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according to what readers perceived as its stance in the great contest of cultures. It was simultaneously praised for depicting Islam as a threatening creed that justified violent opposition to it and condemned for minimising the Islamic threat in the middle ages and, by no leap of imagination, today. Either way, the litmus test was the crudest form of the already crude ‘clash of civilisation’ theory, itself a heated-up version of Cold War propaganda. The debate formed a cocktail of debased Enlightenment positivism, ignorant cultural supremacism and historical illiteracy
his own lifetime, which spanned almost the entire twentieth century (1903–2000), were not only personally anathema but had brought the world near to destruction. He had little time for the tyranny of numbers, the equality of the herd or horde. The responsibility and importance of the individual looms large. ‘By the inexorable laws of history, the whole world pays for the crimes and follies of each of its citizens.’32 To an audience gripped by the impersonal forces of the Cold War, this seemed to soften causation to the explicable, to human agency. The message was
current incarnation, The Family of Man exhibition has remained a touchstone for criticism of the hijacking of documentary humanism in the interests of ‘American cold war liberalism’ (Sekula 1981: 19). Steichen’s curation of the exhibition’s vast array of photographs drawn from the personal collections of photographers and the picture archives of popular pictorial publications such as Look and Life magazines, wrestled individual photographs from their cultural and historical contexts in the service of the exhibition’s idealistic universal themes of love, marriage
Party’s electoral victory, efforts to rebuild Europe, the formation of the United Nations (UN), and the early stages in the Cold War. British – Christian – intellectuals In analysing the Oldham group’s responses to totalitarianism, war and post-war reconstruction, I see its members as British Christian intellectuals . Each term locates the group in a key sphere: a national (British) context featuring specific identities and assumptions (though open to foreign influences); a religious (Christian) context
the Italian stigmatic Padre Pio in 2002.22 Perhaps most telling is the rehabilitation of the visions and writings of the Polish religious Mary Faustina Kowalska when she was canonised in 2000, whose painted image of ‘Christ of the Divine Mercy’ may be seen as a twenty-first century evolution from ‘Sacred Heart’ devotion (with its Cold War connotations), complete with novena prayers on rosaries and the institution of 3pm as an ‘Hour of Mercy’ which recalls the older practice of the Angelus. As a new devotion particularly active on the internet, and through the
influential collection The God that Failed (1949) – urged ‘fighting for the soul of Europe against the Communists’. 110 The WCC’s Amsterdam conference indeed stressed freedom, but the organisers (Oldham included) downplayed elements of anti-Communism in order to enable Eastern Orthodox churches to participate. 111 There continued to be differing ecumenical viewpoints on how to deal with Soviet Communism and the Cold War, and the movement has been reproached both for insufficiently condemning Soviet human-rights violations and for allegedly becoming an instrument of
dollars of sterling, in which substantial Irish assets were held externally in London, was suspended but Ireland was initially able to draw on the sterling area dollar pool –a fund centralising the British Empire’s dollar earnings from products like Malayan rubber or west African cocoa under London Treasury control – to acquire the wherewithal for its imports from the USA. The launching of a European Recovery Programme (ERP) in 1947 against the background of the emerging Cold War with its erstwhile Soviet Union ally brought together the economic and political
improvement but a worsening of the situation […] What is necessary is to behave at all times with dignity, not to be intimidated or frightened. What is necessary is to speak the truth’ (Patočka 1977: 45). In speaking the truth, many dissidents from Central and Eastern Europe were lauded by intellectuals in the West. On the other hand, after the fall of communism in 1989, the writings of dissidents were increasingly regarded as historical documents of interest rather than political interventions of note. Dissidence was part of the ideological battleground of the Cold War
, democratisation and marketisation of university institutions. In order to situate current framings of campus conflicts, I therefore begin with a brief genealogical account of how the meanings attributed to Palestine–Israel activism within the British university context have changed over time. Student pro-Palestine and pro-Zionist campaigns first began to garner momentum in Britain during the Cold War and were deeply enmeshed in its binary ideological framework. Within international student arenas, the General Union of Palestinian Students, established in 1959, became aligned
Introduction: migrants into minorities Since the mid-1980s Europe has seen deep economic and demographic changes that have upset the postwar consensus about a unified national culture and identity. Postwar migration, globalization and the expanding European Union (EU) have all led to a common-sense assumption that national has lost a consensus definition. Academic writing has explored this idea most fully through cultural studies, particularly of film and migration (Chapman, 2005; Hargreaves, 2007). Some of these changes arose out of the Cold War, others from