̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Communism

Forgotten heroes: Study gives voice to China's nationalist WWII veterans

ta385 — Thu, 04 Nov 2021 11:30:00 +0000

As the Chinese Communist Party celebrates its 100th anniversary, new research gives voice to the country's still controversial nationalist (KMT) veterans and the volunteers determined to honour them.

Totalitarianism, violence and the silent majority

sjr81 — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:07:52 +0000

Her lecture ‘True Believers: Collaboration and Opposition under Totalitarian Regimes’ takes place at the Umney Theatre, Robinson College, tonight at 5pm.

Applebaum won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2004 book Gulag: A History, and is also the author of Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, and Gulag Voices: An Anthology. Her most recent book is Iron Curtain: ̽��ֱ��Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956.

She said: “ ̽��ֱ��horrifying genius of Soviet communism - as conceived in the 1920s, perfected in the 1930s and then spread by force to Soviet-occupied Europe was the system's ability to get the silent majority in so many countries to play along without much protest.

“A small proportion of people protested and small proportion collaborated. But carefully targeted violence, propaganda and state's monopoly on economic and civic institutions persuaded the rest to go along. These techniques were used to great effect in Eastern Europe after 1945.”

Applebaum, who is currently Philip Roman Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, a columnist for the Washington Post and Slate, is also a former Editor of ̽��ֱ��Economist, where she provided in-depth coverage of Eastern Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Dr Rachel Polonsky, a lecturer at the Department of Slavonic Studies and organiser of tonight’s event, said: “We are proud to be hosting Anne Applebaum, whose work and life centre on the areas we study in the Department.

“As a historian of the twentieth century, Anne reminds us how intricately interwoven the political destinies and cultures of Russia, Ukraine and Poland have been, and how important it is to study them together. She is one of a series of high-profile lecturers (including the Polish intellectual Adam Michnik and the British historian Norman Davies) whose visits to Cambridge demonstrate the commitment of the ̽��ֱ�� to securing a future for Polish studies within the Slavonic Department, and the hope that this commitment will resonate outward to a wider public, both within and beyond the ̽��ֱ��.”

Head of Slavonic Studies, Dr Emma Widdis, said: “Our research and teaching in Ukrainian, Russian and in future, as we hope, Polish, reflect our sense of the importance of understanding this complex European 'neighbourhood', in which historical legacies remain politically contested. We are all very much looking forward to Anne’s talk this evening.”

Tonight’s talk at Robinson College is part of the CamCREES 2013 public lecture series, which also runs alongside a series of public lectures on Resistance in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Upcoming events in this series include:

'Resistance and Rights' on Thursday 7 March 2013, given by Professor Benjamins Nathans, ̽��ֱ�� of Pennsylvania
How and with what effects was the rhetoric of rights - the lingua franca of liberalism - deployed in an avowedly illiberal society like the Soviet Union? How do activists invoke rights in today's Russia? This lecture will analyse continuities and ruptures in the career of civil and human rights as a mode of resistance from the period of "developed socialism" to the Putin era.

'Resistance and Performance' on Thursday 25 April 2013, given by Dr John Freedman (writer, translator, critic, and scholar of Russian theatre)
Political resistance and social commentary are deeply ingrained in the Russian theatre tradition. Rarely, however, have they been as open and obvious as in recent years. Throughout the Soviet period (and Imperial era) theatre artists "spoke the truth" by way of metaphor and implication. This tended to remain true even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when artists, who achieved new freedoms, were more intent on creating new kinds of art than on speaking about social ills. But in one of the biggest breaks with tradition in the history of Russian theatre, some writers, directors and actors are currently becoming extremely outspoken in their works. This discussion will focus on current developments, putting them into a historical context.

'Resistance and Gender' on Thursday 2 May 2013, given by Dr Olesya Khomeychuk, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

̽��ֱ��‘horrifying genius’ of Soviet totalitarianism and its ability to control and quell protest will be examined tonight by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum.

̽��ֱ��horrifying genius of Soviet communism - as conceived in the 1920s, perfected in the 1930s and then spread by force to Soviet-occupied Europe was the system's ability to get the silent majority in so many countries to play along without much protest.

Anne Applebaum

Newhouse Design

Russian Poster 38

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike

Out of the ashes of Empire

admin — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 09:27:36 +0000

Barack Obama’s resolution to kick off foreign policy for his second term with a tour of the Asia-Pacific region, at the end of 2012, was testimony not only to that area’s growing economic importance, but also to the increasing significance of its politics. East Asia, Southeast Asia and the disputed China Seas now comprise the theatre in which the world’s two superpowers meet. In the eyes of many, it is there that key decisions about supremacy, ideology – perhaps world politics as a whole – will, in future years, be made.

In the West, China’s rise is the subject of constant media analysis and it has almost become de rigueur to ask ourselves how well we really understand this new giant of the world stage. But as America begins to ‘pivot’ eastwards, by striking deals with China’s neighbours, perhaps it is as important to question how much we understand East Asia as a whole. Do we really know what drives the world view of South Korea, or Taiwan, for example? And given the growing importance of that theatre, how effective is our grasp of how these countries view one another?

Historically, the emergence (and re-emergence) of these nations after World War II is a surprisingly neglected topic. Many people are only vaguely aware that, until 1945, many parts of China, along with Taiwan, the Koreas and sections of Indochina, were at various times part of an expanding Japanese Empire that began in 1895. At its height, in 1942, this territory spanned 2.8 million square miles. Yet when two atomic bombs effectively ended the war in August 1945, the entire Empire disappeared, almost overnight.

In the wake of this collapse, new political entities appeared, but it was not always clear what the extent of their power was, or who managed which territory. “Before the Japanese Empire, nation states had not existed in East Asia the same way they had in Europe,” said Dr Barak Kushner, an historian based at the Department of East Asian Studies. ̽��ֱ��next decades would see millions of lives lost as competing forces sought to stamp their authority on parts of Japan’s former Imperial domain, with bitter conflicts in China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and spilling into Indochina, which later developed into the longer Vietnam War.

Post-war East Asian identities formed, then, not in the context of China’s rise, but Japan’s retreat. Historians, meanwhile, have tended to investigate this story from America’s viewpoint, not least because they lacked access to many first-hand sources that could tell the tale from an Asian perspective. Now that is beginning to change. Recent years have witnessed the declassification of numerous government and private archives. Even China recently opened up many of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs records up to 1965. For researchers, this is a golden opportunity to examine and understand what motivated and inspired the emergent powers of East Asia as they came into being.

Kushner is the Principal Investigator for a major new project which, over five years, will attempt to research that issue. Funded by the European Research Council, its title is ‘ ̽��ֱ��Dissolution of the Japanese Empire and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Postwar East Asia, 1945–1965’. Its main focus, however, will be the war crimes trials that took place in East Asia after the war, as the new administrations attempted to bring Japanese war criminals, and those people who were believed to have supported the Japanese regime, to justice.

̽��ֱ��records of those trials offer a perhaps unrivalled view of how political and legal authority was brokered. As these countries stepped out of the Imperial shadow, the trials became statements of whom they believed themselves to be as Chinese, Korean, or Taiwanese citizens, rather than subordinates of Japan.

This was not simply a matter of enfranchising former Imperial subjects, however. Ethnicity, let alone loyalty, in East Asia was exceptionally blurred. Millions of Japan’s own people remained in both Asia and the western Pacific. Their own stricken government did not want them back and many wanted to stay. In some countries, like China, where Chiang Kai-shek actively courted the Japanese to help him in the civil war, their expertise was still much in demand. Elsewhere, people who had for decades lived as Imperial subjects were, in the space of a few weeks, expected to abandon that way of life and all its symbols for something more ‘indigenous’. Many, not surprisingly, struggled to understand what that meant. Identity was flexible to say the least.

Against that backdrop, the trials began. “ ̽��ֱ��business of identifying who was in power and how a break with the past was to be achieved all came out in the trials,” Kushner said. “They were platforms from which the new authorities could make a statement about their emergent identities. That was not an issue that the Americans, conducting trials in Japan itself, had to worry about; for them identity was a moot point.”

For this reason, the project will not look at the US-backed ‘Tokyo Trial’ that arraigned the ‘Class A’ war criminals who had prosecuted Japan’s war. Instead, it will focus on 5,700 class B/C criminals who were tried around East Asia. These were people who had allegedly committed crimes on the ground – rape, murder, illegal incarceration, the abuse of POWs, or general ‘crimes against humanity’. Tens of thousands more were tried for treason and collaboration. In both cases, the penalty, if found guilty, was often death.

̽��ֱ��process varied across the region. In China, 30,000 people were charged from 1945–1947 and 15,000 convicted for treason alone. Such was the zeal of the Kuomintang that in the end evidence collection was capped because the courts could not cope, and the government was more concerned about the civil war with the Communists.

In Korea, by contrast, tensions along the 38th parallel induced the southern administration to ignore collaborators altogether, and set about trying Communists from the start. In Taiwan, even identifying collaborators was coloured by the trials’ function as a stage for the Chinese Nationalists as they sought legitimacy.

Kushner believes that as this process went on, over almost 20 years, 1945 became less significant as a marker for the war’s end and the dawn of a new age. As well as the trials themselves, media coverage, films, literature, monuments and memorials reinforced specific views of what had happened under the Japanese as these cultural responses emerged from the judicial process. And in Japan itself, many people adopted the stance of part-chastened aggressors and part-victims of deeply partial tribunals, in what Kushner calls a “discordant swirl of public opinion.” Little wonder that he anticipates the project will lead not only to a powerful retelling of this chapter in East Asian history, but “policy-relevant findings regarding Asian regionalism” as well.

One reason that ideology and identity during this period remain understudied is that many historians have, understandably, focused on the details of war crimes themselves rather than on the subsequent trials. Accounts of the latter have also tended to dwell on specific and personal aspects of the process, such as individual memoirs, or localised grudge-matches that played out during the hearings. Kushner hopes to move beyond this, arguing that while personal recollections are important in the historical record, the legal process was an expression of broader, large-scale ambitions that offer a genuinely transnational perspective on East Asia after the war. “ ̽��ֱ��war crimes trials are the point at which the precedents for public attitudes thereafter are set up,” he added. “They provide a written record on which a number of post-war policies about authority would be based. ̽��ֱ��time is now ripe to investigate them, and start a new historical assessment from the inside.”

̽��ֱ��new identities and ideologies that emerged in East Asia after the fall of Japan’s Empire have rarely been studied. Now, as the region again becomes a major theatre in world politics, a new project aims to tell that history from the inside.

̽��ֱ��time is now ripe to start a new historical assessment from the inside

Barak Kushner

Center for Research Libraries in Chicago

Cartoon produced as state propaganda in China during the 1950s

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Cold War PR - spinning the ideological battlefront

sjr81 — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:56:45 +0000

Public Relations of the Cold War, organised by CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) sought to examine the ‘selling’ of ideologically motivated policies to domestic audiences during the Cold War – outside of the more commonly studied area of public diplomacy, which concerns a government reaching out to foreign audiences.

̽��ֱ��conference, which drew experts from the UK, Europe, and North America and featured keynote addresses from Professor Christopher Andrew, Official Historian of the Security Service, and Professor Odd Arne Westad, a leading expert in Cold War history, aimed to demonstrate how pervasive the battle to influence domestic public opinion became – on both sides of the Cold War divide.

̽��ֱ��scope of influence was massive, whether it was Executive Branch infighting about how to best present casualty reports to the public during the Vietnam War to models of Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) on sale in children’s toyshops. ̽��ֱ��conference also examined the under-recognized and -examined nuance in various means of disseminating PR.

American historian Hannah Higgin, one of the conference organisers, said: “In today’s PR-laden world, there are very important lessons to be learned by looking at how public relations influenced opinion, occupied governments and seeped into daily life and popular culture.

“And this wasn’t just practised by the USSR and USA. ̽��ֱ��conference has speakers discussing just how neutral Switzerland actually was, how Maoist thought and even the singing of ‘ ̽��ֱ��East is Red’ were among surgeon’s tools in China after the Sino-Soviet split, West Germany’s ‘reptile fund’ and how the work of George Orwell, via the medium of radio, was possibly as potent, if not a more potent, a weapon in the battle against Soviet totalitarianism as any CIA-funded or covertly-backed Cold War cultural enterprise abroad.

“This conference spurred a vital conversation about the channels and means by which governments ‘sold’ the Cold War to their own people - and how journalists, movie-makers, academics, researchers and the general public took up the ideological battle of their own volition.”

̽��ֱ��conference considered a range of controversial issues, including the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the USA’s reporting of combat casualties in both the Vietnam and Korean Wars, and dissected how official policy was transmitted through the mass media.

In the latter case, the media often challenged official casualty statistics, charging that they underreported the actual total. In response, the Pentagon increasingly provided more detailed figures, to the consternation of Truman and particularly Johnson.

In the Soviet Union, the Brezhnev-era of tightly controlled reporting of the 'events' in Afghanistan gave way to the gradual liberalisation of media policy. Under glasnost, the dynamics of public debate could not be controlled by official institutions anymore and contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

Also up for discussion was the selling of the Cold War via the media by America’s ‘Crusade for Freedom’. Developed by the CIA, the Crusade was one of the longest-running and most intensive campaigns which saturated the American media with anti-communist sentiment for two decades.

̽��ֱ��paper, presented by Dr Ken Osgood from the Colorado School of Mines, looked at how such sentiment seeped effortlessly into art, literature, movies, music and politics. ̽��ֱ��Crusade had a particularly wide reach because of the extensive support it received from public relations professionals and the Advertising Council, as well celebrities—including, in one advert, a young Ronald Reagan, corporations and the mass media.

Added Higgin: “America’s battle against Communism touched everyday life through overt and covert means. Whether it was through ‘duck and cover’ (the famous public safety campaign) or Edward R Murrow, one of America’s most respected journalists, becoming the Director of the United States Information Agency in 1961, American culture was filled with subtle and not so subtle messages about how high the ideological stakes were.

“ ̽��ֱ��PR aspect of the Cold War has not been discussed in great depth before. Often domestic and foreign realms of history are studied in relative isolation. Further, people were living with Cold War PR until relatively recently. Now there is some historical distance. We need to understand more about what constitutes domestic PR, how it was—and is—disseminated, and how it was used as means of uniting—or trying to unite—the masses to a common purpose, and when and whether it is good, bad, or something else, for society.”

̽��ֱ��conference was funded by CRASSH as well as by the International History Dept at LSE and the History Faculty at Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��conveners of the conference were PhD students Hannah Higgin (History, Cambridge), Martin Albers (History, Cambridge), Mark Miller (History, Cambridge), and Zhong Zhong Chen (LSE).

̽��ֱ��persuasive powers of Cold War PR, until now little recognised or discussed, was the subject of a three-day conference at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��.

This conference spurred a vital conversation about the channels and means by which governments ‘sold’ the Cold War to their own people - and how journalists, movie-makers, academics, researchers and the general public took up the ideological battle of their own volition.

Hannah Higgin

Image courtesy of X-Ray Delta One via Flickr

American toys for American boys and girls

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes