Arts & International Affairs: Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2018 | Page 15

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
conceptions as distinguished by David Welch (2014): The belief that propaganda serves
only to change attitudes and opinions, and the assumption that propaganda operates
only through lies and falsehoods. The definition used here instead leaves room for the
option of enhancing existing ideas and ideologies and recognises the possibility of several
levels of truth, be they subjective or taken out of context. Propaganda thus becomes
merely an instrument, a means to an end. Following this line of reasoning, peace propaganda
can be harnessed to function as a methodological approach for a quest to uncover
the motives and the means behind the construction of UNESCO’s international society.
Modern beyond Its Means�The Construction of a World Order According
to UNESCO
During the Cold War, art and culture became one of the key instruments of propaganda,
utilised to aggravate tensions through simplified cultural and ideological conceptions.
The Cold War was a new type of a conflict, a war over hearts and minds, although labelled
by the underlying fear of a nuclear war. Within the context of the “communication
revolution,” the propagandists on both sides attempted to sell their own ideological
truth not only to their own citizens, but to the whole world (Welch 2014). Instead of
falling into an outright panic over the ideological muscle bulging between the two superpowers,
UNESCO took a wider approach, while the intensifying Cold War polarisation
called for the organisation to put its strategies to the test like never before. Recognising
the urgency of increasing mutual appreciation between the East and the West, UNES-
CO’s 9 th General Conference decided to authorise a ten-year-long Major Project on the
Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Cultural Values to promote intercultural
relations (UNESCO 1956). The project opened up a space for Asian and Arab states to
present their cultural values as both equal to and distinct from their Western counterparts
(Wong 2006, 2008), placed focus on the questions of cultural unity and cultural
diversity (Maurel 2010), and marked the development of UNESCO to a truly worldwide
forum of intercultural dialogue, initiating an ongoing discussion of the nature of
intercultural relations within the UNESCO context (Huttunen 2017). It was within this
frame that the Orient catalogue project was initiated.
The Orient catalogue is in two parts. Part one introduces 139 feature films suitable for
festival screening from the following 13 countries: Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iraq,
Japan, Korea, Malaya, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Tunisia, the United Arab Republic
and the U.S.S.R.. Part two includes 209 documentaries and short films for television
distribution, covering a wider collection of countries than part one: Burma, Ceylon,
India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Malaya, Morocco, Pakistan, the Philippines,
Qatar, Thailand, Turkey, the United Arab Republic, the U.S.S.R. and Viet-nam. Even
though the core of the catalogue is the films themselves, what is of interest here is the
way the contents are framed. The context the films are placed in is created through the
one-and-a-half page introduction to the catalogue, which explains how the films have
been selected and how they should be looked at. The introduction also tells us about the
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