In January 1950, the missionaries reported a vicious attack and an attempted stoning while preaching in the town of Castel Gandolfo, home to the Papal Palace and the Pope’s summer residence. The missionaries’ efforts to preach and proselytize in the town sparked outrage among the local population, with violent reactions allegedly incited by the local clergy. Accounts of the incident varied. In Italy, the police and pro-Vatican press sought to downplay the event, framing it as a reaction to the missionaries’ perceived insensitive and aggressive behavior, and accusing them of aiding the spread of Communism. The missionaries seized the opportunity to raise awareness of their challenges and promote their mission. The crisis garnered headlines in the United States, leading to a significant mobilization in Congress, where senators and representatives urged the Truman administration to pressure the Italian government to allow the missionaries to preach and proselytize. The Italian Foreign Ministry and the State Department entered into protracted negotiations, which lasted several years, as they sought a practical solution that could accommodate the many actors involved. The Castel Gandolfo incident thus became a flashpoint in the broader struggle over religious freedom, sovereignty, and Cold War geopolitics.

This chapter focuses on the careers of Ivana Loudová (1941–2017) and Sylvie Bodorová (born 1954), two prominent Czech female composers who embarked on their careers in different historical phases of communist Czechoslovakia, dealt with specific cultural-political circumstances, and reacted to distinct domestic and global music styles. Whereas Loudová began her career in the liberal 1960s, a time when Czech artists started to embrace Western avant-garde styles, Bodorová’s work took shape during the normalization era following the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact countries. This period officially rejected the reforms of the previous decade and sought to reinstate the aesthetics of socialist realism, which had dominated Czech culture after the communists initially came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948. Although the two composers were significantly influenced by prominent state music institutions, they also developed unique compositional styles.

This chapter explores the ways in which folk music and dance were linked to science and politics in the twentieth century. To understand these relationships, the chapter starts with nineteenth-century collections of folksongs, which determine the canon of Bohemian and Moravian folk music until the present day. The traditional forms of folk music recorded by nineteenth-century collectors nearly disappeared in the twentieth century. This decline coincided with the emergence of a prominent folk revival, marked by the proliferation of both amateur and professional folk ensembles in post-1948 communist Czechoslovakia. Throughout the communist era, which lasted until 1989, these endeavors were officially aligned with the Communist Party’s politics and often carried propagandistic undertones. In the late twentieth century, folk music ensembles and practitioners were both influenced by and influencing classical music, as well as, later, rock and jazz, with institutionalized radio broadcasts playing a significant role in this evolution.

The ideology of Marxism–Leninism seemingly contradicts competition, yet competition was prevalent in former communist countries to foster productivity and economic growth. The Stakhanovite movement, originating in the Soviet Union, incentivized laborers to excel as an economic propaganda tool, while also honoring them as socialist heroes but also penalizing dissent as a political propaganda tool. Competition extended to managers of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) vying for government resources. Consumer competition arose from pervasive shortages, driving black market economies. Underground enterprises, which were protected from competition, resisted economic reform from a planned economic system to a more market-oriented system to maintain their privileged status. Post-World War II, some SOEs adopted market-based approaches, competing domestically and globally. This chapter argues that such forms of competition emerge when humans struggle for survival amid perceived inequalities in the existing system, prompting them to seek opportunities and thrive.

Chapter one explores the very specific role the architects, leaders and volunteers of the International Brigades assigned themselves within the wider loyalist war effort, arguing that they became one of many interest groups keen to shape the antifascist struggle in their own image. Their ubiquitous claim to be bringing desperately-needed reserves of unity, order and discipline to the Republican cause owed much to the transnational attitudes of the unitߣs members as well as their more immediate links to the Communist Party and its armed Fifth Regiment. This self-assigned mission was internalised by many of the volunteers on the basis of their military training, trench press and experiences of combat, going on to shape their attitudes towards other groups fighting against Franco. In spite of an underlying rhetoric of antifascist unity, the volunteersߣ understanding of their place in Spain inspired mixed responses from their allies. By uncovering the creation and reception of the International Brigadesߣ military culture, this opening chapter restores the famous fighting force to the wider social, political and military context which underpins the rest of the book.

The introduction provides an overview of the volume’s key theoretical concepts and empirical cases. It emphasizes that there have been a variety of antifascisms in Latin America and the Caribbean that were not merely derivative of European antifascism or the product of European exiles. Rather, there were homegrown Latin American and Caribbean antifascist movements forged in the interplay between local, regional, and transnational processes. By placing Latin American and Caribbean antifascists in relation to the broader historiography on antifascism, the introduction illuminates their specific heterogeneous agendas, strategies, and styles as well as their class, racial, ethnic, and gendered dimensions. Latin American and Caribbean antifascists participated in exchanges from the Global South to the Global North and within the Global South. They resembled and yet differed from other Global South antifascisms regarding race and imperialism. The introduction ends by providing an overview of the chapters by placing them within the book’s theoretical framework.

Chapter 2 explores the impact of the global Cold War on decolonisation in these Caribbean territories. Three factors relating to the Cold War are explored: Americanisation in the Caribbean region; the significance of the Cuban Revolution; and anticolonial and Third World solidarity movements. As a newer colonial power in the Caribbean, the US played an important role as a cultural and ideological counterpoint to the metropolitan governments of Britain and France. The French State was greatly concerned about the popularity of the Communist Party in the French Antilles and took extensive measures to monitor and suppress members. The Cuban Revolution was a key moment for the region, inspiring activists across the Caribbean, including in the four territories in question. Fear of the spread of communism affected local politics and was used to discredit pro-autonomy politicians and activists. Chapter 2 argues that the Cold War in the Caribbean was, at times, a backdrop to political developments and, at other times, a crucial part of the political situation.

This chapter focuses on the reception of Sean O’Casey’s drama in central Europe, defined for the purpose as consisting of Czechoslovakia (and its successor states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Poland, Hungary, and Austria. We see how, in this geographical area, productions and publications of the playwright’s work did not really take off until the 1950s. But this chapter shows that, from the mid-twentieth century, successful productions included Jan Werich and Jiří Krejčík’s filmed adaptations of O’Casey’s one-act plays in Czechoslovakia, and Zygmunt Hübner and Bronisław Pawlik’s Polish translation of The Shadow of a Gunman.

The friendship between Shaw and O’Casey was so personally significant that O’Casey’s widow published an entire book on the subject. This chapter charts the course of that friendship, and examines the influence that Shaw exerted upon O’Casey and vice versa. The chapter begins by examining the way O’Casey knew of Shaw’s work before their first meeting, and traces the contours of their personal relationship after O’Casey moved to London in 1926. The chapter analyses the way that, once the Abbey had rejected The Silver Tassie in 1928, O’Casey turned to Bernard Shaw for friendship and advice, and gives a close reading of the reciprocal influence that can be found in the two men’s playwriting and political viewpoints.

This chapter analyses the place of class in O’Casey’s thinking and focuses in particular on a relatively unknown O’Casey script from 1919, The Harvest Festival, which revolves around a charismatic worker-hero who dies when a strike becomes violent. The chapter also examines the rewritten version of that play, Red Roses for Me (1943), in order to explore how O’Casey’s aestheticizing of class confrontation was developed and refined. The chapter shows how O’Casey wanted class analysis to replace ideologies like religion and nationalism, which he believed to be misdirections of humanity’s important longings.

O’Casey was a great writer of war, and he wrote a great deal during the Second World War when he lived in England, although much of this work has failed to find a place in the theatrical repertoire. This chapter focuses on the two wartime plays set during the war: the comic Purple Dust (1940), about two Englishmen moving to Ireland to escape the conflict; and the tragic Oak Leaves and Lavender (1946), set during the Battle of Britain. This chapter shows how the geopolitics of the Second World War, combined with O’Casey’s complex political affiliations and a heightened anxiety about Irish masculinity, placed O’Casey in a position from which he found it difficult to speak.

Totalitarian systems, marked by extreme violence, are fundamentally bound to an ideology, such as Marxism-Leninism, which is instrumental to their creation and persistence, from the Bolshevik revolution in Russia to modern China. The chapter examines the genesis of communist totalitarian ideology in early Christian communal equality, connecting it to Rousseau’s and Babeuf’s anti-property ideals, which ultimately influenced Marxism and its vision of a dictatorial society in the name of absolute equality. The enduring pull towards egalitarianism, when pushed to extremes, can encroach on private property rights, ironically culminating in totalitarian rule and unprecedented inequality.

In past decades, the relationship between fascism and communism was of major interest. The theory of totalitarianism viewed them as different versions of the same phenomenon. Communists saw fascism as a function of capitalism, and communism as its only legitimate opponent. Both views marginalized the Holocaust. As the Holocaust came to the fore in Western scholarship, entanglements with communism slipped out of view. This chapter argues that they deserve closer attention. Though its roots were older, after 1917 anticommunism gave the right a new focus, giving radical fringe groups respectability. Communism exerted a “negative fascination” on the right, encouraging mutually escalating extremes. Anti-Marxism legitimated Nazi violence after 1933, drawing support even from the Churches. For their part, even after the adoption of the popular front strategy in 1935, the KPD continued to believe that the SPD was the main enemy, and long remained silent on the persecution of Jews. Since the end of the Cold War, the question of the relationship between communism, Nazism, and the Holocaust has been expressed above all in the culture of remembrance.

This chapter returns to the conception of philosophy as the thought of the illimitable object from which Marx began. It then considers how, in the here and now, the actualization of philosophy can be conceived as the actualization of a resurgent absolute idealism. This actualization shows the question of the ‘applicability’ of philosophy to the world to be misplaced: philosophy, being human thought as such, and philosophy actualized the actualization of that, our human thinking life is already its own application to the ‘real’ world. This is brought out by considering that there are, in and around us, pockets of communism—actual, not merely potential.

This chapter examines the unstable intellectual situation of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, in which an abstract conception of the Hegelian subject–object that had allegedly been naturalized by Feuerbach into the pair human–nature jostles, on the one hand, with a recognition on Marx’s part of a historical dimension lacking in Feuerbach but which had already been present in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and, on the other, with an emerging familiarity with radical politics. Marx’s conception of the human as Gattungswesen, the basis of a communism that as fully developed naturalism equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism, is still indebted to that of Feuerbach. At the same time, he is developing his own conception of the human that resolutely carries Aristotle’s theory of soul through into the case of rational soul where Aristotle himself suffered a failure of nerve.