De oprichting van Het Vlaamsche Front te Antwerpen. Een getuigenis van Rob Van Roosbroeck

2009 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-286
Author(s):  
Luc Vandeweyer

De partij, het Vlaamsche Front, werd door de vooraanstaande Vlaams-nationalistische historicus Hendrik Elias in de jaren zestig van de 20ste eeuw beschreven als een partij waar sociaal bewogen, pacifistische en links-revolutionaire wereldverbeteraars een plaats vonden en invloed uitoefenden. Die strekking werd verbonden met het vage begrip ‘humanitair’ en met een uitgesproken democratische en pacifistische ingesteldheid. Haar werd verhoudingsgewijs erg belangrijke rol toegedicht in het Vlaams-nationalisme van die naoorlogse jaren. Robert Van Roosbroeck, geboren in Antwerpen in 1898, was vier jaar ouder dan Hendrik Elias. Hij had deze jaren als jong, militant kaderlid van de partij meegemaakt. Elias gebruikte hem als bron voor de beschrijving van de overgang van oorlog naar vrede in het Vlaams-nationalisme in Antwerpen. Van Roosbroeck  had daardoor een grote invloed op de creatie van dit humanitaire en pacifistische amigo van het Vlaamsche Front. De autobiografische teksten waarmee hij Elias beïnvloedde, zijn het onderwerp van deze bronuitgave.________The foundation of The Flemish Front in Antwerp. A testimony by Rob Van RoosbroeckIn the nineteen sixties Hendrik Elias, the prominent Flemish Nationalist historian, described the Flemish Front party, which was founded after the First World War, as a party where pacifists with a social conscience and left-revolutionary do-gooders found a niche and exerted influence. That meaning was linked with the vague concept of ‘humanitarian’ and a more explicit democratic and pacifist conviction. The Flemish-Nationalism of those past war years attributed a comparatively large role to the Flemish Front. Robert Van Roosbroeck, born in Antwerp in 1898, was four years older than Hendrik Elias. He had experienced these years as a young, militant executive member of the party. Elias used him as a source for the description of the transition from war to peace in Flemish Nationalism in Antwerp. For that reason Van Roosbroeck greatly influenced the creation of the humanitarian and pacifist image of the Flemish Front. The autobiographic texts with which he influenced Elias constitute the subject of this source publication.

2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 276-289
Author(s):  
Luc Vandeweyer

Het wordt in de historiografie van de Vlaamse beweging aanvaard dat Hendrik Conscience door de Brusselse progressieve vereniging ‘De Veldbloem’ in 1872 werd gevraagd om te kandideren voor de parlementaire verkiezingen. Conscience zou dat geweigerd hebben. Dit is uiteraard geen onbetekenend feit in de biografie van de man die ‘zijn volk leerde lezen’.Dit gegeven is terug te voeren op de geschriften van Antoon Jacob (°1889) van na de Eerste Wereldoorlog. Jacob werd beschouwd als een autoriteit inzake Conscience. Maar waar is het bewijs? Hij verwees daarbij naar “uitvoerige correspondentie” maar die is niet te vinden. Het ADVN slaagde erin om de archivalische nalatenschap van de in 1947 gestorven Jacob te verwerven. Daarin bleken heel wat brieven van en aan Conscience te zitten. De briefwisseling met ‘De Veldbloem’ was onderwerp van deze bijdrage. Daarin is geen spoor te vinden van de poging om Conscience op het politieke strijdtoneel te brengen in Brussel. Daarbij moet de vraag gesteld worden hoe Jacob deze archiefstukken verzamelde en wat ermee is gebeurd tijdens zijn turbulente leven en talrijke omzwervingen. Het is best mogelijk dat er een en ander is verloren gegaan. Toch is deze nalatenschap een belangrijke aanwinst voor de studie van de geschiedenis van de Vlaamse beweging en die van Conscience in het bijzonder. ________ The Brussels association ‘De Veldbloem’ seeks contact with Hendrik Conscience. Two recently discovered letters It is an accepted fact in the historiography of the Flemish Movement that the Brussels progressive Association ‘De Veldbloem’ [=the Wildflower] asked Hendrik Conscience in 1872 to be their candidate for the parliamentary elections. It is said that Hendrik Conscience refused the request. This is of course a very significant fact in the biography of the man ‘who taught his people to read.’ This information may be inferred from the writings of Antoon Jacob (°1889) from the period after the First World War. Jacob was regarded as an authority on Conscience. But where is the evidence of this? In his claim, he referred to ‘extensive correspondence’, but that correspondence is not extant. The ADVN managed to acquire the archival legacy of Jacob who died in 1947. It turned out that it included quite a number of letters to and from Conscience. The exchange of letters with ‘De Veldbloem’ was the subject of this contribution. It contains no trace of the attempt to bring Conscience into the political arena in Brussels. It raises the question how Jacob collected these archival documents and what happened to them during his turbulent life and his many peregrinations.  It is certainly possible that some documents have been lost. However, this legacy is still an important acquisition for the study of the history of the Flemish Movement and of Conscience in particular.


1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith G. Robbins

James Bryce considered that 1914 would be a satisfying year. He had just been created a viscount and, at the age of seventy-six, could look back on a career of distinction in university life, politics and diplomacy. He could continue to write books and indulge in correspondence with his friends. In fact, the books were not written and his correspondence became very practical. The tension in Europe in the summer of 1914 caused many people to ask him for advice on the best course of action. What, in particular, were Liberals to do? Some M.P.s were talking of peace demonstrations to keep Britain out of European war, but Bryce hesitated. On the evening of 31 July, the matter was discussed with J. A. Spender who noted that ‘… Bryce … strongly advised not to join this demonstration. He agreed that violation of Belgium would be casus belli.’ When Belgium was violated, Bryce was committed to the war but his commitment was reluctant, hesitant and with foreboding. The consequences of his decision are the subject of this article.


Author(s):  
Kirill V. Vertyaev ◽  

The article develops the stadial formation thesis of the proto-statehood among the Iraqi Kurds. The concept of national identity of the Iraqi Kurds remains the subject of a complex and long-lasting discussion. The main obstacle for the emergence of the Kurdish integral nationalism is still the fact that the Kurds speak different dialects of Kurdish language, and still maintain political and inter-clan conflicts over the distribution of power (not to mention the futility of any attempts to define political boundaries of Iraqi Kurdistan). Ironically, Great Britain faced practically the same contradictions during its occupation of Mesopotamia at the end of the WWI (following the Mudros armistice in October 1918), when British attempts to create an independent Kurdish state failed for a number of reasons, which are discussed in the article. In our opinion, this period was responsible for the formation of proto-statehood in Kurdish area (Kingdom of Kurdistan, for example, obtained classic characteristics of a chiefdom, but at the same time had a vivid anti-colonial, anti-imperialist orientation). The phenomenology of the British government’s political relations with such ‘quasi-states’ presents the subject for this article’s analysis.


Author(s):  
Ekaterina Simonenko ◽  

Introduction. The paper is devoted to the participation of Canada in the creation and activities of the Imperial War Cabinet and two Imperial War Conferences of 1917 and 1918 to explain the evolution of the foreign and political status of Canada as a part of the British Empire after the end of the War. Methods and materials. The paper is based on the British and Canadian Parliamentary Debates, Reports, Minutes of Proceedings and Meetings of the Imperial War Conferences 1917/1918 and the Imperial War Cabinet. To study them, it uses the method of historical criticism of sources. The author also uses the historical-genetic, comparative and the narrative methods to investigate the causes, the process of creating and activities of imperial military bodies for the unified management of the war. Analysis. The paper analyzes the reasons for the creation of imperial military organizations in the British Empire during the war. It reveals the organizational and functional differences between the two imperial military bodies: Cabinet and Conference. The author studies the activities of imperial military bodies during the war in detail, determines the role of the Canadian delegation in this process. The article analyzes the decisions of the imperial military bodies, reveals their domestic and foreign policy consequences for Dominion of Canada. Results. Canada’s active participation in the creation and activities of the imperial military bodies during the First World War was one of the factors in the transformation of the Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations, the formation of its own national identity, political and foreign independence within the Empire.


1964 ◽  
Vol 68 (637) ◽  
pp. 25-34
Author(s):  
W. H. Garing

Because two world wars have exerted such a profound influence on military aviation I have chosen to treat the subject under the following headings:The BeginningThe First World War.The Inter-War Years.The Second World War.From 1945 to the present.The Future.Under each heading I will endeavour to outline the developments and changes in technology and rôle which have taken place, and to indicate the effects these were to have upon each succeeding period.


2020 ◽  
pp. 39-70

The Ministry of Food was essentially created during the War, and survived until it was reabsorbed into the Ministry of Agriculture in 1958. It has been the subject of extensive popular and scholarly interest as part of research into the management of the Second World War on the Home Front. Lessons about food control had been learned from the experiences of the First World War, which were consciously applied to this war. This was in part because so many of the men had been involved in that conflict in some way, including Woolton himself. They had personal memories of what had worked well then, but were also very aware of the mistakes that had been made, which they did not wanted repeated. Woolton certainly was, as his ...


2004 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 357-368
Author(s):  
Michael Snape

Of all the dark legends which have arisen out of the British experience of the First World War, perhaps none is more compelling than the fate of more than three hundred British, Dominion and Colonial soldiers who were tried and executed for military offences during the course of the conflict. Controversial at the time, these executions were the subject of much debate and official scrutiny in the inter-war period and, even today, the subject continues to have a bitter and painful resonance. Led by the Shot at Dawn Campaign, pressure for the rehabilitation of these men continues and the case for a millennium pardon was marked in June 2001 by the opening of an emotive memorial to them at the National Memorial Arboretum near Lichfield. However, this paper is not concerned with the justice of the proceedings which led to the deaths of these men. Whether due legal process was followed or whether those executed were suffering from shell shock are difficult and probably unanswerable questions which I will leave to legal and to military historians. Instead of investigating the circumstances of the condemned, this paper turns the spotlight onto the circumstances and attitudes of men whose presence at military executions was as inevitable as that of the prisoner or the firing squad; namely, the commissioned chaplains of the British army.


1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 875-898 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. Taylor

In July 1918 it was the considered opinion of Lord Northcliffe that propaganda and diplomacy were incompatible. When, only five months earlier, Northcliffe had accepted Lloyd George's invitation to take charge of the newly created department of enemy propaganda, his appointment, coupled with that of Lord Beaverbrook as Britain's first minister of information, had held out the promise of a new phase in the efficiency and co-ordination of Britain's conduct of official propaganda in foreign countries. It was then, in February 1918, that the Foreign Office had finally been forced to relinquish its control over such work. However, the creation of the two new departments had produced an intolerable situation. After three years of inter-departmental rivalry and squabbling over the conduct of propaganda overseas, Whitehall closed ranks on Beaverbrook and Northcliffe and united behind the Foreign Office in opposition to any further transference of related duties into their hands. Now, after five months of continued obstruction, Northcliffe expressed the view that:As a people we do not understand propaganda ways…Propaganda is advertising and diplomacy is no more likely to understand advertising than advertising is likely to understand diplomacy.


1943 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25
Author(s):  
Edwin E. Witte

There is by this time quite a literature on the war economy. With the one exception of the recent symposium by Professor Steiner and his associates, most of whom are connected with the University of Indiana, all of the longer treatises on the subject discuss the war economy in abstract terms or on the basis of the experience of the First World War. These treatises served a useful purpose and were the only books on the economies of war which could be written at the time; but they now seem unreal, because this war differs so greatly from the prior struggle. The University of Indiana book, dealing as it does with concrete problems of present war, is up-to-the-minute and excellently done in all respects. It does not attempt, however, to do what I am venturing: a brief, overall picture of what the war has been doing to the United States.


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