1986, San Diego. When his father returns from a submarine deployment, Christian’s family splinters apart. The boy’s evangelical mother demands a divorce. His older sister announces that she has dropped out of college and is moving to LA with her guitarist boyfriend. And then Christian discovers that there are surveillance microphones in their home. He and his hacker friends are investigating the situation when suited government agents with strange mask-like faces appear on the naval base. Dad thought he had more time, but he must tell his son the truth now: Christian was born with special abilities—the Navy has been monitoring his development because he is destined to become a Dream Telepath. He must learn how to enter the dreams of others and control the ancient monsters of the deep. His powers are essential to defeating the Soviets and preventing nuclear war. But is Christian ready?
The Religious Right came to prominence in the early 1980s, but it was born during the early Cold War. Evangelical leaders like Billy Graham, driven by a fierce opposition to communism, led evangelicals out of the political wilderness they'd inhabited since the Scopes trial and into a much more active engagement with the important issues of the day. How did the conservative evangelical culture move into the political mainstream? Angela Lahr seeks to answer this important question. She shows how evangelicals, who had felt marginalized by American culture, drew upon their eschatological belief in the Second Coming of Christ and a subsequent glorious millennium to find common cause with more mainstream Americans who also feared a a 'soon-coming end,' albeit from nuclear war. In the early postwar climate of nuclear fear and anticommunism, the apocalyptic eschatology of premillennial dispensationalism embraced by many evangelicals meshed very well with the "secular apocalyptic" mood of a society equally terrified of the Bomb and of communism. She argues that the development of the bomb, the creation of the state of Israel, and the Cuban Missile Crisis combined with evangelical end-times theology to shape conservative evangelical political identity and to influence secular views. Millennial beliefs influenced evangelical interpretation of these events, repeatedly energized evangelical efforts, and helped evangelicals view themselves and be viewed by others as a vital and legitimate segment of American culture, even when it raised its voice in sharp criticism of aspects of that culture. Conservative Protestants were able to take advantage of this situation to carve out a new space for their subculture within the national arena. The greater legitimacy that evangelicals gained in the early Cold War provided the foundation of a power-base in the national political culture that the religious right would draw on in the late seventies and early eighties. The result, she demonstrates, was the alliance of religious and political conservatives that holds power today.
Hopes for a new peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War have been dashed by sobering realities: Great powers are once again competing for honor and influence. The world remains “unipolar,” but international competition among the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and Iran raise new threats of regional conflict, and a new contest between western liberalism and the great eastern autocracies of Russia and China has reinjected ideology into geopolitics.For the past few years, the liberal world has been internally divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty. Now, in The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Robert Kagan masterfully poses the most important questions facing the liberal democratic countries, challenging them to choose whether they want to shape history or let others shape it for them.
This study develops the notion of dreamworld as both a poetic description of a collective mental state and an analytical concept. Stressing the similarites between East/West the book examines extremes of mass utopia, dreamworld and catastrophe.
When the Chinese Communists defeated the Chinese Nationalists and occupied the mainland in 1949–1950, U.S. policymakers were confronted with a dilemma. Disgusted by the corruption and, more importantly, failure of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies and party and repelled by the Communists’ revolutionary actions and violent class warfare, in the early 1950s the U.S. government placed its hopes in a Chinese “third force.” While the U.S. State Department reported on third forces, the CIA launched a two-prong effort to actively support these groups with money, advisors, and arms. In Japan, Okinawa, and Saipan, the agency trained third force troops at CIA bases. The Chinese commander of these soldiers was former high-ranking Nationalist General Cai Wenzhi. He and his colleagues organized a political group, the Free China Movement. His troops received parachute training as well as other types of combat and intelligence instruction at agency bases. Subsequently, several missions were dispatched to Manchuria—the Korean War was raging then—and South China. All were failures and the Chinese third force agents were killed or imprisoned. With the end of the Korean War, the Americans terminated this armed third force movement, with the Nationalists on Taiwan taking in some of its soldiers while others moved to Hong Kong. The Americans flew Cai to Washington, where he took a job with the Department of Defense. The second prong of the CIA’s effort was in Hong Kong. The agency financially supported and advised the creation of a third force organization called the Fighting League for Chinese Freedom and Democracy. It also funded several third force periodicals. Created in 1951 and 1952, in 1953 and 1954 the CIA ended its financial support. As a consequence of this as well as factionalism within the group, in 1954 the League collapsed and its leaders scattered to the four winds. At the end, even the term “third force” was discredited and replaced by “new force.” Finally, in the early 1950s, the CIA backed as a third force candidate a Vietnamese general. With his assassination in May 1955, however, that effort also came to naught.
In International Relations Since the End of the Cold War many of the world's leading scholars examine the Cold War legacy. The authors examine several key issues including: the relationship between democracy and peace, the Cold War and the Third World, superpowers, the role of post-Cold War nuclear weapons.
Claiming that a Cold War mentality has impaired the ability of literary theorists to talk about the politics of criticism effectively, the author of this treatise argues that modern criticism is a child of the Cold War.
This is a ground-breaking study of the psychological and cultural impact of the Cold War on the imaginations of citizens in the UK and US. The Literary Cold War examines writers working at the hazy borders between aesthetic project and political allegory, with specific attention being paid to Vladimir Nabokov and Graham Greene as Cold War writers. The book looks at the special relationship as a form of paranoid plotline governing key Anglo-American texts from Storm Jameson to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, as well as examining the figure of the non-aligned neutral observer caught up in the sacrificial triangles structuring cold war fantasy. The book aims to consolidate and define a new emergent field in literary studies, the literary Cold War, following the lead of prominent historians of the period.
While the arms race of the post-war period has been widely discussed, Purcell explores the under-acknowledged but critical role another kind of 'race' – that is, race as a biological and sociological concept – played within the global and cultural Cold War.
