A Cold War State of Mind: Brainwashing and Postwar American Society (Culture, Politics, and the Cold War) - Softcover

Dunne, Matthew W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1625340419 ISBN 13: 9781625340412

Verlag: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013

Über diesen Titel

Críticas:

A Cold War State of Mind provides a fascinating framework for understanding both the strength and breakdown of the Cold War consensus in postwar America. Using the trope of brainwashing, it integrates contemporary debates about politics, psychology, and the crisis of masculinity to present an intriguing analysis of anxieties that the suspected communist infiltration of American society could succeed through the infection and contamination of Americans brains. It is a wide ranging, concise, and thoroughly enjoyable book.--Robert A. Jacobs, author of The Dragon s Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age

Reseña del editor:

First popularised during the 1950s, the concept of "brainwashing" is often viewed as an example of Cold War paranoia, an amusing relic of a bygone era. Yet as Matthew W. Dunne shows in this study, over time brainwashing came to connote much more than a sinister form of Communist mind control, taking on broader cultural and political meanings. Moving beyond well-known debates over Korean War POWs and iconic cultural texts like The Manchurian Candidate, Dunne explores the impact of the idea of brainwashing on popular concerns about freedom, individualism, loyalty, and trust in authority. By the late 1950s the concept had been appropriated into critiques of various aspects of American life such as an insistence on conformity, the alleged "softening" of American men, and rampant consumerism fueled by corporate advertising that used "hidden" or "subliminal" forms of persuasion. Because of these associations and growing anxie-ties about the potential misuse of psychology, concerns about brainwashing contributed to a new emphasis on individuality and skepticism toward authority in the 1960s. The notion even played an unusual role in the 1968 presidential race, when Republican frontrunner George Romney's claim that he had been "brainwashed" about the Vietnam War by the Johnson administration effectively destroyed his campaign. In addition to analysing the evolving meaning of brainwashing over an extended period of time, A Cold War State of Mind explores the class and gender implications of the idea, such as the assumption that working-class POWs were more susceptible to mind control and that women were more easily taken in by the manipulations of advertisers. .

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: University of Massachusetts Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1625340419
• ISBN 13: 9781625340412
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304