Anti-war Position Research Articles

Данилов В. ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ВИСВІТЛЕННЯ ПАЛЕСТИНО-ІЗРАЇЛЬСЬКОГО КОНФЛІКТУ У СВІТОВИХ ЗМІ

The article attempts to identify the peculiarities of the coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the world media. The research was based on publications from the websites of three media outlets - «The Washington Post», «The Guardian» and «Al Jazeera». The author talks about the difficulties that journalists may face when covering armed conflicts. Firstly, it is the threats to the physical and mental health of the journalist. Secondly, it is the difficulty of abstracting from one's own preferences in the conflict. Thirdly, it is difficulty in determining the status of the parties to the conflict. The author notes that in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict there are difficulties in determining the status of Hamas, since not all countries in the world consider the group to be terrorists. The article examines the views on the conflict of two high-quality private newspapers - «The Washington Post» and «The Guardian». The intrigue of the position of quality publications is that they are located in the United States and Europe, i.e., they should hypothetically support Israel against the collective Arab world. In fact, both media outlets have maintained a high level of quality and have covered the conflict in a balanced manner. Moreover, the newspapers' coverage is somewhat critical of the Jewish state. While «The Washington Post's» criticism is more of a guess, the Guardian's journalists express it quite frankly and emotionally. When expressing its attitude, an American newspaper must take into account the views of the powerful Jewish diaspora in the United States. As for the Guardian, the newspaper criticizes Israel from the liberal anti-war position of the British and European elite. The state-owned Qatari television company Al Jazeera has long been criticized for its bias and rather open communication with individuals whose activities are considered terrorist by some parts of the world. The intrigue with the Qatari media's coverage of the conflict is whether they will at least try to pretend to be objective to a global audience. In practice, the Arab media's website is falling into outright anti-Israeli and anti-American propaganda. It uses a selection of «correct» sources of information, mockery and manipulation of facts. The author of the article assumes that media workers are well aware of their target audience, which is quite effectively influenced by such publications.

On ‘New Tuva’ Anti-war Movement

Abstract ‘New Tuva’ is a Tuvan anti-war movement that was created in the spring, 2022, after the Russian government started the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The movement consists of a decentralised group of activists and volunteers of Tuvan origin with an anti-war position and shared aim to prevent support of the war against Ukraine from Tuva in all forms of its manifestation. Their main activities include providing assistance to military personnel and those who might be mobilised in refusing to participate in the war and public awareness-building regarding the real situation in Ukraine, Tuva and statistics over Tuvans killed in the war etc. This study focuses on the context of the Tuvan republic, the activities of ‘New Tuva’, its influence on the Tuvan society within the region and what main obstacles and difficulties the movement faces in its work.

Introduction

The present situation urgently calls for the multifaceted studies of Russophone literature against war. The authors of the following essays develop their inquiry through the following questions: How does the relationship with the notion of the enemy shape the war poetry of Boris Slutskii and Ian Satunovskii? To what extent can the war poetry of the latter be seen as a matrix of his biographic narrative construction, especially considering that Satunovskii's lyrical subject is shattered, stuttering, de-language/d? How does today's popular poetry of protest differ from today's avant-garde poetics? What are the differences between their means of expression, address, and foci? All of these studies seek to explore the anti-war position in modernist poetry that has been developed through drastically different means, yet the general purpose is aptly formulated by one of our authors as “to bear witness and respond to the ongoing atrocities and destruction.”

КОСМОПОЛИТИЧЕСКАЯ МОДЕЛЬ МИРА В РАННЕМ ТВОРЧЕСТВЕ ЮРИЯ КУЗНЕЦОВА

The purpose of this article is to consider the cosmopolitan aspect of Yuri Kuznetsov’s early works. Kuznetsov was the Russian poet of the 2nd half of the 20th century. The main method of research for us is the method of ontological poetics, and elements of interdisciplinary and comparative analysis. It allows us to consider an artistic text in the context of consciousness and subconsciousness, archetypes and phenomena of the surrounding being. They, in turn, form a personal author’s myth. Yuri Kuznetsov creates his own poetic myth based on the real events of his own biography. In particular, the phenomenon of war has a key influence on it. The author is a “children of war” generation representative (born in 1941). His father died at the front in 1944. This fact determines Yuri Kuznetsov’s further outlook and path in literature. The article examines a number of the poet’s early poems. The opposition of Nature and War concepts can already be traced to each other at this stage. The latter is portrayed as an unnatural phenomenon that hinders the development of personality. Nature symbolizes life and natural dynamics, and War symbolizes halt and death, lack of dynamics. It comes into direct conflict with the laws of Nature. The leitmotif of the poet’s early work is the idea of man and nature’s unity. Such unity, in the end, allows us to build a progressive cosmopolitan model of the Home-Universe. It consists of three parts: Family-Home, Motherland-Home, and Planet-Home. The cosmopolitan orientation of Yuri Kuznetsov’s poems is manifested in his craving for the idea of “world citizenship”. At the same time, the fundamentally important fact is not the rejection of the Motherland and one’s own cultural identity, but their inclusion in a common threefold ontological model. The article also attempts to compare Yuri Kuznetsov’s work with the ideas of Russian symbolism representatives of the early 20th century. Conclusion. Based on the interdisciplinary analysis of the literary text, here are the following research results: 1. In poet Yuri Kuznetsov’s early works there is a process of upward movement along the vertical axis: from the personal myth and the lyrical “I/me” to the universal human experience. The latter, at the same time, is a unifying factor leading to the formation of an anti-war position. 2. The poet’s early works use cosmopolitan motives in the context of the verb “to create” which is semantically equivalent to the verbs “to generate” and “to build”, as well as connotatively close to the ontological processes of dynamics and movement. The verb “to create” is also opposed to the concept of War and is considered as part of the author`s anti-war position. Creativity acts both as an anti-destructive manifesto and as a means of uniting elements of the artistic world scattered by war. We should note that the author’s artistic world is closely connected with his biography and personal family history. 3. Through creativity Yuri Kuznetsov attempts to comprehend the phenomenon of War in three interdependent contexts: family, country and planet (“all people”). This approach allows us to come to the conclusion that war is incompatible with the natural course of things, that is, in fact, with the laws of Nature. 4. The sphere of the unconscious plays a key role in the formation of the author’s anti-war position and the stepped three-part model of the House. One more important connotation of the verb “to create” is connected with it. This connotation can be defined as the process of integrating the personal author’s unconscious into the collective unconscious (“great”). At the same time, a prerequisite for successful integration is a “storm”, a certain dynamic involving vertical ascent. The conclusions of such integration lead the author to the idea of “world citizenship” and universal interconnection. This, in turn, forms an anti-war position based on the similarity of the two sides in the “friend-foe” opposition.

A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac by Zachery A. Fry

Reviewed by: A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac by Zachery A. Fry Joseph T. Glatthaar (bio) A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac. By Zachery A. Fry. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 336. Cloth, $45.00.) Until very recently, scholars embraced the idea that Union soldiers overwhelmingly endorsed Abraham Lincoln’s reelection bid in 1864. Soldiers despised the opposition Peace Democrats, applauded Lincoln’s unwavering support for victory, and embraced a belief that the confiscation or destruction of slavery and other Rebel property was both morally right and advantageous to the cause of reunion. In 2014, Jonathan W. White challenged that notion in Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln. In it, White argues that Republican authorities suppressed Democratic opinions, persecuted those who openly opposed emancipation, and ultimately drove large numbers of Democrats into leaving the army when their term of enlistment expired in 1864, rather than reenlisting. White insists that 60 percent of the soldiers actually voted for Lincoln (20 percent were too young, and a few states prohibited soldiers voting in the field), and many of them were coerced. In A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac, Zachery A. Fry challenges White’s arguments. Fry attempts to develop the formation of political culture in the ranks of the Army of the Potomac by framing it with the theories of Mats Alvesson and Edgar Schein, business and management scholars whose work translates readily to the armed services. Although Fry draws on a range of sources, he relies principally on manuscripts, memoirs, and published materials of officers. Fry is particularly adept at tapping published letters by officers in dozens of local newspapers, a vastly underutilized source. [End Page 288] Fry’s thesis is that while high-ranking officers battled to shape the politics of the army, it was the junior officers, the lieutenants and captains, who converted enlisted men to the Republican cause. He explains how Major General George B. McClellan and his high-ranking associates tried to build support for the Democratic Party by preventing Republican and abolitionist newspapers and tracts from circulating in the army. When Major General Joseph Hooker, a regular army officer and Republican, took command in 1863, he blocked Democratic literature from the army and promoted the distribution of pro-administration material. Hooker’s successor, Major General George G. Meade, confessed a lack of expertise to determine what type of published literature came to the army. By then, Fry argues, the demand for pro-Democratic literature had declined owing to its increasingly strident antiwar position. This is unquestionably Fry’s strongest contribution. Fry agrees with White that there was some harassment of Democratic voters in the ranks in 1864, but he dismisses that as largely insignificant, arguing that there were also officers who made it explicitly clear that soldiers were free to vote their conscience without any repercussions in their units, and 20 percent of the troops did vote Democratic. Fry concedes that campfire discussions, experiences in war in the slave states, a need for more manpower, and the extremist views of Peace Democrats all helped convert the troops to Republicanism. What he underplays is the trust that soldiers developed in the Lincoln administration. By targeting slavery, authorizing the confiscation and destruction of goods and property of secessionists, providing essential manpower by enlisting Black men and imposing a draft, soldiers believed that the Lincoln administration would take any measures to aid them in winning the war. Fry also places too much emphasis on the role of junior officers in building Republican support among the ranks. Here his approach with regard to sources fails him. By relying heavily on officers and newspaper articles as sources, he does not capture the true sentiments of enlisted soldiers and strips them of their agency. Many soldiers expressed a surprising level of animosity toward their officers at all ranks, including their captains and lieutenants. Moreover, 53 percent of all soldiers in the Army of the Potomac at the time of Lincoln’s reelection had never been able to cast a vote...

Valorization of an ‘Enemy Language’: Politics of ‘Progressive Anti-War’ Position and English-Worship in the Japanese TV Show Massan

ABSTRACT This article analyzes portrayals of English in Japan during World War II in Massan, a Japanese television show that features the life of a mixed-race bilingual couple, Masaharu (the Japanese husband) and Ellie (the Scottish wife), and their adopted Japanese daughter (Ema) living in Japan. I argue that the show constructs a hierarchy of languages where English is valorized as a sign of an anti-war position, speaking one’s mind and material wealth, all framed as progressive, in contrast to Japanese language. As the use of language is connected to race relations in the drama, this hierarchisation of English and Japanese languages is consistent with the historical and current valorization of English and whiteness in Japan. However, this hierarchy contradicts the show’s explicit message of inclusiveness of all races. This article analyses a set of performative messages conveyed by this highly popular drama in the current Japanese political and racial context to show the ways uses of language convey unarticulated and sometimes contradictory messages.

“A Greater Danger than a Division of the German Army”: Bible Students and Opposition to War in World War I America

In June 1918, seven leaders of the International Bible Students Association (IBSA), a small but high profile Christian community, were convicted under the United States Espionage Act and sentenced to twenty years in prison. The conviction stemmed from the unique position on Christianity and war propagated by Charles Taze Russell, the Bible Students’ fountainhead. The refusal of the IBSA leaders to countenance the hypernationalism which accompanied America's entry into World War I in April 1917 but instead to circulate widely antiwar literature made them a target for governmental authorities intent on silencing those opposed to America's involvement, particularly communities invoking the Bible to condemn militarism and conflict. This article argues that the fundamental differences between the IBSA's antiwar position and those of the historic peace churches made them a particular challenge to the American political and religious establishment, which regarded Bible Student theology as explicitly political and cast their literature as a potent weapon against America's prosecution of the war. It ultimately aims to write the IBSA into the history of opposition to war not in spite of but because of their unusual position on Christianity and armed conflict. By doing so, the article also reveals the origins of conscientious objection for Jehovah's Witnesses, as the Bible Students are now called, known worldwide for their refusal to perform military service.

Философ в круге Марло: Уолтер Рэли и его трактат «Рассуждение о первоначальной и фундаментальной причине естественной, произвольной, необходимой и противоестественной войны»

<p>В статье рассматриваются взгляды Уолтера Рэли (1552–1618), английского политика, военного деятеля, мыслителя и поэта из круга Кристофера Марло. Предметом статьи является концепция войны, выработанная Рэли и сделанная им отправной точкой в анализе динамики общественной жизни в целом.</p><p>Рассматривается вопрос о характере возможного влияния социально-философских идей Рэли на мировоззрение Марло, анализируются идеи философских и политических трактатов Рэли, выявляется его место в разработке проблематики войны в философской литературе Ренессанса. Ключевые темы философского творчества Рэли — анализ феноменов войны, политических манипуляций, мотивов политического действия — созвучны сюжетам драматургии Марло, в то же время содержание его рассуждений коренным образом отличается от распространенного в литературе представления о вольнодумстве Марло. Влияние, которое могло испытывать мировоззрение Марло со стороны философских идей Рэли, по нашему мнению, имело направленность, типичную для христианского гуманизма в духе Эразма Роттердамского.</p><p>В своем трактате Рэли выступает с антивоенных позиций и стремится выявить предпосылки возникновения войн и условия, необходимые для их предотвращения. Среди войн он выделяет, во-первых, «естественные», связанные с борьбой за обладание жизненно важными ресурсами. Некоторые из них — неизбежны, другие — произвольны и, следовательно, могут быть предотвращены. Другой тип войн имеет предпосылки субъективного, социально-психологического порядка. Эти войны, среди которых гражданские и религиозные, противоестественны и чужды разумной природе человека. Особенность подхода Рэли к осмыслению войны состоит в синтезе идей макиавеллевского политического реализма и мировоззрения христианского гуманизма.</p><p>Текст доклада автора на Первой Всероссийской научной конференции «Кристофер Марло и его творчество в русской и мировой культуре: междисциплинарный взгляд», которая прошла в Москве 22–23 июня 2018 г.</p>

Understanding masculine identity among anti-war veterans

The military is an arena in which strong ideals regarding masculinity are enforced, with the soldier often portrayed as a model of hegemonic masculinity in the USA. Men who adopt an anti-war position, which may directly conflict with positions taken by the military as an organization, may be particularly challenged in the renegotiation of their masculine identity upon re-entry to civilian life. This study employs Burke and Stets' Identity Theory (2009) and Connell's hegemonic masculinity (2005) to examine masculine identity among a group of 26 veterans. Using data from in-depth interviews with 26 former military personnel that now claim an anti-war position, the study explores how masculinity is (re)negotiated among these men. The findings include respondents' description of masculinity before and after adopting an ‘anti-war’ identity, as well as variations in masculinity among our respondents. Specifically, we found three types of masculinity among respondents. The masculinity scripts within these typologies, as well as patterns occurring within each type are presented and best explained by social status giving some men more freedom to protest the hegemonic ideal.

Book Review: Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion, by Harold Holzer

Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion. Harold Holzer. New York, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. 768 pp. $37.50 hbk.Harold Holzer, a Lincoln scholar and a Roger Hertog Fellow at the New-York Historical Society, offers a fascinating view into the cooperation and competition between politics and the press in mid-19th-century America. Although the book focuses on Lincoln, this work goes beyond the 16th president to look at how the leading politicians and newspapermen of the time, including Horace Greeley, James Gordon Bennett, and Henry Raymond, vied for power and patronage.This exhaustively researched work begins with the early life of the leading figures of the book-Lincoln, Greeley, and Bennett-and situates them in the context of an America on the brink of technological and societal change. Holzer documents the country's growing factionalism, which led newspapers to openly support Democratic and Whig politicians. Often the editors of these papers were motivated not only by ideology, but by self-interest, expecting patronage jobs once their candidates assumed office.The relationship between Lincoln and the press reflected the prevailing attitudes. Holzer traces Lincoln's early fascination with the press and his growing awareness of how to use it to achieve his political ambitions. Lincoln caught the attention of a group of Whig newspapermen who plotted to send him to Washington to fill a vacant House seat.Once settled in Washington, Lincoln took up the anti-war position of the Whig Party and fought to keep the issue alive, even when hostilities ceased. As Lincoln and Senator Stephen A. Douglas lined up on different sides of the Mexican War question, and later the slavery issue, so did newspaper editors Bennett and Greeley. Greeley, the editor of the New-York Tribune who was prone to take up various utopian causes, opposed the war and slavery. Bennett, the Democratic editor of New York Herald, took the opposite stance. Although the divisive issues of slavery and secession were bad for the country, they were good for newspapers, which saw circulations soar.The mid-19th-century press not only openly lobbied for causes and candidates, the editors themselves often held elective office. Greeley won a seat to Congress as a compromise candidate for the Whigs, all the while keeping his position as editor of the Tribune. Like Greeley, Henry Raymond was not content to limit his political influence to the pages of his newspapers. He was elected to the New York General Assembly and from there planned his next newspaper venture-the New York Daily Times.Holzer deftly places the leading figures of this book within the context of changes occurring in the newspaper business. …

Responding to War on Capitol Hill: Battlefield Casualties, Congressional Response, and Public Support for the War in Iraq

Recent scholarship argues that how members of Congress respond to an ongoing war significantly influences the president's strategic calculations. However, the literature is comparably silent on the factors influencing the public positions members take during the course of a military venture. Accounting for both national and local electoral incentives, we develop a theory positing that partisanship conditions congressional responses to casualties in the aggregate, but that all members respond to casualties in their constituency by increasingly criticizing the war. Analyzing an original database of more than 7,500 content‐coded House floor speeches on the Iraq War, we find strong support for both hypotheses. We also find that Democrats from high‐casualty constituencies were significantly more likely to cast antiwar roll‐call votes than their peers. Finally, we show that this significant variation in congressional antiwar position taking strongly correlates with geographic differences in public support for war.

On Mo Yan’s War Ideas --- Based on Red Sorghum, Big Breasts and Wide Hips

Mo Yan has expressed his simple war ideas through his war fictions. He writes that the bandit resists against Japan for the purpose of rewriting the standard of the hero of resisting against Japan. He praises mother and expresses his own anti-war position by mother’s boring sufferings. MoYan's war fictions have shown the war noumenon from many different aspects, and has expanded the aesthetic space of the war greatly.

1898: The opposition to the Spanish-American war

This article focuses on the months before the Spanish-American war began in April 1898 and addresses two related questions: first, why was the opposition to the war so strong in the United States; second, why did it not prevail? To explore these questions, the papers of the McKinley administration are examined, along with the Congressional Record and forty-one US newspapers, as well as twelve major European newspapers (British, French, German and Spanish) and the relevant documents from the British and Spanish archives. It is only in the press that one can find a coherent, well-articulated and explicit explanation of the antiwar position.

Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans, Neither Victims nor Executioners

The reissuing of Robert Jay Lifton's moving and important 1973 study of Vietnam veterans can serve as a timely reminder of how easily and how much we forget. Lifton's study, furthermore, raises the of what we as a society have learned from the pain, guilt, and rage of these men, and from our own unease over a small, undeclared war that we lost. Lifton's work is based on two years5 intensive participation in weekly groups55 with veterans that met in the New York office of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. This program, which he initiated in 1970, was part of an effort by participants to make sense of their experience, and to deal with the numbing55 response that so many had adopted as a defense against acceptance of guilt. Lifton takes care to point out that the 400 men involved in his rap sessions and interviews were in no sense representative of all Vietnam veterans; most had seen active duty, and most came to articulate a clear antiwar position on their return. Similarly, Lifton himself is neither a dispassionate phantom researcher,55 nor the remote psychiatrist in the traditional doctor-patient relationship. (He indeed argues against both stances.) His purpose is instead that of raising the important question of the significance of an important change undergone by a relatively small group of men for a larger change in human consciousness55 (p. 21). Thus, the study must be read at three intertwined levels: for what it tells us about the troubled veterans who are still with us, for what it tells us about the war and its implications for the larger society, and (most impor tant) for what it tells us about psychological insight, transformation, and growth. Indeed, the difficulty in reading and absorbing what Lifton has to say stems from the complex interplay of these three themes. The study is dense, sometimes repetitious, and difficult to follow in a linear way. Recent statistics on Vietnam veterans present an alarming picture. We already knew, at war's end, about the 57,692 casualties and the 300,000 wounded. We now are confronted with an estimated 40 percent unem ployment rate among this group, as well as a figure of 41 percent who have either served or are serving time in jail. Estimates on suicides, on problems from Agent Orange, and on alcoholism are equally stark. Lifton5s extensive quotations and analysis help to show why this is so, and why such statistics only hint at the debilitating psychological burden

The Disruption and Decline of the Oklahoma Socialist Party

Students of the Socialist Party of America are well-acquainted with the extensive and persistent support it received from poor farmers, many of them tenants, in Oklahoma and Texas. David Shannon and, more recently, James Weinstein have both noted that the Socialist Party of Oklahoma had a more active and widespread membership than any other state branch of the Party. Both writers have also given proper emphasis to the shattering impact of repression upon the widely scattered and vulnerable Socialist locals in the rural areas of the Southwest after the United States entered World War I. Weinstein especially has suggested that the Socialist Party was a broadly-based and effective political organization, not only ‘in’ but ‘of’ the world of American workers and small farmers. Pointing to the vigour of the Socialist Party's support in the North and Eastafterit opposed American participation in the war, Weinstein argues that an American Socialism attuned to American conditions and needs had much potential vitality and could have been a significant political force in the country. For this assertion Weinstein was sharply criticized by a reviewer who argued that he exaggerated the depth of the Party's support after 1912 and that he specifically failed to perceive the German ethnic origin of much of the Party's ‘new’ support for its anti-war position.