Ideological Enemies Research Articles

The love of hating: The psychology of enmity

This paper explores the roots and dynamics of enmity as they operate on the individual, group, and national levels. The importance of the study of enmity lies in the premise that ‘guns do not kill, heads do’. Before we create the gun or the bomb, we have first to envision the destruction of the enemy in our minds. The UNESCO Charter stated this premise clearly: ‘Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that we have to erect the ramparts of peace.’ A systematic exploration of enmity is a prerequisite to the prevention of wars. If we can understand how propaganda affects people, we may be able to intervene in the diabolical process of enemy-making. Resolving conflicts nonviolently is one of the most urgent tasks of the nuclear era. Exploring enmity is one of the initial steps in preventing all-out nuclear war and offering hope to the planet. In 1989 alone, the world experienced dozens of conflicts resulting from enmity turned violent. Some were national enemies (Iran-Iraq, Israel-Arabs), others are religious enemies (Protestants-Catholics, Muslims-Christians), or ideological enemies (Communists and capitalist supported factions in Nicaragua), and yet others were ethnic enemies (Serbs-Croats, Czechs-Slovaks). One cannot help but question whether all countries or groups must have enemies. Most countries do, however a few do not. Sweden and Switzerland are two contemporary examples of enemy-free nations. The fascinating dynamics of enmity have been illustrated in recent years by the major shifts in the Soviet-American relationship. Only a few years after Reagan called the Soviet Union an ‘Evil Empire’, the Soviet leader has been titled the ‘Man Of The Year’ by Time magazine. He and his wife seem to be more popular in the United States than their American counterparts. National polls have found that the number of Americans who perceive the Soviet Union as ‘unfriendly and an enemy of the U.S.’ dropped from 63% in 1983 to 20% in 1989.2 At the heart of the process of making enemies is a split between us-them and good-evil. However, not all dichotomies/polarities are pathological or lead necessarily to enmity. Humans, like all living things, are capable of differentiating good food from rotten and safe encounters from those that are

Laos in 1989: Quiet Revolution in the Marketplace

Laos continued through 1989 to stamp out its own distinctive brand of Southeast Asian socialism. This small landlocked country has ostensibly jettisoned the doctrinaire assumptions that guided the first decade of postrevolutionary transformation. From beneath the Vietnamese shadow, Laos has restored party-to-party ties with China and, with the assistance of Thailand, another erstwhile ideological enemy and revanchist neighbor, has embraced economic liberalization and the advantages that accrue from the natural trans-Mekong trade.

Henry David Thoreau's Political Economy

FOR those who wish to understand Henry David Thoreau's politics, his texts alone may not offer sufficient education. Heretofore, the relatively few scholars of literature and history who have examined his politics have been inclined to register Thoreau in their own modern political party or to relegate him to the camp of the ideological enemy. To lionize or dismiss him the arch-foe of modern statism, global power politics, free-enterprise politics, or militarism and war is superficial at best. To reject him an arch-duke of anarchism is to take the eighteenth-century English establishmentarian and the American Tory view. Perhaps even more severe built-in historical and contextual limitations govern the views that Thoreau is anomalous or that he is thoroughly inconsistent. Rather, one must be aware that the terms Thoreau used-such virtue, culture, law (moral well natural), corruption, liberty, power, and conspiracy-are terms and concepts he shared with his age, an age that can be characterized by its devotion to the ideology and language of Revolutionary republicanism. Republicanism not only provided the dominant language but also functioned as a kind of meta-language.... As such, the language of republicanism was so completely taken for granted that it established the very categories within which political discourse could properly-perhaps even possibly-be undertaken.'

England and the Northern War in Soviet Historiography: 1935-1950

The middle and late 1930s were years of severe change for the USSR. Stalin, in an effort to destroy any effective political opposition, completed his great purge. The Soviets, seeking to avoid an international conflagration, attempted to build collective security as a bulwark against their avowed ideological enemies, the Nazis. As a consequence of these domestic and international developments and the Party's reaction to them, the historical profession experienced profound changes as well. The State,which had formerly demanded that historians write Marxist history based upon class-struggle and socio-economic analyses exclusively, now ordered historians to produce more traditional and nationalistic interpretations of the past within the context of Marxism.