The letters of French and German soldiers in World War One

<p>This thesis uses letters written by French and German soldiers to investigate the mobilization of masculinity during World War One 1914-1918. Through the letters of French and German soldiers of World War One, the thesis discusses the initial ways the soldiers were encouraged to enlist, which includes discussions on patriotism. The work also discusses the concepts of brotherhood and equality, and the idea of protecting women. While masculinity in these two societies was highly militarized, the soldiers took their role as domesticated men very serious and rarely followed instructions from censors as to what to write to their families. Although soldiers were separated from their loved ones and relationships were truly strained by separation, they never forgot their role at home. A comparative framework has been employed to highlight significant differences in French and German ideals of masculinity. This includes an emphasis on religion among French soldiers and the concept of Heldentod in German letters. The analysis of hundreds of letters in published or digitized collections complicates the image of French and German soldiers portrayed in both official propaganda and historians’ work. For example, French and German soldiers had different ideas concerning thoughts on the enemy and equality within the army took on different forms as well. Yet the soldiers from both nations had similar notions regarding goals of personal survival and the defence of the country. Studies of World War One soldiers’ letters have overwhelmingly focused on English language sources. Therefore, an overall aim of this thesis is to contribute to existing research in the English language by using French and German sources. The aim of translating these letters is to facilitate the availability of foreign language sources for English-language historians.</p>

The letters of French and German soldiers in World War One

<p>This thesis uses letters written by French and German soldiers to investigate the mobilization of masculinity during World War One 1914-1918. Through the letters of French and German soldiers of World War One, the thesis discusses the initial ways the soldiers were encouraged to enlist, which includes discussions on patriotism. The work also discusses the concepts of brotherhood and equality, and the idea of protecting women. While masculinity in these two societies was highly militarized, the soldiers took their role as domesticated men very serious and rarely followed instructions from censors as to what to write to their families. Although soldiers were separated from their loved ones and relationships were truly strained by separation, they never forgot their role at home. A comparative framework has been employed to highlight significant differences in French and German ideals of masculinity. This includes an emphasis on religion among French soldiers and the concept of Heldentod in German letters. The analysis of hundreds of letters in published or digitized collections complicates the image of French and German soldiers portrayed in both official propaganda and historians’ work. For example, French and German soldiers had different ideas concerning thoughts on the enemy and equality within the army took on different forms as well. Yet the soldiers from both nations had similar notions regarding goals of personal survival and the defence of the country. Studies of World War One soldiers’ letters have overwhelmingly focused on English language sources. Therefore, an overall aim of this thesis is to contribute to existing research in the English language by using French and German sources. The aim of translating these letters is to facilitate the availability of foreign language sources for English-language historians.</p>

Early Defectors, 1924–1930

This chapter identifies sixteen intelligence and state security officers who defected from the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1930. Their revelations show that Soviet intelligence targets focused initially internally, but gradually turned outward as the Soviet government sought to identify external support to internal threats. Most of the defectors in the first group began their careers as enthusiastic Bolshevik adherents, while others cooperated out a sense of personal survival. Regardless of their backgrounds, each of the officers in this group lost their faith in the system, and even more so, lost their faith in the people around them. Several individuals in this group complained about the low moral standard of the early Bolsheviks, their lust for blood, and their intolerance for anyone not fully in agreement with them. This chapter further explains the longest period in Soviet history without any intelligence officer defectors: 1931 to 1936, caused by new Soviet government measures to stem the flow of Soviet officials who were choosing to leave the system in the 1920s.

Honduras

A fact of Honduran history after the 1840s is the structural weakness of the state as an organized political agent capable of administering a nationally defined territory, managing its constitutionally prescribed monopoly over security, and effectively addressing the most minimal aspects of the population’s economic and social welfare. Various factors explain this. A key problem has been Honduran elites’ lack of cohesion and enlightened commitment to their long-term interests among themselves and beyond their borders. Resorting to lethal violence to secure advantaged and corrupt access to state resources has been the result and norm, even to the detriment of elite unity and hegemony. This has often placed the state and country at the mercy of economic and military forces, local and international, that elites cannot control, and with which they have negotiated for short-term benefit and even personal survival, most often to the detriment of national interests, and Hondurans’ rudimentary well-being.

AI: Artificial Immortality and Narratives of Mind Uploading

AI promises to be a master technology that can solve any problem—including the problem of death. There are two main contemporary narratives describing how AI might achieve this: cyborgization and mind uploading. This chapter focuses on the latter. It examines how works of nonfiction by influential technologists, in particular Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil, have framed this possibility. It pays particular attention to three narrative elements: the promise of boundless wish fulfilment, the assumption of exponential technological progress, and the assumption of personal survival through the mind-uploading process. It then examines how works of fiction, including those of William Gibson, Greg Egan, Pat Cadigan, Robert Sawyer, Rudy Rucker, and Cory Doctorow, offer problematized accounts of these claims. It focuses on three problems in particular, which I call the problems of identity, stability, and substrate. It concludes that science fiction offers a particularly important site of critique and response to techno-utopian narratives.

Personalism

Personalism is the thesis that only persons (self-conscious agents) and their states and characteristics exist, and that reality consists of a society of interacting persons. Typically, a personalist will hold that finite persons depend for their existence and continuance on God, who is the Supreme Person, having intelligence and volition. Personalists are usually idealists in metaphysics and construct their theories of knowledge by inference from the data of self-awareness. They tend to be nonutilitarian in ethics and to place ultimate value in the person as a free, self-conscious, moral agent, rather than in either mental states or in apersonal states of affairs. Typically, holding that a good God will not allow what has intrinsic value to lose existence, they believe in personal survival of death. The term ‘personalism’, even as a term for philosophical systems, has myriad uses. There is said to be, for example, atheistic personalism (as in the case of McTaggart, famous for embracing both atheism and the immortality of the soul), absolute idealistic personalism (Hegel, Royce, Calkins), and theistic personalism (Bowne, Brightman, Bertocci). Leibniz and Berkeley are seen as early personalists; both were theists and idealists. Kant, while not strictly a personalist, was influential in personalism’s history. In particular, B.P. Bowne (1847–1910) borrowed freely from Kant, while refusing to accept a Kantian transcendentalism in which our basic concepts or categories apply in a knowledge-giving way only to appearances and not to reality. R.H. Lotze made personality and value central to his worldview, and was a European precursor of American personalism.

Bootstrapping the Afterlife

Samuel Scheffler defends “The Afterlife Conjecture”: the view that the continued existence of humanity after our deaths— “the afterlife”—lies in the background of our valuing; were we to lose confidence in it, many of the projects we engage in would lose their meaning. The Afterlife Conjecture, in his view, also brings out the limits of our egoism, showing that we care more about yet unborn strangers than about personal survival. But why does the afterlife itself matter to us? Examination of Scheffler’s second argument helps answer this question, thereby undermining his argument. Our concern for the afterlife involves bootstrapping: we care more about the afterlife than about personal survival precisely because the latter has such salient limits that our lives are structured by adaptation to mortality, and it is only because the afterlife does provide a measure of personal survival that it can give meaning to our projects.