scholarly journals 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BEGINNING OF WORLD WAR I – HAVE WE LEARNED ANYTHING FROM THE CONFLICTS IN THE PAST 100 YEARS

2014 ◽  
pp. 9-11
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World Order ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
100Th Anniversary ◽  
Chemical Weapons ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Security

With this thematic issue the editorial board wishes to commemorate this important anniversary. Our objective was not to discuss military history, for we, as the name says, deal with Contemporary military challenges. However, we cannot avoid mentioning certain military topics and facts, as it is rather difficult to assess what we have learnt from the conflicts in the past one hundred years without examining and presenting the framework of certain events. It has been a long and dynamic century. A lot has been written about this period, especially from the security as well as military and defence aspects. World War One and Two were unexpectedly extensive in political, security, defence, economic, societal, geographical and geopolitical sense. The twentieth century was also marked by two other wars: the Cold War and the fight against terrorism. The latter was gradually renamed into combat against terrorism. In Slovenia, however, we came to an agreement that this area in fact refers to counter terrorism. The aforementioned wars were strongly influenced by developments in various fields, such as technology, informatics, civil engineering, logistics, engineering, aviation, armament, transport and so on. A lot of interesting individuals influenced the course of events in this period. It all started with Gavrilo Princip who fired at the heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand on that fatal Sunday, 28 June 1914. This eventually resulted in Austria-Hungary's decision to attack Serbia. A lot of names found their place on the historical timeline; some of them with a positive and others with a negative connotation. For Slovenians, the best symbol of that time is undoubtedly the first Slovenian General Rudolf Maister, even though some generations never even heard of him in school. The times are changing, and so are our views on certain historical memories and the facts related to them. It is therefore appropriate to remember certain things, persons and events, and it is also appropriate to analyse and to assess them in order to learn from them. Especially with the intent of not repeating that which is seen throughout the eyes of the history as wrongful, bad or harmful to an individual, nations, nature, states and the world. As the answer to our question whether we have learnt anything in the past one hundred years, Uroš Tovornik prepared a paper titled The time of the formation of a new world order, in which he claims that modern security issues originate, in particular, from the decisions adopted at the Versailles Peace Conference and the events that followed. In the conclusion, the author sums up that modern geopolitical situation differs substantially from the one a hundred years ago or, on the other hand, resembles it very much. In her paper Chemical weapons – particularity of World War I or a still imminent danger, Valerija Bernik takes us through the history of the use of different types of chemical weapons. The latter were first tested by the Austro-Hungarian soldiers on the Isonzo Front in combat with their Italian opponents. Further on she presents all efforts the international community invests in the prevention and limitation of the use of chemical weapons as well as in protection against them. It is nowadays difficult to imagine that a Slovenian would voluntarily engage in a war far from their homeland and fight in the region that lies on the border between Romania and Bulgaria. Jože Rozman writes about this particularity in his paper titled Military geographical dimension of Dobrogea and (Slovenian) volunteers in this battlefield in World War I. What was once a territory where severe combats took place, is now an area important for the allied forces combating the crisis in Ukraine. In the paper titled Market Garden – the epic and the tragedy of allied paratrooper units in the Netherlands, Mircea Tănase presents and analyses the mentioned allied operation in World War One in detail, assessing what went according to plans and what went wrong. Tănase concludes the paper by stressing the importance of intelligence both in the present and in the future. Viktor Potočnik writes about Slovenian Armed Forces size and character. A lot has already been written, in general, about how many members and which types of units the Slovenian Armed Forces should have. In this paper, the author confronts us with facts. His overview and the calculations are very simple and transparent. Is there anyone among the readers who does not share his opinion and would be willing to write an article about it? In her paper titled Military medical intelligence with limited resources in the case of small countries, Tanja Kremžar Kovač states that essential to this sub-type of intelligence and security activities is the acquisition of data on medical and environmental hazards and the medical capabilities in the international area in which members of the armed forces are engaged. Integrating her experience in the paper, the author also explains why this is an important topic and how this activity takes place. Maja Garb read the book of Thomas R. Mockaitis Soldiers of Misfortune? and wrote a peer review titled The challenges of military and security contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. With this issue, we conclude the year of important anniversaries, as we have named the year 2014 at the very beginning. We invite you to write on and read about the topics for which we have prepared an open invitation for articles for 2015, which is published on our website http://www.slovenskavojska.si/en/publications/.

scholarly journals A YEAR OF IMPORTANT ANNIVERSARIES

2014 ◽  
pp. 11-13
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
National Security ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Topical Issue ◽  
World War ◽  
Member States ◽  
Eu Member States ◽  
The Past

We have entered the sixteenth year of the publication Contemporary Military Challenges with a wish to mark a few important anniversaries. In 2004, Slovenia joined the European Union and became a NATO member. Slovenia has thus been an active member of two distinguished international organisations for ten years. At the same time, this denotes a decade of active participation of Slovenian Armed Forces members in international operations and missions organised by the Alliance. In addition, it is the year in which the Slovenian Armed Forces reached the full age of its presence in the international environment. Eighteen years ago, in May 1997, twenty five members of Slovenian Armed Forces medical unit were deployed to a peace operation ALBA in Albania. If we look deeper into the past, Slovenian General Rudolf Maister was born one hundred and forty years ago. He significantly influenced the evolution of developments before World War I, but mostly Slovenian national consciousness. This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of World War I. The anniversary itself or the reasons for it are certainly not motivational – quite the opposite. It was an event on a worldwide scale which caused a great number of deaths and thus represented a devastating catastrophe. At that time, people did not even imagine what wars could bring for the future generations. All these anniversaries, and more could be found, impacted the substantive premise of this year’s issues. This is, of course, not because we would wish to turn backwards and deal with the historical issues. After all, we are the “Contemporary Military Challenges”. What mainly interests us is what have we learned from these examples and experiences. Is today’s situation any different because of them? Are we any better? For this purpose, we have published on our Slovenian (http://www.slovenskavojska. si/publikacije/sodobni-vojaski-izzivi/) and English (http://www.slovenskavojska. si/publikacije/sodobni-vojaski-izzivi/) websites an invitation for authors who would wish to deal with this subject. We are an interdisciplinary scientific and technical publication, which publishes articles on topical issues, research and expert discussions, as well as on technical and social science analyses covering the fields of international and national security and defence; global security challenges; crisis management; civil-military cooperation, and operations, development and transformation of the armed forces. The main topics that entertain our interest have been incorporated into the titles of individual issues. This year’s second issue will be entitled “Recent education and training trends in security, defence and military sectors”, the third one “Ten years of Slovenia’s NATO membership”, and the fourth one “100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I - have we learned anything from the conflicts in the past 100 years”. This year’s first issue was reserved for the topics suggested by the authors and we have received some very interesting articles. Ljubo Štampar in his article entitled Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms in armed forces of EU member states: approaches, practices and mechanisms presents, in relation to the armed forces, the human rights and freedoms as the foundations of modern democratic societies. He compares freedom of speech, right to announce candidacy in the election or join political parties, freedom of association, freedom of trade unions and right to strike in individual EU member states. Vinko Vegič in his article The role of armed forces in Europe: from territorial defence to various security tasks establishes that two of the most important changes in the role of the armed forces include the need for a defence of the territory, and the appearance of some relatively differing and often poorly defined tasks. Countries have to adapt their defence doctrines and military structure to these two subjects, whereby the public (potentially) plays a decisive role. The young, patriotism and national security: armed forces as a pillar of patriotic structures is the article by Vladimir Prebilič and Jelena Juvan. The authors base their findings on the circumstances already described by Vinko Vegič, and establish the relation among the system of national security, values and patriotism among young people in Slovenia. Do the results of the survey represent a cause for concern? The transformation of armed forces has been a topical issue, especially in the recent two years, and has intrigued Mihael Nagelj enough to verify the theoretical and practical understanding of this notion in the defence system. His findings are presented in the article entitled Defence sector transformation: as understood in the world and Slovenia. Tomaž Pajntar, the author of the article Security of buildings in the event of a terrorist bomb attack writes about a blast as a result of an explosion and its effects on the buildings and their security. He carefully analyses and illustrates the laws of explosions, the knowledge of which is very important in the provision of building security. In her article entitled Information management and network collaboration in the Slovenian Armed Forces – a necessity or only a topical issue, Dragica Dovč presents the theory and practice of terms that at first seem very familiar. However, the results of her survey based on the case of the Slovenian Armed Forces, reveal that this field of work is still fairly unexplored. So, here is one more reason for other friends of defence and military topics to join the group of writers.

Crisis, 1919–1920

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas I. Faith
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Chemical Warfare ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Chemical Weapons ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
World War ◽  
The Face ◽  
Uncertain Future ◽  
The U.S

This chapter discusses the Chemical Warfare Service's (CWS) struggle to continue chemical weapons work in the face of a hostile political environment as the U.S. Army sought to digest the lessons learned from World War I under the budget constraints of the postwar period. It considers the uncertain future of the CWS and chemical weapons after the war as the American public reacted against modern weapons in general and poison gas in particular because of the battlefield suffering it had caused. It also discusses the attempts of policymakers in the Department of War and the U.S. Army to limit all chemical warfare activities in the armed forces after the armistice. Finally, it examines how the CWS, primarily under the leadership of Amos A. Fries, tried to counter anti-gas sentiment and promote chemical weapons and manage to lay a foundation that would allow them to continue improve their reputation through the 1920s.

“Fighting Spirit”: World War I and the YMCA's Allied Boxing Program

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-430
Author(s):  
Adam Park
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World Order ◽  
White Men ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
Fighting Spirit ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
Spirit World

ABSTRACTThis article highlights the U.S. Armed Forces’ appointment of the YMCA to train American soldiers in boxing during World War I and so contributes to scholarly research on religion and war as well as religion and sports. As the YMCA taught the fistic art to white regiments in stateside military camps and to the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front, I argue that World War I was a watershed moment for both Muscular Christianity and boxing. Religious, political, and military leaders announced boxing to be ideal for the close-proximity encounters in the trenches, and they championed the YMCA as being best equipped to turn newly enlisted recruits into hardened trench-pugs. To the YMCA-military, the practical benefits of boxing were that soldiers would not just be “good with their hands” but also have a good manly character, a “fighting spirit.” In the establishment of a new world order, boxing thereby became a bellicose technique for unmaking evil others and a Christian method for remaking “overcivilized” white men. Immediately after the war—because of the Y—the sport of boxing, previously believed unscrupulous, was redeemed. Protestant Christians and a larger public recast boxing as less an activity for the morally corrupt and the criminal underworld and more an enlightened pursuit in the realization of an authentic, God-given human nature. Legalized, mainstreamed, and backed by antimodern logic, Christian theology, and white fears of racial devolution, boxing was for “character” more than crime.

THE PEDIATRICIAN AND THE PUBLIC

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1950 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-480
Author(s):  
MARY E. PARKER
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
World War ◽  
Nursing Service ◽  
Public Health Agencies ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Health Agencies ◽  
Salutary Effect

For the past few years, many patients have been unable to secure adequate nursing care because there are not enough nurses in the whole world to give it. Unfortunate as this is, it has had one salutary effect. It aroused the public, the administrators of institutions, the physicians and the nurses to the need for doing "something" so that this situation will not continue and will not occur again. This is very similar to the situation in World War I and immediately following. At that time also there was a shortage of nurses, and a committee of outstanding people in medicine and nursing sat down to try to find out what was wrong and to make recommendations to make things right. Out of this in 1923 came the Goldmark Report. The recommendations were excellent and are still good today, but little was done about them. Then came the depression, and there were too many nurses for the people who could afford to pay for this service. This situation gradually improved until we had reached the other extreme, a shortage of nurses due to expansion of nursing service in hospitals and public health agencies and the needs of the armed forces. Much criticism was leveled at the nursing profession, some of it justified, some of it not justified.

Behind the stage of a literary text. ‘Custom is despot among men’

2020 ◽  
pp. 63-83
Author(s):  
E. N. Tsimbaeva
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Skeletal System ◽  
World War ◽  
Internal Organs ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fiction Writers

The article analyzes physical and physiological problems caused by fashionable clothing in the mid-18th to early 20th cc. that shaped people’s appearances and lifestyles in the past. Affecting the skeletal system and the functioning of internal organs and brain in particular and causing various illnesses, these problems went largely unrecognized by contemporaries, including writers, but would inevitably surface in literary works as part and parcel of everyday life. Without understanding their role, one may struggle to comprehend not only plot twists and characters’ motivations but also the mentality of the bygone era as portrayed in fiction. Chronologically, the research covers the period from the mid-18th c. to World War I. The author only focuses on so-called respectable society (a very tentative term that covers members of the aristocracy and other classes with comparable lifestyles), since it was this group which drew the most attention from fiction writers of the period. The scholar chose to concentrate on the kind of daily realia of ‘noble society’ that permeate works by Russian, English, French and, to some extent, German authors, considered most prominent in Europe at the time.

scholarly journals Preface: The Historical Geography of the Hungarian Nation

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-376
Author(s):  
Andrew Ludanyi
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
East European ◽  
The Past ◽  
French And English ◽  
The Subject

The fate of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe has been one of the most neglected subjects in the Western scholarly world. For the past fifty years the subject—at least prior to the late 1980s—was taboo in the successor states (except Yugoslavia), while in Hungary itself relatively few scholars dared to publish anything about this issue till the early 1980s. In the West, it was just not faddish, since most East European and Russian Area studies centers at American, French and English universities tended to think of the territorial status quo as “politically correct.” The Hungarian minorities, on the other hand, were a frustrating reminder that indeed the Entente after World War I, and the Allies after World War II, made major mistakes and significantly contributed to the pain and anguish of the peoples living in this region of the “shatter zone.”

scholarly journals Reception of Natalie's Ramonda, Armistice Day Symbol in Serbia

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Senka Kovač
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Representative Sample ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
First Year ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
The Public ◽  
Ongoing Process ◽  
The Past

Nataliе’s Ramonda, a symbol of Armistice Day – November 11 in Serbia, is a new memorial symbol constructed and promoted by politicians in 2012. The Armistice Day was celebrated then as a national holiday in Serbia. The reception of this symbol has been explored over a five-year period, both in a public discourse and on a representative sample of first year students at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. In public discourse, as well as among students of the Faculty of Philosophy, Natalie’s Ramonda is perceived as an emblem, a badge, and most often as a symbol. It was seen as an emblem on the lapel of public and media figures, inaccessible to broad commercial promotion and sales. In public discourse and among students at the Faculty of Philosophy, Natalie’s Ramonda was perceived in several answers as a medal, and is also recognized as a flower that symbolizes the suffering of the Serbian people in World War One; symbol of the nation’s rebirth – the flower phoenix, as a mark of peace and freedom. As a newly constructed symbol of the Armistice Day in Serbia, for the past seven years, Natalie’s Ramonda has been a mediator in the public culture of remembrance and in the ongoing process, by becoming a part of cultural memory.

scholarly journals And did those hooves: Pan and the Edwardians

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Eleanor Toland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
World War ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
World War One ◽  
Peter Pan ◽  
Major Work ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

<p>A surprisingly high number of the novels, short stories and plays produced in Britain during the Edwardian era (defined in the terms of this thesis as the period of time between 1900 and the beginning of World War One) use the Grecian deity Pan, god of shepherds, as a literary motif. Writers as diverse as Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, Frances Hodgson Burnett and G.K. Chesterton made Pan a fictional character or alluded to the god of shepherds in more subtle ways. The mystery of why the Edwardians used an ancient Greek god as a symbol requires a profound interrogation of the early twentieth century British soul. The Edwardian era was a narrow corridor of time between the Victorian age and the birth of modernism with the First World War, a period characterised by vast social and political transition, as a generation began to comprehend change they equally feared and desired. Pan was an equivocal figure: easily portrayed as satanic due to his horns and goatish nature, but as the kindly god of shepherds, also a Christ-like figure. Such ambiguity made Pan an ideal symbol for an age unsure of itself and its future. Writers like Maugham and Machen, afraid of social and sexual revolution, portrayed Pan as diabolical, a tempter and a rapist. E.M. Forster, a homosexual man hopeful about the possibility of change, made Pan a terrifying but ultimately liberating figure for those ready to accept the freedom he represented. Kenneth Grahame, desiring the return of a Luddite, Arcadian past that had never truly existed, wrote of Pan as Jesus on the riverbank, sheltering the lost and giving mystic visions to the worthy. Pan represented a simultaneous craving in the Edwardians to flee to the past and to embrace the future, an idealism of the primitive coupled with hope for the future. What he also symbolized was anxiety about the future and the desire to not return to the horrors of the past, fears of the primitive suggested in the nightmarish atavism of Saki’s “The Music on the Hill” and the fears of what society might become expressed in Forster’s “The Machine Stops”. The Edwardian Pan eventually reached its culmination in J.M. Barrie’s twentieth-century fairy tale Peter Pan, in which the eponymous character, seeming at first so different from the ancient Greek mythological figure, became an embodiment of everything the Edwardian Pan phenomenon represented. With the nightmarish yet fascinating figure of Peter Pan, the Edwardians had created a new Pan, reborn for their age. With the beginning of World War One, the Pan figure would begin to fade into insignificance, with only one major work later published which could justifiably be called part of the phenomenon; Lord Dunsany’s The Blessing of Pan, a fitting elegy for the Edwardian Age.</p>

The Trianon Peace Treaty of 1920: facts, legends, speculations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Balázs Ablonczy ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sequence Of Events ◽  
Mass Consciousness ◽  
Opinion Polls

The signing of the peace treaty between the winners of World War One and the defeated Austria-Hungary in the Grand Trianon Chateau in the suburbs of Paris in 1920 was one of the most dramatic events in twentieth-century Hungarian history. It left traces in the mass consciousness and political culture of Hungary, and is still a controversial historical topic. According to recent opinion polls, the vast majority of the population believes that the treaty signed in Versailles was unjust. This book explores the mythical nature of this popular conviction, legends born around the signing of this document, and conspiracy theories that are still used to plausibly explain the past. The book is intended for the reader who wants to go beyond a mere reconstruction of the formal sequence of events, who searches for deeper explanations of the non-evident interdependences of the present day with the past, and who does not take “hot” news, journalistic speculations, and gossip at face value.

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