In Inglorious, Illegal
Bastards , Aaron Herald Skabelund examines
how the Self-Defense Force (SDF)-the post-World War II Japanese
military-and specifically the Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF),
...struggled for legitimacy in a society at best indifferent to them
and often hostile to their very existence.
From the early iterations of the GSDF as the Police Reserve
Force and the National Safety Force, through its establishment as
the largest and most visible branch of the armed forces, the GSDF
deployed an array of public outreach and public service
initiatives, including off-base and on-base events, civil
engineering projects, and natural disaster relief operations.
Internally, the GSDF focused on indoctrination of its personnel to
fashion a reconfigured patriotism and esprit de corps. These
efforts to gain legitimacy achieved some success and influenced the
public over time, but they did not just change society. They also
transformed the force itself, as it assumed new priorities and
traditions and contributed to the making of a Cold War defense
identity, which came to be shared by wider society in Japan. As
Inglorious, Illegal Bastards demonstrates, this identity
endures today, several decades after the end of the Cold War.
This social and cultural history of Civil War medicine and science sheds important light on the question of why and how anti-Black racism survived the destruction of slavery. During the war, white ...Northerners promoted ideas about Black inferiority under the guise of medical and scientific authority. In particular, the Sanitary Commission and Army medical personnel conducted wartime research aimed at proving Black medical and biological inferiority. They not only subjected Black soldiers and refugees from slavery to substandard health care but also scrutinized them as objects of study. This mistreatment of Black soldiers and civilians extended after life to include dissection, dismemberment, and disposal of the Black war dead in unmarked or mass graves and medical waste pits. Simultaneously, white medical and scientific investigators enhanced their professional standing by establishing their authority on the science of racial difference and hierarchy. Drawing on archives of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, recollections of Civil War soldiers and medical workers, and testimonies from Black Americans, Leslie A. Schwalm exposes the racist ideas and practices that shaped wartime medicine and science. Painstakingly researched and accessibly written, this book helps readers understand the persistence of anti-Black racism and health disparities during and after the war.
Will be of interest to those working on conflict and peace studies,
economic development, cultural studies, and women in the modern world. A key new
publication. -- Chandra R. de Silva, Old Dominion
...University ... offers a superb overview of how a civil war,
driven by ethnicity, can engender a new culture and a new political economy...
Highly recommended. -- Choice Economy, Culture, and
Civil War in Sri Lanka provides a lucid and up-to-date interpretation of Sri Lankan
society and its 20-year civil conflict. An interdisciplinary examination of the
relationship between the economy, broadly defined, and the reproduction of violent
conflict, this volume argues that the war is grounded not just in the goals and
intentions of the opposing sides, but also in the everyday orientations,
experiences, and material practices of all Sri Lankan people. The contributors
explore changing political and policy contexts; the effect of long-term conflict on
employment opportunities and life choices for rural and urban youth; life histories,
memory, and narratives of violence; the economics of enlisting and
individual decisions about involvement in the war; and nationalism and the moral
debate triggered by women's employment in the international garment manufacturing
industry. Contributors are Francesca Bremner, Michele Ruth
Gamburd, Newton Gunasinghe, Siri T. Hettige, Caitrin Lynch, John M. Richardson, Jr.,
Amita Shastri, Deborah Winslow, and Michael D. Woost.
How to Look Good in A War examines the methods used to depict, defend and justify the use of state violence. Many books have shown how 'truth is the first casualty of war' but this is the first to ...analyse exactly how pro-war narratives are constructed and normalised. Brian Rappert details the 'upside-down' world of war in which revelation conceals, knowledge fosters uncertainty, and transparency obscures. He looks at government spin during recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya where officials manoeuvre between circulating and withholding information. Examining how organised violence is justified, How to Look Good in A War draws on experiences from recent controversy to consider how ignorance about the operation of war is produced and how concerned individuals and groups can intervene to make a difference.
This open access book explores the history of asylums and their civilian patients during the First World War, focusing on the effects of wartime austerity and deprivation on the provision of care. ...While a substantial body of literature on 'shell shock' exists, this study uncovers the mental wellbeing of civilians during the war. It provides the first comprehensive account of wartime asylums in London, challenging the commonly held view that changes in psychiatric care for civilians post-war were linked mainly to soldiers' experiences and treatment. Drawing extensively on archival and published sources, this book examines the impact of medical, scientific, political, cultural and social change on civilian asylums. It compares four asylums in London, each distinct in terms of their priorities and the diversity of their patients. Revealing the histories of the 100,000 civilian patients who were institutionalised during the First World War, this book offers new insights into decision-making and prioritisation of healthcare in times of austerity, and the myriad factors which inform this.
Throughout the history of the Crusades, liturgical prayer, masses, and alms were all marshaled in the fight against Muslim armies. In Invisible Weapons, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin focuses on the ways in ...which Latin Christians communicated their ideas and aspirations for crusade to God through liturgy, how public worship was deployed, and how prayers and masses absorbed the ideals and priorities of crusading. Placing religious texts and practices within the larger narrative of crusading, Gaposchkin offers a new understanding of a crucial facet in the culture of holy war.
How should Christians think about the relationship between the exercise of military power and the spread of Christianity? In Russian Orthodoxy and the Russo-Japanese War, Betsy Perabo looks at the ...Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 through the unique concept of an 'interreligious war' between Christian and Buddhist nations, focusing on the figure of Nikolai of Japan, the Russian leader of the Orthodox Church in Japan.Drawing extensively on Nikolai's writings alongside other Russian-language sources, the book provides a window into the diverse Orthodox Christian perspectives on the Russo-Japanese War - from the officials who saw the war as a crusade for Christian domination of Asia to Nikolai, who remained with his congregation in Tokyo during the war. Writings by Russian soldiers, field chaplains, military psychologists, and leaders in the missionary community contribute to a rich portrait of a Christian nation at war. By grounding its discussion of 'interreligious war' in the historical example of the Russo-Japanese War, and by looking at the war using the sympathetic and compelling figure of Nikolai of Japan, this book provides a unique perspective which will be of value to students and scholars of both Russian history, the history of war and religion and religious ethics.
Prisoners returning home from the Korean War were treated differently than after other conflicts. The Army complained that they collaborated with the enemy and succumbed easily to brainwashing ...because their families coddled them. The fates of American POWs had became linked to communist prisoners when they both were used as propaganda props. China used American voices to denounce the war and capitalism.The United States claimed that thousands of communist prisoners were defecting. While partially true, this stand doubled the length of the conflict and culminated in the withholding of thousands of prisoners after the war. Former American POWs continued to be used in publicity at home where the government feared that the nation and its soldiers were becoming effeminate. But collaboration in prison camps and the reaction to it were due more to the circumstances of limited war than the character of GIs. POWs were also important in why Korea became the “forgotten war.” Unlike Vietnam, where all the POWs were treated as heroes, during Korea their use in psychological warfare poisoned the memory, making them unusable for reremembering a more glorified war.
Via rigorous study of the legal arguments Spain developed to justify its acts of war and conquest, The Other Side of Empire illuminates Spain's expansionary ventures in the Mediterranean in the late ...fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Andrew Devereux proposes and explores an important yet hitherto unstudied connection between the different rationales that Spanish jurists and theologians developed in the Mediterranean and in the Americas. Devereux describes the ways in which Spaniards conceived of these two theatres of imperial ambition as complementary parts of a whole. At precisely the moment that Spain was establishing its first colonies in the Caribbean, the Crown directed a series of Old World conquests that encompassed the Kingdom of Naples, Navarre, and a string of presidios along the coast of North Africa. Projected conquests in the eastern Mediterranean never took place, but the Crown seriously contemplated assaults on Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and Palestine. The Other Side of Empire elucidates the relationship between the legal doctrines on which Spain based its expansionary claims in the Old World and the New. The Other Side of Empire vastly expands our understanding of the ways in which Spaniards, at the dawn of the early modern era, thought about religious and ethnic difference, and how this informed political thought on just war and empire. While focusing on imperial projects in the Mediterranean, it simultaneously presents a novel contextual background for understanding the origins of European colonialism in the Americas.
Anatomy of a Civil War demonstrates the destructive nature of war, ranging from the physical to the psychosocial, as well as war’s detrimental effects on the environment. Despite such horrific ...aspects, evidence suggests that civil war is likely to generate multilayered outcomes. To examine the transformative aspects of civil war, Mehmet Gurses draws on an original survey conducted in Turkey, where a Kurdish armed group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has been waging an intermittent insurgency for Kurdish self-rule since 1984. Findings from a probability sample of 2,100 individuals randomly selected from three major Kurdish-populated provinces in the eastern part of Turkey, coupled with insights from face-to-face in-depth interviews with dozens of individuals affected by violence, provide evidence for the multifaceted nature of exposure to violence during civil war. Just as the destructive nature of war manifests itself in various forms and shapes, wartime experiences can engender positive attitudes toward women, create a culture of political activism, and develop secular values at the individual level. In addition, wartime experiences seem to robustly predict greater support for political activism. Nonetheless, changes in gender relations and the rise of a secular political culture appear to be primarily shaped by wartime experiences interacting with insurgent ideology.
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