War Atrocities Research Articles

Posttraumatic stress disorder and emotion dysregulation among Syrian refugee children and adolescents resettled in Lebanon and Jordan.

Since the outbreak of the conflict in Syria, many people, including children and adolescents, have fled their homes into neighboring countries. Little research exists on the psychosocial adjustment of refugee children and adolescents resettled in Lebanon and Jordan. This study investigated the prevalence and predictors of PTSD and emotion dysregulation in Syrian refugee children and adolescents who resettled in Lebanon and Jordan. It was hypothesized that a combination of pre-trauma variables (age and gender), trauma-specific variables (traumatic events and time spent in host country, and host country), and post-trauma variables (coping strategies, family relationships, and school environment) would be associated with PTSD and emotion dysregulation. Participants were 1000 Syrian refugee children and adolescents aged 7-18 years attending formal and non-formal schools representing various governorates in Lebanon and Jordan. The trauma exposure scale, DSM-IV criteria for the assessment of PTSD, the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale Short Form, Kidcope, Family relationship scales, and school environment scale were administered in an interview format with children and adolescents at school by two trained psychologists. Multivariate binary logistic regression was used to predict PTSD whereas hierarchical multiple regression was used to predict emotion dysregulation. Results indicated that 45.6% of the refugees have developed PTSD with excessive risk for comorbidity with emotion dysregulation. Emotion dysregulation was reported by older refugee children and adolescents. The prevalence of PTSD was higher in refugee children and adolescents who had resettled in Lebanon than for those who had resettled in Jordan. Refugee children and adolescents who were exposed to higher levels of war atrocities evidenced the greatest prevalence of PTSD and emotion dysregulation. PTSD symptomatology and emotion dysregulation in children and adolescents varied according to coping styles, family relationships, and school environment. Both decreased significantly with the passage of time spent in host country. The results may be used to formulate cognitive-behavioral coping interventions that can lead to optimal developmental outcomes in the posttrauma environment.

Tore KvævenNÃ¥r landet mørknar

Norbert Scheuer The Language of Birds Trans. Stephen Brown Haus Norbert Scheuer’s The Language of Birds follows protagonist Paul Arimond, an army paramedic, as he navigates war-torn Afghanistan in 2003. Paul treads the same ground as his ancestor, Ambrosius Arimond, an ornithologist who traveled to Afghanistan in the late eighteenth century. The narrative follows Paul’s diary entries detailing the birds he encounters, illustrations of these creatures, as well as letters written by Ambrosius. This format, combined with Scheuer’s poetic prose, allows readers intimate access into Paul’s mind, resulting in a poignant look at personal tragedy and the atrocities of war. Srđan Srdić Combustions Trans. Nataša Srdić Glagoslav Combustions, translated from its original Serbian, is a collection of short stories penned by author Srđan Srdić, who has won numerous literary awards and has had his work translated across eight languages. Srdić’s prose is authentic and straightforward, weaving intertextual references into his emotionally detached yet detailed depictions of contemporary life. Nota Bene The final dispossession of Removal was followed by a reconstruction of their government and the gradual healing of the divisions that fractured the nation until after the American Civil War. No sooner had the war ended than dispossession at the hands of the federal government resumed, reaching its final conclusion with the dissolution of their sovereign government in 1906. This, however, is not a story of unremitting tragedy. After 1906 the Cherokees worked unceasingly to restore their sovereignty until self-government was restored in 1971. This is a story of resiliency and success. Since the Jones and Faulk book, the Cherokee Nation elected Wilma Mankiller as the tribal nation’s first female principal chief. She brought financial stability to the nation. The advent of casino gaming brought expanded opportunities and economic success. Informative sidebars slow the story to give profiles of significant figures from Beloved Woman Nancy Ward to W. W. Keeler, the first principal chief after the resumption of the government. Boney richly illustrates the volume with historical photographs and paintings and rich contemporary works by Cherokee artists , including stunning cover art by Daniel HorseChief. One wishes he had included more of his own work besides the single portrait of a Cherokee codetalker. (He also produced the helpful maps throughout the text that make history visible.) In sum, Cherokee Nation is an important tale well told. Jace Weaver University of Georgia Tore Kvæven Når landet mørknar Oslo. Samlaget. 2018. 451 pages. Når landet mørknar (When darkness falls over the land) is a powerful historical novel, but it also has the visionary qualities that mark it as a great work of literature. The winner of the 2018 Brage Prize, Norway’s most prestigious literary award for fiction, this novel relates momentous events, from the first, baffling episode inside the mind of a hunted, wounded walrus, to the final episode in a young man’s struggle against fate. The core story is about love, bravery, and feuding set among people who are trapped and threatened by the environment they have exploited; the sparse language, rooted in the Icelandic sagas, evokes the vengeful beauty of land and sea. The narrative is shot through with strands of mysticism, but painstaking background research makes it more persuasive than any fantasy dystopia. The “land” of the title is real: Greenland. The time is 1293, and, in the north, the Little Ice Age is beginning. With it begins the end game for the community of Norwegian Vikings that has colonized the southwestern coast. For the past three hundred years, the settlers lived well, farming and hunting on land and sea. Now, they see signs of a slow, murderous change. Deforestation halts the building of houses and ships, soil erosion means poorer harvests, and the most profitable prey is in sharp decline—even birds are scarce. In the first of many unforgettable scenes of life on the edge, the men climb into their aging, dilapidated boats to hunt a solitary walrus. They know the risks—and as we know, so does the walrus. During the chase, fifteen-year-old Arnar distinguishes himself, but Eir, a girl he falls in love with, looks at...

Forgetting and Othering: Representing the War of Resistance

A & Q 15 6 Works Cited Field, Norma. 1991. In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End. New York: Pantheon Books. Field, Norma. 1997. “War and Apology: Japan, Asia, the Fiftieth, and After.” positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 5, no. 1: 1–­ 51. Iwasaki, Minoru, and Steffi Richter. 2008. “The Topology of Post-­ 1990s Historical Revisionism.” Translated by Richard F. Calichman.positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 16, no. 3: 507–­ 38. Kwan, SanSan. 2013. KinestheticCity:DanceandMovementinChineseUrban Spaces. New York: Oxford University Press. Sontag, Susan. 1977. OnPhotography. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Yoneyama, Lisa. 2016. Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American JusticeandJapaneseWarCrimes. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Forgetting and Othering: Representing the War of Resistance Xiaojue Wang Remembering and forgetting are both human capacities and techniques of engaging with the past. They interact in many ways. As memory studies scholars have well noted, remembering and forgetting are not inherently good or bad, and their meanings depend on the specific social and cultural frames within which they are constructed (Assmann 1996; Reemtsma 2010). When it comes to wartime conflict and trauma, however, forgetting is often dismissed, if not reproached, as the malignant other of remembering , especially when related to revisionist denial and intentional evasion by the perpetrators. It is often claimed that forgetting is something that needs to be resisted . The front wall of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall completed in 1985 bears the inscription “Victims 300,000” in simplified and traditional Chinese and in English, and the inscription on the inner wall features four Chinese characters—­ 勿忘国耻—­ meaning “Never Forget National Humiliation.” These four characters have been inscribed in many other materials—­ bronze or marble—­ and in many other forms of Chinese calligraphy in historical museums and on memorials and monuments burgeoning since the 1980s. The inscription alerts the visitors to the peril of forgetting and pointedly suggests that “forgetting” itself is an essential source of this peril. The urge to establish a monument out of materials of permanence points not merely to the importance of 16 A & Q remembering or the monumental weight of history but even more to the difficulty of remembering and the impermanent, volatile nature of remembrance. Furthermore, what to remember, and what to forget, is a process of selection. The selective criteria are set by the sponsor of the memorials, in this case, the official Chinese government. It is as if the petrified stone could not articulate the exact message, therefore the necessity to engrave written words to specify in an unmistakable manner the precise message of the memorial. “Never Forget National Humiliation” is evidently a crucial part of the official discourse of patriotic education that was initiated during Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform of the 1980s, which aimed at modernizing and revitalizing China.1 Forgetting national humiliation is considered as a menace hampering modernization and leading to a weak nation and hence as a negative, despicable mode of dealing with the past. In response to the questions raised in this A&Q, particularly how the politics of forgetting affected postwar epistemologies of Asia that continued to shape the region and the globe, I will examine the representational strategies of forgetting and othering in the PRC narratives of China’s War of Resistance against Japan (1937–­ 45) during the Cold War era. I had begun this essay thinking about the sudden memory boom in the 1980s, which brought Japanese war atrocities back to the “terrain of official commemoration” (Gluck 2007) in the PRC. Given that this occurred at a moment when the Cold War started to thaw and China developed better regional and international relations, one might ask, Why now? What of the oblivion of Japanese war crimes for more than thirty years since 1949? How did forgetting shape China’s new image and changing political alignments in global Asia? Forgetting was used as a necessary narrative technology when the new Chinese government set out to write its history of socialist revolution , accentuating the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (the CCP) in guiding the Chinese people to the nation’s final victory. Ernest Renan’s well-­known 1882 statement that “forgetting . . . is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation” remains true here...

Patrząc na przemoc. Postawa, odczucia i bezsilność człowieka wobec okropności wojny w świetle retoryki okresu średniobizantyńskiego

The second and third decade of the 10th century was marked by an armed conflict between the East Roman Empire and Bulgaria. A conflict, which nearly brought about the downfall of Byzantium, was caused by ambitious plans of Sy­meon I (893-927), the Bulgarian ruler who desired to impose his supremacy upon the empire and gain new territories on the Balkan Peninsula at its cost. Only his death let the Byzantines take a breath and conclude a peace treaty with his son and follower, Peter I (927-969). Theodore Daphnopates (890/900 - after 961), the alleged author of a rhetoric work On the Treaty with the Bulgarians, praising the freshly concluded peace (in 927), reminded the atrocities of war. He also built up the image of a suffering human who had become a witness to the violence inflic­ted to the soil, temples and villages, as well as and first of all to humans during war operations. And although that image was in many aspects a cliché of the Byzantine literature through multiplying the images of suffering, present in other similar works, it referred to the deeply inrooted pattern of such feelings, based on the experience of many generations of Byzantines themselves and of the human­kind in general. So, despite being a customary topos it reflected the possible or perhaps actual human experience of meeting with violence. In my presentation I will present and characterize the attitudes and emotions which accompanied the Byzantine author he had experienced (or at least said he had), being a witness and hearing the relations of atrocities of a fratricidal war.

Bohdan Boichuk’s Childhood Reveries: A Migrant’s Nostalgia, or, Documenting Pain in Poetry

This paper examines Bohdan Boichuk’s poetry by looking into the role his childhood memories played in forming his poetic imagination. Displaced by World War II, the poet displays a unique capacity to transcend his traumatic experiences by engaging in creative writing. Eyewitnessing war atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis does not destroy his belief in the healing power of poetry; on the contrary, it makes him appreciate poetry as the only existentially worthy enterprise. Invoking Gaston Bachelard’s classic work The Poetics of Reveries: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, I argue that Boichuk’s vivid childhood memories, however painful they might be, helped him poetically recreate and reimagine fateful moments of his migrant life.

Psychometric Properties of a Modified Moral Injury Questionnaire in a Military Population.

Moral injury (MI) results from perpetration of or exposure to distressing events, known as morally injurious events (MIEs), that challenge moral beliefs and values. Due to the type of involvement in recent military conflicts, many veterans report MIEs that may cause dissonance and, in turn, MI. Although two existing measures assess MIEs, neither currently assesses the defining characteristics of MI (i.e., guilt, shame, difficulty forgiving self and others, and withdrawal). The present study reports the initial psychometric test of a modified version (Robbins, Kelley, Hamrick, Bravo, & White, 2017) of the Moral Injury Questionnaire - Military version (MIQ-M; Currier, Holland, Drescher, & Foy, 2015) in a sample of 328 military personnel (e.g., veterans, National Guard/reservists, active duty members). The MIQ-M was modified to assess both MIEs and the defining characteristics of MI. Exploratory factor analyses suggested a three-factor model of MIEs consisting of Atrocities of war, Psychological consequences of war, and Leadership failure or betrayal. The modified MIQ-M factors were correlated with defining characteristics of MI. In addition, each MIE factor and associated defining characteristics of MI were positively correlated with symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety, as well as substance use. The modified MIQ-M is a reliable measure of MI that is comprised of three subscales that are associated with, but distinct from, mental health outcomes. Although findings are promising, further research evaluating the applicability of the modified MIQ-M in clinical settings is required to establish construct validity of the defining characteristics and secondary manifestations of MI.

War atrocities and inattention-hyperactivity: The mediating role of religiosity in children

ABSTRACTThe study investigated whether religiosity mediates or moderates the relationship between war atrocities and inattention-hyperactivity in children from Gaza Strip and South Lebanon. Participants were 600 children aged 12–16 years, of whom 273 were males and 327 were females from public schools. Questionnaires were administered by two psychologists. To examine the mediating and moderating effects of religiosity, Baron and Kenney’s mediational criteria and hierarchal regression analysis were conducted. Results indicated that religiosity mediated and moderated the relationship between war atrocities and inattention–hyperactivity in children. The clinical and research implications of these conclusions are discussed.

Memory abuse, violence and the dissolution of Yugoslavia: a theoretical framework for understanding memory in conflict

This paper explores the term “memory abuse” as an analytical framework to understanding politically constructed mnemonic tensions in the years preceding Yugoslavia's violent dissolution. Here, “memory abuse” represents an intersection between the literatures of memory and conflict studies and refers to the intentional manipulation of memory beyond an intangible threshold, past which violence inevitably results. Drawing on the typologies of collective and cultural memory by Aleida and Jan Assmann, I argue that the political mobilisation of both distant and recent memories in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s to a significant degree contributed to the outbreak of war in the early 1990s, and contemporary political actors have perpetuated an abuse of memory that has limited reconciliatory outcomes in the region since the end of conflict. In reformulating the memories of, inter alia, the 1389 Battle of Kosovo and the atrocities of the Second World War to fit nationalist narratives, political actors across Yugoslavia's republics sought to profit from forced divisions that ultimately brought about the country's end.

Bones and Recognition: Compensating families of Missing Persons in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina

A growing trend in post-war transitional justice posits that structural conditions explain why only some post-war countries award material assistance to survivors of war atrocities. While these explanations provide critical insights into the processes behind compensation adoption across post-war states, they do not explain the great variance in which victims obtain compensation within post-war countries. Using the case of missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a victim category that secured compensation in 2004, I present a new model to explain compensation using a rationalist approach. The paper shows that compensation adoption is primarily driven by an opportune combination of three factors: international salience (defined as the international attention given to the victim category and/or prioritisation of its demands), moral authority (defined as the level of perceived domestic deservingness for compensation) and mobilisation resources (defined as the victim category's capacities to mobilise and the quality of its networks). Drawing on fieldwork, this article shows that the prominence of the Srebrenica genocide propelled the issue of missing persons on to domestic and external agendas, affording the surviving families an opportunity to demand special compensation.

“Good Morning, Vietnam!” The discursive construction of nationhood in the War Remnant Museum wall-texts

When the tourism industry is operatively organized by governmental institutions, it seems that the destination is commodified in ways that are ideologically constructed so as to ‘educate’ tourists to perceive them as having a historically different identity. This seems to be what happens when visiting the War Remnant Museum (WRM) in Vietnam. The WRM is a war museum, in Ho Chi Min City, containing exhibits related to the Vietnam and Indochina wars in a series of themed rooms; they include graphic photography accompanied by wall-texts, in English, Vietnamese and Japanese, covering the effects of such chemicals as Agent Orange andother defoliant sprays, the use of napalm and phosphorus bombs and other war atrocities. Since, in some guidebookswritten for an international Western audience,we readthat the Cold War is dealt with by looking at the US with a benevolent eye, there seems to be some dissonance between what the Cold War is, how it is described in guidebooks and what is told about the WRM. The purpose of this study is to analyse the discursive construction of Vietnamese identity through the descriptions of war in the wall-texts found in the WRM. More specifically, this study aims to investigate how the WRM frames Vietnamese identity construction and how this can be inscribed in the tourist experience. This corpus-based methodological approach (WordSmith Tools and WMatrix) is grounded in critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1989, 1992, 2001, 2006, 2014). What seems to emerge from this investigation is that the Vietnamese war, as depicted by the WRM,isnot simply the other side of the coin. Reality is filtered through anideological lens of political interpretation usedby the Vietnamese which frames discursive processes and strategies that establish the social order and power relations in a useful way in the construction of a strong national identity to be reproduced in WRM wall-texts. Such an analysis can provide useful insights intomultifaceted aspects of the institutional discourse(s) related to the construction of a national identity and at the same time linked to the commodification of war.

Traces of violence: Representing the atrocities of war

This article explores the relationships between war and representation through the use of visual images, and takes a cue from the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio, who has written extensively on the militarization of vision in ways that have yet to be fully recognized in criminology. It then outlines some of the disputes surrounding documentary photography, not least since one of the main factors driving the development of the medium was the desire to record warfare, before turning to recent efforts to reconfigure the violence of representation by focusing on what has been termed ‘aftermath photography’, where practitioners deliberately adopt an anti-reportage position, slowing down the image-making process and arriving well after the decisive moment. This more contemplative strategy challenges the oversimplification of much photojournalism and the article concludes by reflecting on how military-turned-consumer technologies are structuring our everyday lives in more and more pervasive ways.

Review: The Destruction of Memory, directed by Tim Slade

Tim Slade, director The Destruction of Memory Icarus Films, New York, 2017, 85 min., http://icarusfilms.com/if-destr The 2017 documentary The Destruction of Memory , based on a book of the same title by architecture critic Robert Bevan, traces the history of the purposeful destruction of architecture, urban infrastructure, and monuments over the course of the twentieth century and into the early 2000s, through conflicts primarily in the Middle East and Europe.1 The film is a feat of archival research, pulling together footage from a number of events from the late nineteenth century forward. Its agenda is simple: to reveal that architecture and other cultural artifacts are frequently strategic targets of war and that their destruction is often more than mere collateral damage. Through interviews with a wide-ranging group of experts in the international arena—lawyers, preservation officers, historians, politicians, and architects—supported by archival photographs and footage, Tim Slade, the film's writer and director, tells a vivid and absorbing story of the deliberate destruction of cultural monuments and the emergence of legal frameworks and institutions designed to protect them. The creation and enforcement of those laws has been and remains the responsibility of a host of largely anonymous bureaucrats. To lay the groundwork, the film opens with perhaps the best known of these, Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), a Polish lawyer who is widely credited with coining the term genocide . The film's argument takes as its starting point Lemkin's assertion of a distinction between two forms of genocide: physical and cultural. After experiencing the atrocities of World War I as a child in his native Poland, Lemkin conceived and advocated for legislation and policy to recognize and deal with the perpetrators of mass destruction. Following the war, the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on Enforcement of Penalties was created by the Allies to enumerate a list of war crimes, determine breaches of …

Katastrophe der Wissenschaft?! Gewalteskalation, Kriegsgräuel und Kriegsverbrechen als Instrumente der internationalen (Nicht-)Kooperation in der Rechtswissenschaft 1914–1919

This contribution starts with a dictum from the German classical philologist, Hermann Diels. He referred to a ‘catastrophe of science’ which led most academics and scientists to support national war efforts at the beginning of World War One. This study examines the way in which the escalation of violence during the war and related wartime atrocities influenced international co-operation between jurists, something which Gustave Moynier identified as a prerequisite factor for limiting violence in war within a legal framework. Many jurists, especially those on the side the Entente, linked the escalation of violence and wartime atrocities with the legal concept of ‘crime’ and thereby turned an instrument of international co-operation into one of national mobilisation. A similar development was evident among jurists of the Central Powers. This article also discusses the impact which the curtailment of international co-operation at almost all levels throughout the war years had on the escalation of violence and asks how appropriate Diels’ aforementioned dictum has been.

The black legend on the Spanish presence in the low countries: Verifying shared beliefs on genetic ancestry.

War atrocities committed by the Spanish army in the Low Countries during the 16th century are so ingrained in the collective memory of Belgian and Dutch societies that they generally assume a signature of this history to be present in their genetic ancestry. Historians claim this assumption is a consequence of the so-called "Black Legend" and negative propaganda portraying and remembering Spanish soldiers as extreme sexual aggressors. The impact of the presence of Spaniards during the Dutch Revolt on the genetic variation in the Low Countries has been verified in this study. A recent population genetic analysis of Iberian-associated Y-chromosomal variation among Europe is enlarged with representative samples of Dutch (N = 250) and Flemish (N = 1,087) males. Frequencies of these variants are also compared between donors whose oldest reported paternal ancestors lived in-nowadays Flemish-cities affected by so-called Spanish Furies (N = 116) versus other patrilineages in current Flemish territory (N = 971). The frequencies of Y-chromosomal markers Z195 and SRY2627 decline steeply going north from Spain and the data for the Flemish and Dutch populations fits within this pattern. No trend of higher frequencies of these variants has been found within the well-ascertained samples associated with Spanish Fury cities. Although sexual aggression did occur in the 16th century, these activities did not leave a traceable "Spanish" genetic signature in the autochthonous genome of the Low Countries. Our results support the view that the 'Black Legend' and historical propaganda on sexual aggression have nurtured today's incorrect assumptions regarding genetic ancestry.

TRANSCENDENTALISM IN WILLIAM SAROYAN'S THE CAVE DWELLERS

Equally parallel to European romanticism is American transcendentalism. The movement which emerged in Boston in the mid-nineteenth century by some remarkable American authors was actually a reaction against the fragmented mode of thought among American writers. This disintegration was caused mainly by the rigidly commanding religious authorities, dissimilar European affiliations, accelerating urbanization leading to the destruction of nature and the atrocities of war resulting in the deformation of human soul during that phase. On the other hand, their essential principles consist in a belief in nature as glorifying, man as dignified, and truth as lying within one's intuition. The group of writers who set up the dogma of the movement is in fact reformists whose main objective is to abolish slavery, emancipate women and create a utopian community. Therefore, they reject their society because of its corruption and inequality. What they aspire to is the founding of a unique American literary association which promotes American principal characteristics. The idealistic vision of Ralf Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson and Margaret Fuller unify them together and propel them to form their distinctive technique. The Cave Dwellers (1957) by William Saroyan is a play which reflects the basic features of transcendentalism, and Saroyan is a representative playwright. Almost all his writings reveal a sensitive personality, tender outlook on people and optimistic prediction of their problems. The aim of the present study is to explore in detail the essential transcendental aspects in the play and whether it is compatible with the central ideology of the early movement or no

The Cultural Role and Political Implications of Poland’s 1947 Shakespeare Festival

Emerging from the atrocities of war, and still hoping to avert the results of the Yalta conference during which the countries of Central and South–Eastern Europe, including Poland, were “handed over” to Stalin, Poland’s 1947 Shakespeare theatre festival was a sign of courage and defiance. At the Festival 23 productions of 9 Shakespeare’s dramas were staged by theatres in 11 towns, with its finale in Warsaw. My paper will show that the Festival was an attempt to demonstrate both Polish cultural links with Europe, and to subvert Marxist ideology and Soviet culture.

Burning the Bones of the Dead as a War Atrocity: A Note on Amos 2:1

This short note discusses the nature and significance of the war crime “burning the bones of the dead” referred to in Amos 2:1. A lack of historical data as far as the Hebrew Bible is concerned inhibits a more precise understanding of this serious accusation. After the presentation of a variety of examples from ancient Near Eastern sources (particularly from Assyrian war records) relating to the violation of the remains of the dead, especially the bones, it is now possible to gain a clearer picture of the severity of the crime in Amos. “Burning the bones” was conceived to be the complete annihilation of the memory of a dead person. Accordingly, a relationship between the living and the spirit of the dead is no longer possible, an aspect so essential in the life world of the ancient Near Eastern peoples.

Maji Maji War, Ngoni Warlords and Militarism in Southern Tanzania

As we come to an end of the celebration of a centenary and ten years since the end of the Maji Maji War against German colonialism, it is apparently clear that the historiography on the Maji Maji War focuses on appreciation of the Ngoni heroism against German cruelty and colonialism, as well as the loss of life caused by hunger, casualties of the war and German atrocities. It is however, noted that this view of nationalist historiography is outdated and needs to be corrected because it has outlived its usefulness as local histories and identities reveal the Ngoni atrocities, militarism, and wars against local inhabitants similar to the German rule between 1850–1890s. The nationalist historiography, like colonial historiography, pays little attention to history of victims, rather is the story of powerful state formation, states, and statism. In the nationalist case, historical investigations pay little attention on the Ngoni aggression and plunder or on this aggression’s effects on the conditions of life and the demographic dynamics on Lake Nyasa area and East to Indian Ocean from 1850s to 1907. In particular, these wars had a profound effect on the shaping of relations between 1850s and 1907. The article analyses war, militarism, and atrocities of the Ngoni on the conditions of life in East Lake Nyasa to Indian Ocean region between 1850 and 1907. The article demonstrates that during this period the people of area were harassed by Ngoni attacks and slave trade conflicts which disrupted their ways of life. And that after the German subdual of the regional powers including the Ngoni, Yao and Arab traders, relative peace and stability were restored briefly until the Maji Maji war brought further war calamities, instability and confusions. All in all, the Ngoni warlordism and militarism played large part in shaping history of modern southern Tanzania.

La fuerza de la educación para una cultura de paz

War is inevitable, hence the importance of developing its opposite through education, that is, with ethical values. The conviction that education is one of the paths that makes peace possible must be embodied in a set of provisions that regulate it in a chair that promotes a culture of peace and coexistence with respect. It is the lesson to be learned, peace as an end in itself and education as a means, whose just defense cannot be war, because it would not be coherent to seek peace through the atrocities of war. In education for a culture of peace, human nature must intervene to manage the opportunity to defend the right to life; from there would derive the conviction that “peace is a right and a duty of obligatory fulfillment”.

Postmodernist Literary Movement: A Comprehensive Study of Technique in Vonnegut’s Novels

Kurt Vonnegut is an integral part of the postmodernist literary movement and a master of satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. The uniqueness of Vonnegut's works is that in addition to having excellent themes, the novels are also technically accomplished and colorful. Vonnegut refuses to confine himself to a single form of fiction, which is something that is certainly clear from a review of his books. In reality, modal diversity is demonstrated in each of his works. Vonnegut, a man of profound vision, tries to experiment with brilliant techniques in his novels, including science fiction, comic science fiction, black humor, dark humor, morbid humor, gallows humor, meta-fiction, satire, political satire, postmodernism, dark comedy, war novels, absurdist fiction, modes of absurdity, and semi-autobiographical writing. In his works, he deftly weaves these strategies around his theme. He draws attention to the numerous social defects, the atrocities of war, and the sorrows of modern man. He imagines a society free of societal ills, where people are not enslaved by technology. This essay aims to analyze the literary devices used by Vonnegut in his works.