Deserters

2020 ◽  
pp. 74-100
Author(s):  
Rebecca Ayako Bennette
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Mental Competence ◽  
Mental Fitness ◽  
Military Discipline

This chapter probes the reality of agency and space for dissent that medicalization offered to soldiers during World War I. It explains how the tendency to refer deserters for psychiatric observation and treatment frequently served to shield the soldiers from the full brunt of military discipline if they committed overt acts of disobedience. It also reviews the contemporary understanding of the boundary between mental illness in the actual sense and those who were not truly sick, even if they did not allegedly exhibit complete mental fitness. The chapter reveals the flexibility shown by wartime psychiatrists in determining issues of mental competence for transgressions of discipline related to desertion and the similar charge of going AWOL. It describes how soldiers expressed dissent and avoided significant unwanted involvement in the war, such as direct fighting.

Towards a Psyche for Psychiatry

2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 689-695 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Meares
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
World War I ◽  
William James ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
World War ◽  
The Core

Objective: To draw attention to the absence of a concept of personal existence in standard psychiatric approaches to mental illness. Method: To sketch a shift in Western consciousness which occurred suddenly before World War I, involving a banishment of such notions as self and the awareness of inner life from the discourse of psychiatry, psychology and philosophy, leaving a fundamental vacancy at the heart of these disciplines. Results and Conclusion: The positivist–behaviourist hegemony of the twentieth century involved an implicit devaluation of that which is essentially human. The influence of this tradition brings with it the risk of an understanding and treatment of mental illness which leaves out issues at the core of humanity. I suggest we need to recover something of the manner of thinking of the great figures in psychological thought who were writing before the rise of behaviourism and who were contributing to the origins of dynamic psychiatry. A study of the phenomena of human consciousness was central to their work. Main figures mentioned include: Hughlings Jackson, the great neurologist who considered a career in philosophy; Pierre Janet, a philosopher turned psychiatrist; and William James, a physiologist who became a psychologist and philosopher.

scholarly journals French Workers and the Temperance Movement

1980 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. E. Prestwich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Temperance Movement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Academie Francaise ◽  
Social Reformers

In 1852, when the medical discoverer of alcoholism, Magnus Huss, was being honoured by the Académie française, a spokesman for the Académie wrote that “France has many drunkards, but happily, no alcoholics.” Sixty years later, on the eve of World War I, if one is to believe the reports of parliamentary commissions, economists, hygienists and social reformers, France had few drunks but a plethora of alcoholics, from the Breton peasant who fed calvados to his children to the worker of Paris and the Midi who had abandoned wine, that “natural and hygienic drink”, for the evils of mass-produced industrial alcohol, especially absinthe. By 1914, alcoholism was considered one of the three grands fléaux, or great plagues, that had struck France in the late nineteenth century, and it was blamed for all the ills of society, from a rising rate of criminality, suicide and mental illness to depopulation, revolutionary worker movements and even feminism. Alcoholism was, therefore, not just an individual misfortune, but a national tragedy. It had become, in the words of Clemenceau, “the whole social problem” and as such required the mobilized forces of the country to conquer it.

Equating Temperance with Patriotism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine N. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Temperance Movement ◽  
Selective Service ◽  
Military Involvement ◽  
Eighteenth Amendment ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Military Discipline

This chapter examines the consequences of World War I for Minnesota's temperance movement during the period 1916–1919. The specter and, consequently, the reality of military involvement enhanced the tolerance of many Americans toward restrictive liquor laws they would otherwise not have accepted. The chapter considers how the struggle for prohibition became entangled with the United States's looming military efforts in the Great War and how the war provided an opportunity for temperance reformers to fight for the preservation of military discipline in army camps throughout the United States. Reformers insisted that military efficiency could be achieved only through young soldiers' abstinence and purity, an argument that convinced Congress to pass the Hobson-Sheppard bill, the Selective Service Act, and the Lever Food and Fuel Control Act in 1917. In addition, Progressive reformers waged a social purification campaign. In September 1918, Congress passed the National Prohibition Act, which would function as the enforcement act of the Eighteenth Amendment. The period also saw the demise of German Americans' opposition to Minnesota's temperance movement.

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Economic Well Being

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

The Anarchist Press in Egypt before World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Gorman
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Public Education ◽  
World War I ◽  
State Power ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War

This chapter traces the development of the radical secular press in Egypt from its first brief emergence in the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I. First active in the 1860s, the anarchist movement gradually expanded its membership and influence over subsequent decades to articulate a general social emancipation and syndicalism for all workers in the country. In the decade and a half before 1914, its press collectively propagated a critique of state power and capitalism, called for social justice and the organisation of labour, and promoted the values of science and public education in both a local context and as part of an international movement. In seeking to promote a programme at odds with both nationalism and colonial rule, it incurred the hostility of the authorities in addition to facing the practical problems of managing and financing an oppositional newspaper.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

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