Author: Nigel Copsey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317539370
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
In Post-War Britain cultural interventions were a feature of fascist parties and movements, just as they were in Europe. This book makes a new major contribution to existing scholarship which begins to discuss British fascism as a cultural phenomenon. A collection of essays from leading academics, this book uncovers how a cultural struggle lay at the heart of the hegemonic projects of all varieties of British fascism. Such a cultural struggle is enacted and reflected in the text and talk, music and literature of British fascism. Where other published works have examined the cultural visions of British fascism during the inter-war period, this book is the first to dedicate itself to detailed critical analysis of the post-war cultural landscapes of British fascism. Through discussions of cultural phenomena such as folk music, fashion and neo-nazi fiction, among others, Cultures of Post-War British Fascism builds a picture of Post-War Britain which emphasises the importance of understanding these politics with reference to their corresponding cultural output. This book is essential reading for undergraduates and postgraduates studying far right politics and British history.
Author: Ryan Shaffer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319596683
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
This book examines the domestic evolution and international connections of post-war fascists in the UK. It argues that post-war British fascism became transnational as the radicals increasingly exchanged ideas, money and culture with like-minded foreigners. Using interviews with key figures in several countries, this book traces the history of the National Front (NF) and British National Party (BNP), focusing on the political parties’ youth, music and international outreach. It explores how British fascism grew into an international movement, how fascist youth developed skinhead music as a conduit for their ideas, and how some of those key figures made international connections with people in Iraq, Libya, Syria and the United States. Moreover, it also draws from rare internal party documents, law enforcement records and membership lists to track foreign funding and the parties’ domestic electoral growth. For the first time, this book gained access to both the leadership and rank-and-file of the BNP and NF to explore its culture and international connections. In doing so, it shows the successes, failures and changes that have made British fascism a force in the international extremist subculture.
Author: Simon Reich
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501732153
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361
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Book Description
The West German "economic miracle," Simon Reich suggests, may be best understood as a result of the discriminatory economic policies of the Nazi regime. Reich contends that ideological and institutional characteristics originating under fascism were sustained despite Germany's return to democracy and heavily influenced the economic success of its automobile industry. By contrast, the liberal economic policies of the British state led in time to the decline of an industrial sector that in 1930 had closely resembled its German counterpart. Through detailed comparative histories of German and British automobile firms, Reich challenges traditional explanations of the divergent performances of the two nations' economies and sheds new light on the relationship between state policy and economic success in pre- and postwar Europe. Liberal, nondiscriminatory British policies favorable to multinational investment contributed significantly to the decline of domestic firms, he argues, so that eventually multinationals could threaten the health of the entire British economy by investing elsewhere. The Nazi state, however, thwarted the development of American subsidiaries and fostered a core of producers, government officials, bankers, and labor union leaders.
Author: Joe Mulhall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042984025X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
This book explores the policies and ideologies of a number of individuals and groups who attempted to relaunch fascist, antisemitic and racist politics in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust. Despite the leading architects of fascism being dead and the newsreel footage of Jewish bodies being pushed into mass graves seared into societal consciousness, fascism survived World War II and, though changed, survives to this day. Britain was the country that ‘stood alone’ against fascism, but it was no exception. This book treads new historical ground and shines a light onto the most understudied period of British fascism, whilst simultaneously adding to our understanding of the evolving ideology of fascism, the persistent nature of antisemitism and the blossoming of Britain’s anti-immigration movement. This book will primarily appeal to scholars and students with an interest in the history of fascism, antisemitism and the Holocaust, racism, immigration and postwar Britain.
Author: David A. Forgacs
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253219485
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 754
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Book Description
From the 1930s to the 50s in Italy commercial cultural products were transformed by new reproductive technologies and ways of marketing and distribution, and the appetite for radio, films, music and magazines boomed. This book uses new evidence to explore possible continuities between the uses of mass culture before and after World War II.
Author: Nicholas Doumanis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199695660
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 673
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Book Description
The period spanning the two World Wars was unquestionably the most catastrophic in Europe's history. Despite such undeniably progressive developments as the radical expansion of women's suffrage and rising health standards, the era was dominated by political violence and chronic instability. Its symbols were Verdun, Guernica, and Auschwitz. By the end of this dark period, tens of millions of Europeans had been killed and more still had been displaced and permanently traumatized. If the nineteenth century gave Europeans cause to regard the future with a sense of optimism, the early twentieth century had them anticipating the destruction of civilization. The fact that so many revolutions, regime changes, dictatorships, mass killings, and civil wars took place within such a compressed time frame suggests that Europe experienced a general crisis. The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914-1945 reconsiders the most significant features of this calamitous age from a transnational perspective. It demonstrates the degree to which national experiences were intertwined with those of other nations, and how each crisis was implicated in wider regional, continental, and global developments. Readers will find innovative and stimulating chapters on various political, social, and economic subjects by some of the leading scholars working on modern European history today.
Author: Asato Ikeda
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824872126
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 165
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Book Description
This book examines a set of paintings produced in Japan during the 1930s and early 1940s that have received little scholarly attention. Asato Ikeda views the work of four prominent artists of the time—Yokoyama Taikan, Yasuda Yukihiko, Uemura Shōen, and Fujita Tsuguharu—through the lens of fascism, showing how their seemingly straightforward paintings of Mount Fuji, samurai, beautiful women, and the countryside supported the war by reinforcing a state ideology that justified violence in the name of the country’s cultural authenticity. She highlights the politics of “apolitical” art and challenges the postwar labeling of battle paintings—those depicting scenes of war and combat—as uniquely problematic. Yokoyama Taikan produced countless paintings of Mount Fuji as the embodiment of Japan’s “national body” and spirituality, in contrast to the modern West’s individualism and materialism. Yasuda Yukihiko located Japan in the Minamoto warriors of the medieval period, depicting them in the yamato-e style, which is defined as classically Japanese. Uemura Shōen sought to paint the quintessential Japanese woman, drawing on the Edo-period bijin-ga (beautiful women) genre while alluding to noh aesthetics and wartime gender expectations. For his subjects, Fujita Tsuguharu looked to the rural snow country, where, it was believed, authentic Japanese traditions could still be found. Although these artists employed different styles and favored different subjects, each maintained close ties with the state and presented what he considered to be the most representative and authentic portrayal of Japan. Throughout Ikeda takes into account the changing relationships between visual iconography/artistic style and its significance by carefully situating artworks within their specific historical and cultural moments. She reveals the global dimensions of wartime nationalist Japanese art and opens up the possibility of dialogue with scholarship on art produced in other countries around the same time, particularly Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Politics of Painting will be welcomed by those interested in modern Japanese art and visual culture, and war art and fascism. Its analysis of painters and painting within larger currents in intellectual history will attract scholars of modern Japanese and East Asian studies.
Author: John Green
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315304422
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
The Kuczynskis were a German-Jewish family of active anti-fascists who worked assiduously to combat the rise of Nazism before and during the course of the Second World War. This book focuses on the family of Robert and his wife Berta – both born two decades before the end of the nineteenth century – and their six children, five of whom became communists and one who worked as a Soviet agent. The parents, and later their children, rejected and rebelled against their comfortable bourgeois heritage and devoted their lives to the overthrow of privilege and class society. They chose to do this in a Germany that was rapidly moving in the opposite direction. With the rise of German nationalism and then Hitler fascism, the family was confronted with stark choices and, as a result of making these choices, suffered persecution and exile. Revealing how these experiences shaped their outlook and perception of events, this book documents the story of the Kuczynskis for the first time in the English language and is a fascinating biographical portrait of a unique and radical family.
Author: Daniel Sonabend
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788733258
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
The “inspiring,” little-known history of the Jewish vigilantes of the 43 Group, who fought fascism in Britain following World War II (Guardian). Returning to civilian life, at the close of the Second World War, a group of Jewish veterans discovered that, for all their effort and sacrifice, their fight was not yet done. Creeping back onto the streets were Britain’s homegrown fascists, directed from the shadows by Sir Oswald Mosley. Horrified that the authorities refused to act, forty-three Jewish ex-servicemen and women resolved to take matters into their own hands. In 1946, they founded the 43 Group and let it be known that they were willing to stop the far-right resurgence by any means necessary. Their numbers quickly swelled. Joining the battle-hardened ex-servicemen in smashing up fascist meetings were younger Jews, including hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, and gentiles as well, some of whom volunteered to infiltrate fascist organizations. The Group published its own newspaper, conducted covert operations, and was able to muster a powerful force of hundreds of fighters who quickly turned fascist street meetings into mass brawls. The struggle peaked in the summer of 1947 with the Battle of Ridley Road, where thousands descended on the Hackney market to participate in weekly riots. The history of the 43 Group is not just a gripping story of a forgotten moment in Britain’s post-war history; it is also a timely lesson in how to confront fascism—and how to win.
Author: Enzo Traverso
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788730461
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
What is fascism in the twenty first century? What does Fascism mean at the beginning of the twenty-first century? When we pronounce this word, our memory goes back to the years between the two world wars and envisions a dark landscape of violence, dictatorships, and genocide. These images spontaneously surface in the face of the rise of radical right, racism, xenophobia, islamophobia and terrorism, the last of which is often depicted as a form of "Islamic fascism." Beyond some superficial analogies, however, all these contemporary tendencies reveal many differences from historical fascism, probably greater than their affinities. Paradoxically, the fear of terrorism nourishes the populist and racist rights, with Marine Le Pen in France or Donald Trump in the US claiming to be the most effective ramparts against "Jihadist fascism". But since fascism was a product of imperialism, can we define as fascist a terrorist movement whose main target is Western domination? Disentangling these contradictory threads, Enzo Traverso's historical gaze helps to decipher the enigmas of the present. He suggests the concept of post-fascism--a hybrid phenomenon, neither the reproduction of old fascism nor something completely different--to define a set of heterogeneous and transitional movements, suspended between an accomplished past still haunting our memories and an unknown future.
