Making sense of war Weiner, Amir
2001., 20120116, 2012, 2000, c2001., 2001-01-01
eBook
In Making Sense of War, Amir Weiner reconceptualizes the entire historical experience of the Soviet Union from a new perspective, that of World War II. Breaking with the conventional interpretation ...that views World War II as a post-revolutionary addendum, Weiner situates this event at the crux of the development of the Soviet--not just the Stalinist--system. Through a richly detailed look at Soviet society as a whole, and at one Ukrainian region in particular, the author shows how World War II came to define the ways in which members of the political elite as well as ordinary citizens viewed the world and acted upon their beliefs and ideologies.
This richly textured cultural history of Italian fascism traces the narrative path that accompanied the making of the regime and the construction of Mussolini's power. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi reads ...fascist myths, rituals, images, and speeches as texts that tell the story of fascism. Linking Mussolini's elaboration of a new ruling style to the shaping of the regime's identity, she finds that in searching for symbolic means and forms that would represent its political novelty, fascism in fact brought itself into being, creating its own power and history.
Falasca-Zamponi argues that an aesthetically founded notion of politics guided fascist power's historical unfolding and determined the fascist regime's violent understanding of social relations, its desensitized and dehumanized claims to creation, its privileging of form over ethical norms, and ultimately its truly totalitarian nature.
The existing liberal hegemonic order is essentially an American-led and western-centred one. Its desirability and sustainability have been called into questions due to a wide array of challenges and ...developments. The rise of China is both one of the drivers of change as well as a key determinant shaping the emerging order. This article discusses what China’s vision for a future international order looks like, what kind of impact China is likely to have on this order and how this will happen. By examining the ideas, concepts and practices which inform China’s vision for the future, it argues that China will search for a liberal partnership order composed of an open economic order, a relatively more equal political order and a cooperative security order. To advance this goal, China will aim to preserve or even expand the liberal features of the prevailing order while curtailing its hegemonic nature. Instead of attempting to overturn the current order, China would pursue selective and incremental adjustments that overtime will lead to an order transition. Given current constraints, China cannot shape the emerging order in the same way as the United States did in the post-Second World War period, and the form and tempo of the order transition will depend largely on the outcome of Sino-US bargaining.
Abstract
A century ago, Woodrow Wilson changed America's place in the world when he sent two million men to fight in Europe, but America withdrew into isolationism in the 1930s. After the Second ...World War, Harry Truman and others created a framework of permanent alliances and multilateral institutions that became known as the ‘liberal international order’ or ‘Pax Americana’. Those terms have become obsolete as descriptions of the US place in the world, but the need for the largest countries to provide public goods remains. An open international order covers political–military affairs; economic relations; ecological relations; and human rights. It remains to be seen to what degree these depend on each other and what will remain as the 1945 package is unpacked. Wilson's legacy of developing international institutions continues to make sense. Leadership is not the same as domination, and it will need to be shared. There have always been degrees of leadership and degrees of influence during the seven decades of American pre-eminence after 1945. Now with less preponderance and a more complex world, American exceptionalism in terms of its economic and military power should focus on sharing the provision of global public goods, particularly those that require ‘power with’ others. Wilson's century old insights about international institutions and a rules-based order will remain crucial, but America's place in that world may be threatened more by the rise of populist politics at home than the rise of other powers abroad.
Child survivors of the Armenian Genocide, jewish child survivors of the Holocaust, non-jewish slavic children, and war children of the Second World War EHS Volume 5 presents child-oriented research ...approaches by scholars from the fields of Holocaust Studies, Genocide Studies, and Second World War History. The authors highlight key concepts of Childhood Studies, arguing that children are historical actors with their own ideas, identity-forming experiences, and agency. The contributions demonstrate the importance of children`s accounts of war and postwar experiences for deeper understanding of the history of war and society in the twentieth century. The volume showcases a variety of children`s voices including child survivors of the Armenian Genocide, Jewish child survivors of the Holocaust, non-Jewish Slavic children, and war children of the Second World War by utilising testimonies from lesser-known archival and oral history collections. Includes: Edita Gzoyan: Forcibly Transferred and Assimilated: Experiences of Armenian Children during the Armenian Genocide. Dieter Steinert: Echoes from Hell: Jewish Child Forced Labourers and the Holocaust. Oksana Vynnyk: Surviving Starvation in Soviet Ukraine: Children and Soviet Healthcare in the early 1930s.
Tens of thousands of Italian civilians perished in the Allied bombing raids of World War II. More of them died after the Armistice of September 1943 than before, when the air attacks were intended to ...induce Italy’s surrender. Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945 addresses this seeming paradox, by examining the views of Allied political and military leaders, Allied air crews, and Italians on the ground. It tells the stories of a little-known diplomat (Myron Charles Taylor), military strategist (Solly Zuckerman), resistance fighter (Aldo Quaranta), and peace activist (Vera Brittain) – architects and opponents of the bombing strategies. It describes the fate of ordinary civilians, drawing on a wealth of local and digital archival sources, memoir accounts, novels, and films, including Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro. The book will be of interest to readers concerned about the ethical, legal, and human dimensions of bombing and its effects on civilians, to students of military strategy and Italian history, and to World War II buffs. They will benefit from a people-focused history that draws on a range of eclectic and rarely used sources in English and Italian.
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