Rethinking the Cold War- The intellectuals during the Cold War

Résumé du document

After the Second World War, the Liberation unifies the intellectual world in the devastated vectoring Europe countries. The few intellectuals who had collaborated or had published about the beneficial effects of the arrests against Jews had been sentenced, such as Robert Brasillach, shot on the 6th of February 1945. The images of the horrors of Nazism are discovered and generate unanimous reactions of indignation. A myth is getting born, a myth that gives a total recognition and legitimacy to intellectuals who had understood during the war the dangers of Nazism of fascism in Italy, and who had denounced it. In France, the ideal of this intellectualism is portrayed by figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, for having participated to the intellectual Resistance or by Rene Char, who wrote but also took up arms as one of the responsible of the Resistance in Luberon. However, the year 1946 sees the end of the Grand Alliance between the United States and the USSR, and Churchill does not loose time to evocate the “iron curtain” in a speech given to Fulton University on the 5th of March 1946.

As men of engagement, the European intellectual had to make a choice between the Soviet communist ideology, or the American one. And, as Jean-Paul Sartre declared in the revue Les temps modernes, in 1947: “Every anti-communist is a dog”, separating himself from some of the intellectuals who had fought against Nazism as he did, we may wonder how the intellectual world, until then united by the end of the Second World War, did turn into during the Cold War? To answer, we will first of all study to what extent the intellectual Cold War was a bipolar world, and then the mutations in the intellectual thought appeared with the Détente.

Extraits

[...] In England, a movement from the Labour party tried to encourage neutrality, but it has to be said that all the movement of neutrality or independence towards the two blocks was minority and did not get a real importance because of the lack of followers. Sometimes however, the minor importance of involved intellectuals during the Cold War is not due to the lack of followers. If in France, the intellectuals get, historically the need and almost the duty to express themselves, to affirm theirs engagements into the medias, in Denmark or Sweden, intellectuals' speech are not heard and relayed and the figure of the intellectual is often considered as unbritish, the British thinker confining himself into his role of “public moralist”. [...]

[...] The communist deception After Stalin's death, in 1953, Khrushchev begins the critic of Stalin policy: it is the destalinization. The 24th of February 1956, he reads a devastating rapport about Stalin's abuses, which will be broadcast all around the USSR and will besmirch the image of the powerful and impressive USSR. The different forms of violence and pressures used by the USSR also besmirched the intellectual's admiration for the communist system. The same year, tanks enter in Budapest in order to supress the Hungarian insurrection. [...]

[...] Lately, Indignez-vous , written in 2010 by Stéphane Hessel, who was a resistant during the Second World War, and the indignant movement inspired by the name of the book, reopen the question about the intellectual's influence, which we thought minor, and the question of the importance of engagement since Stéphane Hessel's essay uses the “idée sartrienne” of the need of personal engagement. Bibliography Reference book JUDT Tony, Après-Guerre: Une histoire de l'Europe depuis 1945, Paris, Fayard/Pluriel, 1032p. SIRINELLI Jean-François Dictionnaire de la vie politique française au XXe siècle, Paris, PUF 1152p. General Books CHEBEL D'APPOLLONIA Ariane, Histoire politique des intellectuels en France, tome 1944-1954, Paris, Editions Complexe DELPORTE Christian, Intellectuels et politique, Paris, Casterman 127p. SIRINELLI Jean-François Culture et Guerre Froide, Paris, PU Paris- Sorbonne 308p. [...]

[...] Rethinking the Cold War- The intellectuals during the Cold War Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Aron and André Glucksmann, in 1979. Rethinking the Cold War Intellectuals during the Cold War After the Second World War, the Liberation unifies the intellectual world in the devastated vectoring Europe countries. The few intellectuals who had collaborated or had published about the beneficial effects of the arrests against Jews had been sentenced, such as Robert Brasillach, shot on the 6th of February 1945. The images of the horrors of Nazism are discovered and generate unanimous reactions of indignation. [...]

[...] In front of this kind of transnational dynamism, we found the Congress for Cultural Freedom created in 1950 in Berlin thanks to the financial help from the CIA (this information will be revealed in 1967, as a scandal), and which, at its peak gathered about thirty-five different nationalities: Germans as Karl Jaspers, Americans as John Dewey, Italians as Benedicto Croce, or French as Raymond Aron. The CCF is a liberal platform of the anticommunism, which associates liberals, as well as social democrats or union activists related to the left, but opposed to communists. Regarding to the French side of the intellectual world, the CCF mostly gathered anti-totalitarians who already make theoretical analysis of totalitarianism. The originality of this congress is that he financed a lot of revues in each country. [...]