Download or read book Totalitarian Communication written by Kirill Postoutenko and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Totalitarianism has been an object of extensive communicative research since its heyday: already in the late 1930s, such major cultural figures as George Orwell or Hannah Arendt were busy describing the visual and verbal languages of Stalinism and Nazism. After the war, many fashionable trends in social sciences and humanities (ranging from Begriffsgeschichte and Ego-Documentology to Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis) were called upon to continue this media-centered trend in the face of increasing political determination of the burgeoing field. Nevertheless, the integration of historical, sociological and linguistic knowledge about totalitarian society on a firm factual ground remains the thing of the future. This book is the first step in this direction. By using history and theory of communication as an integrative methodological device, it reaches out to those properties of totalitarian society which appear to be beyond the grasp of specific disciplines. Furthermore, this functional approach allows to extend the analysis of communicative practices commonly associated with fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, to other locations (France, United States of America and Great Britain in the 1930s) or historical contexts (post-Soviet developments in Russia or Kyrgyzstan). This, in turn, leads to the revaluation of the very term »totalitarian«: no longer an ideological label or a stock attribute of historical narration, it gets a life of its own, defining a specific constellation of hierarchies, codes and networks within a given society.

Download or read book Media and Communication in the Soviet Union 1917 1953 written by Kirill Postoutenko and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a systematic account of media and communication development in Soviet society from the October Revolution to the death of Stalin. Summarizing earlier research and drawing upon previously unpublished archival materials, it covers the main aspects of public and private interaction in the Soviet Union, from public broadcast to kitchen gossip. The first part of the volume covers visual, auditory and tactile channels, such as posters, maps and monuments. The second deals with media, featuring public gatherings, personal letters, telegraph, telephone, film and radio. The concluding part surveys major boundaries and flows structuring the Soviet communicate environment. The broad scope of contributions to this volume will be of great interest to students and researchers working on the Soviet Union, and twentieth-century media and communication more broadly.

Download or read book The Invisible Shining written by Bal zs Apor and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a detailed analysis of the construction, reception and eventual decline of the cult of the Hungarian Communist Party Secretary, M ty s R kosi, one of the most striking examples of orchestrated adulation in the Soviet bloc. While his cult never approached the magnitude of that of Stalin, R kosi?s ambition to outshine the other ?best disciples? and become the best of the best was manifest in his diligence in promoting a Soviet-type following in Hungary. The main argument of Bal zs Apor is that the cult of personality is not just a curious aspect of communist dictatorship, it is an essential element of it. The monograph is primarily concerned with techniques and methods of cult construction, as well as the role various institutions played in the creation of mythical representations of political fi gures. Separate chapters present visual and non-visual methods of cult construction. The author engages with a wider international literature on Stalinist cults in an impressive manner. Apor uses the case of R kosi to explore how personality cults are created, how such cults are perceived, and how they are eventually unmade. The book addresses the success?generally questionable?of such projects, as well as their uncomfortable legacies.

Download or read book Asymmetrical Concepts after Reinhart Koselleck written by Kay Junge and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the asymmetrical concepts have been well-known to scholars across the social sciences and humanities, their role in structuring the human world has never been an object of detailed research. 35 years ago Reinhart Koselleck sketched out the historical semantics of the oppositions »Hellenes«/»barbarians«, »Christians«/»pagans« and »Übermensch«/»Untermensch«, but his insights, though eagerly cited, have been rarely developed in a systematic fashion. This volume intends to remedy this situation by bringing together a small number of scholars at the crossroads of history, sociology, literary criticism, linguistics, political science and international studies in order to elaborate on Koselleck's notion of asymmetric counter-concepts and adapt it to current research needs.

Download or read book Global Journalism written by Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-09 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a truly comprehensive overview of international journalism and global news reporting in the digital age, this new introductory textbook surveys the full variety of contexts that journalists around the world operate in; the challenges and pressures they face; their journalistic practices; and the wider theoretical and social implications. Analysing key scholarship in the field, Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova and Michael Bromley explore not just journalism as a single entity, but equally the multiple cultures which host journalism and the variety of journalisms which exist across the world. Clear and accessible, this is an ideal companion for undergraduate and postgraduate students of international and global journalism on journalism or media and communication studies degrees.

Download or read book State and Society in Communist Czechoslovakia written by Roman Krakovsky and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-05-30 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across central and eastern Europe after World War II, the newly established communist regimes promised a drastic social revolution that would transform the world at great pace and pave the way to a socialist future. Although many aspects of this utopian project are well known - such as fast-paced industrialisation, collectivisation and urbanisation - the regimes even sought to transform the ways in which their citizens interacted with each other and the world around them. Using a unique analytical model based on an amalgam of anthropology, sociology, history and extensive archival research, award-winning scholar Roman Krakovsky here considers the Czechoslovakian attempt to 'reinvent the world' - 'time' and 'space' included - in this all-encompassing way. Ranging from WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall, his innovative analysis variously considers the impact of Stakhanovism, the impossible-to-achieve production targets intended to assert socialism's future potential; the attempt to replace Sunday's Christian attributes with socialist ones; and the profound changes brought about to the public and private spheres, including the culture of informing and the ways this was circumvented. Across a wide range of case studies Krakovsky demonstrates both the far-reaching extent of the communist vision and the inherent flaws and contradictions that gradually destabilised it. This in-depth perspective is vital reading for all scholars of twentieth century history and politics.

Download or read book The Quest for an Ideal Youth in Putin s Russia II written by Jussi Lassila and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The so-called Democratic Antifascist Youth Movement “Nashi” represents a crucial case of a post-Orange government-organized formation whose values have broad support in Russian society. Yet, at the same time, in view of the movement’s public scandals, Nashi was also a phenomenon bringing to the fore public reluctance to accept all implications of Putin’s new system. The Russian people’s relatively widespread support for his patriotic policies and conservative values has been evident, but this support is not easily extended to political actors aligned to these values. Using discourse analysis, this book identifies socio-political factors that created obstacles to Nashi’s communication strategies. The book understands Nashi as anticipating an “ideal youth” within the framework of official national identity politics and as an attempt to mobilize largely apolitical youngsters in support of the powers that be. It demonstrates how Nashi’s ambivalent societal position was the result of a failed attempt to reconcile incompatible communicative demands of the authoritarian state and apolitical young.

Download or read book Contesting Torture written by Rory Cox and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-10-27 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume seeks to contest prevailing assumptions about torture and to consider why, despite its illegality, torture continues to be widely employed and misrepresented. The resurgence of torture and public justifications of it led to the central questions that this inter-disciplinary volume seeks to address: How is it possible for torture to be practiced when it is legally prohibited? What kinds of moves do agents make that render torture palatable? Why do so many ignore the evidence that torture is ineffective as an intelligence-gathering technique? Who are the victims of torture? The various contributors in the book look to history, the practices of interrogators, artistic representations, documentary films, rendition policies, political campaigns, diplomatic discourses, international legal rules, refugee practices, and cultural representations of death and the body to illuminate how torture becomes permissible. Building from the personal to the communal, and from the practical to the conceptual, the volume reflects the multivalence of torture itself. This framework enables readers at all levels better appreciate how and why torture is open to so many interpretations and applications. This book will be of much interest to students of International Relations, Security Studies, Terrorism Studies, Ethics, and International Legal Studies.

Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Communist Yugoslavism written by Tomaž Ivešić and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-05 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rise and Fall of Communist Yugoslavism: Soft Nation‐Building in Yugoslavia examines how the Communist Party of Yugoslavia incorporated the idea of a Yugoslav nation into its ideology and created the Yugoslav Soft Nation‐Building project after the Second World War. With an innovative approach of researching three levels of research (from above, from below and from the viewpoint of interethnic relations) the book brings forward an original concept of soft nation‐building, with a focus on the Slovenian‐Yugoslav dimension. Drawing on archival sources from Ljubljana, Zagreb, Sarajevo and Belgrade, the author argues that after the abandonment of the Yugoslav national idea, two Yugoslavisms were created in the mid‐1960s. State‐based socialist Yugoslavism was propagated by the Party and had no ethnic connotations, only a small proportion of the population identified themselves as “Yugoslav” in national terms. The created vacuum was filled by old national identities. The book is of interest to specialists and advanced students of cultural and intellectual history, studies of nationalism, but also history of science and institutions and the history of everyday life. The book aims to appeal to scholars of Balkan, South‐East European and Yugoslav history.

Download or read book Totalitarianisms The Closed Society and Its Friends A History of Crossed Languages written by Juan Francisco Fuentes and published by Ed. Universidad de Cantabria. This book was released on 2019-04-29 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is striking that the main political concept coined by the century of democracy has been totalitarianism. Since its birth in fascist Italy in the 1920s, the term has made a long journey throughout different countries and periods. After representing the fascination for dictatorships during the interwar years, totalitarianism became a key concept of the ‘war of words’ waged between democracy and communism until the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was ‘a hot word for a Cold War’, as termed by the author of this book to convey the importance of this contest of crossed languages, which also included images, symbols and other forms of ‘senso-propaganda’. The Closed Society and Its Friendshighlights the role played by language in the building of a dystopian civilization conceived as an alternative to the open society created by liberalism. The book analyses the dimension of totalitarianisms, from fascism and Nazism to communism, as political religions with some common features, such as the cult of personality and the conception of society as a community of believers. This fascinating essay on the dark side of the 20th century ends with a disturbing epilogue: ‘Is totalitarianism back?’

Download or read book Performing Peace and Friendship written by Pia Koivunen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-11-07 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing Peace and Friendship tells the story of how the Soviet Union succeeded in utilizing the World Festival of Youth and Students in its cultural diplomacy from late Stalinism through the early Khrushchev period. Pia Koivunen discusses the evolution of the youth gathering into a Soviet cultural product starting from the first festival held in Prague in 1947 and ending with the Moscow 1957 gathering, the latter becoming one of the most frequently referred moments of Khrushchev’s Thaw. By combining both institutional and grass-roots’ perspectives, the book widens our understanding of what Soviet cultural diplomacy was in practice, re-evaluates the agency of young people and provides new insights into the Soviet role in the cultural Cold War. Koivunen argues that rather than simply being orchestrated rallies by the Kremlin bureaucrats, the World Youth Festivals also became significant spaces of transnational encounters for young people, who found ways to employ the event for overcoming the various restrictions and boundaries of the Cold War world.

Download or read book The Configuration of the Spanish Public Sphere written by David Jiménez Torres and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the explosion of the indignados movement beginning in 2011, there has been a renewed interest in the concept of the “public sphere” in a Spanish context: how it relates to society and to political power, and how it has evolved over the centuries. The Configuration of the Spanish Public Sphere brings together contributions from leading scholars in Hispanic studies, across a wide range of disciplines, to investigate various aspects of these processes, offering a long-term, panoramic view that touches on one of the most urgent issues for contemporary European societies.

Download or read book Analysing Fascist Discourse written by Ruth Wodak and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past 80 years, there has been disagreement about how to classify or define fascism. Through discourse analysis examples of fascism in Europe in the 20th century and through to today, this book reflects the range of these debates, and argues that a more context-sensitive approach is required.

Download or read book Photographing Mussolini written by Alessandra Antola Swan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering book offers the first account of the work of the photographers, both official and freelance, who contributed to the forging of Mussolini's image. It departs from the practice of using photographs purely for illustration and places them instead at the centre of the analysis. Throughout the 1930s photographs of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini were chosen with much care by the regime. They were deployed to highlight those physical traits - the piercing eyes, protruding jaw, shaved head - that were meant to evoke the Duce's strength, determination and innate sense of leadership in the mind of his contemporaries. The chapters in this volume explore the photographic image in the socio-political context of the time and shows how it was a significant contributor to the development of Italian mass culture between the two world wars.

Download or read book The Stalin Cult in East Germany and the Making of the Postwar Soviet Empire 1945 1961 written by Alexey Tikhomirov and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-03-28 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the construction, dissemination, and reception of the Stalin cult in East Germany from the end of World War II to the building of the Berlin Wall. By exporting Stalin’s cult to the Eastern bloc, Moscow aspired to symbolically unite the communist states in an imagined cult community pivoting around the Soviet leader. Based on Russian and German archives, this work analyzes the emergence of the Stalin cult’s transnational dimension. On one hand, it looks at how Soviet representations of power were transferred and adapted in the former “enemy’s” country. On the other hand, it reconstructs “spaces of agency” where different agents and generations interpreted, manipulated, and used the Stalin cult to negotiate social identities and everyday life. This study reveals both the dynamics of Stalinism as a political system after the Cold War began and the foundations of modern politics through mass mobilization, emotional bonding, and social engineering in Soviet-style societies. As an integral part of the global history of communism, this book opens up a comparative, entangled perspective on the ways in which veneration of Stalin and other nationalistic cults were established in socialist states across Europe and beyond.

Download or read book Ruler Personality Cults from Empires to Nation States and Beyond written by Kirill Postoutenko and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-13 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encompassing five continents and twenty centuries, this book puts ruler personality cults on the crossroads of disciplines rarely, if ever, juxtaposed before: among its authors are historians, linguists, media scholars, political scientists and communication sociologists from Europe, the United States and New Zealand. However, this breadth and versatility are not goals in themselves. Rather, they are the means to work out an integrated approach to personality cults, capable of overcoming both the dominance of much-discussed 20th century poster examples (Bolshevism-Nazism-Fascism) and the lack of interest in the related practices of leader adoration in religious and cultural contexts. Instead of reiterating the understandable but unfruitful fixation on rulers as the cults’ focal points, the authors focus on communicative patterns and interactional chains linking rulers with their subjects: in this light, the adoration of political figures is seen as a collective enterprise impossible without active, if often tacit, collaboration between rulers and their constituencies.

Download or read book The Power of the Powerless written by Vaclav Havel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Books of great political insight and novelty always outlive their time of birth and this reissued work, initially published in 1985, is no exception. Written shortly after the formation of Charter 77, the essays in this collection are among the most original and compelling pieces of political writing to have emerged from central and Eastern Europe during the whole of the post-war period. Václav Havel’s essay provides the title for the book. It was read by all the contributors who in turn responded to the many questions which Havel raises about the potential power of the powerless. The essays explain the anti-democratic features and limits of Soviet-type totalitarian systems of power. They discuss such concepts as ideology, democracy, civil liberty, law and the state from a perspective which is radically different from that of people living in liberal western democracies. The authors also discuss the prospects for democratic change under totalitarian conditions. Steven Lukes’ introduction provides an invaluable political and historical context for these writings. The authors represent a very broad spectrum of democratic opinion, including liberal, conservative and socialist.