scholarly journals The Committee for Cultural Freedom and the Roots of McCarthyism

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-52
Author(s):  
Gary B. Bullert
Keyword(s):  
2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 402-428
Author(s):  
Su Lin Lewis

Abstract In 1952, A. Philip Randolph, the head of America’s largest black union and a prominent civil rights campaigner, traveled to Japan and Burma funded by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. In Asia, he encountered socialists and trade unionists struggling to negotiate the fractious divides between communism and capitalism within postwar states. In Burma, in particular, Western powers, the Soviet bloc, and powerful Asian neighbors used propaganda, aid missions, and subsidized travel to offer competing visions of development while accusing each other of new forms of imperialism and foreign interference. In such an environment, a battle for hearts and minds within Asian labor movements constituted the front lines of the early years of the Cold War. Randolph’s journey shows us how Asian socialists and trade unionists responded to powerful foreign interests by articulating an early sense of non-alignment, forged in part through emerging Asian socialist networks, well before this was an official strategy. The Asian actors with whom Randolph interacted in Japan and Burma mirrored his own struggles as a socialist, a trade unionist, and a “railway man” while furthering his campaign for civil rights at home. This article uses Randolph’s journey to examine parallels and divergences between African-American and Asian socialists and trade unionists during the early Cold War, an age characterized by deepening splits in the politics of the Left.


2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Slater

It is a presumed opinion that gender and love mutually condition each other and that this presumption ought to be embraced by cultural norms, religion, human rights and the ethic of freedom. The notion of mutual conditioning presupposes a healthy and principled environment that facilitates the free dynamic interaction between gender and love. It is the purpose of this article to explore the outcomes of the gender revolution and the additional strands of complexities that it contributed to the human condition. Although feminism has created terminologies such as sex and gender, it is believed that these words have outlived their usefulness to make way for the present-day evolution towards a non-gendered idea of humanity. Gender diversity seeks mutuality, and true love accommodates multiplicity; hence, the interacting and intra-acting of gender and love inevitably come face-to-face with cultural, legal, social, religious and moral milieus that hamper or even contradict the concept of mutual conditioning. This article seeks to trace the evolution of gender within diverse cultural constructions created by new liberal living conditions, but which have not yet infiltrated the diverse cultural domains where gender remains an entity without cultural freedom and therefore undermines the process of mutual conditioning of gender and love. The idea of gender as transcending bodily sex forms part of an old theological and philosophical debate; it, however, resurfaces here while revisiting Aristotle’s idea of a non-gendered society or humanity. A degendered society implies a society that is free from dependence on gender, whereas a non-gendered humanity transcends gender divisions and associations, with its aspirations linked to the transcendence or consciousness of human nature. Love, in this sense, transcends all human dissections, and this article ascertains its capacity to mutually condition the diversity of gender and love.


Author(s):  
Barley Norton

This chapter traces the history of music censorship in Vietnam since 1954 with reference to a broad range of music genres. It discusses music censorship from 1954 to 1975, when Vietnam was divided into North and South. The tight ideological control established by the Vietnamese Communist Party in the North is compared with music movements linked to antiwar protests in the South. The chapter then examines the period of severe censorship following the end of the Vietnamese-American war in 1975 and considers how the cultural climate changed in the reform era after 1986. It highlights the limits of cultural freedom in the reform era and discusses how music censorship has become intertwined with concerns about the effects of globalization on morality and national identity. Finally, the chapter addresses the impact of technology since the late 1990s, paying particular attention to Vietnamese rap and the potential for musicians to use the Internet to bypass conventional systems of state censorship.


2019 ◽  
pp. 47-73
Author(s):  
Mahendra Pal Singh ◽  
Niraj Kumar

There are systems of law within the Indian jurisdiction that either do not rely on the state legal system at all or rely on it only partially. These include systems of religious personal law, tribal customary law, and other similar indigenous mechanisms of administering justice and settling disputes. The formal definition of law in India, along with constitutional provisions which guarantee religious and cultural freedom and allow for modes of self-governance, accommodates different legal systems with indigenous or traditional roots. Moreover, local and village bodies such as traditional or caste councils operate in independent India as well, further questioning the rhetoric of uniform law in India.


Tempo ◽  
1972 ◽  
pp. 15-18
Author(s):  
Colin Mason

The Paris Festival of Masterpieces of the 20th Century lasted throughout May, and few had time to see it all. Unlike many foreign festivals that spread themselves out over a similar period, it was crammed tight with good things throughout, with something of interest every night except Sundays from 30 April to 1 June. The third week was the climax of the festival, and in general the last two weeks were more exciting than the first two, which were apparently meant to draw the Parisian bourgeoisie, being devoted mainly to ballet by the New York City Ballet, and containing nothing in music worth a journey abroad except perhaps two performances by the Vienna Opera of Wozzeck, which is rapidly becoming as familiar as The Rite of Spring. In the last two weeks, the festival's so-called literary conferences on cultural freedom were held, and to give these the best possible chance of wide publicity, the organizers had cleverly saved up their musical trump cards until then, with what was virtually a Stravinsky-Bartók-Schoenberg week, Stravinsky himself conducting his two late symphonies and Oedipus Rex, with Cocteau as producer, designer, narrator (and of course librettist), followed in the last week by Billy Budd conducted by Britten, excerpts from Milhaud's setting of the Oresteia, and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-124
Author(s):  
Andrea Scionti

This article examines the nature and significance of the activities carried out in France and Italy by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), an international organization that was secretly funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to support anti-Communist intellectuals, including those on the left end of the political spectrum. These two West European countries, with their large and politically influential Communist parties, were central to the CCF's work in Europe. The organization's task was complicated by domestic concerns and traditions that forced local intellectuals to stress their autonomy from the CCF International Secretariat and its U.S. patrons. The article uses the cultural Cold War and the competing interpretations of anti-Communism and cultural freedom within the CCF as a lens to explore the limits of U.S. influence and persuasion among the intellectual classes of Europe. By repeatedly asserting their independence and agency, the French and Italian members of the CCF helped redefine the character and limits of U.S. cultural diplomacy.


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