Search Results

This chapter looks at the most successful effort to build an alliance of the kind described in the previous chapter: the anti-fascist alliance built by Jawaharlal Nehru and parts of the Labour left, and the Communist Party of Great Britain, in the late 1930s. Nehru's greater success in alliance-building in Britain is analysed and explained, and the organizational consequences of his approach — in particular the growing strength of V. K. Krishna Menon's India League, and the anti-fascist agreement co-sponsored by Stafford Cripps in 1938 — are traced. The chapter goes on to examine and explain the difficulties Nehru encountered in delivering the Indian side of the bargain in the early years of the Second World War, the failure of the Cripps Mission in 1942, and the consequent fragmentation of metropolitan anti-imperialism.

This chapter traces Soviet cultural diplomacy through three radically divergent periods: the mid-1930s height of the Popular Front, the Great Terror and show trials from 1936–38, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939–41. Although the Soviet system for receiving foreigners that had emerged in the 1920s was not fundamentally reworked in the 1930s, prewar Stalinism was marked by sea-shifts in ideology and attitudes toward the outside world. The first was the rise of a “superiority complex,” in which virtually everything Soviet was deemed the best in the world, at least officially. The second was a decisive internal Soviet tilt, underway already at the height of European anti-fascism in the mid-1930s, away from the optimistic Soviet quest to engage and dominate Western cultural politics in favor of “vigilance,” ideological xenophobia, and the hunt for hidden enemies. During the Great Terror, international contacts that had previously brought prestige to Soviet cultural mediators suddenly became the grounds for mass physical annihilation as VOKS and Soviet international organizations were decimated; during the Pact period of Soviet cultural diplomacy, reduced to a shadow of its former self, became largely a matter of sending symbolic signals to the Nazis.

This chapter discusses the early exile literature that Zur Mühlen published after arriving in Austria, and how she continued to experiment with content and form in her search for a balance between political instruction and entertainment that publishers would accept in that political climate. Contrary to much secondary literature, it contends that Unsere Töchter, die Nazinen is more than just a flawed Zeitroman, and examines the ways in which she alerted her readership to the dangers of the Third Reich and tried to promote resistance. Her humorous novel, Nora hat eine famose Idee shows how she continued to appropriate popular genres for a political purpose, and demonstrates the limitations of the Humoreske for this use. Ein Jahr im Schatten uses many familiar elements from her Mädchenliteratur to discuss the rise of fascism in Germany from an Austrian perspective. In these three early exile novels, her politics are defined by anti-fascism and by an increasing move from Communism towards the Catholic Left. In advocating resistance she continued to champion collective action, but this was founded on basic human decency and individual responsibility, rather than Communist politics.

This chapter discusses how intelligence was central to the formulation of the land and air rearmament programmes adopted by the Popular Front government in the late 1936. This decision was triggered by the support generated by the anti-Fascism in order to come up with a defence expenditure from the traditionally pacifist left.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt so dominated the American political scene from the fall of 1932 through the end of the Depression decade that historians refer to these years as the Age of Roosevelt. He won the 1932 presidential race in one of the greatest landslides in American history, trouncing Hoover—who the electorate blamed for the Depression—by almost seven million votes. FDR then presided over the extensive New Deal recovery, relief and reform programs, whose popularity helped keep him in the White House longer than any other president. But Roosevelt’s great popularity with the general public did not initially carry over onto college campuses. During most of his first term, neither FDR nor his major programs captured the imagination of the American student body. Roosevelt’s presidential campaign in 1932 failed to generate much excitement on campus, and from 1933 to 1935 the cause that most inspired college youth was world peace rather than the New Deal. If the choice had been left to college students, the straw polls show, Franklin Roosevelt would not have been elected president in 1932. FDR ran far behind Hoover in the campus polls taken shortly before election day. Only 31 percent of the collegians polled supported Roosevelt, while 49 percent endorsed Hoover. Roosevelt even did badly on campuses where he had direct, personal connections. At Harvard, FDR’s alma mater, the Democratic candidate lost to Hoover by a margin of more than three to one: 1211 students there voted for Hoover, while only 395 cast their ballots for Roosevelt. Support for Roosevelt was also weak among undergraduates at Columbia University, despite the fact that several of his key advisers, popularly known as the New Deal “brain trust,” including Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Adolph Berle, were Columbia professors. With almost two thirds of Columbia undergraduates voting, FDR attracted only 221 votes, losing not only to Hoover, who drew 307 votes, but also to Norman Thomas, the socialist candidate, who won 421 votes. This enabled Columbia socialists to boast at the Norman Thomas rally at Madison Square Garden that “Columbia Professors May Write Roosevelt’s Speeches But Columbia Students Vote For Thomas.”

Prior to Foucault’s articulation of anti-fascism as the Deleuzo-Guattarian ethical project, Deleuze described his work as a contestation of the “dogmatic” or “moral” image of thought. For this contestation, Deleuze turned in Difference and Repetition to a Kantian notion of critique as the examination of the limits and powers of the faculties. Deleuze’s theory of faculties is a theory of how the subject is produced as an identity through active syntheses that are themselves the produce of passive syntheses. The critical analysis Deleuze undertakes in Difference and Repetition builds on the analysis of habit formation in the process of subjectivation insofar as it offers a method of analysis that is itself disruptive of habits and identities. Deleuze’s “immanent critique” describes in facultative passive synthesis not only the genesis of experience from sensibility, but the breakdown of experience in the violence of encounter. Critique reveals that the movement from the empirical to the transcendental or “heautonomous” forms of the faculties, which happens via an internalization of the violence of encounters that rupture ordinary experience, can be cultivated toward the ends of moving beyond the constraints of rule-governed, limited ways of thinking through the practice of critique itself.

The United States declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941 following the attack on Pearl Harbor. The controversy that raged in America between partisans and adversaries of the country's participation in World War II was rendered more complex by the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and attitudes within America to Nazi Germany. If Americans were united from 1941–1945, films made in the period 1938–1940 showed that anti-fascism brought together filmmakers of very different political opinions. Before discussing certain war films, this chapter describes an event that occurred in September 1941 whose repercussions were revelatory of the political climate in America and were to return, in an inverted form, once the war was over: the Senate Sub-Committee War Films Hearings. The Sub-Committee was created at the request of two senators, the Democrat Burton Wheeler and the Republican Gerald Nye, to investigate what they saw as blatant propaganda films put out by Hollywood to support Franklin D. Roosevelt's foreign policy and create a situation where the American public would support America entering the war.

The ultra-conservative newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst published a doggerel which evokes the twin assumptions destined to become articles of faith for the Red-baiting Right after World War II: the equation of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal with Communism with the notion that the New Deal's radical supporters were acting at the Soviet Union's behest. Those who continue to justify witch-hunting are embarrassed by the prevalence of anti-Semitism amongst the Red-baiters of the period. It is necessary to address the question of fascism and anti-fascism in order to understand why Communists lost support after World War II. The Hollywood Reds did represent an immense danger, but not to American democracy. What they challenged was the status quo, the economic order, the power and profits of the few, worse: the ideological notion of American hegemony as going without saying. And this challenge started before the opposition to racism and fascism became the rallying cry of the forces of progress.

This chapter examines Venice's experience during World War II, the alliance between Italy and Germany during the war, and the restoration of peace in the city by 1948. It considers the impact of the war on Venice, particularly in the fields of art, architecture, leisure, and tourism. It also discusses politics in the city, including the rise of anti-Fascism. Finally, it describes the conditions in Venice in the post-war period, citing the establishment of welfare states as payment to the people for toppling Nazism and Fascism.

This chapter focuses on the theme of death in Venice in the years after World War II. Venice's official population in 1951 stood at 174,808. A decade later, the tally in old Venice had dropped to 137,150. By 2001 there were only 65,695 people in Venetia. After ten years, the urban population was down to 59,635. The chapter first describes the issues and concerns that preoccupied Venice during the first years of peace, including those relating to anti-Fascism, the Communist Party, and the social conditions that sustained it, tourism, and employment. It then considers the Christian Democrats who ruled the city, as well as city politics involving the Catholic Church. It also discusses the five-point plan proposed for Venice aimed at restoring damaged artworks and protecting the city from man-made pollutants, among other environmental initiatives.

This chapter uses oral history to uncover the range of political models that activists drew upon as inspiration for their own struggles. It examines the extent to which the tradition of the anti-fascist struggle of the 1930s and 1940s remained, or regained, importance in the socialization of activists of this generation, and ways in which new exemplars drawn from the ‘Third World’ revolutions against imperialism and colonialism in Latin America, Africa or Asia supplanted earlier models. Testimony is drawn from southern European dictatorships, the communist bloc and democratic west of Europe to compare ways in which, in very different political contexts, anti-fascism and anti-imperialism were harnessed to motivate and legitimate revolt.

This book has challenged various notions about Venice, such as the claim that the Italian city's history offers little with which modern-day visitors can identify personally, or that its history is dead just like Venice itself. It has argued that Venice actually boasts copious histories, many of which are modern, and that the city has been subject to change like any other place. In other words, time has not stood still in Venice. From the years after 1866, when Venetians learned to live under the rule of liberalism, to the glamour and squalor of the belle époque, Venice has actually experienced the full impact of contemporary history. The book has also chronicled Venice's experience with totalitarianism through the years of Benito Mussolini's rule, as well as the disputes involving cosmopolitanism and nationalism, Fascism and anti-Fascism, and between particularists and defenders of the Catholic Church.

This chapter discusses Edward Palmer Thompson's family. The British intelligentsia did not enjoy a great deal of institutional and cultural autonomy. The incompleteness of Edward John's radicalisation was reflected in the books he wrote during the 1920s. He showed his ambivalent, conflicted attitude towards Britain and its Empire by rejecting the political positions of the Quit India movement established by his friends Nehru and Gandhi. Both Frank and Edward Palmer Thompson were powerfully influenced by their parents' interests and attitudes. They soon came to share their father's great love of literature, as well as some of his political views. The chapter then draws together some of the threads of the stories of Edward John and Frank Thompson, and relates them to the story of Edward Palmer Thompson. Thompson's historiographical positions ultimately defer to moral and political arguments which he pursued outside as well as inside the discipline of history.

In Italy, as in France, the issue of state responsibility for the persecution of Jews was a key theme in debates surrounding commemoration in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In Italy these debates were strongly influenced by a broader ongoing national discussion about the legacies of Fascism and anti-Fascism. As this chapter explores, Holocaust commemoration was made politically viable in the Italian case through a consciously dehistoricized and depoliticized interpretation of the Fascist-era and wartime persecution of Italy's Jews. The Day of Memory, which became Italy's official Holocaust commemoration in 2000, was often used to serve the needs of competing political agendas, and it thus was, and remains, an event for which a superficial consensus masks deep divides at the level of practice. As in France, the figure of the rescuer assumed a central place in the new commemoration, but its symbolism was sometimes used as a tool of partisan politics.

This chapter examines the role of German anti-fascism in the promotion of communism. It suggests that while Germany in the 1960s was undoubtedly the most anti-Nazi country in the world, official statistics reveal that there were about thirteen thousand trained communist agents in West Germany with an annual budget of 120 million marks and more than thirty crypto-communist organizations that operated openly under various fronts. It also argues that the so-called anti-fascism in every country was under the control of international communism which used it for its own objectives.

Chapter two analyzes developments between 1947 and 1949 when the Cold War became firmly entrenched in Italy as evidenced by the exclusion of the communists and socialists from Christian Democratic Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi’s cabinet, Italy’s contentious membership in NATO, and the Pope’s excommunication of communists and socialists. It argues that despite a call for the return of women behind domestic walls, the Italian women’s associations actually stepped up their mobilization efforts and worked tirelessly to design and implement social service programs for housewives and working women and to participate in the great European and international debates that would affect Italy’s political and economic future. To place the Italian women’s associations in their international context, the chapter examines the CIF’s contribution to the founding of the international Catholic organization the World Movement of Mothers in 1947 and the development of the UDI’s role within the Women’s International Democratic Federation.