Download or read book Godless Communists written by William B. Husband and published by . This book was released on 2002-09 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Godless Communists" offers a fresh interpretation of early Soviet efforts to create an atheistic, scientific society. Husband shows that religion, contrary to Bolshevik assertions, was not merely an expression of gullibility and ignorance but a firmly entrenched system for ordering family and community relationships. The Bolsheviks' efforts to abolish the Church failed because they underestimated how tightly religious beliefs were woven into the fabric of the Russians' daily lives. Exploring the confrontation between secularism and the lower classes' traditional beliefs, "Godless Communists" illustrates how developments between 1917 and 1932 shaped the attitudes toward religion and atheism that endure in Russia today.
Download or read book Storming the Heavens written by Daniel Peris and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A member of the first generation of scholars allowed access to formerly closed Soviet archives, Daniel Peris offers a new perspective on the Bolshevik regime's antireligious policy from 1917 until 1941. He focuses on the activities of the League of the Militant Godless, the organization founded by the regime in 1925 to spearhead its efforts to promote atheism and he presents the League's propaganda, activities, and personnel at both the central and the provincial levels. On the basis of his research in archives in rural Pskov and industrial Iaroslavl', as well as in the central party and state archives in Moscow, Peris emphasizes the transformation of the ideological agenda formulated in Moscow as it moved to its intended audience. Storming the Heavens places the League within the broader context of a Bolshevik political culture that often acted at cross purposes to undermine the regime's stated goals. The League's lack of success, argues Peris, reflects the bureaucratic orientation of Bolshevik political culture, particularly in how it pursued the radical social vision of 1917. His book provides a framework for undertanding secularization in revolutionary contexts as well as contributing to the on-going reassessments of the Bolshevik era.
Download or read book Communism written by and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book 100 Things You Should Know about Communism and Religion written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities and published by . This book was released on 1948 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Plot to Kill God written by Paul Froese and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-08-06 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Froese explores the nature of religious faith in a provocative examination of the most massive atheism campaign in human history. That campaign occurred after the 1917 Russian Revolution, when Soviet plans for a new Marxist utopia included the total eradication of all religion. Even though the Soviet Union's attempt to secularize its society was quite successful at crushing the institutional and ritual manifestations of religion, its leaders were surprised at the persistence of religious belief. Froese's account reveals how atheism, when taken to its extreme, can become as dogmatic and oppressive as any religious faith and illuminates the struggle for individual expression in the face of social repression.
Download or read book A Specter Haunting Europe written by Paul Hanebrink and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Masterful...An indispensable warning for our own time.” —Samuel Moyn “Magisterial...Covers this dark history with insight and skill...A major intervention into our understanding of 20th-century Europe and the lessons we ought to take away from its history.” —The Nation For much of the last century, Europe was haunted by a threat of its own imagining: Judeo-Bolshevism. The belief that Communism was a Jewish plot to destroy the nations of Europe took hold during the Russian Revolution and quickly spread. During World War II, fears of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy were fanned by the fascists and sparked a genocide. But the myth did not die with the end of Nazi Germany. A Specter Haunting Europe shows that this paranoid fantasy persists today in the toxic politics of revitalized right-wing nationalism. “It is both salutary and depressing to be reminded of how enduring the trope of an exploitative global Jewish conspiracy against pure, humble, and selfless nationalists really is...A century after the end of the first world war, we have, it seems, learned very little.” —Mark Mazower, Financial Times “From the start, the fantasy held that an alien element—the Jews—aimed to subvert the cultural values and national identities of Western societies...The writers, politicians, and shills whose poisonous ideas he exhumes have many contemporary admirers.” —Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs
Download or read book Godless Utopia written by Roland Elliott Brown and published by Fuel Publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the early Soviet atheist magazines Godless and Godless atthe Machine, and postwar posters by Communist Party publishers, the authorpresents an unsettling tour of atheist ideology in the USSR.
Download or read book The Spiritual Industrial Complex written by Jonathan P. Herzog and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-05 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his farewell address, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the nation of the perils of the military-industrial complex. But as Jonathan Herzog shows in this insightful history, Eisenhower had spent his presidency contributing to another, lesser known, Cold War collaboration: the spiritual-industrial complex. This fascinating volume shows that American leaders in the early Cold War years considered the conflict to be profoundly religious; they saw Communism not only as godless but also as a sinister form of religion. Fighting faith with faith, they deliberately used religious beliefs and institutions as part of the plan to defeat the Soviet enemy. Herzog offers an illuminating account of the resultant spiritual-industrial complex, chronicling the rhetoric, the programs, and the policies that became its hallmarks. He shows that well-known actions like the addition of the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance were a small part of a much larger and relatively unexplored program that promoted religion nationwide. Herzog shows how these efforts played out in areas of American life both predictable and unexpected--from pulpits and presidential appeals to national faith drives, military training barracks, public school classrooms, and Hollywood epics. Millions of Americans were bombarded with the message that the religious could not be Communists, just a short step from the all-too-common conclusion that the irreligious could not be true Americans. Though the spiritual-industrial complex declined in the 1960s, its statutes, monuments, and sentiments live on as bulwarks against secularism and as reminders that the nation rests upon the groundwork of religious faith. They continue to serve as valuable allies for those defending the place of religion in American life.
Download or read book Values and Identities in Europe written by Michael J. Breen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contrary to what is suggested in media and popular discourses, Europe is neither a monolithic entity nor simply a collection of nation states. It is, rather, a union of millions of individuals who differ from one another in a variety of ways while also sharing many characteristics associated with their ethnic, social, political, economic, religious or national characteristics. This book explores differences and similarities that exist in attitudes, beliefs and opinions on a range of issues across Europe. Drawing on the extensive data of the European Social Survey, it presents insightful analyses of social attitudes, organised around the themes of religious identity, political identity, family identity and social identity, together with a section on methodological issues. A collection of rigorously analysed studies on national, comparative and pan-European levels, Values and Identities in Europe offers insight into the heart and soul of Europe at a time of unprecedented change. As such, it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in social attitudes, social change in Europe, demographics and survey methods.
Download or read book Raised under Stalin written by Seth Bernstein and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Raised under Stalin, Seth Bernstein shows how Stalin’s regime provided young people with opportunities as members of the Young Communist League or Komsomol even as it surrounded them with violence, shaping socialist youth culture and socialism more broadly through the threat and experience of war. Informed by declassified materials from post-Soviet archives, as well as films, memoirs, and diaries by and about youth, Raised under Stalin explains the divided status of youth for the Bolsheviks: they were the "new people" who would someday build communism, the potential soldiers who would defend the USSR, and the hooligans who might undermine it from within. Bernstein explains how, although Soviet revolutionary youth culture began as the preserve of proletarian activists, the Komsomol transformed under Stalin to become a mass organization of moral education; youth became the targets of state repression even as Stalin’s regime offered them the opportunity to participate in political culture. Raised under Stalin follows Stalinist youth into their ultimate test, World War II. Even as the war against Germany decimated the ranks of Young Communists, Bernstein finds evidence that it cemented Stalinist youth culture as a core part of socialism.
Download or read book Atheist Secularism and its Discontents written by T. Ngo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Atheist Secularism and Its Discontents takes a comparative approach to understanding religion under communism, arguing that communism was integral to the global experience of secularism. Bringing together leading researchers whose work spans the Eurasian continent, it shows that appropriating religion was central to Communist political practices.
Download or read book Storming the Heavens written by Daniel Peris and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Lost World of Socialists at Europe s Margins written by Maria Todorova and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maria Todorova's book is devoted to the 'golden age' of the socialist idea, broadly surveying the period in and around the time of the Second International. It critically examines the promise for an alternative socialist utopia from 1870 to the 1920s. Todorova brings in the experience of the periphery in a comparative context in the belief that the margins can often elucidate better the character of a phenomenon, and de-provincialize it from essentialist notions. In doing so, The Lost World of Socialists at Europe's Margins moves beyond the traditional historiographical emphasis on ideology by looking at different intersections or entanglements of spaces, generations, genders, ideas and feelings, and different flows of historical time. The study provides a social and cultural history of early socialism in Eastern Europe with an emphasis on Bulgaria, arguably the country with the earliest and strongest socialist movement in Southeast Europe, and one that had a unique relationship to both German and Russian social democracy. Based on a rich prosopographical database of around 3500 biographies of people born in the 19th century, the book addresses the interplay of several generations of leftists, looking at the specifics of how ideas were generated, received, transferred and transformed. Finally, the work investigates the intersection between subjectivity and memory as reflected in a unique cache of archival materials containing over 4000 documentary sources including diaries, oral interviews, and unpublished memoirs. A microhistorical approach to this material allows the reconstruction of 'structures of feeling' that inspired an exceptional group of individuals.
Download or read book The Northeast Question written by Pradip Phanjoubam and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the idea, psychology and political geography of Northeast India as forged by two interrelated but autonomous meta-narratives. First, the politics of conflict inherent in, and therefore predetermined by physical geography, and second, the larger geopolitics that was unfolding during the colonial period. Unravelling the history behind the turmoil engulfing Northeast India, the study contends that certain geographies — most pertinently fertile river valleys and surrounding mountains which feed the rivers — are integral to nature and any effort to disrupt this cohesion will result in conflict. It comprehensively traces the geopolitics of the region since colonial era — in particular the Great Game; the politics that went into the making of the McMahon Line, the Radcliffe Line and the Pemberton Line; the region’s relations with its international neighbours (China, Bhutan, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Nepal); as well as the issue of many formerly non-state-bearing populations awakening to the reality of the modern state. Lucid and analytical, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of Northeast India, modern Indian history, international relations, defence and strategic studies, and political science.
Download or read book And God Created Lenin written by Paul Gabel and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-10-04 with total page 627 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bookexamines in depth the conflict between Lenin''s logic-driven efforts to stamp out religion and the churches'' passionate attempts to save themselves from obliteration. It looks at both sides objectively and admits that they both presented strong cases. In this thoroughly researched yet accessible study, historian Paul Gabel offers a new understanding of the only effort in world history to upset the universality of religion. Besides the main conflict between the Russian Orthodox Church and the atheist state, Gabel also considers the tensions that this campaign against religion caused within the Communist Party. In addition, he discusses the bitter hatred dividing the Orthodox factions that refused cooperation with the government from those that tried to adapt the church to communism. Was the failure of Soviet communism to eradicate religion simply a matter of practical miscalculation, or was this effort, in light of the persistence of religion throughout history, ultimately unrealistic and doomed from the start? This is the key question that Gabel''s fascinating, insightful narrative attempts to answer.
Download or read book Stalinism written by Alter L. Litvin and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, the fruit of co operation between a British and Russian historian, seeks to review comparatively the progress made in recent years, largely thanks to the opening of the Russian archives, in enlarging our understanding of Stalin and
Download or read book Disbelief 101 written by S. C. Hitchcock and published by See Sharp Press. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Filled with wit, humor, and clear metaphor, this exploration into atheism is written specifically for young adults, though any adult interested in learning more about atheism will find value within. Not just focused on atheism, this crash course in logical thinking addresses the issues of indoctrination, whether it be religious, political, or commercial, and makes the case that morality is created through reasoning and logic, not through divine communication. Many hot topics are touched upon, such as traditional arguments for God's existence, the relationship of evolution and religious belief, the incompatible nature of science and religion, and the harmfulness of both Christianity and Islam.
