Professor Heather Streets-Salter from Northeastern University lecture, \u201cThe Chill Before the Cold War: The Roots of Anti-Communism in the Interwar Period\u201d was a very great lecture because she explained a technical historical story that typically would require a lot of context in a way that someone like me without the historical background could understand.<\/p>\n
Professor Heather Streets-Salter started off the lecture by introducing it with another title called the Noulens Affair Story. This was a story about Joseph Ducroux a spy that was arrested and was caught with an address book that exposed himself and his network all across the region. When officials investigated each of the locations found in the address book, they found information on payroll, list of pseudonyms, correspondents, and cipher codes which incriminated many people in the network. This discovery led to the arrest of 276 individuals and the confiscation of 963,601 copies of communist literature. Upon further digging, officials were able to discover links between Moscow and Shanghai and Shanghai and Southeast Asia via Hong Kong, along with connections between Java and India via Burma and Thailand.<\/p>\n
The lecturer explained that this story was so significant because the Noulens Affair was a metaphor for thinking about empire in the 20th century. She said that Empires were not as firmly bounded territories mainly in communication with the metropole, but as connected territories connected to one another via transitional and global forces. Another reason why this story is so important that I found interesting, was that it sparked so many Pan- movements. According to Professor Heather Streets-Salter, the Noulens Affair made it so that colonial peoples connected to one another and extra colonial people via diasporic movements, like pan-Islam, pan-Asianism, and communism for example.<\/p>\n
Pan-Islamic and pan-Asian ideas were highly influential intellectual and political forces during the time leading up to the Noulens Affair. This was non-Western elites\u2019 contribution to the end of European hegemony in Asia. By rebelling against the West these thinkers were shaping and legitimizing their own self-identity. Pan-Islam and pan-Asianism helped to articulate non-Western discourse on civilization, modernity, and internationalism on a global public sphere. The politics of these new civilization identities functioned in relation to rising nationalist movements and changing power relations between Europe and Asia.<\/p>\n
Professor Heather Streets-Salter concluded her lecture by arguing that the Noulens Affair Story is an extremely useful case study for exploring transnational and global connections and the violent world of international communism and anti-communism in this period. This story forces us to read in between the lines and connected seemingly unrelated stories together to piece together much greater phenomena occurring around us.<\/p>\n
During the questions and answers part of the discussion, someone asked if the prejudice in the colonial era influence the prejudice of the Cold War. Professor Streets-Salter\u2019s answered this by saying that ideas of race leave powerful legacies. She explained that ideas do not die but become entangled in policy and become implicit. The prejudices in the colonial era instead of going away became institutionalized and left lasting marks on the Cold War era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Professor Heather Streets-Salter from Northeastern University lecture, \u201cThe Chill Before the Cold War: The Roots of Anti-Communism in the Interwar Period\u201d was a very great lecture because she explained a technical historical story that typically would require a lot of context in a way that someone like me without the historical background could understand. Professor … <\/p>\n