Cannon Fodder Research Articles

Geopolitics of separatism

Geopolitics of separatism

Roe v. Wade and the Predatory State Interest in Protecting Future Cannon Fodder.

The reversal of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the states to regulate terminations of pregnancy more autonomously than during 1973-2022. Those who think that women should be legally entitled to abortions at their own request are suggesting that annulling the reversal could be an option. This would mean continued reliance on the interpretation of privacy that Roe v. Wade stood on. The interpretation does not have the moral support that its supporters think. This can be shown by recalling the shortcomings of Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous violinist example and its application to abortion laws. Philosophically better reasons for not restricting access to abortion can be found in a simple principle of fairness and in sensible theories on the value of human life. Whether or not philosophy has any use in the debate is another matter. Legal decisions to regulate terminations are probably based on pronatalist state interests, shared by the apparently disagreeing parties and immune to rational argumentation.

American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era

American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era

"It's Been Ugly": A Large-Scale Qualitative Study into the Difficulties Frontline Doctors Faced across Two Waves of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

This study aimed to gain an uncensored insight into the most difficult aspects of working as a frontline doctor across successive COVID-19 pandemic waves. Data collected by the parent study (CERA) was analysed using conventional content analysis. Participants comprised frontline doctors who worked in emergency, anaesthetic, and intensive care medicine in the UK and Ireland during the COVID-19 pandemic (n = 1379). All seniority levels were represented, 42.8% of the sample were male, and 69.2% were white. Four themes were identified with nine respective categories (in parentheses): (1) I’m not a COVID hero, I’m COVID cannon fodder (exposed and unprotected, “a kick in the teeth”); (2) the relentlessness and pervasiveness of COVID (“no respite”, “shifting sands”); (3) the ugly truths of the frontline (“inhumane” care, complex team dynamics); (4) an overwhelmed system exacerbated by COVID (overstretched and under-resourced, constant changes and uncertainty, the added hinderance of infection control measures). Findings reflect the multifaceted challenges faced after successive pandemic waves; basic wellbeing needs continue to be neglected and the emotional impact is further pronounced. Steps are necessary to mitigate the repeated trauma exposure of frontline doctors as COVID-19 becomes endemic and health services attempt to recover with inevitable long-term sequelae.

War and the subaltern: Voice as power in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra

In Africa, as in most other parts of the world, whenever there is war (or massive violence of any other hue), the common people are used as cannon fodder to protect the powerful upper class formulators of the letters of the war. Women and children are easily the most vulnerable. They are raped, tortured, murdered, starved, widowed, and exposed to all sorts of insecurity and depredation. In the end they are marginally characterized in upper class, male-centered war discourse. In this research, we locate the voice of the subaltern in Buchi Emecheta’s civil war novel, Destination Biafra (1982). We utilize Subaltern Studies in a qualitative approach to offer the needed agency to female subalterns as well as a few other marginalized groups. We map the trajectory of these voices and show that the subaltern woman and the other margins denounce colonial complicity in the androcentric war, and would rather the society eschewed violence as conflict resolution strategy. With this study we fill an existing gulf in the Nigerian Civil War narrative and create an alternative discourse against the largely upper class, male-centered voices that have hitherto characterized civil war novels.

Going Dark

Going Dark

Review of “Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military”

The end of conscription in the US in 1973 ended the supply of cannon fodder and made it more difficult and far more expensive to replace each soldier injured or killed in combat. That, in turn, focused the Pentagon leadership’s minds on the task of making its existing soldiers ever more invulnerable to enemy attack. Stealth planes, which cost multiples of more visible aircraft, are more useful for protecting pilots from death or capture than in actually winning battles. The Pentagon armors soldiers for battle in ways that protect them from being shot or blown up even though that makes it almost impossible to interact with the local populations whose hearts and minds they are supposed to win. Chemical Heroes describes decades of efforts by the US military to go beyond armoring soldiers from external attack by remaking soldiers’ bodies in ways that let them remain in combat for ever...

Концепт «вiйна» у романi Г. Бьолля «Будинок без господаря»

This article deals with the cultural heritage of the famous German writer Heinrich Böll (Boell) (1917–1985), who represents a moral conception in literature. This article examines some specific issues of his creative work, based on the novel “House without Guardians”, which are related with the problems of the German people after the Second World War and of the modern world. It is so because human society is still suffering from wars, racial intolerance and the broken souls of people who have faced such conflicts. The postwar German literature was the starting point of a new era – a new turn, when the past couldn’t exist anymore, and something new should be created. The first step for literary inspiration was the newspaper “Der Ruf”, it was a magnet for the new generation of authors – pioneers, for example W. Borchert was published here, he spoke out as the new against-war-generation. Therefore, it was not a surprise that Heinrich Boell joined the magazine too, so he wished to be a part of that new Literature of the Ruins (Trümmerliteratur). The next landmark union was the Group 47, which gave a rise to many young, unknown authors, who supported the democratization of society and the creation of a literature free from the ideological influence of Nazism. The interest toward such an issue like the individual fault for the war was shown many writers (I. Bachmann, H. Grass, Z. Lenz, H. Richter, M. Walzer, etc.). Heinrich Boell was among them. His creative life was closely connected with the activity of the Group 47. The short story “Black Sheep” (Die schwarzen Schafe, 1951) “went public” during one of such meetings. The talented writer was rewarded and asked to join the organization without delay. In the 1950s, he wrote the novels “Der Zug war pünktlich” («The Train Was on Time»), “Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa...” (1950), “Wo warst du Adam?” (“And Where Were You, Adam?” 1951), “Und sagte kein einziges Wort”, (“And Never Said a Word” 1953), “Billard um halbzehn” (“Billiards at Half past Nine” 1959), in each of them one can find the author's concept of “futility”. According to him, the meaninglessness of war is measured by its destructive power and mass murder. The war can’t be a “noble mission” using the idea to «clean» the society from the evil ideologies. The war has no patriotism and faith. Boell had a strong interest to the psychology of the young people who were in the center of tragedy. They had a very unpleasant choice – to be cannon fodder or defectors. The writer brought up the wrong ideals situation. He spoke categorically about glorifing heroic deaths, calling them a fiction or a bargaining coin of the politicians. The writer's works were in opposition to the official optimistic ideology. Boell wanted to emphasize not only physical, but first of all the psychological scars of the survivors. His characters had no place in stable life of the present reality, all their thoughts were about the past. A bitter taste of their past was the guarantor of their humanity.

Cannon Fodder: A doctor on the front lines

Cannon Fodder: A doctor on the front lines

Studying International Relations through Horror Films: A New Approach and Illustrations from Cannon Fodder and Freak Out

Abstract This paper argues that works of popular culture, specifically horror films, offer valuable insights into dominant and critical perceptions of the sources of violence in ongoing armed conflicts—an issue of concern for scholars of International Relations (IR) scholars, which as yet has not received sufficient attention. Accordingly, we present a new approach that IR scholars can utilize in their analysis of works of popular culture, applying it to two recent horror films from Israel/Palestine: Cannon Fodder (2013, dir. Eitan Gafny) and Freak Out (2015, dir. Boaz Armoni). The analysis of these films, combined with a discussion of films dealing with violence from other contexts, reveals how works of popular culture in general, and horror films in particular, can help address the question of whether violence in armed conflicts is perceived as endogenous or exogenous to the groups involved. This can also shed light on specific issues, such as the connection between social representation and violence, the link between the use of military technology and violence, and the blurred boundaries between endogenous and exogenous sources of violence.

Cannon Fodder: A doctor on the front lines

106 essay Cannon Fodder A doctor on the front lines Laura Kolbe War and peace is making a comeback this spring, along with other great fat books, book clubbing in general, twelve-­ bean soups, and other projects meant to reac­ quaint us with a more glacial, less contemporary sense of time. When I think of War and Peace now, though, my mind strays from the Rostovs and Bezhukovs to Charles Joseph Minard’s graphs of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Minard was a nineteenth-­ century French civil engineer esteemed for his data-­ rich but immediately apprehensible diagrams of everything from commuter traffic to wine imports. His most famous and damning image, however, maps the progress of the Napoleonic army as it staggered west from Russia back to central Europe. Soldiers’ lives are initially a thick red band, a gash of enormous and emphatic force. Each mil­ limeter of red width stands for ten thousand men. As the march Cannon Fodder | 107 continues, the red band dwindles, etiolates. By the end of the cam­ paign only a small stream trickles back to safely held territory. As a child, I went to a somewhat old-­ fashioned Catholic school where history was largely understood as the study of military bat­ tles and their outcomes. This kind of education leaves much out, but helps me recognize a Minardian or Napoleonic situation when I see one. It’s becoming rapidly apparent that I, an internal medi­ cine doctor based at two academic hospitals in Manhattan, am part of the thick red band that’s about to be wrung threadbare. In the Trump administration’s United States, COVID-­ 19 has always been about commodities—that is, their scarcity. First there weren’t nearly enough tests, and the available tests were sporadi­ cally employed and sluggish to yield results. Then there were too many probable cases for it to be practicable to test widely, and besides, we somehow ran out of the swabs compatible with the test assays (just as there were finally almost enough of the latter). I’m speaking in the national “we,” and in particular the New York “we.” Here in New York City we’ve mostly stopped testing all but the severely ill sick enough to need a hospital bed—it would be a waste of precious swabs. While we worried about tests and swabs, we ran out of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers. Over the last two weeks my hospital’s stock of gowns, gloves, masks, and face shields visibly dwindled in every cabinet. Eventually you had to know who to ask about secret cabinets, small locked stashes. It helped to whisper; it helped to have friends. My head was full of combination codes for various locked drawers and closets around the hospital. Then even the locked chambers started to empty. Every day we are told that a modest quantity of new supplies is almost here, but every day they’re not quite here. Ditto for ventilators. There is now a growing array of formal and informal protocols for cleaning, reusing, stretching, and sharing everything from masks to rooms and ventilators, all of them inge­ nious but admittedly not quite as good as the gold standards for worker safety or patient care. This is ubiquitous in all hospitals in our region, with mine in fact faring better than most. In addition 108 | Laura Kolbe to finding or reusing scarce equipment, new aspects of my job include lengthy and heartbreaking conversations about prognosis and “code status” (a patient’s wish for resuscitation and/or a ven­ tilator), determining which patients’ deaths are imminent enough that they can be allotted their single hour-­ long visit from the loved one of their choice (otherwise, no visitors allowed), and studying textbooks and videos so that I might serve as an ICU critical-­ care doctor should the need arise (which normally would require an extra two years of intensive training beyond the medical education I’ve had). Each day a portion of my list of patients is critically ill, and a portion are recovering. I quiz those who are recovering more extensively about their living conditions than I ever would have before. A single...

Cannon Fodder

Cannon Fodder Jiang Xue (bio) Translated by Frank Stewart and Ming Di We try to hold the ashesin the remaining, deformed palm.When mixed with tearsthe ashes solidify into cement.Do we feel grief? We are too numbeven to sort out the fragments in the ashes. They fall from the sky like snowsmudging our faces with their blackness,as if a punishing spirit wanted us to seeour streaked faces when we gaze in a mirror. So we must bathe,try to cleanse ourselves,though it’s not possible to wash away the memory,or scrub away the stains. Splintered like painful nerve endingsthey are everywhere in our bodies,crying out to us like rivers. Cannon fodder. Cannon ashes. We roll the cannon ashes through the snowas if creating a giant snowballthat could gather up the fearsthat overpower the remnantsof our dreams, and roll away our silence.The snowball of ashes is enormous, like a monumentthat could collapse at any moment: dark ashes, heavy and brittle. Hubei2017 [End Page 182] Jiang Xue Jiang Xue is the pen name for Jiang Shan, born in 1970 in Hunchun, Hubei province. He grew up in an iron-mining area in Huangshi and started publishing literary works in 1987. He is a poet, writer, artist, and founder and editor of Houtian Journal (houtian means “the day after tomorrow” in Chinese). Copyright © 2019 University of Hawai‘i Press

The great training robbery

I chose to train in general practice for a multitude of powerful and positive reasons but increasingly feel the victim of a great training robbery. Many problems have beset the programme, with the recent House of Lords report calling it unfit for purpose.1 There is however nothing more illustrative of the depth of despair than the lived experiences of ambitious generalists who are used as cannon fodder for an understaffed, flailing secondary care system. General practice is the shortest specialty training for the broadest of all fields. To become a generalist today, half of my training is spent in subspecialised secondary and tertiary care settings, honing skills, accumulating knowledge, and reflecting on the experiences of service delivery in these particular institutions. The nature and purview of hospital care are fundamentally different, such as, its pathology-centred approach, …

4-F

4-F Arthur Ramírez (bio) 'Nam was raging. The Tet offensive—we called it the "tit offensive"—moved the stakes up. And there were bamboo stakes. They grew very fast. A guy could be tied down, someone reminded us, on top of teeny shoots. In a few days they penetrated the soldier all over, completely. Nobody I knew wanted this. Nobody wanted to go to 'Nam. A useless, futile war. A huge empty rice field with only death lurking around. And it was not even a real war. And I thought they'd really be after a "Spanish surname" guy like me. Cannon fodder delight. So, I had nightmares: someone was always chasing me, trying to catch you and spill your guts, blood and more blood. But the second I looked back, thinking maybe I would fight to the death, there was nobody there. I can speak for myself and, actually, all the other guys I knew. Nobody was interested in becoming a hero. Hell, it'd be a dead hero, at best. Anyway, it did seem anyone who died while serving was a god-damned hero. But next door to me when I was growing up in the barrio two brothers had died in World War II; a third just hung around listening to the radio all day. Every afternoon I could hear Mutual's Game of the Day. I could see Abelino through the screened window and all he did was listen to the radio. Spanish, or English, but he wouldn't miss baseball. I knew his nephew Lalo, who was 20, of the next generation. He didn't like me; I was a little shrimp. Then a few months after he was drafted I heard the most horrendous screams and piercing cries I've ever heard. His sister and mother got a telegram from the President. He was in a truck in Korea, I heard later, and the truck had not made it around a hill. Rain and mud and a slick road, and a cliff. Everybody was killed. Lalo's funeral services, at their house, made me think of death and the sadness around me. Abelino came out of the room and kneeled before his nephew's closed coffin. I thought of Lalo, and how little he thought of me, a kid who couldn't hold up his end in ballgames, and I returned the favor. Now he was a victim. The truth was we were all scared shitless. Just the general condition of potential or even helpless and hopeless victims. And now here we were. We had all gone to this large lecture hall, all us guys; we were overflowing in that large room. I couldn't help thinking: We were oozingly disgusting, like pus, guys barely hanging on all over, over the sides, sliding. The usual overcrowded UT couldn't contain us all. We were there to take a test that had nothing to do with serving in the army. But, on the other hand, was crucial. This test was one of those usual totally irrelevant tests. In fact, "relevance" was a much-used word then. Really, it was like the SAT and was supposed to separate the soldiers from the scholars. If you ranked high you got a draft deferment and could continue in school. If you didn't, you were cannon fodder in the rice fields of Vietnam. Someone whispered to me, "Damn, I forgot all my high school math." At another time I heard another guy whisper. "I mean, how do you do these things? It's all crazy. What the fuck does knowing the multiple-choice answer to 'A germ is to an epidemic as. . . .'" So vocab, besides equations, were all tarnished, covered with junior-high rust. We all felt paralyzed and impotent, trapped, a panic hovering over us. But the answer was all over as you looked at the walls of that auditorium: "No Exit." Afterwards, we all seemed to hang around the dorm mailbox at the appointed time the mail was delivered in our boxes in the mail room. We liked it when a magazine was put in, but really all of us feared a thick official...

‘If you shoulder a rifle […] let it be for Ireland’: James Connolly's War on War

As virtually all Europe's major socialist parties re-aligned with their own national governments with the outbreak of World War I, Irish socialist and trade unionist James Connolly found himself internationally isolated by his vociferous opposition to the war. Within Ireland, however, Connolly's energetic and relentless calls to interrupt the imperial transportation and communications networks on which the ‘carnival of murder’ in Europe relied had the converse effect, drawing him into alignment with certain strains of Irish nationalism. Connolly and other socialist republican stalwarts like Helena Molony and Michael Mallin made common cause with advanced Irish nationalism, the one other constituency unamenable to fighting for England under any circumstances. This centripetal gathering together of two minority constituencies – both intrinsically opposed, if not to the war itself, certainly to Irish Party leader John Redmond's offering up of the Irish Volunteers as British cannon fodder – accounts for the “remarkably diverse” social and ideological character of the small executive body responsible for the planning of the Easter Rising: the Irish Republican Brotherhood's military council. In effect, the ideological composition of the body that planned the Easter Rising was shaped by the war's systematic diversion of all individuals and ideologies that could be co-opted by British imperialism through any possible argument or material inducement. Although the majority of those who participated in the Rising did not share Connolly's anti-war, pro-socialist agenda, the Easter 1916 Uprising can nonetheless be understood as, among other things, a near letter-perfect instantiation of Connolly's most steadfast principle: that it was the responsibility of every European socialist to throw onto the gears of the imperialist war machine every wrench on which they could lay their hands.

The Central Asian Militants: Cannon Fodder of Global Jihadism or Revolutionary Vanguard?

Central Asians have long been present within the ranks of organisations linked to the global jihad movement, but has there been an acceleration in their recruitment in recent years? There is growing evidence of substantial numbers of Central Asians (mostly Uzbeks and Tajiks) present in Syria in the ranks of the Islamic State and of a number of organisations linked to Al-Qaida. There is also growing evidence of recruitment inside Kyrgizstan and Tajikistan at least (as opposed as among Central Asian emigrants). The authors argue that distrust towards information provided by the Central Asian regimes should not blind analysts towards an emerging trend, which has substantial destabilising potential. The factors driving this recruitment also seem to be much more complex than a rejection of the authoritarianism of the ruling elites.

Règne animal par Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

Reviews 263 (69). Multiple attempts by the Occupiers to vilify and break up Josette’s band led to harsh realities as they matured in this ambience. Their music, which is organized in CDs under the same title and can be purchased separately from the book of de Cortanze, was played in surreptitious concerts throughout Paris and became opportunities to dance the swing or especially to be musicians (Charles Louis performed on the clarinet and saxophone in various gigs). Citations from newspapers of the moment and historical references ground this story’s affirmation of youth as a positive cultural contribution to the struggle for the survival of Paris and France from World War II. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne Del Amo, Jean-Baptiste. Règne animal. Paris: Gallimard, 2016. ISBN 978-2-07017969 -5. Pp. 419. Del Amo’s novel has an immense and weighty feel to it, not least because it spans four generations of farmers rooted all but literally in the rugged terrain of l’Occitanie. The novel’s first half (1898–1917) has distinct Zola-esque qualities, including long sentences with realist descriptions of the smell of soil, angles of light, vegetation, field fauna, farm implements, and rough and ancient farm structures that house equally rough and worn people. Like Zola, Del Amo uses his title as a framing metaphor about the overlapping domains of humans and animals, privileging, of course, our animal natures. An early event sets the stage: a cold-hearted virago known only as the génératrice miscarries in a pig-stall while watching over a sow in labor. She lets the animal dispose of the human fetus, a fatal error in swine husbandry that she only realizes later: the sow henceforth tries to eat her own farrows. This metaphor of eating one’s young will bob to the surface repeatedly. When World War I’s demands for cannon fodder extend to this rural community, the systematic depopulation is not limited to men between sixteen and forty years of age: government officials strip the farms of all viable livestock, leaving farm widows with a fistful of worthless war bonds. Instead of following the story of the farmer drafted to serve, the author follows the fates of his animals, transported and slaughtered in the most inhumane, unhygienic, and wasteful ways imaginable, a mirror image of the butchery of war. Beyond the hell wrought by the war, the génératrice’s daughter, Éléonore, holds the farm together by supporting the new patriarch, a soul-damaged veteran who labors comme une bête but is equally beastly toward his only child and heir, Henri. Fast forward to 1981, when la harde, both animal and human, has increased. This second half of the novel is stylistically more modern than the first half: descriptions are less dense; characters have more dialogue; and dialogue inevitably carries much of the drama. The increased herds serve as a superficial sign of modern prosperity. Henri has doubled his progeny: two sons, both of whom work to maintain a large pig farm. On closer inspection of this material success, however, we see that family members have been isolated on the farm, and the defects of their forbearers have reemerged. The eldest son has fallen into alcoholism; his wife succumbs to mental illness; the children of this generation are alternately rejected and sexually exploited by their peers. Jérôme, the last male of his lineage, autistic and mute, has an uncanny sensitivity toward animals but also a dangerous lack of boundaries, both between humans and animals and between his own body and the bodies of other people. To say more would be to divulge a plot that is gripping and beautifully crafted. In brief, this is a breathtakingly powerful read. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March Des Accords, Laure. Grichka. Lagrace: Verdier, 2016. ISBN 978-2-86432-881-0. Pp. 128. Ce petit roman ne se donne pas de prime abord. Pour en apprécier la facture, il faut le relire comme une pièce de théâtre aux décors sobres, aux personnages en demiteinte appuyés par des monologues, des choeurs et des apartés. Comme dans son premier...

Khromeychuk, Olesya ‘Undetermined’ Ukrainians: Post-War Narratives of the Waffen SS ‘Galicia’ Division (review)

REVIEWS 385 Khromeychuk, Olesya. ‘Undetermined’ Ukrainians: Post-War Narratives of the Waffen SS ‘Galicia’ Division. Nationalisms Across the Globe, 11. Peter Lang, Oxford Bern and New York, 2013. xix + 197 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €50.00: £40.00: $64.95 (paperback). Olesya Khromeychuk’s study of the Waffen SS ‘Galicia’ Division — a synthetic name for a division that changed its name several times during its short existence between 1943 and 1945 — seeks to answer the questions 1) why some 8,000 members of this division escaped repatriation to the Soviet Union and 2) how their transfer to Great Britain as POWs, their ‘civilianization’ in Great Britain and the eventual move of an undetermined number of former Division members to Canada were arranged. The more ambitious goal is to explore how memory and identity were formed and how narratives of the SS Division and of Ukrainian self-assertion became intertwined. An even more general purpose of the study is suggested in the foreword by David R. Marples. He submits that the careful reconstruction of the formation and perpetuation of narratives — the historicization of memory in other words — may provide a way out of the impasse of antithetical accounts of the role of Ukrainians in the Second World War. The story of how the Ukrainian members of the SS Division escaped repatriation, were shipped to the United Kingdom and entered Canada as civilians is not a flattering one, at least in terms of Ukrainian narratives of identity. First, the British Screeners were hard-pressed to identify (the) Ukraine as an entity, but they were sure that (Ukrainian-)Poles — ‘Galicians’ — could not be repatriated to the Soviet Union, because it was not their patria. For once, statelessness turned into an advantage. Second, they concluded that the Ukrainians under their scrutiny were really not eager volunteers at all, but simple Eastern European peasant folk, who got caught up in the maelstrom of war and surely could not have been capable of war crimes. Imperial attitude for once worked in favour of Eastern Europeans. Third, the experience of the repatriation of Cossack units on the one hand and a growing anti-Soviet attitude on the other boiled down to the defence of ‘our’ Ukrainians against ‘their’ (the Soviets’) vengeful demands. Fourth, the Vatican was actively involved in protecting a group of God-fearing Christians. And last but not least, Britain needed menial labourers, especially in agriculture, after the release of German POWs. However, none of the above convinced the British media, which retained a far more distrustful, if not necessarily more informed, view. The fact that the detained Ukrainians were (Waffen) SS members and that — with or without reference to Nuremberg — the SS was widely considered a criminal, evil and indeed German organization factored prominently in these SEER, 95, 2, APRIL 2017 386 early debates. The latter in turn shaped the narratives of division members and more broadly the expatriate Ukrainian discourse. The Ukrainian diaspora closedranksandcametoenfoldthemembersoftheWaffenSS‘Galicia’Division within a narrative of ‘the’ Ukrainian struggle for nation and statehood. The ensuingnarrativeistrivial,becauseitissoutterlycommon.TheDivisionfought the good fight for Ukrainian statehood — with Nazi Germany as its ally. It may have had a few criminals in its ranks, but otherwise committed no war crimes. Khromeychuk lets this narrative stand as one truth among others. That seems very dubious to me and surely not a way out of what has become a poisonous debate about the legacy of the Second World War. While I do not consider the multiplication of narrative ‘truths’ to be a solution, I was somewhat surprised to note that not all narratives were presented, for there was a heated, internal debate among Ukrainian nationalists — in this respect not different from what happened in colonial India — on the wisdom of Ukrainians joining the SS in the first place. This was not a debate about war crimes, but about Ukrainians being used as colonials and cannon fodder for German imperial ends. It may well prove to be a better starting point to reconstruct the variety of political voices (and choices) among the varieties of Ukrainians in order for Ukrainian historians to escape a poisoned memory. This said, old-fashioned history, painful as it may be, still...

At Home in Two Countries: The Past and Future of Dual Citizenship . By Peter J. Spiro (New York: New York University Press, 2016. 191 pp.).

Peter J. Spiro, a leading legal scholar of immigration and citizenship with a special interest in international law, has given us a short, pithy tour d’horizon concerning the fascinating subject of dual nationality. As he explains, people are increasingly acquiring two and sometimes more nationalities. Why is dual nationality so intriguing? He suggests at least five reasons. First, the historical dimension. The evolution of dual citizenship tracks some of the most important developments in world history. Traditionally, states treated their inhabitants as subjects with few if any rights but imposed duties, particularly military service, taxes, and perpetual allegiance to the state. Well into the twentieth century, almost all nation-states in principle provided their subjects (or citizens in the relatively few democracies) with little more than diplomatic protection if they encountered problems while living abroad. But protecting them was mostly a way to prevent the host state from using the home state’s subjects as cannon fodder that the home state needed for itself. In Spiro’s telling, the centuries-long transition from a regime of single, perpetual allegiance to one in which multiple allegiances seemed both possible and plausible reflected world-transforming changes—in mobility, economics, warfare, diplomacy, state-building, individual rights, and conception of communal belonging. He skillfully traces these convulsive changes without taking his eye off the ball — the epiphenomenon of dual citizenship.

Talkin' about Class Formation

Talkin' about Class Formation Diane P. Koenker (bio) Reading Boris Mironov's assessment of the role of workers in the 1917 revolution immediately swept me back to the 1970s, when an entire cohort of historians of Russia engaged with a broader community of historians of labor to reassess the prevailing view of Russian workers as "dark masses" (from the right) or "red masses" (from the left). Seeking to replace condescension with respect for individuals as well as for sources, we social historians sought to interrogate these generalizations, whether from the right or the left, whether about "irrational" peasant-workers or monolithic working-class armies.1 In bringing these methods to the study of the 1917 revolution, this cohort—whether looking at workers, peasants, soldiers, or sailors—contributed to a new consensus that dispelled theories of revolution based on assumptions of conspiracies (German or Masonic) or coups d'états. If in our early writing, we confronted these interpretations each time we presented our evidence, after a while these old views of conspiracies aided by idiotic social forces became so discredited that we no longer needed to engage with them. Now the argument of "cannon fodder" is back, challenging a 30-plus-year consensus about the nature of the Russian working class in 1917. "Class theory" has remained important to me and this broad cohort of scholars as a heuristic tool for analyzing the phenomena of revolution and worker experience. The work of E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and others led us to seek to disentangle "class," to search for divisions as much [End Page 377] as commonalities.2 Demographic data—especially from censuses and other forms of social surveys—were necessary but not sufficient to draw conclusions. Mironov acknowledges as much when he recognizes that "the proletariat was also distinct from other groups in terms of its multilayered social structure" (354). Their political views could be varied. But he rejects the distinction among "vanguard," "intelligent," and "socialist-minded" workers and the mass of backward, patriarchal, alcoholic, thieving workers. Even the "vanguard" was insufficiently advanced to act politically without mentors from the intelligentsia, he says. For Mironov, the primary attribute of "workers" is their low level of literacy (drawn from census aggregates), which meant they were unable to think critically or analytically. Thus he considers "workers" to be a mass of deplorables who did not really understand what they were supporting. But let's take "multiple structure" a little more seriously. The more closely we look at work experience, the more we see many sources of difference and distinction. It is now well established for European, US, and Russian historiography that artisanal workers—laboring in small shops, possessing high levels of skills, proud of their ability to control their own working conditions—were the leaders of the earliest trade unions and other forms of labor organization.3 Contrary to Marx, the more complex organization of large factories did not predispose workers there to imagine parallel forms of labor organization. For labor historians, "skill" has become an [End Page 378] important analytical tool. However imprecisely we can distinguish among "skilled," "semiskilled," and "unskilled," labor historians have shown how workers who share these attributes react to economic and political challenges in similar ways, precisely because the nature of their work shapes the way they see their world.4 Certain types of trades were more conducive to drinking on the job: one cannot track alcoholism along a straight line from "backwards" to "politically aware."5 Gender (a category of analysis that came late to labor history and that troubles Mironov not at all) and generation complicate these divisions and our ability to generalize about structure. Many skilled male workers refused to believe that women could acquire skills at all. The different social roles of men and women also led them to different forms of activism, not neatly measurable in trade union membership statistics or arrest records.6 Historians of Russian labor have long noted the distinctiveness of patterns of labor migration, with men leading the way to the cities and living in bachelor communities.7 But they have disagreed on the political significance of this phenomenon. Did having "one foot in the city and industry...