The Clear and Present Danger

Worldview ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-24
Author(s):  
J. W. Fulbright

It is one of the perversities of human nature that people have a far greater capacity for enduring disasters than for preventing them, even when the danger is plain and imminent. Winston Churchill, for all his prescience and eloquence, was powerless to prevent the Second World War: He wrote in 1936 of an England “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.” The question for us today is whether, we can succeed where Churchill failed—a tall order Indeed— by preventing disaster so as not to have to endure it.

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-61
Author(s):  
Jill Felicity Durey

This article illuminates two short stories by John Galsworthy through examining them with the help of his diaries and letters, a handful of unpublished letters by his nephew from an internment camp and secondary historical sources. It argues that the stories, when read in conjunction with these sources, are highly revealing about human nature during Second World War and also about Galsworthy’s prescient fears concerning a second twentieth-century world war, which he did not live to see.


Author(s):  
Bryce Evans

The ending of the Anglo-Irish Economic War (1932-8) is often represented as a watershed in British-Irish relations. However, it was soon followed by renewed trade hostility. Between 1940 and 1945, Winston Churchill subjected Ireland to an economic squeeze: the price of Irish neutrality in the Second World War. While the length of this trade war has generally been overlooked by historians, the effect of this ‘long’ Economic War on Irish public health has been similarly disregarded. This contribution argues that the Anglo-Irish economic war resulted in the mass slaughter of Irish herds due to the removal of the British export market. Market disruption had a significant knock-on effect on Irish public health, particularly in the countryside. Similarly, the British economic squeeze of the Second World War ensured that Ireland’s agricultural economy was denied fertilisers, feed, chemicals and tractors; modern productive aids that are essential to food production. The Irish government infamously introduced the ‘black loaf’ as wheat production wheat stalled, causing fears of a second Famine. Aggravated by a belatedly introduced rationing system, public health suffered.


1984 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 925-945 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold L. Smith

At the national women's conference convened by the government in September 1943 Winston Churchill assured the women delegates that the contribution to the war effort by British women had ‘definitely altered those social and sex balances which years of convention had established’. His belief that the war had brought about profound changes in the status of women was shared by contemporary authors attempting to evaluate the effect of the war on British women. Studies written near the end of the war by Margaret Goldsmith and Gertrude Williams refer to a wartime ‘revolution’ in the position of women. Both authors defined this revolution primarily in terms of the changed position of women workers.


Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam

This introductory chapter offers a quick glimpse into the historical milieu during which this volume is set. Between the Second World War and the 1970s, this chapter shows that scientists from a wide range of disciplines crafted a historical trajectory for humanity that was self-consciously anti-eugenic. The best of humanity had not degenerated from living in the artificial constructs of civilization, would not dissolve because of the overbreeding of the lower classes, and could not be corrupted through miscegenation. Instead, these evolutionists argued that our common past provided evidence of our continued remarkable success as a species. In essence, so these scientists reasoned, our present human nature resulted from the synergy of biology and culture, both in dynamic flux throughout our development as a species. We had become the most recent manifestation of a human lineage destined for even greater things in the future. Through their work, an evolutionary perspective wended its way into each discipline perched at the intersection of the natural and social sciences.


2005 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Eliot

Few Britons could resist the powerful rhetoric of Winston Churchill, whose words to the House of Commons in June 1940 (Churchill 1989) called upon all men, women, and children to do their utmost to serve the war effort. During the worst of the bombings, from 1940 to 1941, in what came to be known as “the blitz,” London and its populace were transformed. J. B. Priestly noted that “for once, [we] felt free, companionable, even—except while waiting for the explosions—lighthearted.” Fear, anxiety, the sense of struggle, or so the story goes, pulled Londoners together and united them in a sense of camaraderie that broke down centuries-old class barriers (Ziegler 1995, 165–166).Among the commonly accepted myths of the British participation in the Second World War was this one—perpetuated by British authorities and some later historians—that all classes and all people were united in common cause against the enemy. While true on some levels, the picture of an island nation joined in communal sacrifice during the “People's War” masks the underlying societal anxieties that muffled differences of opinion and threatened those who did not adopt accepted notions of patriotism. Vera Brittain, writing at a key point during the world conflict, noted that the Nazi invasions of Europe “produced a rising clamour against unpopular minorities throughout England,” and that “both government and people are temporarily seized by a panic of suspicion” (Brittain 1941, 33). In his examination of the twentieth-century manifestations of British nationalism, Patrick Wright, for one, noted that exclusionary impulses, emerging under the threat of foreign invasion, were linked to subtle but prevalent patterns of anti-Semitism prior to and during the war years (Wright 1985).


2020 ◽  
pp. 7-28
Author(s):  
Stephen Wall

Joining the European Community would, in the words of Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, be ‘the end of a thousand years of history’. Britain, as an island, was set apart from continental Europe both geographically, politically, and psychologically. It had fought off invasion and fought continental wars to prevent the formation of too-dominant continental alliances. But Britain’s economic and political life was inextricably bound up with that of the continent and its own monarchical dynasties were sometimes more foreign than domestic in origin. The English Reformation was a key definer of national identity and resistance to continental encroachment. The Second World War entrenched British confidence in the UK’s national institutions, which had stood against tyranny, by comparison with those on the continent that had been disgraced or destroyed. After the Second World War, Winston Churchill played a key role in the vision that became the European Community but he wanted to be ‘with’ it, not ‘of’ it.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-219
Author(s):  
REGINA KUNZEL

Psychoanalysis is at once a system of thought, a toolkit for cultural diagnosis and criticism, and a therapeutic practice. In Dagmar Herzog's exciting new book Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes, psychoanalysis is among the most transformative intellectual events of the twentieth century and is itself transformed by that century's roiling forces, shaping and profoundly shaped by politics and culture. Foregrounding the historicity of psychoanalysis requires Herzog to wrest psychoanalysis from its own claims to historical transcendence. “While psychoanalysis is often taken to be ahistorical in its view of human nature,” Herzog writes, “the opposite is the case” (2). After Freud's death, during the heyday of psychoanalysis in the 1940s and 1950s, through challenges to its authority in the 1960s and 1970s, to what Herzog calls its “second golden age” in the 1980s, the analytic frame offered by psychoanalysis (and the debates it generated) helped people grapple with the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War and offered novel ways of thinking about the most important questions of the postwar decades: about aggression, guilt, trauma, the capacity for violence, indeed about “the very nature of the human self and its motivations” (1).


Costume ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Orla Fitzpatrick

This paper will explore how clothes rationing impacted upon the population of Ireland during the Second World War and how the restrictions were encountered by the general population. It allows for a reconsideration of the period with particular reference to notions of respectability and class, and how these were manifested in dress and fashion. It will also examine the concept of Dublin as a destination, both during and after the war, for the purchase of Irish manufactures and clothing types which remained scarce in Britain and on continental Europe. It will draw upon a diverse range of sources including the espionage reports provided to Winston Churchill by the Anglo-Irish writer, Elizabeth Bowen, contemporary fiction, memoirs, travelogues, government papers, newspaper reports and advertisements. These vivid accounts will reveal much about a period which has received little consideration from dress historians within the Irish context.


Author(s):  
Andrew Stewart

This book presents a new account of the long-overlooked achievement of British-led forces who, against all odds, scored the first major Allied victory of the Second World War. Surprisingly neglected in accounts of Allied wartime triumphs, in 1941 British and Commonwealth forces completed a stunning and important victory in East Africa against an overwhelmingly superior Italian opponent. A hastily formed British-led force, never larger than 70,000 strong, advanced along two fronts to defeat nearly 300,000 Italian and colonial troops. This book draws on an array of previously unseen documents to provide both a detailed campaign history and a fresh appreciation of the first significant Allied success of the war. The book investigates such topics as Britain's African wartime strategy; how the fighting forces were assembled (most from British colonies, none from the U.S.); General Archibald Wavell's command abilities and his difficult relationship with Winston Churchill; the resolute Italian defense at Keren, one of the most bitterly fought battles of the entire war; the legacy of the campaign in East Africa; and much more.


1987 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 415-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Kitchen

When thinking of Churchill's attitude towards the Soviet Union one automatically thinks of him as the most outspoken of the advocates of armed intervention during the civil war, or as the author of the speech in Fulton, Missouri, which many people regard as the opening salvo in the Cold War. During the war, however, when the Soviet Union became a great ally without whose help the war in Europe could never have been won, his attitude was bound to be quite different. Even before the Germans launched ‘Operation Barbarossa’ thus forcing the Soviets into the Allied camp, Churchill had been thinking of the Russians as possible partners in the struggle against Nazi Germany, for however much he detested the Soviet regime, his passionate determination to destroy Nazism was a far more powerful emotion, and, as he put it, if Hitler were to invade Hell he would promptly sign a pact with the Devil.


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