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• Hollywood Ascendant: American Films in Hungary in the 1970s

  Róbert Takács

  Views:

  113

  Hungarian cultural policy makers denied Hungarian viewers access to American films between 1949 and 1956. Hollywood movies were publicly shown again behind the Iron Curtain from 1957 in spite of hostile American–Hungarian bilateral relations after the crushing of the Revolution of 1956. The de-Stalinized cultural policy of Hungary allowed for one third of the films released in Hungarian cinemas to come from capitalist countries. In the 1970s the United States became the largest non-socialist film exporter to Hungary and Hollywood export “sky-rocketed” at the end of the decade. The annual purchase of thirteen to twenty-nine American films still made it possible to apply ideological filters; however, only a part of the films released in Hungary could be regarded as useful in representing negative social trends in the United States. The majority of Hollywood movies screened in Hungary should rather be labeled as entertaining, and these served leisure on one hand and financial considerations on the other. Entertainment was recognized as a legitimate demand of the public after 1956 and the program of the cinemas had to be supplemented from Western sources. In the 1970s Hollywood became the number one Western movie entertainer in communist Hungary. The narrowing budgetary sources of cultural policy and the need for self-financing also paved the way for this tendency. (RT)

• The 1990s and the Remaking of the Neoconservative Foreign Policy Paradigm

  Rasha Awale

  Views:

  247

  This essay explains how neoconservative foreign policy doctrine evolved from strenuously seeking to defeat the communist enemy during the Cold War to thoroughly seeking to preserve America’s newfound “unipolar moment” by constructing new enemies to defeat. It analyzes the generational transition within the neoconservative movement from the 1970s to the 1990s and its empire-building project in the post-Cold War era. Based on neoconservative publications and contributions to magazines such as Commentary, The National Interest, and Weekly Standard as well as the publications, reports, and statements of neoconservative think tanks (The Coalition for a Democratic Majority, The Committee on the Present Danger, American Enterprise Institute, The Project for New American Century, among others), the essay argues that the themes associated with the neoconservatives after 9/11—such as militarism, preemptive war, regime change, democratization, and unilateralism—had been rooted in the neoconservative discourse since the 1970s. It also shows that the post-9/11 neoconservative foreign policy approach was the product of neoconservative narratives during the Cold War era and after the fall of communism. (RA)

• Through the Eyes of the Delusional Ones

  Rasha Awale

  Views:

  215

  Book review:

  Hanson, Victor Davis. The Case for Trump. New York: Hachette Book Group Inc., 2019. 355 pages. ISBN 978-5416-7353-3. Ebook. $16.81.

• They Dare Disturb the Universe

  Rasha Awale

  Views:

  94

  Book review:

  Kauffman, L. A.  Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism. London: Verso, 2017. 236 pages. ISBN 978-1-78478-409-6. Pbk. $12.