Terrorist Attacks in Western Europe: A Counter-Terrorism Medicine Analysis

Background: The modern concept of terrorism has its roots in the “old continent” of Western Europe, more specifically in France, during the “Reign of Terror” period of the French Revolution. At the time, this form of state terror had a positive connotation: it was a legitimate means of defending the young state. While no single accepted definition of terrorism exists today, it is universally considered an attack on both state and society. The health care impacts of terrorist attacks often extend disproportionally beyond the casualty toll, but the potential for such events to induce mass casualties remains a concern to Disaster Medicine and Counter-Terrorism Medicine (CTM) specialists. Method: Data collection was performed using a retrospective database search through the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). The GTD was searched using the internal database search functions for all events which occurred in Western Europe from January 1, 1970 - December 31, 2019. Years 2020 and 2021 were not yet available at the time of the study. Primary weapon type, country where the incident occurred, and number of deaths and injured were collated. Results were exported into an Excel spreadsheet (Microsoft Corp.; Redmond, Washington USA) for analysis. Results: A total of 15,306 events were recorded in Western Europe out of a total of 201,183 events world-wide between the years 1970 and 2019 inclusive. This resulted in a total of 5,548 deaths and 17,187 injuries. Explosives were used as a primary weapon/attack modality in 8,103 attacks, followed by incendiary attacks in 3,050 events and firearm use in 2,955 events. The use of chemical, biological, radiation, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons was rare and only accounted for 47 events. Conclusion: From 1970 through 2019, 9.11% of all terrorist attacks occurred in Western Europe. Compared to global trends of attack methodologies in the same study period, the use of explosives as a primary attack modality in Western Europe was similar (52.94% in Western Europe versus 48.78% Global). Firearm use was comparatively low (19.31% versus 26.77%) and the use of CBRN as an attack modality was rare (0.30% versus 0.20%). The United Kingdom, Spain, and France accounted for over 65% of all terrorist attacks and over 75% of terrorism-related deaths in Western Europe.

«I often thought if it could not be dissolved, it could only with life be extirpated»: a translemic analysis and Spanish translation of Frances Burney’s Letter from Frances Burney to her sister Esther about her mastectomy without anaesthetic, 1812

Frances Burney (1752-1840) was one of the most influential eighteenth-century British novelists. Apart from the novel, Burney also cultivated the theatre and she wrote texts of a marked political nature on the French Revolution, a fact that is not so well– known by the general public. This article is inscribed within the framework of gender studies and the so-called Burney Studies and aims to analyze Letter from Frances Burney to Her Sister Esther About her Mastectomy Without Anaesthetic, 1812. By its subject, the document is an account of current interest for both medicine and feminism. Here Letter Here Letter is studied from the perspective of translation studies, specifically taking Itamar Even-Zohar’s theory of literary polisystems and various translation strategies as a methodological reference. We will examine the configuration of the key elements of Even-Zohar’s approach and various translation strategies as a methodological reference in this text which we will approach translation studies as a pathography, insisting on the identification between female subject and writing, Burney’s courage in confronting the disease and the particular relationship she establishes with the participants in the story and the impact that disease has on those around and helping her. Finally, the Spanish translation of Letter is offered, so Spanish-speaking readers have access to this document recently digitized by The British Library. Letter is a chronicle of pain, but also of courage and a real lesson in the intimate relationship between women and writing that was always so important to Burney. This study also means a re-vision of the writer that is far from what we could have until now.

Między utopią i antyutopią. Krytycznie o doktrynie Jana Jakuba Rousseau w świetle kontrowersji wokół jego poglądów na istotę woli powszechnej

The article is devoted to the controversy related to the interpretation of key concepts in the doctrine of one from among the most important thinkers of the eighteenth-century Europe — Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The considerations are carried out on many levels, focusing on the key concept of volonté générale in the treatise Du Contrat social ou principes de droit politique. The applied method, exegesis of the source text, corresponds with the polemic that has been conducted for decades, creating a rich literature on the subject. Selecting the positions of many distinguished researchers, the author attempts to confront Rousseau’s views with the flagship triad of basic values of the Great French Revolution: freedom, equality, and fraternity. This allowed the formulation of numerous comments, assessments, and opinions, at least some of which could be considered polemical or directly controversial.

The Wilmot Committee: Redefining Relief and National Interest in Britain during the French Revolution

Although anti-Catholicism and anti-Jacobinism primed many Britons to fear what one observer called “the hordes of vagabond French” who reached their shores in the fall of 1792, others launched widespread relief efforts. Among the more remarkable was the Wilmot Committee. This subscription charity convened in September 1792, channeling donations from the public to destitute French priests at a time when the British government remained hesitant to directly aid refugees from revolutionary France. This article situates the committee's particular structures in both their eighteenth-century philanthropic contexts and Britain's history of aid to foreign refugees. It then traces interconnections between charitable giving and wartime exigencies, arguing that the Wilmot Committee, which managed relief efforts first to clergy and then also to laity throughout the subsequent war years in an evolving partnership with government, played a crucial role in shaping and shifting attitudes toward foreigners during an era of ideological revolution. Ultimately, the committee worked alongside legislation like the Aliens and Emigrant Corps Acts to underline that foreigners of different religious persuasions—provided their loyalties were confirmed, their principles appropriate, and their backgrounds appealing—might be mobilized to strengthen national interests. By the 1790s, shared opposition to revolutionary republican ideology came to supersede shared Protestantism in predicting foreigners’ utility to Britain.

Review of J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (London: Secker & Warburg, 1960)

Wight noted that in an earlier book, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, Professor Talmon identified Rousseau as the ‘main source’ of ‘the totalitarian messianism of the French Revolution’. In this sequel he examines ‘the vast effervescence of utopian political thought between 1815 and 1848, which produced modern nationalism and Communism’. He aims to place the genesis of Marxism ‘in a wider historical setting than histories of socialism usually supply, against a background not only of Owen and Fourier, Fichte and Hegel, but of the whole romantic range of the Saint-Simonists and Lamennais, Michelet, Mazzini, and Mickiewicz’. The complex outcome is ‘the world we still live in, where national particularities seek to justify themselves in the service of a universal ideal, but revolutionary war makes national frontiers irrelevant; where national uniqueness is the strongest adversary of international revolution, nationalism finds its fulfilment by turning socialist, and socialism cannot establish itself except within national boundaries’.

Wordsworth’s Lucy poems as the Reflections of the French Revolution: A New Historicist Study

The current study takes a New Historic outlook toward William Wordsworth’s the “Lucy Poems” and believes that by a minute scrutiny of these poems we can expose the power structure and the dominant discourses that according to New Historicism have shaped the poet’s character, society and world. Accordingly, the paper suggests that the poet through symbolic and non-symbolic ways has embedded historical and political facts in these poems. To do so, the research will reveal some controversial correspondences among these poems, William Wordsworth’s life and historical facts of the French Revolution. To support this idea, the study will bring quotations not only from modern conspicuous literary critics but also from the poets and Romantic contemporaries to show how the historical and political discourses of the period have greatly influenced both William Wordsworth and even the literature of the whole era, i.e., Romanticism. As a matter of fact, this research intends to connect the “Lucy Poems” to the contemporary historical context and the poet’s ideals of the Revolution in France. The findings, however, reveal that William Wordsworth has been submissive to the historical events of his time.