions of the border with Hungary increased the threat of Hungarian irredentism. The intelligence services were once again challenged by World War II and the communist takeover; the events of 1989 repeated these challenges. To examine this series of transformations is to ask, among other things, what it means for the form of the state or its ruling regime to change. The paper, delivered as a keynote address at the 2018 international conference organized by the Society for Romanian Studies in Bucharest, explores continuities across these various transitions.

Screening Migrants in the Early Cold War: The Geopolitics of U.S. Immigration Policy

Abstract The main elements of U.S. immigration policy date back to the early Cold War. One such element is a screening process initially designed to prevent infiltration by Communist agents posing as migrants from East-Central Europe. The development of these measures was driven by geopolitical concerns, resulting in vetting criteria that favored the admission of hardline nationalists and anti-Communists. The argument proceeds in two steps. First, the article demonstrates that geopolitics influenced immigration policy, resulting in the admission of extremist individuals. Second, it documents how geopolitical concerns and the openness of U.S. institutions provided exiles with the opportunity to mobilize politically. Although there is little evidence that the vetting system succeeded in preventing the entry of Communist subversives into the United States, it did help to create a highly mobilized anti-Communist ethnic lobby that supported extremist policies vis-à-vis the Soviet Union during the early Cold War.

Facing History: Sovereignty and the Spectacles of Justice and Violence in Poland's Capitalist Democracy

AbstractThis article explores the nexus of sovereignty, violence, and transitional justice through an analysis of the public exhibitions of the faces of communist-era secret service officers in Poland. During the rule of right-wing government from 2005 to 2007, the state-run Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) organized exhibitions in public squares across Poland, which stirred much contention. Was it a pursuit of justice or a call for public lynching? Was it a means to ensure public transparency and identify the “faceless” evil of communism, or instead a political instrument of anti-communist nationalists? In some places, like the deindustrialized city of Katowice, the exhibition even met with devastating attacks. Focusing on this event in Katowice, I use media reports, interviews, and other ethnographic material to explore what the IPN-led state spectacles of justice, particularly the figure of the face and the defacement practices they employ, reveal about tensions and contradictions of “post-socialist” sovereignty; how the figure of the (secret) communist agent has come to facialize both the unfinished reckoning with communist-era state violence and the “normalized” violence of capitalist transformation. I argue that past violence, which is the typical object of transitional justice, needs to be approached in a dynamic and relational manner, with a focus on the conjunctures—how different forms of violence become transformed, reproduced, or entangled across time and space. My comparative perspective on transitional justice highlights the problems caused when its nationalist appropriation becomes entangled with capital's violence.

Hero worship at all costs?

The new landmark of Gdansk is a leaning tower made of glass, steel, and red concrete located on the Motława River. The panorama windows of the restaurant at the Museum of the Second World War offer the only view of the old Hanseatic city with its town houses and its Brama Żuraw (crane gate). The legendary Lenin Shipyard (now Gdansk Shipyard), where the Solidarność was once launched, is just a short walk away. Lech Wałęsa’s fame as an anti-communist workers’ hero has faded though. The present leaders of Poland consider Wałęsa as a communist agent and traitor of the nation because of his alliance with the much-hated liberals. The new hero is Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the PiS-Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, Law and Justice). A Gdansk graffiti artist immortalized him on a firewall across from the museum, as an angular head with a Roman toga. The great chairman currently exercises his power over many people, even in the new leaning tower by the Motława.

Hero worship at all costs?

The new landmark of Gdansk is a leaning tower made of glass, steel, and red concrete located on the Motława River. The panorama windows of the restaurant at the Museum of the Second World War offer the only view of the old Hanseatic city with its town houses and its Brama Żuraw (crane gate). The legendary Lenin Shipyard (now Gdansk Shipyard), where the Solidarność was once launched, is just a short walk away. Lech Wałęsa’s fame as an anti-communist workers’ hero has faded though. The present leaders of Poland consider Wałęsa as a communist agent and traitor of the nation because of his alliance with the much-hated liberals. The new hero is Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the PiS-Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, Law and Justice). A Gdansk graffiti artist immortalized him on a firewall across from the museum, as an angular head with a Roman toga. The great chairman currently exercises his power over many people, even in the new leaning tower by the Motława.

Vietnam, the Movie: Part Deux

“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (nguyen, sympathizer 179). and so viet thanh nguyen's The Sympathizer invokes Karl Marx's “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” although the reference is just as likely to be Edward Said's Orientalism, since Marx was concerned with political representation (608), whereas Said was concerned with discursive representation (21). These words frame the important middle act of The Sympathizer, one that focuses on the filming of The Hamlet, a mash-up of Hollywood's sins against not only Vietnamese but also Asians and Asian Americans at large. Reading like a morality play crossed with a backstage musical, this section draws on thinly veiled references to Francis Ford Coppola (the Auteur), Marlon Brando (the hespian), and Martin Sheen (the Idol), who drag the narrator from his newly formed Southern Californian refuge and round up a bunch of stray boat people milling around in the Philippines to put on a movie about the Vietnam War. From the recycling of American military equipment originally sold to Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to the reuse of Vietnamese bodies recently shot at and now en route to the United States as refugees, every aspect of the making of The Hamlet illustrates the dangers of allowing oneself to be represented by others. More subtly, The Sympathizer shows how difficult it is to intervene in this regime of representation, especially in the name of authenticity, as it is often deployed by protestors against stereotypes in the media. But if we situate the section on The Hamlet within the overall narrative of The Sympathizer and also in Nguyen's larger critique of memory industries as war industries, we must also understand that the content of the ilm is less important than the dynamics of spectatorship. By linking the narrator's quixotic quest to subvert this film with his repression of his complicity in the rape and torture of a communist agent during the narrator's days as a mole in the South Vietnamese police, Nguyen suggests that watching the Vietnam War is potentially as dangerous as ighting in (or misrepresenting) the war.

Ideological battles in and out 1911

PurposeDuring the centennial anniversary of Xinhai Revolution in 2011, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television supported the production of 1911 for celebrating such an important event that lead to the rise of the Republic of China in the contemporary Chinese history. This paper aims to reflect upon this film in relation to China’s propagation of “Greater China” for the Empire-building project.Design/methodology/approachBy scrutinizing the film text and following the strait controversies over the film, this paper demonstrates how the Chinese Communist agents employed the coproduction model with Hong Kong for globalizing a cinematic discourse of Greater China in part of their Empire-building project.FindingsThe study challenges how contemporary Chinese history is ideologically and politically manipulated for advancing the Chinese Communist propaganda over Taiwan. The overall objective is to reflect upon the longstanding historical divergences that stand on the current geopolitical envision and strategy of China for reunification.Originality/valueThis paper provides an interdisciplinary reflection upon the intricate post-Cold War politics in part of the contemporary Chinese cinema under the China–Hong Kong coproduction model. The findings advance novel and timely insights into China’s current envision and strategy for reunification.

Iancu, Carol and Platon, Alexandru-Florin (eds) Pogromul de la Iaşi şi Holocaustul în România. Le Pogrom de Iaşi et la Shoah en Roumanie (review)

REVIEWS 565 Iancu, Carol and Platon, Alexandru-Florin (eds). Pogromul de la Iași și Holocaustul în România. Le Pogrom de Iași et la Shoah en Roumanie. Editura Universității ‘Alexandru Ioan Cuza’, Iași, 2015. 364 pp. RON34.00. Amongst the most appalling acts of inhumanity to be perpetrated against the Jews by the Romanian authorities during the Second World War was the pogrom in the Romanian city of Iaşi at the end of June 1941. It has become a convention to include a succession of events — including deportations of Jews by train — that took place over the period 29 June–6 July in Iaşi under the title ‘pogrom’ when in fact it can be argued that the pogrom itself, strictly speaking, spanned the days 29–30 June. This volume, which contains the proceedings of an international conference held in Iaşi in June 2011 to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the tragedy, follows that convention. Reconstructing the events of the pogrom, during which scholars give estimates ranging from 1,000 to 14,000 for the numbers of Jews massacred in Iaşi, and calculations that a further 2,713 died during deportation by train southward, is no simple matter. The numbers themselves of those shot in the city are the subject of dispute. The self-serving nature of official reports — some of which contradict each other in essential details — and the absence of an accurate record of the number of victims are impediments to providing a clear account of the murderous behaviour of the German and Romanian forces, and of the criminal incompetence of the Romanian military authorities. Since this volume is principally addressed to a Romanian audience — sixteen of the twenty-five papers are in Romanian, the remainder in French — which has been fed a diet by ultra-nationalists of exaltation of Romania’s wartime pro-German leader Marshal Antonescu, and minimalization of his responsibility for the death of up to 300,000 Jews, the breadth of the papers is significant for they provide context for this episode of the Holocaust in Romania. A number of the papers use eye-witness accounts to corroborate official reports on the pogrom. However, more clarity to its background would have been brought had the reader been told that in preparation for the GermanRomanian attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 the three armies in the ‘General Antonescu Army Group’ each took up a position along the river Prut. The city of Iaşi came within the area of deployment of the German Eleventh Army, and consequently Antonescu declared it a German military zone on the understanding that it would continued to be administered by the Romanian civil authorities. Antonescu took steps to secure the Prut and the area behind it. The Jews in Moldavia were the target of these measures, since Antonescu harboured strong doubts about their loyalty to the Romanian state. On 21 June 1941, the Romanian Army General Staff sent the army, police, gendarmerie SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 566 and prefects an order from Antonescu by telegram that all able-bodied Jews between the ages of eighteen and sixty should be moved immediately from the villages in the frontier area between the Siret and the Prut to the camp in Târgu-Jiu in the south and to the surrounding villages. The remaining Jews from the area, as well as Jews from other villages in Moldova, were to be deported by train with their necessary belongings within forty-eight hours to towns in the province. The first reports from Romanian officials to reach Antonescu explained the murders of Jews in Iaşi as a response by the Germans to the actions of Communist agents, parachuted in to make contact with the Jews in order to carry out sabotage behind the German-Romanian lines. On 1 July, Antonescu ordered an immediate investigation into the violence by General Emanoil Leoveanu,theChiefofPolice.Instead,however,ofhavingonereport,historians are faced by an extraordinary situation: the existence of two reports, written and signed by the same person — Leoveanu — bearing the same date and number, but with a different content. One of the reports argues that the pogrom...

Re-Constructed Unitary History on Green Island, Taiwan: The Former Political Prison/Oasis Villa

during the Period of National Mobilisation for Suppression of the Rebellion, and followed this by imposing Martial Law throughout Taiwan. This period of Martial Law lasted for 38 years. With legislation such as the Offenses against the Internal Security of the State in the Criminal Code, the Betrayers Punishment Act and Statute to Prevent Espionage, the government and its various secret agencies and military tribunals, created a climate in which improper trials were common place. This resulted in loss of life, freedom and property, and serious, and ongoing, violations of human rights. During the period of Martial Law, the government, police or security forces were involved in torture; the harsh treatment, including psychological pressure, of detainees; surveillance and harassment of the relatives and other associates of the dissidents; and the sentencing for an average of 10 years of several hundred political prisoners. Of those affected during the period only a minority were actually Communist agents or engaging in rebellionas defined by law, most were falsely accused, or the victims of mistakes or fabricated cases. Individuals could be either sentenced to death and executed, or sent to prison. The best preserved of the prisons from this period are the Military Prison situated on the outskirts of Taipei and the prison on Green Island.

Jorge Semprun's Broken Mirror: The Broader Text of Resistance, the Shoah, and Camps in L'�criture ou la vie and Le Retour de Carola Neher

Jorge Semprun's Broken Mirror:The Broader Text of Resistance, the Shoah, and Camps in L'Écriture ou la vie and Le Retour de Carola Neher Van Kelly In January 1944, the resister Jorge Semprun was deported from France to Buchenwald. He survived to see the camp liberated on 11 April 1945, but did not publish his experience until his first novel, or more precisely his first "autofiction," Le Grand Voyage of 1963, which tells of the deportation of "Gérard," member of a Special Operations Executive (Buckmaster) maquis in Burgundy, though the narration includes segments devoted to the Holocaust per se, notably the S.S.'s brutal execution of a group of Jewish children on their arrival at Buchenwald.1 The resister's perspective remains primary in L'Évanouissement (1967), with some reference as well to experiences as a clandestine Communist agent in postwar Spain (1978). Subsequently, Semprun published several works on his captivity: Quel beau dimanche (1980), L'Écriture ou la vie (1994), Le Retour de Carola Neher (1998), and Le Mort qu'il faut (2002). These works broaden to embrace many topics including racial deportations, Auschwitz, his family's involvement in the Spanish Republic, his experience of Buchenwald as "Red Spaniard" protégé of the camp's German Communist shadow hierarchy, after the liberation his role in the Spanish Communist Party, disillusionment with Marxism, expulsion from the Party in 1964,2 and critiques of Stalinism and the Gulag, which were vectors for his own sense of complicity.3 Semprun's work echoes Henry Rousso's chronology of the Vichy Syndrome, but only in part. In L'Écriture ou la vie, Semprun recounts the "unfinished mourning" that kept him from writing about Buchenwald more than a decade after his liberation. Moreover, the return of the memory of racial deportations, "la mémoire juive" or beginning of "Obsession" in the Vichy Syndrome, indelibly marks L'Écriture ou la vie, overcoming the limited view afforded of the Nazi machine by Buchenwald, deadly but without gas chambers and dominated by political prisoners.4 By contrast, Semprun's denunciation of the Gulag, "[l]'horizon du communisme, incontournable,"5 is his version of Rousso's third stage, the "broken mirror," and this orientation transcends Vichy and the Syndrome, though as Rousso himself insists, "Seule une perspective qui transcende les frontières peut rendre sa véritable dimension au souvenir de la dernière guerre" (22). [End Page 20] Semprun's broad reach right and left relates directly to his narrative technique. From Le Grand Voyage onward, he develops an interlocking-ring narration, based on successive flashbacks and flashforwards, where multiple strands of his ethical remembering touch and intertwine. I will first discuss Part One, Chapters Two and Four of L'Écriture ou la vie, because of allusions to Kant, Goethe, Blum, Heidegger, Brecht, and the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. These writerly memory loops with their tangents define Semprun's ethical crux, which he revisits in Le Retour de Carola Neher, performed in 1995 at Weimar. The play expands to include genocides in ex-Yugoslavia via coincidence with the term "Muslim" or "musulman," referring to exhausted prisoners on the verge of extinction in the Nazi camps. By revisiting his memory sites, Semprun works through to the camps' wider dimensions. His "repetition of the same," says Ursula Tidd, is a "bearing witness [that] carries the instant outside itself, projecting it into the future, addressing it to the Other" ("Infinity" 407). Rather than compulsive repetition, this is a truer register of his multi-voiced score or palimpsest: "plus j'écris, plus la mémoire me revient," says Semprun, "De là ma théorie que c'est une écriture inépuisable, à la fois impossible et inépuisable. On ne peut pas tout dire, mais on n'aura jamais tout dit. On peut dire à chaque fois davantage."6 Semprun's ethical foundation Part One, Chapter Two of L'Écriture ou la vie condenses Semprun's ethical loop. This crux manifests itself in the aftermath of Auschwitz, as recounted to Buchenwald detainees by a survivor of the Sonderkommando that emptied gas chambers of their corpses: Il m'a semblé alors, dans le silence qui a suivi le récit du...

Review: Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter & Vietnamese Communist Agent, by Larry Berman

Review: <i>Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter &amp; Vietnamese Communist Agent</i>, by Larry Berman

‘Only Religions Count in Vietnam’: Thich Tri Quang and the Vietnam War

AbstractThich Tri Quang has long been one of the most controversial actors in the history of the Vietnam War. Scholars on the right have argued that Tri Quang was in all likelihood a communist agent operating at the behest of Hanoi. Scholars on the left have argued that Tri Quang was a peaceful religious leader devoted to democracy and a rapid end to the war. This article argues that neither of these interpretations is persuasive. As American officials rightly concluded throughout the war, there was no compelling evidence to suggest that Tri Quang was a communist agent or in any way sympathetic to the goals of Hanoi or the NLF. Drawing on the extensive archival evidence of Tri Quang's conversations with American officials, it is apparent that Tri Quang was in fact strongly anti-communist and quite receptive to the use of American military power against North Vietnam and China. The main factor that led to conflict between the Buddhist movement and the Johnson administration was Tri Quang's insistence that the military regimes that followed Ngo Dinh Diem were hostile to Buddhism and incapable of leading the struggle against Communism to a successful conclusion.

France and the Partition Plan: 1947–1948

France and the Partition Plan: 1947–1948

Trial of the Rosenbergs: An Account

The Rosenberg Trial is the sum of many stories: a story of betrayal, a love story, a spy story, a story of a family torn apart, and a story of government overreaching. As is the case with many famous trials, it is also the story of a particular time: the early 1950's with its cold war tensions and headlines dominated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his demagogic tactics. The Manhattan Project was the name given to the top-secret effort of Allied scientists to develop an atomic bomb. One of the Manhattan Project scientists working in Los Alamos was a British physicist named Klaus Fuchs. Twice in 1945 Fuchs met with a Soviet agent named Raymond and provided notes on the working design for the atomic bomb. In February 1950, less than two weeks after a jury convicted Alger Hiss of perjury for denying under oath that he had passed secret information to a Communist agent named Whittaker Chambers, Klaus Fuchs was arrested and confessed to disclosing to the Soviets information about the Manhattan Project. One week after Fuchs' arrest, Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin propelled himself into the headlines by charging that the State Department employed over 200 Communist agents. It was a bad time to be a suspected Communist; it was a terrible time to be a suspected spy. Fuchs' arrest, which began the chain of investigations that led authorities to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, was made possible by American cryptanalysts who successfully deciphered intercepted cables (the Venona Cables) from the Soviet Consulate to the KGB. One cable was a report by Fuchs on the progress of the Manhattan Project. When confronted with evidence of his espionage, Klaus confessed and told authorities of his meetings with a spy he knew only as Raymond. Within three months, the FBI began to focus on a pudgy, middle-aged chemist, Harry Gold, as the Raymond to whom Fuchs had given information about the bomb. Within a week after the FBI first began to ask Gold questions such as Were you ever west of the Mississippi?, Gold offered a voluntary confession. By June 1, authorities knew of a soldier, stationed at Los Alamos, married with no children, who Gold paid $500 to in September of 1945 in Albuquerque in exchange for information about the implosion lens for the atomic bomb. Gold could not remember the soldier's name, but thought his wife may have been Ruth and that he was a New York City native. Within two days, Gold was shown a picture of a man meeting the description he had given. The man pictured was David Greenglass. Gold told investigators that Greenglass resembled the man he met in New Mexico. On June 15, 1950, FBI officials questioned David Greenglass. In his first interview, Greenglass admitted that he was the machinist-soldier stationed in Los Alamos that had passed information to Gold. He also identified his wife, Ruth, and his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, as participants in the Soviet spy ring.

The Fifties: Transforming the Screen 1950-1959 (review)

Reviewed by: The Fifties: Transforming the Screen 1950-1959 Robert Fyne Peter Lev . The Fifties: Transforming the Screen 1950-1959 ( History of the American Cinema, Vol. 7). University of California Press, 2006. 382 pages; $27.50. Sweep Clean As the 1940s drew to a close, much had altered the American landscape. Five years earlier, in 1945, the Second World War ended, and millions of GIs returned home hoping, as the popular song encouraged, "To pick up the pieces" of a lifestyle that, by now, was fading. Everything was in flux; labor unions demanded recognition and better pay for their members, refrigerators replaced ice boxes in most kitchens, washing machines, not scrub boards, cleaned the family clothing, a commercial airline industry emerged providing faster means of travel especially from coast to coast, sleek automobiles with automatic transmissions and one-piece windshields dazzled consumers with their high-powered eight-cylinder engines, and, as the pièce de résistance, an innovative technology, called television, allowed large numbers of working people the opportunity to sit down in their front rooms, turn on a large size apparatus with a seven- or nine-inch screen, and—during the evening hours—enjoy some commercial entertainment provided by a handful of networks. Without question, this upcoming decade, the 1950s, like a new broom, would sweep clean. Why wouldn't it? For the 1950s' Hollywood motion picture industry, everything seemed topsy-turvy. A federal antitrust law broke up the hand-in-glove production company/theater network cutting into those huge profits, while the sale of black-and-white television sets kept soaring, keeping potential audiences away from their movie houses. Clearly, these Tinseltown moguls needed a cinematic blood transfusion if their businesses planned to continue. Adding to their problems, a political imbroglio, involving a handful of screenwriters and directors dubbed the Hollywood Ten, created more anxiety. What's next, the capitalists pondered? How can we bring viewers back to our fold? Of course the motion picture industry rallied and, for the next ten years, during this fifties decade, introduced various strategies to revitalize their shaky house and then continued to fine-tune their product well into the future. With their eyes on trends, fads, whimsical ideas, and crazes, Hollywood reinvented itself, creating new markets and cinematic technology to lure moviegoers back into their darkened theaters. How did this happen? Who were the people and companies responsible for this makeover? What moving pictures became the touchstones? These are some of the complex issues raised in a carefully researched study, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, written by established scholar, Peter Lev. According to Lev, Hollywood moved quickly and, ever mindful of such censorial groups as the Motion Picture Production Code, the Catholic Legion of Decency, different veteran's organizations, and rightwing fringe groups, created an unusual format that made the small television seem inadequate. Manufactured under different trademarks—including Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision, Todd-AO, and other tongue-twisting names—these innovations were elaborate anamorphic systems that projected a large, rectangular image on a special screen and used oversized, stereophonic speakers positioned throughout an auditorium, all of which gave the viewer a vicarious you-are-there feeling in such productions as The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben Hur (1959), or This is Cinerama (1952). To complement this pseudo-realism, another invention, the 3-D motion picture, allowed viewers—wearing inexpensive, cardboard, colored glasses—to experience a dimensional quality in a few screenplays. Beside these technological advances, Hollywood turned its attention to the strained relations with the Soviet Union. Motion pictures depicting the Korean Conflict appeared weeks after the thirty-eighth parallel crossing, showing American GIs routing their Oriental foes while, back in the states, communist agents, intent on stealing classified blueprints, were routinely rounded up by [End Page 67] fast-moving FBI agents. Another genre, the science fiction photodrama, became thinly disguised versions of Russian nuclear attacks or inland invasions as Brobdingnagian mutants, unexplained blobs, or defrosted dinosaurs ravaged American cities. Still other factors shaped the fifties. The Hollywood musical, long the staple of production companies, lost much of its allure and edged downward, while the Western, usually associated with the cowboy and Indian motif, turned reflective, suggesting there was more to...

East Germany: The Stasi and De-Stasification

Shortly Mikhail Gorbachev was installed as secretary general of the Soviet Union's Communist Party in the spring of 1985, he began to pursue his liberalization policies of glasnost and perestroika. The impact was felt almost immediately within the ruling Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), the Communist Party of the East German Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR). Gorbachev's policies gave new hope for political, economic, and social renewal to those disenchanted with the gerontological Stalinist leadership of Erich Honecker and his sycophants. (1) A new wind was blowing from the East, generated by the great teacher--the Soviet Union. In line with the USSR's change of course, both Moscow's German-language propaganda magazine, Sputnik, and its weekly newspaper, Neue Zeit, reprinted Gorbachev's speeches and editorialized on the necessity for reforms of the socialist system. For East Germany's leaders, however, they became hostile publications and were banned despite protests emanating from Moscow. Nonetheless, they presaged a major change: For the first time since the founding of the DDR in 1949, the restlessness of Party members and much of the citizenry could not be blamed on the capitalist enemy of the proletariat. Until the mid-1980s, opposition to the regime was largely underground, although hundreds of thousands of burghers spent time in penitentiaries for publicly voicing their discontent. The repression began immediately after the end of World War II, carried out by Soviet security services and German Communist Party veterans (both those who had been in exile in the Soviet Union and those that had survived Nazi imprisonment). Thousands of people were arrested and shipped off to the infamous former Nazi concentration camps of Sachsenhansen and Buchenwald. Initially, the inhabitants of East Germany shrugged off the wave of arrests, believing the victims to be only former Nazi officials or war criminals. Then, in spring 1946, the Soviets ordered the fusion of two archenemies, the German Communist Party (the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD) and the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD). Outwardly, the creation of the new party, the SED, appeared to proceed smoothly. In reality, however, thousands of rank-and-file socialists opposed to the union were thrown into prisons or concentration camps. They were joined by people who had been denounced for making anticommunist or anti-Soviet remarks, hundreds of them as young as fourteen. (2) On August 16, 1947, the Soviet Military Administration (SMA) ordered the creation of the first postwar German political police. Named Kommissariat 5 (K-5), it was formally attached to the criminal investigation department of the Volkspolizei (the People's Police, or VOPO). In reality, however, it operated independently under Soviet supervision; the subterfuge was necessary because the rules of the Allied Control Commission for Germany forbade the reestablishment of a German political police. Wilhelm Zaisser, a veteran German operative for Soviet military intelligence (GRU) and a former commander of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, was named as its head. Erich Mielke, another long-time Communist agent of the Soviet security services, became Zaisser's deputy. During its early years, the K-5 arrested citizens and turned them over to the Soviet security organs for trial by Soviet military tribunals. In most cases, the proceedings lasted no more than a few minutes, often resulting in sentences of twenty-five years in a Soviet labor camp or a high security penitentiary in East Germany. (3) Less than a year later, Erich Mielke was detailed to create another secret police bearing the innocuous name of Deutsche Wirtschaftskommission, the German Economic Commission. It was charged with guarding confiscated property against misuse and sabotage, as well as with the investigation of economic crimes. …