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1

Przybyło, Łukasz. "Building Military Doctrine based on History and Experience: 20th century examples from Germany, France, Israel and the US." Estonian Yearbook of Military History 9 (2019): 114–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.22601/saa.2019.08.04.

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MUNG, Duong Thanh. "Trade between the United States and Indochinese Union in the First Half of the 20th Century." Vostok. Afro-aziatskie obshchestva: istoriia i sovremennost, no. 2 (2024): 78. http://dx.doi.org/10.31857/s086919080030063-6.

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This article aims to analyze the commercial activities between the Indochinese Union (Indochina) and the United States in the first half of the XX century. The study focuses on three fundamental issues: The US efforts to seek markets in the Indochina region; commercial exchanges between the French-controlled Indochina and the US in the first half of the XX century; and the commercial benefits that the parties obtained. The results show that the commercial exchange between the Indochina and the US was under the strict management and control of the French colonial government. The policies that France conducted in Indochina during this period caused many disadvantages for the Indochina - US commercial relationship. The Indochinese Union did not have much freedom in choosing trade partners and was highly dependent on France's policies in the colonies. Apart from the subjection to France’s manipulation, commercial exchanges between the Indochina and the US had different rules compared to other European and American countries. Starting from merely commercial activities, the US intervened more deeply in the region by launching a military invasion of Indochina. This study contributes to clarifying the commercial policies of France towards the Indochina during the colonial period, the commercial activities of the US in the Far East region, as well as the history of Vietnam in the first half of the XX century.
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Dene, Elizabeth. "A Comparison of the History of the Entry of Women into Policing in France and England and Wales." Police Journal: Theory, Practice and Principles 65, no. 3 (1992): 236–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0032258x9206500307.

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France and England have, through the course of history, shared in many historical events, sometimes as the opposing countries on the battlefield and at other times united through conflict, research and discovery. The two countries have, since the late 19th and early 20th century, seen dramatic changes in the role and status of women within their societies, this being especially so with regard to the employment of women. No longer content with their dual roles as wife and mother, they have increasingly looked outside the home and family for a new challenge, and have increasingly turned to those areas of employment which have been seen as male preserves, including the armed forces, medicine and the police service. This paper seeks to trace the record of women's fight to enter the police forces of England and Wales and the non-military police forces of France.
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Aydın, Abdurrahim, and Tuncay Zorlu. "Transfer of German Military Know-How and Technology to the Ottoman Military Factories at the beginning of the First World War." Belleten 79, no. 285 (2015): 739–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.37879/belleten.2015.739.

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Supply of military weapons, equipment, spare parts and ammunition had always been of a crucial importance for the Ottoman Empire. This issue came to be a part of an international diplomacy from 19th century onwards when the Ottoman governments were forced into a position to choose allies from European Powers who were in rivalry in providing military materials. Many companies from France, England and Germany competed with each other in order to have the greatest share from the military supplies market in the Ottoman Empire. Such German companies as Krupp, and Rheinische Metallwaren und Maschinefabrik in Düsseldorf; French company Sxneider/Le Creusot; and British Armstrong/Vickers Company were among them. However, German weapon companies stood out in meeting the needs of the Ottoman military. In the reign of Abdulhamid II, the German company of Krupp came forward in selling artillery weapons in particular after the 1880's, and turned out to be the dominant power in the end of the century, while the other German companies dealt in the various other military materials such as rifles, ammunitions, spare parts, wagons, factory workbenches. Levazımat-ı Umumiye Dairesi (General Supplies Department) which functioned as attached to the Harbiye Nezareti (Ministry of War) during the early years of the 20th century was in charge of the supply and distribution of primary materials which were necessary for the provisioning of the army. This department was not only involved in the provisioning and equipment of the army during the WWI, but played an important role in procuring the technical equipment for the setting up and development of military factories as well as establishing connections and cooperation with Germany to this end, through its branches. It is possible to reach many correspondences about these cases in ATESE Archives which is attached to the General Staff. This study aims to provide some examples concerning the activities of the above-mentioned department and military factories and procuring the wartime equipment in particular, based on the primary sources.
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Linkova, Elena V., and Marc De Bollivier. "French historiography of the Crimean war (1853-1856): main trends and tendencies." RUDN Journal of Russian History 19, no. 1 (2020): 240–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.22363/2312-8674-2020-19-1-240-253.

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This article is devoted to the study of the French historiographical tradition of studying the Crimean war. Due to the fact that the French historiography of the Crimean campaign has diff erences from the Russian or Anglo-Saxon, it is interesting to turn to the study of the features that are characteristic for the works of French historians. One of the key theses of this article is the statement of the following situation in French historical science: since the second half of the 19th century the Crimean war was studied in the framework of studies on the history of the Second Empire. In the late twentieth century the scientifi c tradition has undergone certain changes, as a result of which the events of 1853-1856 became the subject of separate studies on the military history of France and historical anthropology. This feature infl uenced the perception of the war in French public opinion and the scientifi c community and led to the diff erentiation of certain problems and subjects directly related to the history of the Crimean war. The study of French historiography allows us to determine the themes that prevailed in the scientifi c thought of France during the second half of the 19th - 20th centuries, as well as those trends that are currently key in discussing the prerequisites, the nature, the results of the military campaign of 1853-1856. The authors conclude that the scientifi c and possibly public interest in the Crimean war in France is much lower than in Russia. The events of 1853-1856, largely overshadowed by the discussions and memory of the First World war, gradually turn into a little-known period of French history. However, the jubilee years associated with the Crimean war and the siege of Sevastopol are an important point that allows us to revisit the study of both the military campaign and diplomacy, and in general the history of Russian-French relations.
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Fal’ko, S. A. "Activity of European Military-Instruction Missions in the Countries of South-Eastern Europe at the beginning of the XX century." Problems of World History, no. 13 (March 18, 2021): 24–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.46869/2707-6776-2021-13-2.

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This article studies one of the components of the history of modernization processes in the countries of South-Eastern Europe in the latter half of the 19th century – the early 20th century – military modernization.
 The purpose of research is to analyze the role of foreign military assistance in formation of military forces of Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Albania and Greece. Separate directions of military assistance provided to the countries of South-Eastern Europe in the form of military missions, training of officers in Europe, arms export and other aspects are disclosed.
 One of the markers of military development during the period in question was the military instructor activity of the developed European countries in the framework of military modernization of possible military allies in these countries.
 The lower limit of research is the Bosnian crisis in 1908 caused by annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary. The conflict was the reason of rapid militarization of the region. Military missions from the countries of Europe began their activity in Greece, Montenegro, Turkey. Thousands of officers from Balkan army studied in military establishments of Europe. The top limit of the research is the First world war І 1914-1918. The obvious success was attained with modernization of the armed forces of allies by military missions from Germany in Turkey and from France in Romania in that time.
 The work deals with the process of military modernization, i.e. the activities of military instructor missions of the leading European countries during the interwar period. The time interval of the study ranges within 1908-1918. This was the period marked by modernization of new national armies in Eastern Europe. Military missions played an important role in this complex process.
 The comparison of the results of transformations provides for better understanding of the regional specifics and concrete results of this form of military modernization of armed forces during the twenty-year interwar period.
 The method for comparing variations of military modernization of armies of Oriental countries occurring at the turn of the 20th centuries and reorganization of military forces of the countries of South-Eastern Europe is used. This method instantiates results, consequences, failures and success of military modernization.
 The research is relevant for studying modern processes of military modernization.
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7

Pavlenko, Valerii, and Oleksandr Komarenko. "HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF: THE INABILITY OF THE FORCES OF PEACE AND DEMOCRACY AROUND THE WORLD TO PREVENT THE OUTBREAK OF A PLANETARY WAR IN THE 2ND HALF OF THE 1930S." European Historical Studies, no. 21 (2022): 82–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/2524-048x.2022.21.6.

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In this paper the international political situation, which was established in Europe and in the world in the latter half of the 30s of the 20th century, is investigated. The authors draw a comparison between the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, pointing out that the 30s brought a series of military conflicts, as well as say that the fear of a new great war has been appeared throughout the world. Attention is drawn to the inactivity of the League of Nations, which failed to ensure a collective security policy between 1936 and 1938. Special attention has been drawn to the appeasement policy and the role of Great Britain and France in this policy, who did not want to bring the situation to military confrontation. It is pointed out that by the mid-1930s Germany went on the offensive and set itself the goal of achieving supremacy in Europe. Special attention is drawn to the reaction of Western countries to Hitler’s aggressive policy, as well as the actions of the Soviet Union and the policy carried out by Moscow on the eve of World War II are assessed. It is stated that in 1938-1939 the world policy increasingly focused on particular regions, where the conflict number and intensity were increasing sharply. The role of the Munich Conference in September 1938 and the fact that the initiative in international affairs was completely transferred to A. Hitler upon the signing of the agreement are determined. The policy of Great Britain and France after the Munich Conspiracy is analysed; it is explained why London and Paris thought primarily about personal security. A special place in this paper is given to the explanation of why the existing international system could no longer ensure the world order and why war becomes inevitable. The authors come to the conclusion that although Hitler managed to win the diplomatic struggle on the eve of World War II, but he did not finally become a triumphant.
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8

ROSE, EDWARD P. F. "CANADIAN LINKS WITH BRITISH MILITARY GEOLOGY 1814 TO 1945." Earth Sciences History 40, no. 1 (2021): 130–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.17704/1944-6187-40.1.130.

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ABSTRACT Military applications of geology became apparent within the United Kingdom during the nineteenth century, and were developed during the First World War and more extensively during the Second, incidentally by some officers with links to Canada. In the nineteenth century, three Royal Engineer major-generals with geological interests had served there briefly: Joseph Ellison Portlock (1794–1864) helped to stem invasion of Upper Canada by the United States Army in 1814, pioneer geological survey in Ireland from 1826, and promote knowledge of geology amongst British Army officers; Frederick Henry Baddeley (1794–1879) helped to pioneer geological studies in south-east Canada in the 1820s; Richard John Nelson (1803–1877) served in Canada after mapping the geology of Jersey in 1828 and making geological observations in Bermuda. During the First World War, Tannatt William Edgeworth David (1858–1934), a Welsh-born Australian and from 1916 to 1918 the senior of two geologists serving with the British Army on the Western Front, had a Canadian military family link through his mother; and Reginald Walter Brock (1874–1935), Dean of Applied Science at the University of British Columbia and a distinguished Canadian geologist, interrupted his career for infantry service in Europe but was used as a geologist from mid-1918, in Palestine. During the Second World War, the British military geologist Frederick William Shotton (1906–1990) provided geological advice to, amongst other units, Canadian forces who generated thematic maps for parts of northern France that predicted ‘going’ (conditions affecting cross-country vehicle mobility) to follow the D-Day Allied landings in Normandy. In 1943, Thomas Crawford Phemister (1902–1982), Professor and Head of the Department of Geology and Mineralogy at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland but from 1926 to 1932 an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, as an ‘emergency’ Royal Engineers captain founded the Geological Section of the Inter-Service Topographical Department, a unit whose reports and thematic maps provided terrain intelligence for Allied forces in both Europe and the Far East from a base in England, within the University of Oxford. John Leonard Farrington (1906–1982), an undergraduate student from 1923 to 1928 of Brock and/or Phemister at the University of British Columbia, co-founded the Section and soon succeeded Phemister as its head, from 1944 to 1945 in the rank of major. Soon after 1945, military geologists became established in continuity within the British Army.
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9

Luparenko, Hryhorii. "The front line transporter as the embodiment of the USSR military doctrine in the middle of the 20th century." History of science and technology 12, no. 1 (2022): 114–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.32703/2415-7422-2022-12-1-114-132.

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The paper based on a source analysis of the history of creation, design, and production of LuAZ-967, LuAZ-967M, against the background of the processes of implementing projects of small tactical high mobility wheeled vehicles for the armies of European countries, shows that the developing, testing, and commissioning a front line transporter became a deepening of the process of motorization of the Soviet army. The designs of similar vehicles have been analyzed. An attempt to assess the degree of uniqueness of the front line transporter design and its place in the history of technology, as well as its potential as a reminder of science and technology has been made. The experience of using various civilian and military vehicles in the army required the creation of a special small transporter. In each of the countries, developing their designs, embodying new original or time-tested ideas, ones developed vehicles both for the army and for separate armed forced formations. Features of the automotive industry of the countries were reflected in the design of army vehicles. The works and operation Volkswagen Type 82, Volkswagen Schwimmer Type 166, DKW Munga, Volkswagen Type 181 in the armed forced formations in Germany had a significant impact on the spread of the concept of an army small transporter. In France, production of a licensed sample of Willys and the original Citroën Méhari was launched. The Steyr-Daimler-Puch vehicle (Austria) has become one of the most original, successful developments of a small transporter for difficult operating conditions. The development of a front line transporter in the USSR fully corresponded to the challenges of the time and it was carried out through similar stages. The first transporter projects developed by the Scientific Automotive Institute used heavy motorcycle engines mastered in production. It was the lack of the necessary engine for the vehicle that was the main reason for the long proof of the project. Only after the involvement of the designers of the automobile plant in Zaporizhzhia and the installation of units of the mass-produced ZAZ vehicle in the transporter made it possible to prove the design and to master small-scale production. The use of the most powerful engine of a production vehicle, which would correspond to the concept of a small army vehicle, had enabled to master mass production for the army and the development of vehicles for the civilian market. An analysis of the front line transporter design, its systems, compared with its foreign counterparts, suggests that it is a Soviet refinement of the concept of a small army vehicle, a more specific means directly for the battlefield. At the same time, it was developed taking into account foreign developments and similar designs, imitating individual designs, adapting to the capabilities of the USSR automotive industry.
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Sulhan, Ahmad. "Islam Kontemporer: Antara Reformasi Dan Revolusi Peradaban." Ulumuna 12, no. 1 (2017): 143–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.20414/ujis.v12i1.395.

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The 19th and 20th centuries were periods for main transformation in Muslim history: periods of degradation and conquest, independence and revolution, renaissance and reform. Toward the 19th century, world power moved from Muslim world to Europe. It was remarked by emerging power of British, France, Spain, Russia, Netherlands, Italy and Portuguese. They dominated Muslim societies in Asia, Africa, and Middle East in economic, military, politic and ideological aspects. Muslim societies’ responses to Europe domination were diverse from rejection and confrontation to emigration and non-cooperative attitudes of traditional Muslim. They planned reform, reconstructed Islamic thinking and beliefs, reformed theology and Islamic law, and emphasized Muslim’s self-esteem significance, unity and solidarity in facing cultural threats and Europe colonialism. However, not few secular Muslims and reformers, were proud and greatly imitated Europe civilization and cultures. They did secularization that ended khalifah system in order to reconstruct Muslim societies.
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11

Bourdillon, Pierre, Caroline Apra, and Marc Lévêque. "First clinical use of stereotaxy in humans: the key role of x-ray localization discovered by Gaston Contremoulins." Journal of Neurosurgery 128, no. 3 (2018): 932–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.3171/2016.11.jns161417.

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Although attempts to develop stereotactic approaches to intracranial surgery started in the late 19th century with Dittmar, Zernov, and more famously, Horsley and Clarke, widespread use of the technique for human brain surgery started in the second part of the 20th century. Remarkably, a significant similar surgical procedure had already been performed in the late 19th century by Gaston Contremoulins in France and has remained unknown. Contremoulins used the principles of modern stereotaxy in association with radiography for the first time, allowing the successful removal of intracranial bullets in 2 patients. This surgical premiere, greatly acknowledged in the popular French newspaper L’Illustration in 1897, received little scientific or governmental interest at the time, as it emanated from a young self-taught scientist without official medical education. This surgical innovation was only made possible financially by popular crowdfunding and, despite widespread military use during World War I, with 37,780 patients having benefited from this technique for intra- or extracranial foreign bodies, it never attracted academic or neurosurgical consideration. The authors of this paper describe the historical context of stereotactic developments and the personal history of Contremoulins, who worked in the department of experimental physiology of the French Academy of Sciences led by Étienne-Jules Marey in Paris, and later devoted himself to radiography and radioprotection. The authors also give precise information about his original stereotactic tool “the bullet finder” (“le chercheur de projectiles”) and its key concepts.
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Kacprzak, Alicja. "War jargon of a peace mission: the case of the polish army contingent in Afghanistan (2002 – 2014)." Linguistica 58, no. 1 (2019): 153–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/linguistica.58.1.153-162.

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In the centenary of the First World War many historical studies concerning the period between 1914 and 1918 and its consequences have appeared in France. Many of these are also interested in the public discourse of this time and its language, especially the lexicon. There is no doubt that it is not only the history of the country and of its citizens that has been marked by the war, but also the French vocabulary. Numerous dictionaries containing war vocabulary have been published in recent years, while others are still being prepared, and all of them prove the existence of an indissoluble bond between the history of a community and its language.The horror of the First and Second World Wars did not cause the world to abandon military conflicts. They continued over the whole 20th century and have not ceased at the beginning of the third millennium. Poland, which since 1945 has not been involved in international military conflicts on its own territory, has nonetheless taken part in the so-called local wars, among them the recent (2002-2014) war in Afghanistan. The majority of Polish society (70-80%) has never accepted the engagement of national forces in this conflict, even though it used to be called “a peaceful mission”.The common experience of over 28.000 Polish soldiers who have served in Afghanistan has found its reflection in reports, books and blogs written by the participants. These texts, though rather rare, contain specific vocabulary that has developed in Task Force White Eagle (names for weapons, mines, military actions, enemies, etc.). In this article, the language of the mission is analyzed and the question is raised about the possible functions of this specific jargon.
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Zygmont, Alexey. "“Martyrs for God and Spain”. National Martyrdom in Spain from the Civil War to the Historical Memory Law." Philosophy. Journal of the Higher School of Economics VII, no. 1 (2023): 128–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.17323/2587-8719-2023-1-128-164.

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The article considers the ideology of national martyrdom in 20th century Spain, especially the cult of “martyrs for God and Spain” spread during the period of Spanish Civil War (1939–1939) and the reign of caudillo Francisco Franco (1939–1975). The author reasons that, as a mechanism for legitimization and mobilization, the idea of martyrdom for the nation was one of the integral parts of Francoist regime. The origins of this idea are traced back to several sources: “old” national martyrdom of 19th century Spain, associated with its struggle for independence from France, the sacrificial culture of local groups such as the Carlist and Jesuits, the ideology of the fascist Spanish Phalanx and some theological concepts put forward by distinguished Roman Catholic bishops in Spain. Particular attention is given to the discourse of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of Spanish fascism, who cultivated a “spirit of sacrifice” and promoted the veneration of dead Falangists as martyrs. Theory and practice of martyrdom in the Civil War are examined in relation to its conceptualization as a “Crusade”, which contributed to the junction between the images of military hero and martyr. After the end of war, this militaristic ideology became routinized and more peaceful, although preserving its unifying force. The article's final section examines the issues associated with the Valley of the Fallen memorial and the recent politics of “demartyrization” as part of overcoming the legacy of dictatorial rule. The author concludes that as long as José Antonio's body remain at the center of the Valley, state policy on “historical memory” and the cult of martyrs would remain conceptually incomplete.
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Kazakevych, G. "UKRAINIAN O'CONNORS: THE FAMILY OF IRISH ANCESTRY IN THE CULTURAL LIFE OF THE 19TH CENTURY UKRAINE." Bulletin of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. History, no. 132 (2017): 15–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/1728-2640.2017.132.1.03.

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The article is devoted to the O'Connor family, which played a noticeable role in the Ukrainian history of the 19 – early 20th centuries. A founder of the family Alexander O'Connor leaved Ireland in the late 18th century. The author assumes that he was a military man who had to emigrate from Ireland shortly after the Irish rebellion of 1798. After some years in France, where he had changed his surname to de Connor, he and his elder son Victor arrived in Russia where Alexander Ivanovich De-Konnor joined the army. As a cavalry regiment commander, colonel De-Konnor took part in the Napoleonic wars. He married a noble Ukrainian woman Anastasia Storozhenko and settled down in her estate in the Poltava region of Ukraine. His three sons (Victor, Alexander and Valerian) had served as army commanders and then settled in Chernihiv, Poltava and Kharkiv regions respectively. Among their descendants the most notable were two daughters of Alexander De-Konnor jr – Olga and Valeria as well as Valerian De-Konnor jr. Olga De-Konnor married a famous Ukrainian composer and public figure Mykola Lysenko. As a professional opera singer, she stood at the origins of the Ukrainian national opera. Her younger sister Valeria was a Ukrainian writer, publicist and political activist who joined the government of the Ukrainian People's Republic in 1917. Valerian De-Konnor jr. is well known for his research works and translations in the field of cynology.
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Fonju, Njuafac Kenedy. "New Strategic Actors of African Military Leaders (NSAAML) in the Path of International Relations (PIR) versus Mechanisms of Western Neo-Colonial Actors (MWNA): The Case of Burkina Faso in the 21st Century." Cross-Currents: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal on Humanities & Social Sciences 9, no. 09 (2023): 155–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.36344/ccijhss.2023.v09i09.001.

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The History of Africa in International Relations (HAIR) put at the disposal of Post-Graduate Students and other readers is well intensive using scrutinized research work of the specialization to make an in-depth understanding of the happenings since the second half of the 20th Century and what is occurring in the 21st Century with new leaders cropping up with more pragmatic ideologies of chasing out neo-colonialist for the benefit of their specific countries. This situation is very welcoming in West African countries with specific strategic of using military coup d’états to flush out puppet Western leaders in the names of Head of States. The cases of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger among others caught our attention more recently. Our inspirations are drawn from published scientific works, documentaries, related books and specialized websites consulted online following the recent occurring with specific focus concerning Burkina-Faso where on September 30, 2022 a military coup took place in Burkina Faso. As a result, Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba was overthrown and Captain Ibrahim Traoré replaced him in power. The constitution was suspended, state institutions were dissolved, borders were closed and the army imposed a curfew throughout the country thereby urging the Departure and end of French neo-colonialism with cancellation of specific accords of cooperation signed at independence This research is very interesting to students specializing in International Relations (IR) especially Africa in HAIR. However, a historical method was deem necessary with statistical tables giving some important representations and commercial exchanges between Burkina Faso and France barely a year before the cropping of conflicting bilateral relations since 2022.Our experiences from lecturing IR and HAIR with specific questions frequently asked by Post-Graduates students is among the motivated factors thereby highlighting issues which can be more valuable to other ..........
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Carey, Peter, and Christopher Reinhart. "British Naval Power and its Influence on Indonesia, 1795–1942: An Historical Analysis." Journal of Maritime Studies and National Integration 5, no. 1 (2021): 14–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.14710/jmsni.v5i1.9343.

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In Indonesian history, Britain has never been considered a prominent player in the politics of the archipelago. From an Indonesian perspective, the British presence only lasted a brief five years (1811–1816) during short-lived interregnum regime led by Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826). This began with the British seizure of Java from the Franco-Dutch administration of Marshal Daendels (1808-11) and his successor, General Janssens (May-September 1811), and ended with the formal return of the colony to the Netherlands on 19 August 1816. However, as this article demonstrates, Britain has had a long-lasting and decisive influence on modern Indonesian history, dating from the time when the archipelago entered the vortex of global conflict between Britain and Republican France in the 1790s. The presence of the British navy in Indonesian waters throughout the century and a half which followed Britain’s involvement in the War of the First Coalition (1792-97) dictated inter alia the foundation of new cities like Bandung which grew up along Daendels’ celebrated postweg (military postroad), the development of modern Javanese cartography, and even the fate of the exiled Java War leader, Prince Diponegoro. in distant Sulawesi (1830-55). This British naval presence had pluses and minuses for the Dutch. On the one hand, it was a guarantor of Dutch security from foreign seaborne invasion. On the other, it opened the possibility for British interference in the domestic politics of Holland’s vast Asian colony. As witnessed in the 20th-century, the existence of the Dutch as colonial masters in the Indonesian Archipelago was critically dependent on the naval defence screen provided by the British. When the British lost their major battleships (Prince of Wales and Repulse) to Japanese attack off the east coast of Malaya on 10 December 1941 and Singapore fell on 15 February 1942, the fate of the Dutch East Indies was sealed. Today, the vital role played by the Royal Navy in guaranteeing the archipelago’s security up to February 1942 has been replaced by that of the Honolulu-based US Seventh Fleet but the paradoxes of such protection have continued.
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Pylypchuk, Oleh, Oleh Strelko, and Yuliia Berdnychenko. "PREFACE." History of science and technology 11, no. 2 (2021): 271–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.32703/2415-7422-2021-11-2-271-273.

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The issue of the journal opens with an article dedicated to the formation of metrology as government regulated activity in France. The article has discussed the historical process of development of metrological activity in France. It was revealed that the history of metrology is considered as an auxiliary historical and ethnographic discipline from a social and philosophical point of view as the evolution of scientific approaches to the definition of individual units of physical quantities and branches of metrology. However, in the scientific literature, the little attention is paid to the process of a development of a centralized institutional metrology system that is the organizational basis for ensuring the uniformity of measurements. The article by Irena Grebtsova and Maryna Kovalska is devoted to the of the development of the source criticism’s knowledge in the Imperial Novorossiya University which was founded in the second half of the XIX century in Odesa. Grounding on a large complex of general scientific methods, and a historical method and source criticism, the authors identified the stages of the formation of source criticism in the process of teaching historical disciplines at the university, what they based on an analysis of the teaching activities of professors and associate professors of the Faculty of History and Philology. In the article, the development of the foundations of source criticism is considered as a complex process, which in Western European and Russian science was the result of the development of the theory and practice of everyday dialogue between scientists and historical sources. This process had a great influence on the advancement of a historical education in university, which was one of the important factors in the formation of source studies as a scientific discipline. The article by Tetiana Malovichko is devoted to the study of what changes the course of the probability theory has undergone from the end of the 19th century to our time based on the analysis of The Theory of Probabilities textbook by Vasyl P. Ermakov published in 1878. The paper contains a comparative analysis of The Probability Theory textbook and modern educational literature. The birth of children after infertility treatment of married couples with the help of assisted reproductive technologies has become a reality after many years of basic research on the physiology of reproductive system, development of oocyte’s in vitro fertilization methods and cultivation of embryos at pre-implantation stages. Given the widespread use of assisted reproductive technologies in modern medical practice and the great interest of society to this problem, the aim of the study authors from the Institute for Problems of Cryobiology and Cryomedicine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine was to trace the main stages and key events of assisted reproductive technologies in the world and in Ukraine, as well as to highlight the activities of outstanding scientists of domestic and world science who were at the origins of the development of this area. As a result of the work, it has been shown that despite certain ethical and social biases, the discovery of individual predecessor scientists became the basis for the efforts of Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe to ensure birth of the world's first child, whose conception occurred outside the mother's body. There are also historical facts and unique photos from our own archive, which confirm the fact of the first successful oocyte in vitro fertilization and the birth of a child after the use of assisted reproductive technologies in Ukraine. In the next article, the authors tried to consider and structure the stages of development and creation of the “Yermak”, the world's first Arctic icebreaker, and analyzed the stages of preparation and the results of its first expeditions to explore the Arctic. Systematic analysis of historical sources and biographical material allowed to separate and comprehensively consider the conditions and prehistory for the development and creation of “Yermak” icebreaker. Also, the authors gave an assessment to the role of Vice Admiral Stepan Osypovych Makarov in those events, and analyzed the role of Sergei Yulyevich Witte, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev and Pyotr Petrovich Semenov-Tian-Shansky in the preparation and implementation of the first Arctic expeditions of the “Yermak”icebreaker. The authors of the following article considered the historical aspects of construction and operation of train ferry routes. The article deals with the analysis and systematization of the data on the historical development of train ferry routes and describes the background for the construction of train ferry routes and their advantages over other combined transport types. It also deals with the basic features of the train ferries operating on the main international train ferry routes. The study is concerned with both sea routes and routes across rivers and lakes. The article shows the role of train ferry routes in the improvement of a national economy, and in the provision of the military defense. An analysis of numerous artefacts of the first third of the 20th century suggests that the production of many varieties of art-and-industrial ceramics developed in Halychyna, in particular architectural ceramic plastics, a variety of functional ceramics, decorative tiles, ceramic tiles, facing tiles, etc. The artistic features of Halychyna art ceramics, the richness of methods for decorating and shaping it, stylistic features, as well as numerous art societies, scientific and professional associations, groups, plants and factories specializing in the production of ceramics reflect the general development of this industry in the first half of the century and represent the prerequisites the emergence of the school of professional ceramics in Halychyna at the beginning of the 20th century. The purpose of the next paper is to analyze the formation and development of scientific and professional schools of art-and-industrial ceramics of Halychyna in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. During the environmental crisis, electric transport (e-transport) is becoming a matter for scientific inquiry, a subject of discussion in politics and among public figures. In the program for developing the municipal services of Ukraine, priorities are given to the development of the infrastructure of ecological transport: trolleybuses, electric buses, electric cars. The increased attention to e-transport on the part of the scientific community, politicians, and the public actualizes the study of its history, development, features of operation, etc. The aim of the next study is to highlight little-known facts of the history of production and operation of MAN trolleybuses in Ukrainian cities, as well as to introduce their technical characteristics into scientific circulation. The types, specific design solutions of the first MAN trolleybus generation and the prerequisites for their appearance in Chernivtsi have been determined. Particular attention has been paid to trolleybuses that were in operation in Germany and other Western European countries from the first half of the 1930s to the early 1950s. The paper traces the stages of operation of the MAN trolleybuses in Chernivtsi, where they worked during 1939–1944 and after the end of the Second World War, they were transferred to Kyiv. After two years of operation in the Ukrainian capital, the trolleybuses entered the routes in Dnipropetrovsk during 1947–1951. The purpose of the article by authors from the State University of Infrastructure and Technologies of Ukraine is to thoroughly analyze unpaved roads of the late 18th – early 19th century, as well as the project of the first wooden trackway as the forerunner of the Bukovyna railways. To achieve this purpose, the authors first reviewed how railways were constructed in the Austrian Empire during 1830s – 1850s. Then, in contrast with the first railway networks that emerged and developed in the Austrian Empire, the authors made an analysis of the condition and characteristics of unpaved roads in Bukovyna. In addition, the authors considered the first attempt to create a wooden trackway as a prototype and predecessor of the Bukovyna railway.
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18

KOCJANČIČ, KLEMEN. "REVIEW, ON THE IMPORTANCE OF MILITARY GEOSCIENCE." CONTEMPORARY MILITARY CHALLENGES 2022, no. 24/3 (2022): 107–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.33179/bsv.99.svi.11.cmc.24.3.rew.

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In 2022, the Swiss branch of the international publishing house Springer published a book, a collection of papers entitled Military Geoscience: A Multifaceted Approach to the Study of Warfare. It consists of selected contributions by international researchers in the field of military geoscience, presented at the 13th International Conference on Military Geosciences, held in Padua in June 2019. The first paper is by the editors, Aldin Bondesan and Judy Ehlen, and provides a brief overview of understanding the concept of military geoscience as an application of geology and geography to the military domain, and the historical development of the discipline. It should also be pointed out that the International Conferences on Military Geosciences (ICMG), which organises this biennial international conference, has over the past two decades also covered other aspects, such as conflict archaeology. The publication is further divided into three parts. The first part comprises three contributions covering military geoscience up to the 20th century. The first paper, by Chris Fuhriman and Jason Ridgeway, provides an insights into the Battle of Marathon through topography visualisation. The geography of the Marathon field, the valley between Mt. Cotroni and Mt. Agrieliki, allowed the Greek defenders to nullify the advantage of the Persian cavalry and archers, who were unable to develop their full potential. This is followed by a paper by Judy Ehlen, who explores the geological background of the Anglo-British coastal fortification system along the English Channel, focusing on the Portsmouth area of Hampshire. The author thus points out that changes in artillery technology and naval tactics between the 16th and 19th centuries necessitated changes in the construction of coastal fortifications, both in terms of the form of the fortifications and the method of construction, including the choice of basic building materials, as well as the siting of the fortifications in space. The next article is then dedicated to the Monte Baldo Fortress in north-eastern Italy, between Lake Garda and the Adige River. In his article, Francesco Premi analyses the presence of the fortress in the transition area between the Germanic world and the Mediterranean, and the importance of this part of Italy (at the southernmost part of the pre-Alpine mountains) in military history, as reflected in the large number of important military and war relics and monuments. The second part of the book, which is the most comprehensive, focuses on the two World Wars and consists of nine papers. The first paper in this part provides an analysis of the operation of trench warfare training camps in the Aube region of France. The group of authors, Jérôme Brenot, Yves Desfossés, Robin Perarnau, Marc Lozano and Alain Devos, initially note that static warfare training camps have not received much attention so far. Using aerial photography of the region dating from 1948 and surviving World War II photographic material, they identified some 20 sites where soldiers of the Entente forces were trained for front-line service in trenches. Combined archaeological and sociological fieldwork followed, confirming the presence of these camps, both through preserved remains and the collective memory. The second paper in this volume also concerns the survey on trenches, located in northern Italy in the Venezia Tridentina Veneto area in northern Italy. The authors Luigi Magnini, Giulia Rovera, Armando De Guio and Giovanni Azzalin thus use digital classification methods and archaeology to determine how Italian and Austro-Hungarian First World War trenches have been preserved or, in case they have disappeared, why this was the case, both from the point of view of the natural features as well as from the anthropological point of view of the restoration of the pre-war settings. The next paper, by Paolo Macini and Paolo Sammuri, analyses the activities of the miners and pioneers of the Italian Corps of Engineers during the First World War, in particular with regard to innovative approaches to underground mine warfare. In the Dolomites, the Italian engineers, using various listening devices, drilling machinery and geophysical methods, developed a system for drilling underground mine chambers, which they intended to use and actually used to destroy parts of Austro-Hungarian positions. The paper by Elena Dai Prà, Nicola Gabellieri and Matteo Boschian Bailo concerns the Italian Army's operations during the First World War. It focuses on the use of tactical maps with emphasis on typological classification, the use of symbols, and digital cartography. The authors thus analysed the tactical maps of the Italian Third Army, which were being constantly updated by plotting the changes in positions and tactical movements of both sides. These changes were examined both in terms of the use of new symbols and the analysis of the movements. This is followed by a geographical presentation of the Italian Army's activities during the First World War. The authors Paolo Plini, Sabina Di Franco and Rosamaria Salvatori have thus collected 21,856 toponyms by analysing documents and maps. The locations were also geolocated to give an overview of the places where the Italian Army operated during the First World War. The analysis initially revealed the complexity of the events on the battlefields, but also that the sources had misidentified the places of operation, as toponyms were misidentified, especially in the case of homonyms. Consequently, the area of operation was misidentified as well. In this respect, the case of Vipava was highlighted, which can refer to both a river and a settlement. The following paper is the first on the Second World War. It is the article by H. A. P. Smith on Italian prisoners of war in South Africa. The author outlines the circumstances in which Italian soldiers arrived to and lived in the southern African continent, and the contribution they made to the local environment and the society, and the remnants of their presence preserved to the present day. In their article, William W. Doe III and Michael R. Czaja analyse the history, geography and significance of Camp Hale in the state of Colorado. In doing so, they focus on the analysis of the military organization and its impact on the local community. Camp Hale was thus the first military installation of the U.S. Army, designated to test and train U.S. soldiers in mountain and alpine warfare. It was here that the U.S. 10th Mountain Division was formed, which concluded its war path on Slovenian soil. The Division's presence in this former camp, which was in military use also after the war until 1965, and in the surrounding area is still visible through numerous monuments. This is followed by a paper by Hermann Häusler, who deals with German military geography and geology on the Eastern Front of the Second World War. A good year before the German attack on the Soviet Union, German and Austrian military geologists began an analysis of the topography, population and infrastructure of the European part of the Soviet Union, which led to a series of publications, including maps showing the suitability of the terrain for military operations. During the war, military geological teams then followed the frontline units and carried out geotechnical tasks such as water supply, construction of fortifications, supply of building materials for transport infrastructure, and analysis of the suitability of the terrain for all-terrain driving of tracked and other vehicles. The same author also authored a paper in the next chapter, this time focusing on the activities of German military geologists in the Adriatic area. Similarly to his first contribution, the author presents the work of military geologists in northern Italy and north-western Slovenia. He also focuses on the construction of fortification systems in northern Italy and presents the work of karst hunters in the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral. Part 3 covers the 21st century with five different papers (chapters). The first paper by Alexander K. Stewart deals with the operations of the U.S. Army specialised teams in Afghanistan. These Agribusiness Development Teams (ADTs) carried out a specialised form of counter-guerrilla warfare in which they sought to improve the conditions for the development of local communities through agricultural assistance to the local population. In this way, they were also counteracting support for the Taliban. The author notes that, in the decade after the programme's launch, the project had only a 19% success rate. However, he stresses that such forms of civil-military cooperation should be present in future operations. The next chapter, by Francis A. Galgan, analyses the activities of modern pirates through military-geographical or geological methods. Pirates, who pose a major international security threat, are present in four regions of the world: South and South-East Asia, East Africa and the Gulf of Guinea. Building on the data on pirate attacks between 1997 and 2017, the author shows the temporal and spatial patterns of pirate activities, as well as the influence of the geography of coastal areas on their activities. This is followed by another chapter with a maritime topic. Mark Stephen Blaine discusses the geography of territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Through a presentation of international law, the strategic importance of the sea (sea lanes, natural resources) and the overlapping territorial claims of China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia, the author shows the increasing level of conflict in the area and calls for the utmost efforts to be made to prevent the outbreak of hostilities or war. M. H. Bulmer's paper analyses the Turkish Armed Forces' activities in Syria from the perspective of military geology. The author focuses on the Kurdish forces' defence projects, which mainly involved the construction of gun trenches, observation towers or points, tunnels and underground facilities, as well as on the Turkish armed forces' actions against this military infrastructure. This involved both mountain and underground warfare activities. While these defensive infrastructures proved to be successful during the guerrilla warfare period, direct Turkish attacks on these installations demonstrated their vulnerability. The last chapter deals with the current operational needs and limitations of military geosciences from the perspective of the Austrian Armed Forces. Friedrich Teichmann points out that the global operational interest of states determines the need for accurate geo-data as well as geo-support in case of rapidly evolving requirements. In this context, geoscience must respond to new forms of threats, both asymmetric and cyber, at a time when resources for geospatial services are limited, which also requires greater synergy and an innovative approach to finding solutions among multiple stakeholders. This also includes increased digitisation, including the use of satellite and other space technologies. The number of chapters in the publication illustrates the breadth and depth of military geoscience, as well as the relevance of geoscience to past, present and future conflicts or military operations and missions. The current military operations in Ukraine demonstrate the need to take into account the geo-geological realities of the environment and that terrain remains one of the decisive factors for success on the battlefield, irrespective of the technological developments in military engineering and technology. This can also be an incentive for Slovenian researchers and the Slovenian Armed Forces to increase research activities in the field of military geosciences, especially in view of the rich military and war history in the geographically and geologically diverse territory of Slovenia.
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19

Kalmo, Hent. "Enesemääramise paleus ja pragmaatika: Tartu versus Pariis." Ajalooline Ajakiri. The Estonian Historical Journal 173, no. 3/4 (2021): 243–301. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/aa.2020.3-4.04.

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The Tartu Peace Treaty of 1920, signed between Estonia and Soviet Russia, has been credited with laying the foundation for stability in Eastern Europe in the interwar period. Ants Piip, a member of the Estonian delegation at Tartu, attributed this achievement to the equitable character of the agreement, comparing it favourably with the Treaty of Versailles, widely seen as a dictated peace already in the immediate aftermath of its signature. A similar view was expounded by the Soviet government, which portrayed the Tartu Peace Treaty as an expression of the principles underlying the November Revolution. It especially emphasised the self-determination of peoples, proclaimed repeatedly by the Soviet government as a sine qua non for a just peace. According to the Soviet narrative, the principle of selfdetermination had been hailed by the Entente only to be later betrayed at the Paris Peace Conference. The Tartu Peace Treaty, where the principle of self-determination figured prominently in Article II, thus became, in this telling, an ideological counter model to the results of the Paris Peace Conference. Despite their anti-Bolshevik outlook, Estonian diplomats and politicians inclined towards a comparable interpretation: they had accepted the Soviet peace proposal, with the offer to recognise their right to selfdetermination and independent statehood, only after the Allies had failed to live up to their promises at Paris.
 The refence to the principle of self-determination in the Tartu Peace Treaty has not received much attention from historians. As Lauri Mälksoo has noted, it remains a well-nigh forgotten chapter in the history of international law. Mälksoo argued that the reference is all the more noteworthy since the Soviet government gave the principle a remarkably wide scope, joining to it the right to secession, which was not yet enshrined in general international law at the time. Assuming that the principle of selfdetermination was mentioned in the Tartu Peace Treaty at the initiative of the Soviet side, Mälksoo suggested two motives that might have prompted it: the need to recognise the fait accompli of Estonian independence, and the wish to justify within Russia itself the decision to relinquish territories that had formerly belonged to the Tsarist Empire. This article shows that the Estonian side was also keen to refer to the principle of self-determination, quite independently of Soviet wishes, as demonstrated by a draft peace treaty drawn up two months prior to the start of the Tartu negotiations by a commission of experts convened by the Estonian Minister of Foreign Affairs. This fact is indicative of the broader diplomatic significance that the Estonian delegation – and its head, Jaan Poska, in particular – attached to peace talks with the Bolsheviks. The article demonstrates that Poska did not start the negotiations in December of 1919 with the sõle aim of signing a peace treaty with Soviet Russia. Just as important, if not more so, was the prospect of using the talks to convince the Entente to recognise Estonian independence de jure.
 The Estonian government had founded its claim to international recognition on the principle of self-determination. Upon the outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution, the Estonian Provisional Assembly had availed itself of the Soviet decree proclaiming the right of all peoples of Russia to selfdetermination, including secession and the formation of a separate state. Without being confident in the resolve of the Soviet government to adhere to the letter of its public pronouncements, Estonian politicians nonetheless saw the usefulness of invoking the decree, since the latter could be seen as ratifying Estonia’s decision to secede from Russia. They were already positioning themselves vis-à-vis the Entente Powers, whose freedom to recognise the nascent republic was constrained by rules of international law regarding the validity of secession. The principle of self-determination had great value for a seceding state, especially in circumstances where the mother country did not have a lawful government and was thus unable to consent to any separation of territories (as Russia was regarded in the eyes of most governments at the end of 1917). The Estonian position was buttressed by a string of diplomatic statements made by the Entente Powers in 1918, assuring Estonia that its status would be determined at a forthcoming peace conference in accordance with the principle of self-determination.
 Such assurances filled Estonian diplomats with great optimism when they set out for the Paris Peace Conference at the beginning of 1919. The principle of self-determination was tantamount to independence in their mind. It was therefore with growing disappointment that they observed the unwillingness of France and Great Britain to recognise their independence at Paris, intent as the latter were to reconstitute their former eastern ally. This is not to say that Estonian claims were completely ignored. British politicians did not think that they were failing to honour their promises when offering Estonia internationally guaranteed autonomy, under the aegis of the League of Nations, instead of independence. Autonomy did not satisfy Estonians, however, who were canvassing all options at their disposal to arrive at their aim. The quest for ‘other ways’, beginning in earnest in the summer of 1919, has been mostly interpreted by scholars as a decision to reach a peace settlement with the Bolsheviks. The article shows that the Estonian strategy was more multi-faceted. International recognition remained their chief aim, and their receptiveness to Bolshevik peace feelers should be seen in this light. The emphasis placed on the principle of self-determination from the very start of negotiations with Soviet Russia in September of 1919 was a part of this Western-directed diplomatic approach. The Bolsheviks had their own aims in mind when foregrounding this principle. The consternation that the Treaty of Versailles had caused in Germany offered them an opportunity to depict the Paris Peace Conference as the latest manifestation of Great Power imperialism, to which the Soviet proposal of a ‘democratic peace’ (no annexations, no contributions, self-determination to all peoples) was allegedly the only viable alternative.
 The peace talks between Estonia and Soviet Russia were thus caught in an ideological struggle between the Soviet government and the Western Allies concerning ‘just peace’. But they also fitted in with the – apparently contrary – Soviet strategy of abandoning outright military aggression and preparing the ground for ‘peaceful coexistence’ with capitalist states, with a view to buttressing the Soviet regime economically. The reference to the principle of self-determination in the Tartu Peace Treaty can be explained by all the considerations mentioned above. The Estonians had their sights set on reinforcing their international status by tying it to the principle. The Bolsheviks were showcasing their adherence to ‘democratic peace’ and contrasting their favourable attitude to small peoples with the hypocrisy of the Great Powers (the fact that it was Soviet Russia that had initiated the war with unprovoked military aggression in 1918 was conveniently ignored). Moreover, on a less public level, Soviet Russia was signalling that it was willing to consent to self-determination in the Russian borderlands in order to reach an agreement with its Western foes, and that it would rely on the long-term superiority of the Bolshevik system in lieu of head-to-head collision with capitalist states. In this last sense, the Treaty of Tartu marks a strategic turn for the Soviet government that became so consequential for the 20th century that the treaty with Estonia acquires truly foundational significance.
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20

Vella Bonavita, Helen. "“In Everything Illegitimate”: Bastards and the National Family." M/C Journal 17, no. 5 (2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.897.

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This paper argues that illegitimacy is a concept that relates to almost all of the fundamental ways in which Western society has traditionally organised itself. Sex, family and marriage, and the power of the church and state, are all implicated in the various ways in which society reproduces itself from generation to generation. All employ the concepts of legitimacy and illegitimacy to define what is and what is not permissible. Further, the creation of the illegitimate can occur in more or less legitimate ways; for example, through acts of consent, on the one hand; and force, on the other. This paper uses the study of an English Renaissance text, Shakespeare’s Henry V, to argue that these concepts remain potent ones, regularly invoked as a means of identifying and denouncing perceived threats to the good ordering of the social fabric. In western societies, many of which may be constructed as post-marriage, illegitimate is often applied as a descriptor to unlicensed migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. In countries subject to war and conflict, rape as a war crime is increasingly used by armies to create fractures within the subject community and to undermine the paternity of a cohort of children. In societies where extramarital sex is prohibited, or where rape has been used as a weapon of war, the bastard acts as physical evidence that an unsanctioned act has been committed and the laws of society broken, a “failure in social control” (Laslett, Oosterveen and Smith, 5). This paper explores these themes, using past conceptions of the illegitimate and bastardy as an explanatory concept for problematic aspects of legitimacy in contemporary culture.Bastardy was a particularly important issue in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe when an individual’s genealogy was a major determining factor of social status, property and identity (MacFarlane). Further, illegitimacy was not necessarily an aspect of a person’s birth. It could become a status into which they were thrust through the use of divorce, for example, as when Henry VIII illegitimised his daughter Mary after annulling his marriage to Mary’s mother, Catherine of Aragon. Alison Findlay’s study of illegitimacy in Renaissance literature lists over 70 portrayals of illegitimacy, or characters threatened with illegitimacy, between 1588 and 1652 (253–257). In addition to illegitimacy at an individual level however, discussions around what constitutes the “illegitimate” figure in terms of its relationship with the family and the wider community, are also applicable to broader concerns over national identity. In work such as Stages of History, Phyllis Rackin dissected images of masculine community present in Shakespeare’s history plays to expose underlying tensions over gender, power and identity. As the study of Henry V indicates in the following discussion, illegitimacy was also a metaphor brought to bear on issues of national as well as personal identity in the early modern era. The image of the nation as a “family” to denote unity and security, both then and now, is rendered complex and problematic by introducing the “illegitimate” into that nation-family image. The rhetoric used in the recent debate over the Scottish independence referendum, and in Australia’s ongoing controversy over “illegitimate” migration, both indicate that the concept of a “national bastard”, an amorphous figure that resists precise definition, remains a potent rhetorical force. Before turning to the detail of Henry V, it is useful to review the use of “illegitimate” in the early modern context. Lacking an established position within a family, a bastard was in danger of being marginalised and deprived of any but the most basic social identity. If acknowledged by a family, the bastard might become a drain on that family’s economic resources, drawing money away from legitimate children and resented accordingly. Such resentment may be reciprocated. In his essay “On Envy” the scientist, author, lawyer and eventually Lord Chancellor of England Francis Bacon explained the destructive impulse of bastardy as follows: “Deformed persons, and eunuchs, and old men, and bastards, are envious. For he that cannot possibly mend his own case will do what he can to impair another’s.” Thus, bastardy becomes a plot device which can be used to explain and to rationalise evil. In early modern English literature, as today, bastardy as a defect of birth is only one meaning for the word. What does “in everything illegitimate” (quoting Shakespeare’s character Thersites in Troilus and Cressida [V.viii.8]) mean for our understanding of both our own society and that of the late sixteenth century? Bastardy is an important ideologeme, in that it is a “unit of meaning through which the ‘social space’ constructs the ideological values of its signs” (Schleiner, 195). In other words, bastardy has an ideological significance that stretches far beyond a question of parental marital status, extending to become a metaphor for national as well as personal loss of identity. Anti-Catholic polemicists of the early sixteenth century accused priests of begetting a generation of bastards that would overthrow English society (Fish, 7). The historian Polydore Vergil was accused of suborning and bastardising English history by plagiarism and book destruction: “making himself father to other men’s works” (Hay, 159). Why is illegitimacy so important and so universal a metaphor? The term “bastard” in its sense of mixture or mongrel has been applied to language, to weaponry, to almost anything that is a distorted but recognisable version of something else. As such, the concept of bastardy lends itself readily to the rhetorical figure of metaphor which, as the sixteenth century writer George Puttenham puts it, is “a kind of wresting of a single word from his owne right signification, to another not so natural, but yet of some affinitie or coueniencie with it” (Puttenham, 178). Later on in The Art of English Poesie, Puttenham uses the word “bastard” to describe something that can best be recognised as being an imperfect version of something else: “This figure [oval] taketh his name of an egge […] and is as it were a bastard or imperfect rounde declining toward a longitude.” (101). “Bastard” as a descriptive term in this context has meaning because it connects the subject of discussion with its original. Michael Neill takes an anthropological approach to the question of why the bastard in early modern drama is almost invariably depicted as monstrous or evil. In “In everything illegitimate: Imagining the Bastard in Renaissance Drama,” Neill argues that bastards are “filthy”, using the term as it is construed by Mary Douglas in her work Purity and Danger. Douglas argues that dirt is defined by being where it should not be, it is “matter in the wrong place, belonging to ‘a residual category, rejected from our normal scheme of classifications,’ a source of fundamental pollution” (134). In this argument the figure of the bastard aligns strongly with the concept of the Other (Said). Arguably, however, the anthropologist Edmund Leach provides a more useful model to understand the associations of hybridity, monstrosity and bastardy. In “Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse”, Leach asserts that our perceptions of the world around us are largely based on binary distinctions; that an object is one thing, and is not another. If an object combines attributes of itself with those of another, the interlapping area will be suppressed so that there may be no hesitation in discerning between them. This repressed area, the area which is neither one thing nor another but “liminal” (40), becomes the object of fear and of fascination: – taboo. It is this liminality that creates anxiety surrounding bastards, as they occupy the repressed, “taboo” area between family and outsiders. In that it is born out of wedlock, the bastard child has no place within the family structure; yet as the child of a family member it cannot be completely relegated to the external world. Michael Neill rightly points out the extent to which the topos of illegitimacy is associated with the disintegration of boundaries and a consequent loss of coherence and identity, arguing that the bastard is “a by-product of the attempt to define and preserve a certain kind of social order” (147). The concept of the liminal figure, however, recognises that while a by-product can be identified and eliminated, a bastard can neither be contained nor excluded. Consequently, the bastard challenges the established order; to be illegitimate, it must retain its connection with the legitimate figure from which it diverges. Thus the illegitimate stands as a permanent threat to the legitimate, a reminder of what the legitimate can become. Bastardy is used by Shakespeare to indicate the fear of loss of national as well as personal identity. Although noted for its triumphalist construction of a hero-king, Henry V is also shot through with uncertainties and fears, fears which are frequently expressed using illegitimacy as a metaphor. Notwithstanding its battle scenes and militarism, it is the lawyers, genealogists and historians who initiate and drive forward the narrative in Henry V (McAlindon, 435). The reward of the battle for Henry is not so much the crown of France as the assurance of his own legitimacy as monarch. The lengthy and legalistic recital of genealogies with which the Archbishop of Canterbury proves to general English satisfaction that their English king Henry holds a better lineal right to the French throne than its current occupant may not be quite as “clear as is the summer sun” (Henry V 1.2.83), but Henry’s question about whether he may “with right and conscience” make his claim to the French throne elicits a succinct response. The churchmen tell Henry that, in order to demonstrate that he is truly the descendant of his royal forefathers, Henry will need to validate that claim. In other words, the legitimacy of Henry’s identity, based on his connection with the past, is predicated on his current behaviour:Gracious lord,Stand for your own; unwind your bloody flag;Look back into your mighty ancestors:Go, my dread lord, to your great-grandsire’s tomb,From whom you claim; invoke his warlike spirit…Awake remembrance of these valiant dead,And with your puissant arm renew their feats:You are their heir, you sit upon their throne,The blood and courage that renowned themRuns in your veins….Your brother kings and monarchs of the earthDo all expect that you should rouse yourselfAs did the former lions of your blood. (Henry V 1.2.122 – 124)These exhortations to Henry are one instance of the importance of genealogy and its immediate connection to personal and national identity. The subject recurs throughout the play as French and English characters both invoke a discourse of legitimacy and illegitimacy to articulate fears of invasion, defeat, and loss of personal and national identity. One particular example of this is the brief scene in which the French royalty allow themselves to contemplate the prospect of defeat at the hands of the English:Fr. King. ‘Tis certain, he hath pass’d the river Somme.Constable. And if he be not fought withal, my lord,Let us not live in France; let us quit all,And give our vineyards to a barbarous people.Dauphin. O Dieu vivant! shall a few sprays of us,The emptying of our fathers’ luxury,Our scions, put in wild and savage stock,Spirt up so suddenly into the clouds,And overlook their grafters?Bourbon. Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!...Dauphin. By faith and honour,Our madams mock at us, and plainly sayOur mettle is bred out; and they will giveTheir bodies to the lust of English youthTo new-store France with bastard warriors. (Henry V 3.5.1 – 31).Rape and sexual violence pervade the language of Henry V. France itself is constructed as a sexually vulnerable female with “womby vaultages” and a “mistress-court” (2.4.131, 140). In one of his most famous speeches Henry graphically describes the rape and slaughter that accompanies military defeat (3.3). Reading Henry V solely in terms of its association of military conquest with sexual violence, however, runs the risk of overlooking the image of bastards themselves as both the threat and the outcome of national defeat. The lines quoted above exemplify the extent to which illegitimacy was a vital metaphor within early modern discourses of national as well as personal identity. Although the lines are divided between various speakers – the French King, Constable (representing the law), Dauphin (the Crown Prince) and Bourbon (representing the aristocracy) – the images develop smoothly and consistently to express English dominance and French subordination, articulated through images of illegitimacy.The dialogue begins with the most immediate consequence of invasion and of illegitimacy: the loss of property. Legitimacy, illegitimacy and property were so closely associated that a case of bastardy brought to the ecclesiastical court that did not include a civil law suit about land was referred to as a case of “bastardy speciall”, and the association between illegitimacy and property is present in this speech (Cowell, 14). The use of the word “vine” is simultaneously a metonym for France and a metaphor for the family, as in the “family tree”, conflating the themes of family identity and national identity that are both threatened by the virile English forces.As the dialogue develops, the rhetoric becomes more elaborate. The vines which for the Constable (from a legal perspective) represented both France and French families become instead an attempt to depict the English as being of a subordinate breed. The Dauphin’s brief narrative of the English origins refers to the illegitimate William the Conqueror, bastard son of the Duke of Normandy and by designating the English as being descendants of a bastard Frenchman the Dauphin attempts to depict the English nation as originating from a superabundance of French virility; wild offshoots from a true stock. Yet “grafting” one plant to another can create a stronger plant, which is what has happened here. The Dauphin’s metaphors, designed to construct the English as an unruly and illegitimate offshoot of French society, a product of the overflowing French virility, evolve instead into an emblem of a younger, stronger branch which has overtaken its enfeebled origins.In creating this scene, Shakespeare constructs the Frenchmen as being unable to contain the English figuratively, still less literally. The attempts to reduce the English threat by imagining them as “a few sprays”, a product of casual sexual excess, collapses into Bourbon’s incoherent ejaculation: “Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!” and the Norman bastard dominates the conclusion of the scene. Instead of containing and marginalising the bastard, the metaphoric language creates and acknowledges a threat which cannot be marginalised. The “emptying of luxury” has engendered an uncontrollable illegitimate who will destroy the French nation beyond any hope of recovery, overrunning France with bastards.The scene is fascinating for its use of illegitimacy as a means of articulating fears not only for the past and present but also for the future. The Dauphin’s vision is one of irreversible national and familial disintegration, irreversible because, unlike rape, the French women’s imagined rejection of their French families and embrace of the English conquerors implies a total abandonment of family origins and the willing creation of a new, illegitimate dynasty. Immediately prior to this scene the audience has seen the Dauphin’s fear in action: the French princess Katherine is shown learning to speak English as part of her preparation for giving her body to a “bastard Norman”, a prospect which she anticipates with a frisson of pleasure and humour, as well as fear. This scene, between Katherine and her women, evokes a range of powerful anxieties which appear repeatedly in the drama and texts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: anxieties over personal and national identity, over female chastity and masculine authority, and over continuity between generations. Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost – Further Explored points out that “the engendering of children on a scale which might threaten the social structure was never, or almost never, a present possibility” (154) at this stage of European history. This being granted, the Dauphin’s depiction of such a “wave” of illegitimates, while it might have no roots in reality, functioned as a powerful image of disorder. Illegitimacy as a threat and as a strategy is not limited to the renaissance, although a study of renaissance texts offers a useful guidebook to the use of illegitimacy as a means of polarising and excluding. Although as previously discussed, for many Western countries, the marital status of one’s parents is probably the least meaningful definition associated with the word “illegitimate”, the concept of the nation as a family remains current in modern political discourse, and illegitimate continues to be a powerful metaphor. During the recent independence referendum in Scotland, David Cameron besought the Scottish people not to “break up the national family”; at the same time, the Scottish Nationalists have been constructed as “ungrateful bastards” for wishing to turn their backs on the national family. As Klocker and Dunne, and later O’Brien and Rowe, have demonstrated, the emotive use of words such as “illegitimate” and “illegal” in Australian political rhetoric concerning migration is of long standing. Given current tensions, it might be timely to call for a further and more detailed study of the way in which the term “illegitimate” continues to be used by politicians and the media to define, demonise and exclude certain types of would-be Australian immigrants from the collective Australian “national family”. Suggestions that persons suspected of engaging with terrorist organisations overseas should be stripped of their Australian passports imply the creation of national bastards in an attempt to distance the Australian community from such threats. But the strategy can never be completely successful. Constructing figures as bastard or the illegitimate remains a method by which the legitimate seeks to define itself, but it also means that the bastard or illegitimate can never be wholly separated or cast out. In one form or another, the bastard is here to stay.ReferencesBeardon, Elizabeth. “Sidney's ‘Mongrell Tragicomedy’ and Anglo-Spanish Exchange in the New Arcadia.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10 (2010): 29 - 51.Davis, Kingsley. “Illegitimacy and the Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 45 (1939).John Cowell. The Interpreter. Cambridge: John Legate, 1607.Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. 1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Findlay, Alison. Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.Hay, Denys. Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost - Further Explored. London: Methuen, 1983.Laslett, P., K. Oosterveen, and R. M. Smith, eds. Bastardy and Its Comparative History. London: Edward Arnold, 1980.Leach, Edmund. “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse.” E. H. Lennenberg, ed. New Directives in the Study of Language. MIT Press, 1964. 23-63. MacFarlane, Alan. The Origins of English Individualism: The Family Property and Social Transition Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978.Mclaren, Ann. “Monogamy, Polygamy and the True State: James I’s Rhetoric of Empire.” History of Political Thought 24 (2004): 446 – 480.McAlindon, T. “Testing the New Historicism: “Invisible Bullets” Reconsidered.” Studies in Philology 92 (1995):411 – 438.Neill, Michael. Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics and Society in English Renaissance Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.Pocock, J.G.A. Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on English Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936.Reekie, Gail. Measuring Immorality: Social Inquiry and the Problem of Illegitimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Rowe, Elizabeth, and Erin O’Brien. “Constructions of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Australian Political Discourse”. In Kelly Richards and Juan Marcellus Tauri, eds., Crime Justice and Social Democracy: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 2013.Schleiner, Louise. Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.Shakespeare, William. Henry V in The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. S. Greenblatt, W. Cohen, J.E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York and London: Norton, 2008.
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21

Gehrmann, Richard. "War, Snipers, and Rage from Enemy at the Gates to American Sniper." M/C Journal 22, no. 1 (2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1506.

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The concept of war is inextricably linked to violence, and military action almost always resounds with the emotion and language of rage. Since the War on Terror began in September 2001, post-9/11 expressions of terror and rage have influenced academics to evaluate rage and its meanings (Gildersleeve and Gehrmann). Of course, it has directly influenced the lives of those affected by global conflicts in war-torn regions of the Middle East and North Africa. The populace there has reacted violently to military invasions with a deep sense of rage, while in the affluent West, rage has also infiltrated everyday life through clothes, haircuts, and popular culture as military chic became ‘all the rage’ (Rall 177). Likewise, post-9/11 popular films directly tap into rage and violence to explain (or justify?) conflict and war. The film version of the life of United States Iraq veteran Chris Kyle in American Sniper (2014) reveals fascinating depictions of rage through the perspective of a highly trained shooter who waits patiently above the battlefield, watching for hours before taking human life with a carefully planned long-distance shot. The significance of the complexities of rage as presented in this film are discussed later. Foundations of Rage: Colonial Legacy, Arab Spring, and ISISThe War on Terror may have purportedly began with the rage of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda missions and the responding rage of George Bush’s America determined to seek vengeance for 9/11, but the rage simmering in the Middle East has deeper origins. This includes: the rejection of the Shah of Iran's secular dictatorship in 1979, the ongoing trauma of an Arab Palestinian state that was promised in 1947, and the blighted hopes of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalism that offered so much in the 1950s but failed to deliver. But these events should not be considered in isolation from events of the whole 20th century, in particular the betrayal of Arab nationalism by the Allied forces, especially Britain and France after the First World War. The history of injustice that Robert Fisk has chronicled in a monumental volume reveals the complexity and nuances of an East-West conflict that continued to fracture the Middle East. In a Hollywood-based film such as American Sniper it is easy to depict the region from a Western perspective without considering the cycle of injustice and oppression that gave birth to the rage that eventually lashed out at the West. Rage can also be rage against war, or rage about the mistreatment of war victims. The large-scale protests against the war before the 2003 Iraq invasion have faded into apparent nothingness, despite nearly two decades of war. Protest rage appears to have been replaced by outrage on behalf of the victims of war; the refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants and those displaced by the ever- spreading conflict that received a new impetus in 2011 with the Arab Spring democracy movements. One spark point for rage ignited when Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi embarked on his act of self-immolation in protest against harassment by public officials. This moment escalated into a kaleidoscope of collective rage as regimes were challenged from Syria to Libya, but met with a tragic aftermath. Sadly, democratic governments did not emerge, but turned into regimes of extremist violence exemplified in the mediaeval misogynistic horror now known as ISIS, or IS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Hassan). This horror intensified as millions of civilised Syrians and Iraqis sought to flee their homelands. The result was the movement of peoples, which included manipulation by ruthless people smugglers and detention by governments determined to secure borders — even even as this eroded decades of consensus on the rights of refugees. One central image, that of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s corpse washed up on a beach (Smith) should invoke open rage. Here, the incongruity was that a one-time Turkish party beach for affluent 18 to 35-year-olds from Western Europe would signify the death place of a Syrian refugee child, now displaced by war. The historical significance of East/West conflicts in the Middle East, recent events post- Arab Spring, the resulting refugee crisis in the region, and global anti-war protests should be foremost when examining Clint Eastwood's film about an American military sniper in Iraq.Hot Rage and Cold Rage Recent mass shootings in the United States have delineated factions within the power of rage: it seems to blow either hot or cold. US Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan was initially calm when he embarked on a public expression of rage, wounding 30 people and murdering 13 others in a mass shooting event in 2009 (MacAskill). Was this to be categorised as the rage of a nihilist, an Islamist - or as just another American mass shooting like events in Orlando or Sandy Hook? The war journalist and film maker Sebastian Junger authored a study on belonging, where he linked mass shootings (or rampage killings) to social stress and disunity, as a “tendency rising steadily in the US since the 1980s” (115-116). In contrast, the actions of a calm and isolated shooter on a rooftop can be justified as acceptable behaviour if this occurs during war. Now in the case of Chris Kyle, he normalised his tale of calm killing, as an example identified by action “built on a radically asymmetric violence” (Pomarede 53).Enemy at the Gates The point is that sniper killings can be presented in film as morally good. For example, the 2001 film Enemy at the Gates portrays a duel of two snipers in Stalingrad, Russia. This is a fictionalised contest of a fictionalised event, because there was only tangential evidence that Russian sniper hero Vasily Zaytsev actually engaged in a three-day sniper duel with his German enemy during the Second World War. Enemy at the Gates presents the sniper as an acceptable figure in mass popular culture (or even a hero?), which provides the justification for American Sniper. However, in this instance, viewers could recognise a clear struggle between good and evil.Politically, Enemy at the Gates, whether viewed from a conservative or a progressive perspective, presents a struggle between a soldier of the allies (the Soviet Union) and the forces of Nazism, undeniably the most evil variant of fascism. We can interpret this as a defence of the communist heartland, or the defence of a Russian motherland, or the halting of Nazi aggression at its furthest expansion point. Whichever way it is viewed, the Russian sniper is a good man, and although in the movie’s plot the actor Ralph Fiennes as political commissar injects a dimension of manipulation and Stalinist authoritarian control, this does not detract from the idea of the hero defeating evil with single aimed shots. There is rage, but it is overshadowed by the moral ‘good.’American Sniper The true story of Chris Kyle is quite simple. A young man grows up in Texas with ‘traditional’ American values, tries sport and University, tries ranch life, and joins the US Navy Special Forces. He becomes a SEAL (Sea, Air and Land) team member, and is trained as a specialist sniper. Kyle excels as a sniper in Iraq, where he self-identifies as America's most successful sniper. He kills a lot of enemies in Iraq, experiences multiple deployments followed by the associated trauma of reintegration to family life and redeployment, suffers from PTSD, returns to civilian life in America and is himself shot dead by a distressed veteran, in an ironic act of rage. Admired by many, the veracity of Kyle’s story is challenged by others, a point I will return to. As noted above, Kyle kills a lot of people, many of whom are often unaware of his existence. In his book On Killing, Lieutenant-Colonel David Grossman notes this a factor that actually causes the military to have a “degree of revulsion towards snipers” (109), which is perhaps why the movie version of Kyle’s life promotes a rehabilitation of the military in its “unambiguous advocacy of the humility, dedication, mastery, and altruism of the sniper” as hero (Beck 218). Most enlisted soldiers never actually kill their enemies, but Kyle kills well over 100 while on duty.The 2012 book memoir of United States Navy sniper Chris Kyle at war in Iraq became a national cultural artefact. The film followed in 2014, allowing the public dramatisation of this to offer a more palatable form for a wider audience. It is noted that military culture at the national level is malleable and nebulous (Black 42), and these constructs are reflected in the different variants of American Sniper. These cultural products are absorbed differently when consumed by the culture that has produced them (the military), as compared to the way that they are consumed by the general public, and the book American Sniper reflects this. Depending upon readers’ perspectives, it is a book of raw honesty or nationalistic jingoism, or perhaps both. The ordinary soldier’s point of view is reiterated and directed towards a specifically American audience. Despite controversy and criticism the book was immensely successful, with weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. While it naturally appealed to many in its primary American audience, from an Australian perspective, the jingoism of this book jars. In fact, it really jars a lot, to the point of being quite challenging to read. That Australian readers would have difficulty with this text is probably appropriate, because after all, the book was not created for Australians but for Americans.On the other hand, Americans have produced balanced accounts of the soldier experience in Iraq. A very different exemplar is Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury blog that became the book The Sandbox (2007). Here American men and women soldiers wrote their own very revealing stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in autobiographical accounts that ranged from nuanced explanations of the empathy for the soldier’s predicament, to simple outright patriotism. TIn their first-hand accounts of war showed a balance of ordinary pathos, humour – and the raw brutality of a soldier finding the neck stem of a human spine on the ground after a suicide bomb attack (Trudeau 161) – and even this seems more palatable to read than American Sniper. A similar book on the US military sniper experience (Cavallaro and Larsen) also shows it is possible to incorporate a variety of perspectives without patriotic jingoism, or even military propaganda being predominant.In contrast to the book, the film American Sniper narrates a more muted story. The movie is far more “saccharine”, in the words of critical Rolling Stone reviewer Matt Taibbi, but still reflects a nationalistic attitude to war and violence — appropriate to the mood of the book. American producer/director Clint Eastwood has developed his own style for skipping around the liminal space that exists between thought-provoking analysis and populism, and American Sniper is no exception. The love story of Chris Kyle and his wife Taya looks believable, and the intensity of military training and war fighting, including the dispassionate thoughts of Kyle as sniper, are far more palatable in the film version than as the raw words on the page.The Iraq War impacted on millions of Americans, and it is the compelling images shown re-living Chris Kyle’s funeral at the film’s conclusion that leaves a lasting message. The one-time footballer’s memorial service is conducted in a Texas football stadium and this in itself is poignant: but it is the thousands of people who lined the highway overpasses for over 200 miles to farewell him and show respect as his body travels towards the funeral in the stadium, that gives us an insight into the level of disenchantment and rage at America’s loss. This is a rage fuelled by losing their military ‘empire’ coupled with a traumatised search for meaning that Jerry Lembcke sees as inextricably linked to US national failure in war and the tragedy of an individual soldier’s PTSD. Such sentiments seem intimately connected to Donald Trump’s version of America, and its need to exercise global power. Kyle died before Trump’s election, but it seems evident that such rage, anger and alienation experienced by a vast segment of the American population contributed to the election result (Kluger). Calm Cold Calculation Ironically, the traditional sniper embodies the antithesis of hot-blooded rage. Firing any long- distance range weapon with accuracy requires discipline, steady breathing and intense muscle control. Olympic shooting or pentathlons demonstrate this, and Gina Cavallaro and Matt Larsen chronicle both sniper training and the sniper experience in war. So, the notion of sniper shooting and rage can only coexist if we accept that rage becomes the cold, calculating rage of a person doing a highly precise job when killing enemies. In the book, Kyle clearly has no soldierly respect for his Iraqi insurgent enemies and is content to shoot them down one by one. In the film, there is greater emphasis on Kyle having more complex emotions based around the desire to protect his fellow soldiers by shooting in a calm and detached fashion at his designated targets.Chris Kyle’s determination to kill his enemies regardless of age or gender seems at odds with the calm detached passivity of the sniper. The long-distance shooter should be dispassionate but Kyle experiences rage as he kills to protect his fellow soldiers. Can we argue he exhibits ‘cold rage’ not ‘hot rage’, but rage none the less? It would certainly seem so. War Hero and Fantasist?In life, as in death, Chris Kyle presents a figure of controversy, being praised by the political far right, yet condemned by a diverse coalition that included radicals, liberals, and even conservatives such as former soldier Michael Fumento. Fumento commented that Kyle’s literary embellishments and emphasis on his own prowess denigrated the achievements of fellow American snipers. Reviewer Lindy West described him as “a hate filled killer”, only to become a recipient of rage and hatred from Kyle supporters. Paul Rieckhoff described the film as not the most complex nor deepest nor provocative, but the best film made about the Iraq war for its accuracy in storytelling and attention to detail.Elsewhere, reviewer Mark Kermode argues that the way the film is made introduces a significant ambiguity: that we as an audience can view Kyle as either a villain, a hero, or a combination of both. Critics have also examined Kyle’s reportage on his military exploits, where it seems he received less fewer medals than he claimed, as well as his ephemeral assertion that he shot looters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Lamothe). In other claims, the US courts have upheld the assertion of former wrestler turned politician Jesse Ventura that Kyle fabricated a bar-room brawl between the two. But humans are complex beings, and Drew Blackburn sees it as “entirely plausible to become both a war hero and a liar” in his candid (Texas-based) assessment of one person who was, like many of us, a multifaceted figure.Conclusion This article has addressed the complicated issues of rage originating in the historical background of military actions that have taken place in the East/West conflicts in the Middle East that began in the region after the Second World War, and continue to the present day. Rage has become a popular trope within popular culture as military chic becomes ‘all the rage’. Rage is inextricably linked to the film American Sniper. Patriotism and love of his fellow soldiers motivated Chris Kyle, and his determination to kill his country’s enemies in Iraq and protect the lives of his fellow American soldiers is clear, as is his disdain for both his Iraqi allies and enemies. With an ever- increasing number of mass shootings in the United States, the military sniper will be a hero revered by some and a villain reviled by others. Rage infuses the film American Sniper, whether the rage of battle, rage at the moral dilemmas his role demands, domestic rage between husband and wife, PTSD rage, or rage inspired following his pointless murder. But rage, even when it expresses a complex vortex of emotions, remains dangerous for those who are obsessed with guns, and look to killing others either as a ‘duty’ or to soothe an individual crisis of confidence. ReferencesAmerican Sniper. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Brothers, 2014.Beck, Bernard. “If I Forget Thee: History Lessons in Selma, American Sniper, and A Most Violent Year.” Multicultural Perspectives 17.4 (2015): 215-19.Black, Jeremy. War and the Cultural Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.Blackburn, Drew. “How We Talk about Chris Kyle.” Texas Monthly 2 June 2016. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/chris-kyle-rorschach/>.Cavallaro, Gina, and Matt Larsen. Sniper: American Single-Shot Warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guildford, Connecticut: Lyons, 2010. Enemy at the Gates. Dir. Jean-Jaques Annaud. Paramount/Pathe, 2001.Fisk, Robert. The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.Fumento, Michael. “American Sniper’s Myths and Misrepresentations.” The American Conservative 13 Mar. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/clint-eastwoods-fabricated-sniper/>.Gildersleeve, Jessica, and Richard Gehrmann. “Memory and the Wars on Terror”. Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives. Eds. Jessica Gildersleeve and Richard Gehrmann. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 1-19.Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.Hassan, Hassan. “The True Origins of ISIS.” The Atlantic 30 Nov. 2018. 17 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/isis-origins-anbari-zarqawi/577030/>.Kermode, Mark. “American Sniper Review – Bradley Cooper Stars in Real-Life Tale of Legendary Marksman.” The Guardian 18 Jan. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/18/american-sniper-review-bradley-cooper-real-life-tale-legendary-marksman>.Kluger, Jeffrey. “America's Anger Is Out of Control.” TIME 1 June 2016. 17 Feb. 2019 <http://time.com/4353606/anger-america-enough-already>.Kyle, Chris. American Sniper. New York: Harper, 2012. Junger, Sebastian. Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. London: Fourth Estate, 2016.Lamothe, Dan. “How ‘American Sniper’ Chris Kyle’s Truthfulness Is in Question Once Again.” 25 May 2016. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/05/25/how-american-sniper-chris-kyles-truthfulness-is-in-question-once-again/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d8806f2b8d3a>.Lembcke, Jerry. PTSD: Diagnosis and Identity in Post-Empire America. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013.Pomarède, Julien. “Normalizing Violence through Front-Line Stories: The Case of American Sniper.” Critical Military Studies 4.1 (2018): 52-71. Rall, Denise N. “Afterword: The Military in Contemporary Fashion.” Fashion and War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect, 2014. 177-179. Rieckhoff, Paul. “A Veteran's View of American Sniper.” Variety 16 Jan. 2015. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://variety.com/2015/film/opinion/a-veterans-view-of-american-sniper-guest-column-1201406349/>.Smith, Heather, and Richard Gehrmann. “Branding the Muscled Male Body as Military Costume.” Fashion and War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect, 2014. 57-71.Smith, Helena. “Shocking Images of Drowned Syrian Boy Show Tragic Plight of Refugees.” The Guardian 2 Sep. 2015. 17 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/02/shocking-image-of-drowned-syrian-boy-shows-tragic-plight-of-refugees>.Stanford, David (ed.). The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2007.Taibbi, Matt. “American Sniper Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticise.” Rolling Stone 21 Jan. 2015. <https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/american-sniper-is-almost-too-dumb-to-criticize-240955/>.Trudeau, Garry B. The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kansas City: Andrew McMeel Publishing, 2007.West, Lindy. “The Real American Sniper Was a Hate-Filled Killer: Why Are Simplistic Patriots Treating Him as a Hero?” The Guardian 6 Jan. 2015. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/06/real-american-sniper-hate-filled-killer-why-patriots-calling-hero-chris-kyle>.
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