Clive Bell, ‘a fathead and a voluptuary’: Conscientious Objection and British Masculinity

Author(s):  
Mark Hussey

Hussey shows that Clive Bell was a lifelong rebel. His tireless championing of individual liberty as the paramount value of political and social organisation, and of subjective experience as the proper basis for aesthetics pervades his writings on art, society, history and politics. He proselytized for the radically new art of the early twentieth century and for pacifism before and during the First World War. He excoriated the puritanical strictures of post-war England and its appeasement and adherence to untenable ideals in the late 1930s and Second World War. In his close identification with the conscientious objector issue, Bell, though heterosexual, is representative of queer Bloomsbury’s challenge to heteronormativity and the patriarchal family. As nationalist and homophobic rhetoric converged at war’s end, Bell’s writings deplored the lasting effects on British society of the government’s suppression of thought and expression during the war, including queer thought and homosexual expression.

Author(s):  
Igor Lyubchyk

The research issue peculiarities of wide Russian propaganda among the most Western ethnographic group – Lemkies is revealed in the article. The character and orientation of Russian and Soviet agitation through the social, religious and social movements aimed at supporting Russian identity in the region are traced. Tragic pages during the First World War were Thalrogian prisons for Lemkas, which actually swept Lemkivshchyna through Muscovophilian influences. Agitation for Russian Orthodoxy has provoked frequent cases of sharp conflicts between Lemkas. In general, attempts by moskvophile agitators to impose russian identity on the Orthodox rite were failed. Taking advantage of the complex socio-economic situation of Lemkos, Russian campaigners began to promote moving to the USSR. Another stage of Russian propaganda among Lemkos began with the onset of the Second World War. Throughout the territory of the Galician Lemkivshchyna, Soviet propaganda for resettlement to the USSR began rather quickly. During the dramatic events of the Second World War and the post-war period, despite the outbreaks of the liberation movement, among the Lemkoswere manifestations of political sympathies oriented toward the USSR. Keywords: borderlands, Lemkivshchyna, Lemky, Lemkivsky schism, Moskvophile, Orthodoxy, agitation, ethnopolitics


2019 ◽  
pp. 80-104
Author(s):  
R. Shindo

The First World War marked a turning point for civilization development in the 20th century. With the collapse of the Central Powers, a new international order arose. In the wake of the Paris PeaceConference, the founding of the League of Nations was above all due to the initiative of the victorious powers. Member states were expected to contribute to maintaining world peace. Japan was one of themajor Allied powers and a permanent member of the League Council. In this position, Japan was significantly involved in the post-war politics of Europe. To elucidate the nature and consequences of this involvement, the activities of Japanese diplomats in the League of Nations and in the Permanent Court of International Justice in the Hague during theperiod between the First and Second World Wars are examined. Particular attention is paid to Japan’s participation in the regulation of the demarcation and minority issues in Upper Silesia and in theVilnius and Memel districts.


2019 ◽  
Vol 92 (258) ◽  
pp. 790-813
Author(s):  
Samuel Tranter

Abstract Although the First World War did not fundamentally alter the British population, casualty figures were sufficiently large to engender post-war ideas about a lost generation. Closely linked to this popular myth was the commemorative ritual of Armistice Day. Using radio broadcasts, newsreels, Mass Observation reports and newspapers, this article provides a detailed examination of the language surrounding Armistice Day during the Second World War, revealing how it was used not only to frame loss but also to understand and explain the renewal of international conflict at a time when it is frequently assumed that commemoration ground to a halt.


Balcanica ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 189-204
Author(s):  
Vlasis Vlasidis

During the First World War Serbian soldiers were encamped or fought in different parts of Greece. Many of them died there of diseases or exhaustion or were killed in battle. This paper looks at the issue of cemeteries of and memorials to the dead Serbian soldiers (primarily in the area of Corfu, Thessaloniki and Florina) in the context of post-war relations between Greece and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia), at the attitude of post-Second World War Yugoslavia towards them, and the Serbs? revived interest in their First World War history. It also takes a look at the image of Serbs in the memory of local people.


Author(s):  
Stefano Musso

The present contribution is divided into two parts: the first is the transformations of the world of labour between the two wars, tracing the context in which totalitarian impulses of a fascist nature were affirmed; the second, closely connected to the first, tries to outline the methods and contents with which counter-democracy tried to gain consensus, even in the world of labour. We will try to retrace, in broad terms, some trajectories of change induced by the First World War, their evolution in the inter-war period, the influence that these changes exerted on the Second World War and beyond, with some reference to the post-war period.


2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-246
Author(s):  
Graham Cross

Abstract The “crusading” imagery attached to American soldiers in the 1917–1945 period performed an important function in assigning meaning to the wars of the United States. This was the result of a complex interplay between “official” and “vernacular” culture. The doughboys of the First World War at times fought a romantic “crusade” to reform the nation, world and themselves from a morally privileged position. In the post-war era, the romantic “crusade” survived but was more in tune with the conservative corporatism of Republican administrations. By the Second World War, gi s had become the agents of a very different “crusade”. Americans now embraced statist common effort in a realist prospective vision for human rights. This fundamental change in the meaning of “crusade” attached to the experiences of American soldiers suggests a protean nature to the metaphor and problematises notions of an ideologically cohesive American “crusade” in the world during the 20th century.


1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 657-679 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Darwin

The inter-war years are a nomansland in the history of British decolonization. Conventional as it is to see the first World War as a great watershed in British imperial history, separating the era of strength and success from the age of decline and dissolution, it remains difficult to show conclusively that the disintegration of the imperial system had become inevitable before the second World War. Yet historians have felt instinctively that after 1918 much of the crude self-confidence had drained out of British imperialism. The age when Curzon could proclaim heroically that ‘efficiency of administration is in my view a synonym for the contentment of the governed’; when Cromer could lecture the khedive of Egypt like a schoolboy; or when Milner could set out to demolish everything that preserved a separate identity to the Afrikaners, appears in striking contrast to the post-war era when statesmen spoke the language of trusts and mandates, genuflected before the image of self-determination and claimed that self-government was the ultimate purpose of colonial rule. But for all the piety of its new principles, post-war imperial policy seemed strangely reluctant to liberate Britain's dependencies or hold out firm promises of independence; and the imperial government periodically repressed its recalcitrant subjects with a vigour and efficiency that would have impressed Lord Kitchener.


2018 ◽  
Vol 106 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76
Author(s):  
Elliot Worsfold

This study seeks to reassess the notion that German-Canadians in Ontario were “silent victims” during the Second World War by exploring the wartime experience and memory of German-Canadian Lutheran congregations in Oxford and Waterloo Counties. Far from silent, Lutheran pastors initiated several strategies to ensure their congregants did not face discrimination and internment as they had during the First World War. These strategies encompassed several reforms, including eliminating German language church services and embracing English-Canadian symbols and forms of post-war commemoration. However, these reforms were often met with resistance and ambivalence by their congregations, thereby creating a conversation within the German-Canadian Lutheran community on how to reconcile its Germanic and Lutheran heritage with waging a patriotic war. While previous studies have primarily focused on identity loss, this study suggests that the debates that occurred within these Lutheran churches were representative of the community’s German-Canadian hyphenated identity.


1985 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myron Echenberg

The involvement of African combatants in France from 1939 to 1945 probably surpassed the large mobilization of an earlier generation during the First World War. Carefully prepared ideologically and well received by the French public, Africans nevertheless paid a heavy price in lives and suffering as soldiers during the Battle of France and as prisoners of the Germans. Liberation brought a new set of tribulations, including discriminatory treatment from French authorities. These hardships culminated in a wave of African soldiers' protests in 1944–5, mainly in France, but including the most serious rising, the so-called mutiny at Thiaroye, outside Dakar, where thirty-five African soldiers were killed.The war's impact was ambiguous. Tragedies like Thiaroye sent shock waves throughout French West Africa, delegitimizing naked force as a political instrument in post-war politics and sweeping away an older form of paternalism. Yet while a militant minority were attracted to more radical forms of political and trade-union organization, most African veterans reaffirmed their loyalties to the French State, which ultimately paid their pensions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 488-514
Author(s):  
Udith Dematagoda

This article explores Wyndham Lewis's experience of the First World War, and its influence on his varied artistic output. It interrogates how Lewis's initial ambivalence towards an emergent technological society shifted through direct encounters with mechanized warfare, and speculates on the effect of these upon his post-war writing and criticism. By contrasting Lewis's thought against that of his Italian Futurist contemporaries, I will demonstrate the centrality of their divergent conceptions of masculinity in accounting for this opposition – and how Lewis's critique of technological society prefigures contemporary opposition towards the post-humanist philosophy of Accelerationism.


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