The Problem of Memory Preservation and Identity Formation (on the Example of the Great Patriotic War Memory)

Significant events of the past have always been the most important aspects in the structuring of national memory. Obviously, they also become key elements in the formation of identity. Therefore, the use of various falsifications, distortions of history, and manipulations in this area seems to be quite logical in the framework of the ongoing information war. The devaluation and depersonalization of the Great Patriotic War memory, of the irreplaceable losses and sacrifices of the Soviet people, of exploits in the name of the Motherland and in the name of victory over fascism have crushing power, destroy the integration potential of the Soviet past, have a destructive effect on the formation of an identity that should be associated with the correct interpretation of the heroic role of the Soviet people. Pride in the past of one's country contributes to the formation of civic consciousness and a positive awareness of one's belonging. The roots of this perception are in the stories of eyewitnesses of those events, which are becoming less and less every year, in the process of socialization, in school history textbooks. In conditions of freedom of choice, with an ever-increasing virtual component of life, in which there are opportunities for the individual to immerse themselves in the format of a completely different socio-cultural space, with a different system of values and meanings, the global elite imposes new standards and determines the field of choice for modern youth. At the same time, our educational task is the preservation and reproduction of memory for future generations.

The Persistence of National Victimhood: Bosniak Post-War Memory Politics of the Srebrenica Mass Killings

The Persistence of National Victimhood: Bosniak Post-War Memory Politics of the Srebrenica Mass KillingsThis article reveals the origins of the radicalisation of memory politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the year 2010. It shows that the radicalisation in the public sphere of Bosnia and Herzegovina was eventually possible due to the long-term persistence of the nationalist commemorative strategy, rooted in the dialectic mechanism of consolidating and antagonising relevant reference groups, and responsible for structuring the national memories of the last war according to an exclusivist martyrological model. Based on the example of Bosniak post-war memory politics regarding the Srebrenica mass killings, the study describes a more universal political mechanism, one characteristic also of the post-war Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat nationalist factions. Trwałość martyrologii narodowej. Boszniacka powojenna polityka pamięci o masowych morderstwach w SrebrenicyArtykuł odsłania źródła radykalizacji polityki pamięci w Bośni i Hercegowinie po 2010 roku. Pokazuje, że radykalizacja ta była możliwa dzięki długotrwałemu utrzymywaniu się w sferze publicznej Bośni i Hercegowiny nacjonalistycznej strategii komemoratywnej, która była odpowiedzialna za strukturyzację narodowej pamięci o ostatniej wojnie według ekskluzywistycznego modelu martyrologicznego oraz zakorzeniona w dialektycznym mechanizmie konsolidacji i antagonizowania odpowiednich grup odniesienia. Na przykładzie powojennej boszniackiej polityki pamięci dotyczącej masowych morderstw w Srebrenicy opisany został bardziej uniwersalny mechanizm polityczny, charakterystyczny także dla powojennych polityk pamięci prowadzonych przez nacjonalistyczne elity bośniackich Serbów i bośniackich Chorwatów.

"The Living Death": The Repatriation Experience of New Zealand's Disabled Great War Servicemen

<p>The New Zealand government committed over 100,000 men to active service during the Great War of which around 40,000 returned injured. Due to the severity of their disabilities many wounded servicemen required ongoing medical care and were unable to return to their former employment. New Zealand introduced a variety of repatriation initiatives during the 1920s and 1930s to aid the Great War’s struggling wounded soldiers and restore them to their traditional masculine role as independent wage-earners and useful citizens. ‘The Living Death’ uses a variety of qualitative sources including state-based documents, newspapers, journals and oral history as well as a quantitative sample from military personnel files. Using these sources this thesis explores the medical treatment, pensioning and employment assistance offered by state and society to disabled soldiers in order to elucidate how New Zealand’s wounded ex-servicemen experienced and negotiated the cultural issues of disability, masculinity and citizenship in the post-war period. I argue that these men were identified as a class apart from other disabled persons in the immediate aftermath of the war, but that this identity began to fade once the economic conditions worsened, war memory faded and as some wounded ex-servicemen failed to complete a successful transition into civilian life.</p>

"The Living Death": The Repatriation Experience of New Zealand's Disabled Great War Servicemen

<p>The New Zealand government committed over 100,000 men to active service during the Great War of which around 40,000 returned injured. Due to the severity of their disabilities many wounded servicemen required ongoing medical care and were unable to return to their former employment. New Zealand introduced a variety of repatriation initiatives during the 1920s and 1930s to aid the Great War’s struggling wounded soldiers and restore them to their traditional masculine role as independent wage-earners and useful citizens. ‘The Living Death’ uses a variety of qualitative sources including state-based documents, newspapers, journals and oral history as well as a quantitative sample from military personnel files. Using these sources this thesis explores the medical treatment, pensioning and employment assistance offered by state and society to disabled soldiers in order to elucidate how New Zealand’s wounded ex-servicemen experienced and negotiated the cultural issues of disability, masculinity and citizenship in the post-war period. I argue that these men were identified as a class apart from other disabled persons in the immediate aftermath of the war, but that this identity began to fade once the economic conditions worsened, war memory faded and as some wounded ex-servicemen failed to complete a successful transition into civilian life.</p>

Return to Vietnam

Between 1981 and 2016, thousands of American and Australian Vietnam War veterans returned to Việt Nam. This comparative, transnational oral history offers the first historical study of these return journeys. It shows how veterans returned in search of resolution, or peace, manifesting in shifting nostalgic visions of 'Vietnam.' Different national war narratives shaped their returns: Australians followed the 'Anzac' pilgrimage tradition, whereas for Americans the return was an anti-war act. Veterans met former enemies, visited battlefields, mourned friends, found new relationships, and addressed enduring legacies of war. Many found their memories of war eased by witnessing Việt Nam at peace. Yet this peacetime reality also challenged veterans' wartime connection to Vietnamese spaces. The place they were nostalgic for was Vietnam, a space in war memory, not Việt Nam, the country. Veterans drew from wartime narratives to negotiate this displacement, performing nostalgic practices to reclaim their sense of belonging.

Boer War

The Boer War of 1899–1902, also termed the Anglo-Boer War or South African War, was waged by Britain to establish its imperial supremacy in South Africa and by Boers/Afrikaners to defend their independent republican order and control of the destiny of the white settler states they had secured in the interior. Large, long, controversial and costly, the Boer War was a colonial conflict which finally completed the British imperial conquest of the Southern African region. As is to be expected of a war that has a widely recognized significance not only in the history of European imperialism in Southern Africa but in world history more generally, literature on the 1899–1902 conflict is, simply, enormous. Scholarship is available not merely in English and in Afrikaans, but also in Dutch, French, German, Russian, Spanish, and even in Japanese. As it happens, more recent decades have seen the publication of sizeable bibliographies covering a century of writings on the Boer War in German and in Dutch. Although it could obviously not be claimed that every aspect of the 1899–1902 period—military, political, economic, social, or cultural—has been treated, evenly or otherwise, by so vast a body of literature, the sheer quantity of work available has to influence the scope and selectivity of any Boer War bibliography of this kind. While this bibliographic article includes some seminal early pieces, it is weighted toward more recently works and, in particular, includes scholarship which contains detailed bibliographies covering aspects of warfare (battles, sieges) that are not a specific focus of the approach taken here. Secondly, other classifiable areas of historiography which fall beyond the limits of this article, such as war memory and commemoration, and postwar economic reconstruction and political state-making, are treated—in some instances, quite substantially—in single-author general overviews and in multi-author edited treatments. In other respects, this article goes beyond more conventional historical terrain in including the war’s literary and cultural influences.