Atomic Housewives: Shutter Island and the Domestication of Nuclear Holocaust
ABSTRACT: Martin Scorsese's 2010 film Shutter Island is one of several post–September 11 cultural texts that use Cold War settings to challenge the trend in US culture to displace social and political fears by escaping to a nostalgia for an idealized postwar society. The film ostensibly replaces the protagonist's wartime trauma with a domestic tragedy while simultaneously undermining that replacement. Its attempt to bury the guilt for war crimes under worries about the collapse of the nuclear family confronts the United States' attempt to justify its actions in the War on Terror through a nostalgic imaginary of the Cold War.
Islamic Terrorism: The Red Menace of the Twenty-First Century
For nearly half a century, Americans were united against a common enemy of the Soviet Union, and more generally against the ideology of communism, also known as the red menace. With the close of the cold war, the shifts in the world required a rewriting and new understanding of the threats toward American national security. Even before September 11, 2001, government rhetoric increasingly focused on Islamic terrorism as the new enemy. Today, the ideology of Islamic terrorism is undoubtedly the enemy of the United States, more so than any sovereign state. It is much easier to declare war on terrorism sponsored by self-proclaimed, mysterious, and dangerous radicals than it is on another sovereign state. For this reason, and the fact that terrorism is perceived as an absolutely deplorable act, it is easy to assert Islamic terrorism as the enemy. It has also been easier to justify foreign policy actions based on the ever present threat of Islamic terrorism, much like the threat of the spread of communism during the cold war. This chapter examines the process of how Islamic terrorism replaced the Red Menace of communism as “the” American enemy in political rhetoric, justifying major shifts in U.S. foreign policy.
Regional strategies for the minerals industries of the states of the SADCC
The SADCC has been in existence for eleven years but little progress has been made in regional coordination of the minerals sector even though this sector is the most important exporter of the region. There is however scope for minerals development at the regional level.