The Failed Solutions: Imperialism, the Great War, Fascism, Anti-Bolshevism, and the Second World War

Balcanica ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 243-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kosta Nikolic ◽  
Ivana Dobrivojevic

The Second World War involved the conflict of three different ideologies - democracy, fascism and communism - an aspect in which it was different from the Great War. This ideological triangle led to various shifts in the positions, views, and alliances of each of the warring parties. Yugoslavia with its historical legacy could not avoid being torn by similar ideological conflicts. During the Second World War a brutal and exceptionally complex war was fought on its soil. The most important question studied in this paper concerns the foremost objective of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) - to carry out a violent change of the legal order and form of government of the pre-war Kingdom of Yugoslavia.


Author(s):  
Norman Ingram

This chapter sets up three main arguments that are developed in the book: first, that the debate on war origins and war guilt in the First World War nearly destroyed the Ligue des droits de l’homme well before the Second World War; secondly, that this debate lay at the heart of a dissenting, new style of pacifism which emerged in France near the end of the 1920s; and thirdly, that both of these phenomena catalysed the emergence of pro-Vichy sentiments during the Second World War. This latter development was not the result of philo-fascism but rather of an overriding commitment to peace which had its origin in the belief that the Great War had been fought by France under false pretences.


Author(s):  
Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz

The canonical literary epitome of the Great War is, beyond doubt, the infantry soldier trapped in what Paul Fussell called the “troglodyte world” of the notorious trenches. There exists, however, a considerable number of literary accounts devoted to a different ‘space’—and thus allegedly also a different experience—of the conflict. The autobiography by Manfred von Richthofen, and memoirs by Billy Bishop and Cecil Lewis contributed to the fame of the Great War pilots as ‘knights of the air.’ Post-memory literary depictions of air warfare tend to be more ideologically ambivalent. The focus of this paper will be Derek Robinson’s novel War Story (1987), constituting in terms of the chosen historical time of its action the first part of his acclaimed Great War aviation trilogy, including also Goshawk Squadron and Hornet's Sting, to be analyzed within the wider context of the cultural representations of the Royal Flying Corps in 1914–1918. Derek Robinson served in the RAF after the Second World War. He is also the author of the revisionist Invasion, 1940 and, thus, his literary ‘return’ to the Great War, within the context of air warfare, must raise important questions concerning the extent to which he perpetuates or challenges the prevailing myths of the first global conflict of the twentieth-century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 437-467
Author(s):  
JOEL MORLEY

AbstractThis article examines the memory of the Great War and the underexplored topic of morale during the Phoney War, and contributes to, and connects, their historiographies. Analysis of previously unexamined Mass Observation (MO) material confirms and qualifies some of the concerns about morale that MO expressed at the time. It also reveals that many Britons looked backwards to the Great War during the Phoney War, whether they had lived through the Great War or not, and their memories and understandings of the Great War informed their attitudes to the Second World War. Memories of wartime trauma were just one facet of the varied legacy of the Great War that Britons drew upon. Importantly, Britons of different ages drew upon post-war representations and personal and vicarious experiences to different extents, but those who were able to typically ascribed influence to personal rather than cultural memories of the Great War. This complicates the assumption that the latter determined Britons’ responses to the outbreak of the Second World War and contributes to understandings of both the reception and influence of cultural representations of the Great War, and the place of the Great War in the subjective worlds of Britons during the Second World War.


Author(s):  
Norman Ingram

The Ligue des droits de l’homme went into freefall after 1937. It was not the Nazis who killed the Ligue, but rather the crisis which came to a head in 1937. In 1938 and 1939, the Ligue underwent a financial and membership crisis. The last two pre-war Congresses were rather tired affairs. The Munich crisis, the invasion of Prague, the question of Danzig, and the fall of France did not change the political/historical analysis of the minority which continued to explain the crises of 1938–40 through the lens of the Great War. The collaboration of some members of the minority during the Second World War was due to their dissenting position on the origins of the Great War. The Ligue’s papers were seized by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg shortly after the Germans reached Paris in June 1940, eventually to be transported back to Berlin for analysis.


Author(s):  
Jed Rasula

After the Great War, the emerging values in art were purification and organization. Furthermore, Constructivism emerged in the early USSR as a determined effort to rethink the role of art in the milieu of a social tabula rasa. Artistic attempts to reconstitute primal qualities were linked with the effort to revitalize art by vanquishing “Art” altogether. The quest for a new realism affirmed the primal qualities in art as abstract or concrete, the terms of which were recapitulated in the 1936 publication Circle. Contemporaneously, Finnegans Wake was being serialized in the journal Transition, and James Joyce’s “Work in Progress” came to exemplify a new mythology for all the arts. The chapter concludes with a look at the exponents of abstraction and Surrealism in their American exile during the Second World War, as these opposing initiatives began to merge in their quest for a new mythology.


2021 ◽  
pp. 175069802110447
Author(s):  
Pieter Vermeulen

This article analyzes the commemoration of the centenary of the Great War in Flanders to show how the Flemish case complicates customary accounts of the relation between human rights, the duty to remember, and World War. While customary accounts see the commemoration’s focus on victims, on minor perspectives, and on the futility of war as an extension of Holocaust memory, the article shows how in the Flemish context, the Great War functions as a “screen memory” for politically divisive memories of the Second World War, of colonialism, and of labor migration. The article analyses the contribution of Flemish literature, and especially the novel Tell Someone by Rachida Lamrabet, to the commemoration of the centenary to argue that literature is a viable tool for making visible Flanders’ “colonial aphasia,” even if the power of literature to effect mnemonic change is compromised precisely by this colonial aphasia.


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