scholarly journals "We May Not Be Goliath But We Have David’s Sling"

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noah Szajowitz
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Japanese Empire ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Forum ◽  
National Debate ◽  
Second World ◽  
New Zealanders

This thesis focuses on New Zealanders’ perception of the Home Guard through a specific lens of culture demonstrated through wartime printed newspapers across New Zealand. These newspapers allowed for a public forum for New Zealander’s thoughts on the Home Guard, enabling a national debate on the purpose of the Home Guard over the course of the Second World War. Critically, these print newspapers and public opinion drastically influenced the direction of the Home Guard, illuminated the problems the Home Guard faced, and often received a response from the New Zealand Government. The Home Guard’s initial difficulty with recruitment, the impressment of private rifles by the New Zealand government after a failed voluntary campaign, and the later enactment of compulsory enrollment, firmly question the realistic effectiveness of the Home Guard. Competing narratives between the New Zealand government and New Zealanders, both involved in the Home Guard and not affiliated, collectively influenced the Home Guard from 1940 until 1942, as New Zealand feared invasion by the larger Japanese Empire.

scholarly journals Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, and its Enemies

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kierstead
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Open Society ◽  
World War ◽  
Current Generation ◽  
Jewish Intellectual ◽  
To Come ◽  
Influential Book ◽  
Second World ◽  
New Zealanders

According to Michael King, Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies may be “the most influential book ever to come out of New Zealand.” Written in Christchurch in the last years of the Second World War by a Jewish intellectual in exile from Vienna, the book’s forthright attack on Plato created a storm of controversy worldwide, and continues to be influential today. In this piece, I want to reintroduce Popper to the current generation of New Zealanders. I look at how the book came to be written in New Zealand, and what Popper thought of the country. I also examine the controversy surrounding the book, and see what we might say about it today, especially in light of subsequent scholarship.   

In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Second World War ◽  
New Order ◽  
Japanese Empire ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Military ◽  
Second World

The destruction of Japan’s empire in August 1945 under the military onslaught of the Allied Powers produced a powerful rupture in the histories of modern East Asia. Everywhere imperial ruins from Manchuria to Taiwan bore memoires of a great run of upheavals and wars which in turn produced revolutionary uprisings and civil wars from China to Korea. The end of global Second World War did not bring peace and stability to East Asia. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. Rather the disintegration of Japan’s imperium inaugurated a era of unprecedented bloodletting, state destruction, state creation, and reinvention of international order. In the ruins of Japan’s New Order, legal anarchy, personal revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments were the crucible for decades of violence. As the circuits of empire went into meltdown in 1945, questions over the continuity of state and law, ideologies and the troubled inheritance of the Japanese empire could no longer be suppressed. In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire takes a transnational lens to this period, concluding that we need to write the violence of empire’s end – and empire itself - back into the global history of East Asia’s Cold War.

scholarly journals At home with New Zealand in the 1960s

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Richard Thomson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Advanced Technology ◽  
World War ◽  
European Settlement ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Second World ◽  
At Home

<p>Published by A H & A W Reed to immediate success late in 1961, New Zealand in Colour was the first of many large-format books of colour photographs of New Zealand. While they belonged to a tradition of scenic reproduction as old as European settlement, technological changes and the social and economic disruptions of the Second World War intensified the importance of the image in print culture. Drawing on recent historiographic approaches that seek to decentre New Zealand across transnational and city-hinterland relationships, this thesis argues that reproduction, through photography but also as a cultural practice, was intrinsic to a Pakeha conception of place. Looking at scenery was an activity thought to be peculiarly suited to New Zealand, but it was also a prime form of tourist consumption and was therefore essential to New Zealanders’ successful participation in modernity, which required ‘seeing ourselves’ but also awareness of recognition from other moderns. During the decades after the Second World War, modernity took on a more international character with greater mobility of people and goods and a strengthening consumer culture. The complex kinds of looking involved in being modern were increasingly expressed as a tension between modern and anti-modern impulses. The colour pictorial displayed New Zealand as a cultural landscape of cameras, cars, and holidays, but also as a refuge from modernity. The ‘coffee table book’ was a luxury consumer object of advanced technology, but the gift was the preferred method for its circulation. To be at home with this New Zealand may require a move to the suburbs, but it offers a view of nation and nationalism in which mobility, leisure, and consumption have become the chief explanatory tools.</p>

scholarly journals Remembering Gallipoli: Interviews with New Zealand Gallipoli Veterans

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Hutching
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Advisory Body ◽  
The People ◽  
Second World

Before I began my series of books about the Second World War, based on interviews that I and others did with veterans of that conflict, the project was discussed at an advisory body meeting of the History Group (as it then was) of the Ministry for Culture & Heritage. One of the people present wondered how it would be possible to tell the story of the war through interviews as most of the people who knew what had happened – he meant officers – were dead. In Remembering Gallipoli, Chris Pugley and Charles Ferrall have shown that everyone who experiences war knows what happens. They may not have an overview of tactics and plans, but my word, do they understand what it was like to be there. What richness the testimonies in this book add to our understanding of war.

Seoul and Nanking, Baghdad and Kabul: A Response to Timothy Brook and Michael Shin

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-125
Author(s):  
John Whittier Treat
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Japanese Empire ◽  
World War ◽  
Ethical Judgments ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Security State ◽  
Second World

I begin my rejoinder to Timothy Brook and Michael Shin by reiterating the important question with which Brook ends his piece. “[W]hen Hamid Karzai's government falls in Afghanistan, or Nouri al-Maliki's does in Iraq, who then will be the nation's heroes and who the collaborators?” Questions such as this and other present-day conundrums (including the choices I make living in a national security state) were certainly on my mind when I began thinking about collaboration during the Second World War and particularly within the Japanese empire. The line between then and now is direct and short for me. Timothy Brook himself has been the target of an internet smear campaign assailing his work on Chinese collaboration for purportedly preparing an alibi for American mischief in Iraq and Afghanistan. Paramount among my own thoughts was always: what would I do, were I faced with the choices a Yi Kwang-su, a Liang Hongzhi or a Wang Jingwei was? It seems an irresistible reflex to me that we place ourselves in the position of those in the past who wagered and lost, and rehearse their calculations as our own: judgment of their decisions is as inevitable as it is necessary. The question is not if we will judge—to refuse risks our claims to moral agency—it is how. Timothy Brook, whether he once declined or now hesitates, indeed does make ethical judgments (he is on the record, for example, against advocating “collaboration as a morally positive or politically advisable course” [2008]), and indeed he should. That we have not come to similar conclusions only points to our missing consensus on a moral calculus, and not to the lack of an imperative to possess one.

Sucker Nation and Santa Claus

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dayna L. Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Santa Claus ◽  
National Debate ◽  
The World ◽  
Second World ◽  
Important Shift ◽  
Dominant Paradigm

This chapter focuses on the wartime congressional experience, which reflected an important shift in American foreign policy. During the Second World War, support for deep American engagement with the world, once confined to a narrow circle of internationalist elites, replaced isolationism as the dominant paradigm in American political discourse. The long debates and introduction of bills on postwar foreign policy in Congress during the summer and fall of 1943 revealed a sea change toward congressional support for an active postwar foreign policy and extensive commitments around the world. This change in Congress reflected the shift in American opinion as the isolationists and noninterventionists lost the national debate on the country's future.

scholarly journals From Pariahs to Patriots: Canadian Communists and the Second World War

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Frazer
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Royal Canadian Mounted Police ◽  
Mackenzie King ◽  
Communist Party Of Canada ◽  
Second World

Official anti-communist policies, adopted by the Mackenzie King government during the Second World War, were only partially effective. These policies were implemented by the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and the armed forces high command, and included internment, banning the Communist Party of Canada (cpc), and monitoring communists in the armed forces. These policies, however, were thwarted by the logic of the war, as well as by opposition from liberal public opinion and the communists themselves.

A quarterly post-Second World War real GDP series for New Zealand

2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viv B. Hall ◽  
C. John McDermott
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Real Gdp ◽  
Second World
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