Insights to how the issue of antisemitism should be formulated. They declare: “Antisemitism must be debunked and combated. Regardless of pretence, no expression of hatred for Jews as Jews should be tolerated anywhere in the world.” The left and human-rights movement, including Black Lives Matter and formations such as the African National Congress of South Africa, should join those Palestinian and Arab
voices in formulating genuinely international guidelines regarding defence of free speech and in combatting the scourge of antisemitism and all forms of racism. CT Ronnie Kasrils is a former ANC freedom fighter and was Intelligence Minister in South Africa. This article is based on an address to a London online free speech rally last month.
W.J. Astore
Pulp fiction and the Vietnam war
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rowing up, I watched a lot of James Bond movies. That super-tough, supersexy, British secret agent, played with such brilliance by Sean Connery, always seemed to have great fun as he saved the world from various dictators, terrorists, and megalomaniacs. I wanted an Aston Martin like Bond had in Goldfinger, tricked out with all the latest gizmos and gadgets provided by Q Branch. But more than anything I wanted Bond’s competence, his swagger, his ability to win the day while getting the girl as well. Such movies are harmless male fantasy flicks – or are they harmless? While Ian Fleming was writing his Bond books and Sean Connery was breathing life and fire into the character, another
sort of male fantasy was being promulgated and promoted in men’s adventure magazines with titles like Stag and Man’s Life and Man’s World. These pulp magazines appeared at a time when men’s masculinity was threatened (then again, when hasn’t masculinity been under threat?), in the 1950s and 1960s, a new nuclear age in which America seemed stuck behind the Soviet space programme and stuck fighting wars (Korea, Vietnam) that ultimately proved unheroic and unwinnable. It’s easy to dismiss such men’s magazines as a simplistic variety of pulp fiction, but we’d be wrong to do so, argues historian Greg Daddis in his new book, Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure
Magazines. Daddis is quite convincing in showing how this pulp fiction advanced a view of Western, and specifically American, chauvinism in which war served as an adventure, an opportunity to demonstrate the innate superiority of the American male over various foreign, often Asiatic, opponents, while getting the girl, of course, with the girl usually scantily clad and stereotyped as vulnerable and/or duplicitous and/or sexually available.
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addis is careful to say that such magazines, with their often violent and sexist fantasies, didn’t drive or determine US behaviour in places like Vietnam. But they most certainly reflected and reinforced the idea of American martial superiority and the notion that foreigners, and specifically foreign women, were both inferior and exploitable. The book is well-produced and well-illustrated, including colour plates of a representative sample of these magazines. “I’m not afraid of World War III,” “Castration of the American Male,” and “Beat it Sister, I’ve Got a War to Fight!” are a few of the article titles that caught my eye from these pulp covers. For me, Daddis hits a home run as he compares the harsh realities of the Vietnam War to the bizarre fantasies of these adventure magazines. If there were US troops expecting lots of easy victories and easier women in ’Nam, they quickly learned that pulp fiction had nothing to ColdType | January 2021 | www.coldtype.net
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