As communism fades from memory-history into discipline-history, so does an alternative usage of the word “front.” In Cold War parlance, a front was a political shell company, an organization funded by and beholden to the interests of a government. The irony of the Cold War was that it saw the flowering of a new term, the Non-Governmental Organization celebrated for its autonomy from political interest, free to campaign for peace, freedom, equality, and so on. What both memory-history and disciplinary-history have lost sight of, and my site seeks to bring back into view, is that the Cold War inspired a large crop of state-sponsored NGOs. A contradiction in terms, they constituted a key arm in the propaganda war, and one that hardly anyone has written about.
The site will use the internet to plot out where these organizations met, in order to afford viewers a visual representation of Cold War competition on a much bigger world than the East/West, Iron Curtain/Nylon Curtain terminology suggests was possible.
The historical thinking that I hope to employ is substantive inasmuch as I will explain each of the groups and place them in a brief narrative page “contextualizing” them in the traditional sense of the word. I’ll then employ procedural history to ask users to participate in uploading new data, and drawing inferences from the data that do not have to abide by the standard history textbook account of the Cold War.
The people I hope to engage are students and fellow scholars and the wider world, really.
