The Red Cross in the USSR and the World: History and Prospects

1988 ◽  
Vol 28 (265) ◽  
pp. 379-383
Author(s):  
Dmitry D. Venedictov

Public attention is being focused worldwide on the 125th anniversary of the International Red Cross, a milestone in the evolution of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.When celebrating an anniversary, it is customary to look back into the past for a clearer understanding and appraisal of the present, and to gain insight into the future. This is particularly important as regards the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, which is one of the most significant manifestations of humanism, symbolizing the recognition that society must uphold human dignity as the supreme universal value, and the desire to avert or relieve human suffering and safeguard human life and health.


Author(s):  
Lyndsey Stonebridge

Samuel Beckett is known for his unique abstraction of human suffering. This chapter shows how his wartime experiences transformed his writing, producing one of the first really critical literary depictions of the new subject of human rights and humanitarianism. Beckett’s engagement with what he described in 1946 as ‘the time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins’ began with his own experience of displacement and with his work with the Irish Red Cross in Saint-Lô. The characters who wander through the three short stories that he first wrote in French, ‘La Fin’, ‘L’Explusé’, and ‘Le Calmant’, collectively known as the Nouvelles, are both subject to a regime of humanitarian indifference (‘They clothed me and gave me money’ read the first lines of ‘La Fin’) and restless agents, stumbling in a stripped down French, groping for a new narrative. These are the new clowns of the dark background of difference, ironists of their own suffering, chroniclers of the gap that had opened up between the placeless people and the rest of the world.



СИНЕЗА ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Omer Merzić
Keyword(s):  
The Past ◽  

One thing that unites all people regardless of their current place in the world is their history and their past. Another similarity that unites them is the tendency to distort the past for their own ends. Every country and every nation have their own myths which have become the cornerstone in their establishment andprogress. The misuse of history is most dominantly done by ideologies and their creators as a tool in justifying their work. The author of this book is Margaret MacMillan, who is a Canadian histo- rian most notable for her work on the Versailles conference of 1919, which she mentions more than once in this book. MacMillan’s understanding and insight into history and national iden- tity are brought out in this book, where she points out mythical roots of some of today’s most problematic national and ethnic questions.



2020 ◽  
pp. 45-57
Author(s):  
Nicholas Mee

Astronomy was the first science. Even in the fourteenth century, astronomers could accurately predict the date and time of an eclipse that lay one hundred years in the future. But early astronomers also developed some strange ideas which still resound today. Astrologers of the past identified conjunctions of the planets, especially the outer planets Jupiter and Saturn, with disastrous events such as floods, schisms, and pestilence. These ideas were related to the notion that world history can be understood as a series of 1,000-year cycles. This idea dates back to ancient Persian and Babylonian astrologers, but it has been perpetuated within Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity and is known today as ‘millennialism’. It is quite remarkable that the sequence of conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn was also the key that led Johannes Kepler to dedicate himself to astronomy and ultimately to transform astronomy into a modern science.



2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cora Chan

Abstract The 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre marked China out as an exception in the chapter of world history that saw the fall of international communism. The massacre crystalized the mistrust between China and Hong Kong into an open ideological conflict—Leninist authoritarianism versus liberal democracy—that has colored relations between the two since then. This article tracks the hold that authoritarianism has gained over liberal values in Hong Kong in the past thirty years and reflects on what needs to be done in the next thirty years for the balance to be re-tilted and sustained beyond 2047, when China’s fifty-year commitment to preserving Hong Kong’s autonomy expires. Still surviving (just) as a largely liberal (though by no means fully democratic) jurisdiction after two decades of Chinese rule, Hong Kong is a testing ground for whether China can respect liberal values, how resilient such values are to the alternative authoritarian vision offered by an economic superpower, and the potential for establishing a liberal-democratic pocket within an authoritarian state. The territory’s everyday wrestle with Chinese pressures speaks to the liberal struggles against authoritarian challenges (in their various guises) that continue to plague the world thirty years after the end of the Cold War.​



1968 ◽  
Vol 72 (687) ◽  
pp. 191-197
Author(s):  
A. H. Wheeler

Predicting the future for Agricultural Aviation is rendered even more uncertain than predictions for most forms of aviation because in this case the future depends on two entirely separate sets of unknowns. These are the normal unknowns affecting aeronautical development but, more important, there are the unknowns affecting the development of agricultural chemicals. Also, in predicting the future evolution of any activity one must normally look back over the rate and the trend of developments in the activity, so far as they are relevant, from the past and then project this rate and trend into the future, bending and extending the line of projection in accordance with known or foreseeable influences. Here again we get a third set of unknowns related to future farming techniques, although these unknowns are perhaps less significant because the main expansion in agricultural aviation will probably lie in the vast undeveloped regions of the world where the farming techniques will merely be brought up to present standards, or just introduced where there was literally no agriculture before.



Horizons ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 374-396
Author(s):  
William L. Portier

This article1offers an impressionistic look back over the past five decades, from 1968 to 2016, in Catholic theology in the United States. At the heart of this story are Christology, the world of grace, and their relationship. This memoir unfolds in three parts: “Running on Empty, 1968–1980”; “Jesus and the World of Grace, 1980–2016”; “Can Liberal Catholics Come Back?” It identifies the most neuralgic question left to us from this period: How is Christ related to the world of grace?



Author(s):  
Laurence Brockliss

Childhood in western Europe is obviously a vast topic, and this entry will approach it historically and largely chronologically. The study of childhood is still relatively new, and historians have sometimes struggled to construct a history of childhood, with very few firsthand accounts and limited archives. So many children left very few traces of their lives, and historians have had to piece together their history, not from diaries or archives but from court reports, visual representations, and childcare manuals. They have had to struggle to recapture the world of childhood in eras prior to 1800, when sources are especially limited. They, like others interested in childhood studies, have had to address the issue of how to define a child and what childhood is. They have had to contemplate the different historical meanings of the word child prior to 1600 and to resist the temptation to believe that childhood has inevitably improved through the centuries. They have also had to become aware of the dangers of historicizing a phenomenon that has few stable parameters and, in some cultures, may not even exist at all. In several languages there is no word for child; even in English, the word has drastically shifted its meaning over the centuries. These shifts need to be historicized in order to see both the continuities and the discontinuities between the past and the present that suggest that childhood has always been a time of suffering; children have always been the victims of perilous disease, parental neglect, government policy, war, etc. Concurrently, children have also always been the hope of the future, the focus of special love and attention. A historical perspective on European childhoods brings this insight into sharp focus.



2008 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Harvey

AbstractThe practices, habits and convictions that once allowed the inhabitants of Christendom to determine what they could reasonably do and say together to foster a just and equitable common life have slowly been displaced over the past few centuries by new configurations which have sought to maintain an inherited faith in an underlying purpose to human life while disassociating themselves from the God who had been the beginning and end of that faith. In the end, however, these new configurations are incapable of sustained deliberations about the basic conditions of our humanity. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology provides important clues into what it takes to make and keep human life human in such a world. The first part of this essay examines Bonhoeffer's conception of the last things, the things before the last, and what binds them together. He argues that the things before the last do not possess a separate, autonomous existence, and that the positing of such a breach has had disastrous effects on human beings and the world they inhabit. The second part looks at Bonhoeffer's account of the divine mandates as the conceptual basis for coping with a world that has taken leave of God. Though this account of the mandates has much to commend it, it is hindered by problematic habits of interpretation that leave it vacillating between incommensurable positions. Bonhoeffer's incomplete insights are thus subsumed within Augustine's understanding of the two orders of human society set forth in City of God.



2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 289-309
Author(s):  
Max Schaefer ◽  

This paper seeks to address whether human life harbours the possibility of a gratuitous or non-reciprocal form of trust. To address this issue, I take up Descartes’ account of the cogito as the essence of all appearing. With his interpretation of Descartes’ account of the cogito as an immanent and affective mode of appearing, I maintain that Henry provides the transcendental foundation for a non-reciprocal form of trust, which the history of Western philosophy has largely covered over by forgetting this aspect of Descartes’ thought. I demonstrate that Heidegger’s reading of Descartes serves as a pre-eminent example of this. Because Heidegger overlooks Descartes’ insight into the essence of appearing, and reduces this essence to the finite transcendence of the world, I maintain that Heidegger reduces trust to reciprocal relations of understanding between beings of shared contexts of significance.



2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 153
Author(s):  
Viktor Yu. MELNIKOV ◽  
Yuri A. KOLESNIKOV ◽  
Alla V. KISELEVA ◽  
Bika B. DZHAMALOVA ◽  
Aleksandra I. NOVITSKAYA

Without understanding the past can be neither a viable present and no decent future. The appeal of the nation to its history – this is not an attempt to escape from the present and uncertainty about the future. This understanding of who we are, where we came from. Based on our experience, we can confidently move forward. Not happen in the Russian revolution, which way went the history of the world? Can we learn from the past to prevent another disaster? The lessons of history are there – they just need to be able to retrieve. The main lesson we can learn from what happened in 1917 – the need to value human life. Russia of the late XIX – early XX century was an incredible human potential.



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