I think that often when we learn about the twentieth-century world wars in primary and secondary school, a lot of the nuance and complexity of the situation is brushed over in favor of succinct lists of memorize-able facts and causes. Of course, the period is extremely complicated and there is some necessity to leave out some things just to make it manageable for a high school class to cover, but as per usual, the final product in many high school curriculums is decidedly America-centric. When a wider, more global scope is used when looking at this war-ridden era, the multifaceted nature of the conflicts and the international parallels begin to become very clear. The separation between World War I and II was already decidedly shaky, as the two sides of the war were mostly consistent and the first war in many ways directly caused the second one. Dr. Streets-Salter\u2019s lecture on the roots of Anti-Communism in 1930s South and Southeast Asia really brought the Cold War into even closer contact with the two previous wars, making me question why we even divide them into three separate conflicts, when other violent encounters, like the off-and-on battles of the English Hundred Years\u2019 War, is merged into and titled as a single conflict.<\/p>\n
Dr. Streets-Salter\u2019s retelling of the story of the Noulens Affair was riveting. It was a high-stakes investigative tale tied to individual names, maximizing the amount of popularity it would receive, more so than if the actors in the affair were all nameless blobs such as \u201cThe English Army.\u201d In many ways, the popular appeal of the Noulens Affair reminded me of the story of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand II. The tale of Gavrilo Princeps and his terrorist group\u2019s various attempts at assassinating Franz Ferdinand while he was in Sarajevo has almost been seared into my brain at this point. I can recall details from that part of history in scores, and yet this other, similarly action-based and popular Noulens Affair was something entirely new to me. Dr. Streets-Salter admitted that in its time it received huge amounts of international media attention, as it is just the kind of wildly sensationalized news story that would be popular. People love hearing information about crime and horror, which explains why I would think more people can talk about what happened on the Valentine\u2019s Day Massacre than at the Seneca Falls Convention. But the lecture argued, very effectively, that the Noulens Affair deserves more attention in the scholarly world. It is the perfect example of how transnational movements, such as communism, can disrupt the firmly bounded territories of an empire and connect those territories in a different way, separate from their governing authority.<\/p>\n
One member of the audience asked about the reactionary movements of the U.S. government and the paranoid fear of international communism that the Noulens Affair aroused. Dr. Streets-Salter turned this question on its head in an interesting way, by acknowledging the power of the U.S. that would have forced any group supporting communism to go underground in fear of backlash from America. At the same time that fear of Communism brought international cooperation between China, England, and other European nations, it also likely encouraged the underground Communist groups to work together. Learning about the Noulens Affair really just made me rethink what I knew about the origins of the Cold War in a more wholly-encompassing, global manner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I think that often when we learn about the twentieth-century world wars in primary and secondary school, a lot of the nuance and complexity of the situation is brushed over in favor of succinct lists of memorize-able facts and causes. Of course, the period is extremely complicated and there is some necessity to leave out … <\/p>\n