Cannon Fodder Research Articles

Technologies of War, Media, and Dissent in the Post 9/11 Work of Krzysztof Wodiczko

In the U.S. war on Iraq and the elusive, euphemistic ‘global war on terrorism’ manufactured in response to the events of September 11, video and surveillance have been used in radically diverse ways, eroding the line between public and private in the service of state control, political recruitment, terror, individual curiosity and radical critique. These technologies have been used to scrutinise the body by government agencies, publicise beheadings by Iraqi insurgents, send global messages by Osama Bin Laden and produce a recruitment tool by Al-Qaeda now on the Internet.1 Many independent agents have produced private videos that have found their way to a global audience via Internet sites such as YouTube, and, of course, the news media rely on video, subject to the pressures of state control. Artists, too, draw on the technologies of video, surveillance and the media to produce critical works about the troubling and often invisible effects of war. In this essay I examine some of these effects, focusing on the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko and his post 9/11 video, sound and vehicle projects, which mobilise war and media technologies in order to perform a radical critique of the war on terror, particularly the political repression it has unleashed against immigrants in American society and the frightening impulses and enduring damage it has effected on soldiers who function as both perpetrators and cannon fodder in this imperialist adventure.

You Can Teach An Old Revolutionary Historiography New Tricks: Regions, Popular Movements, Culture, and Gender in Mexico, 1820–1940

You Can Teach An Old Revolutionary Historiography New TricksRegions, Popular Movements, Culture, and Gender in Mexico, 1820–1940 Mark Wasserman (bio) Plutarco Elías Calles and the Mexican Revolution. By Jürgen Buchenau. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Pp. 275. $34.95 paper. Bandit Nation: A History of Outlaws and Cultural Struggle in Mexico, 1810–1920. By Chris Frazer. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Pp. 243. $45.00. Bitter Harvest: The Social Transformation of Morelos, Mexico, and the Origins of the Zapatista Revolution, 1840–1910. By Paul Hart. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Pp. 328. $42.50 cloth. Sons of the Sierra: Juárez, Díaz, and the People of Ixtlán, Oaxaca, 1855– 1920. By Patrick J. McNamara. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. 296. $24.95 paper. The Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise and Meat in Mexico City, 1890–1917. By Jeffrey M. Pilcher. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Pp. 245. $29.95 paper. The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940. Edited by Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. 363. $23.95 paper. The major innovations in the historiography of the Mexican Revolution over the past three decades lie in four linked areas. First, historians concluded—perhaps following the advice given by Luis González y González in his famous Invitación a la microhistoria (1972)—that we can understand the revolution only if we explore what occurred at the state and local levels. Patrick McNamara deftly expresses this idea in his Sons of the Sierra: "Like the narrow dirt road that connects Ixtlán with Oaxaca City . . . the interconnection between local and national history in Mexico has always moved in two directions" (4). Second, and this is an outgrowth of the first, historians discovered that the clases populares not only were the cannon fodder of the conflict but shaped it as well. For all the revisionism that swept the landscape of Mexican history after the sinister and tragic [End Page 260] events of 1968, and for all the wrong turns that the postrevolutionary regime took toward authoritarianism (in the form of a one-party state) in 1929 and toward corruption and trickle-down development after 1946, the revolution itself was very much the work of subaltern classes. The more that historians investigated the revolution at the local level, the clearer it became that, whether it succeeded or not, it was the product of workers and peasants. Third, as historians looked more closely at the grassroots revolution, it became apparent that the initial protests and subsequent long period of violence did not arise from strictly economic and political factors; instead, there was a strong cultural element. Culture was also crucial in the long period of reconstruction that comprised the second stage of the revolution, from 1920 to 1940. Issues of local autonomy, for example, had as much to do with maintaining custom and tradition as with politics. Finally, local and state researchers revealed the crucial role of gender in shaping the discourse and structure, if not the events, of the revolution. Women, these studies made clear, were fervent revolutionaries, died in the names of various causes, and helped to formulate the outcome of decades of upheaval. Underlying the various reexaminations of the revolution was also the drive to revisit the periodization of all of Mexican history. In the 1960s, Richard Morse recommended a new chronological framework for Latin America.1 Most pertinent to our discussion, he suggested that we look at the era from 1760 through 1920 that he labels the colonial period, which runs from the Bourbon reforms through the end of the modern export boom in agricultural commodities and minerals. Dozens of dissertations and first books employing this breakdown followed. By the 1990s, however, periodization again came under review as regional and local historians (of Mexico, at least) questioned the notion that the origins of the revolution lay only as far back as the Porfiriato (1876–1911). The new historiography looked to the early postindependence era, 1821 to the 1860s, or even further back, to the mid-eighteenth century, for...

Islam and the Abolition of Slavery

This book delves into Islam and its connection with slavery in historical andetiological terms by presenting the synthesis in an almost axiomatic mannerthat “slavery has always been a part and parcel of the basic core and a centraltenet of Islam.” The author relies on various scholarly sources, including theQur’an and the hadiths, with the bulk of information coming from non-Islamic sources. Providing quotes from various scholars (e.g., Lewis, Muir,Berlioux, Hughes, Garrett, Margoliouth, Roberts, and DeJong) (pp. 16-17),Clarence-Smith brings out of a set of synergistic syllogisms on the assumptiveplane that the Qur’an failed to eliminate slavery, that removing this practicewould shake the faith itself, that the Prophet was totally unaware of theconcept of abolition as an idea as well as in practice, and, importantly, thatthe whole Islamic social structure with its attendant system was based on atype of slavery associated with the organization of the harem.Hence, from the author’s point of view, Islam in essence kept slaverywithin a massive infrastructure and played a negligible role in its demise.Moreover, the system was abolished mostly due to western effort rather thanany purely religious guidelines or impetus. This organized form of slaveryincluded singing girls, concubines, common soldiers from the ranks of warcaptives as well as non-war captives, cannon fodder, bond maidens, haremguards, and chattel similar to livestock – collectively often reaching into themillions. While there were examples of slaves rising to the position of amir,such instances are exceptions and extremely rare.The author defends his argument’s basic propositions in eleven highlycondensed chapters. The first chapter, “Introduction,” basically details hiscentral thesis with supporting arguments, including the intensity of the slavesystems as highlighted above. The concluding segment, “Envoi,” outlinesthe current responsibilities of different religious groups for a greater cooperationand unity toward the process of slavery’s final elimination and apologizingfor past misdeeds ...

The War on Terrorism and the Loss of Freedom

The War on Terrorism and the Loss of Freedom Erwin Chemerinsky (bio) Since September 11, 2001, one of the worst aspects of American history has been repeating itself. For over 200 years, repression has been the response to threats to security. In hindsight, every such instance was clearly a grave error that restricted our most precious freedoms for no apparent gain. I have no doubt that the actions of the George W. Bush Administration and the Ashcroft and Gonzales Justice Departments will, in hindsight, be viewed in the same way. The legacy of suppression in times of crisis began early in American history. In 1798, in response to concerns about survival of the country, Congress enacted the Alien and Sedition Act, which made falsely criticizing the government or its officials a federal crime. The government used the law to persecute its critics and jailed people for what today would be regarded as the mildest of statements. Within a few years after the election of 1800, Congress repealed the law and President Thomas Jefferson pardoned those whom the government convicted. The right to freedom of speech was lost and nothing was gained by the Alien and Sedition Act. [End Page 55] During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Additionally, the government imprisoned dissidents for criticizing the way the government was fighting the war. There is no evidence that this aided the fighting of the Civil War in any way. Ultimately, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus (Ex parte Milligan 1866). During World War I, the government aggressively prosecuted critics of the war. One man went to jail for ten years for circulating a leaflet arguing that the draft was unconstitutional (Schenck v. U.S.). Socialist leader Eugene Debs was sentenced to prison for simply saying to his audience, "You are good for more than cannon fodder" (Debs v. U.S.). During this period, the successful Bolshevik revolution in Russia sparked great fear of Communists in America. Attorney General Mitchell Palmer launched a massive effort to round up and deport aliens living in the United States. The government summarily deported and separated individuals from their families without any semblance of due process. During World War II, the government forcibly interned 110,000 Japanese Americans in what President Franklin Roosevelt called "concentration camps" (Manchester 1974, 300). The internment uprooted adults and children, aliens and citizens from their lifelong homes and placed them behind barbed wire. The government charged not one Japanese American with espionage, treason, or any crime that threatened security. There is not a shred of evidence that the unprecedented invasion of rights accomplished anything useful. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. U.S. (1944) expressed the need to defer to the executive branch of government in wartime and upheld the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. The McCarthy era saw enormous persecution of those suspected of being Communists. People lost jobs, and flimsy allegations ruined their lives. In the leading case during the era, United States v. Dennis, the Supreme Court approved 20-year prison sentences for individuals for the crime of "conspiracy to advocate the overthrow of the government" for teaching works by Marx and Lenin. This brief recitation of history should give pause to any efforts to take away civil liberties in this new time of crisis. To appraise what has occurred [End Page 56] since September 11 in this context is crucial. More than four years have elapsed since September 11, a period longer than World War II, World War I, or the Civil War. There now have been many cases challenging aspects of the U.S. government's War on Terrorism. Much has been written about the Supreme Court's decisions in this area—Rasul v. Bush, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld v. Padilla. However, not nearly enough attention has been focused on lower court cases and the threat they pose to civil liberties. In this article, I want to consider a few examples concerning secrecy, freedom of speech, and detentions. The pattern in each of these cases is the same: federal courts of appeals uncritically accepted the government's...

The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I

In this sweeping historical canvas, Thomas Fleming undertakes nothing less than a drastic revision of our experience in World War I. He reveals how the British and French duped Wilson into thinking the war was as good as won, and there would be no need to send an army overseas. He describes a harried president making speech after speech proclaiming America's ideals while supporting espionage and sedition acts that sent critics to federal prisons. And he gives a harrowing account of how the Allies did their utmost to turn the American Expeditionary Force into cannon fodder on the Western Front.Thoroughly researched and dramatically told, The Illusion of Victory offers compelling testimony to the power of a president's visionary ideals-as well as a starkly cautionary tale about the dangers of applying them in a war-maddened world.

Protégés, clients, cannon fodder: Civilians in the calculus of militias

(2000). Proteges, clients, cannon fodder: Civilians in the calculus of militias. International Peacekeeping: Vol. 7, Managing Armed Conflicts in the 21st Century, pp. 107-128.

"Print the Legend": John Wayne and Postwar American Culture

Randy Roberts and James S. Olson. John Wayne: American. New York: Free Press, 1995. 772 pp. Notes, film index, bibliography, and index. $32.50 (cloth); University of Nebraska Press, $25.00 (cloth).

I, Pierre Seel, deported homosexual: a memoir of Nazi terror

As a young man in German-occupied France, Pierre Seel appeared on a list of accused homosexuals and was sent to an interment camp. He managed to survive the war, spending most of it as cannon fodder on the Russian front. Available for the first time in English, this account of Seel's experiences provides an invaluable contribution to the literature of the Holocaust.

Why Does Military Combat Experience Adversely Affect Marital Relations?

Using data on 2,101 Vietnam veterans, we investigate the ways in which combat decreases marital quality and stability. We test three models: (a) Factors that propel men into combat also make them poor marriage material; (b) combat causes problems such as post-traumatic stress symptoms or antisocial behavior that increase marital adversity; and (c) combat intensifies premilitary stress and antisocial behavior that then negatively affect marriages. All three models were supported. Combat crates stress and antisocial behavior, but only antisocial behavior has direct effects on marriage; all ether effects are indirect. Four generations of United States men have been exposed to military combat during this century. Typically each-war has been followed by an increase in the divorce rate (Pavalko & Elder, 1990; South, 1985). While this increase cannot be attributed solely to the behavior of military veterans, there is some indication that veterans contributed disproportionately to the immediate post-World War II rise in divorce rates when compared with nonveterans (Pavalko & Elder, 1990). Extant research indicates that life disruption (education, career, and marriage) is one factor that accounts for the increase in marital dissolution among veterans (Card, 1983; Pavalko & Elder, 1990) and that combat exposure is another factor (Kulka et al., 1990; Laufer & Gallops, 1985; Pavalko Elder, 1990; Stellman, Stellman, & Sommer, 1988). While the strains of long periods of separation (Rindfuss B Stephen, 1990) and economic stress caused by delays in education and career (Voydanoff, 1990) clearly affect marital stability, the relationship between combat exposure and marital dissolution is less clear. Questions regarding the latter relationship guide the investigation reported here. Rather than focus exclusively on divorce, we examine the relationship between combat experience and a wide range of indicators of marital quality including divorce, marital separation for reasons other than divorce, infidelity, and abuse. We employ the more encompassing term, marital adversity, to describe our dependent variable. Using a representative sample of more than 2,000 Vietnam veterans, we explore three possible models of the relationship between combat exposure and marital adversity. First, we consider a spurious relationship model. Individuals most likely to be exposed to battle also are more likely to be people who are poor marriage material. People who are assigned to combat by others or who volunteer for battle may be more likely to have psychological problems or to engage in antisocial acts before they ever get to battle. Troubled men might be more likely to experience combat for several reasons. First, if preservice emotional problems or antisocial behaviors are in any way associated with lower aptitude scores at entry into the military, then assignment to the less complex combat positions as compared to technical noncombat jobs is likely (Laurence & Ramsberger, 1983). Second, men with preservice emotional problems and/or early antisocial behaviors most likely do not have the skills necessary to manipulate the system to avoid combat once a combat assignment is made (Baskir & Strauss, 1978). Finally, at the battlefield level, these men might be viewed as less competent soldiers and thus might be more likely to be assigned to serve as bait in order to draw the enemy out of cover. These assignments would probably lead them to be exposed to more combat than the typical soldiers. (See Helmer, 1974, for a discussion of the frequent use of the cannon fodder strategy in Vietnam.) Men with a history of antisocial behavior might also be more likely to volunteer for combat experiences as a continuation of their earlier risk-taking behaviors. These same qualities that propel men toward battle also make them poor marriage partners (Booth & Edwards, 1992; Kitson & Sussman, 1982), lead them to select inadequate or inappropriate partners (e. …

A materialistic view of men's and women's attitudes towards war

Women are victims in all wars. Men plan them, they train for them and they conduct them. They have the capacity to inflict pain and death, destroy people and territories. The different roles of men and women in wars dispose the two sexes to different thinking, feeling and action with regard to warfare. A similar difference of interests exists between men and women with respect to the army. For women, their children, most often sons, have made up the armies of history. As cannon fodder, women's work and life intentions are disrespected and destroyed. For men, the army consists of comrades who become the most important people for them because their life- and death-chances are bound up with their fellow soldiers. Finally, through history the owners of territories have been men. Women have very seldom held land, property or slaves. More often they have been sold, captured, stolen or even given away. These three contrasting relationships toward warmaking, the army, and territories provide perspectives for men and women when they discuss military matters and policies for peace.

Parties, Connections, and Parliamentary Politics, 1689-1714: Review and Revision

The notion that parliamentary politics in the days of William III and Queen Anne revolved around the conflict of the Whig and Tory parties is deeply rooted in the historiography of the later seventeenth century. Nourished by the many contemporary references to the existence and activities of the Whig and Tory parties, the “two-party concept” had its first flowering in the nineteenth century and came to full blossom in the early decades of the twentieth in the works of W. C. Abbott, K. G. Feiling, W. T. Morgan, and G. M. Trevelyan.The canons of orthodoxy of one generation of historians, however, have often proved to be little more than the cannon fodder of their successors. In this case, it was one of Abbott's own students, Robert Walcott, who has led the way in the task of reinterpretation. As early as 1941, Walcott — remarking upon the obscurity enveloping accounts of party groupings in the period 1689 to 1714 — advanced the hypothesis that “the description of party organization under William and Anne which Trevelyan suggested in his Romanes Lecture on the two-party system is less applicable to our period than the detailed picture of eighteenth-century politics which emerges from Professor Namier's volumes on the Age of Newcastle.”Walcott's invocation of Sir Lewis's studies of mid-eighteenth-century politics was, of course, a testimony to the advance in historical methodology that had gained prominence with the appearance in 1929 of The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III.

Time and Motion Study Volume 11 Issue 7

WHEN John I. Snyder Jr. flew over from the United States he probably did not relish the Cassandra rôle into which circumstances had forced him. As president of U.S. Industries he gave one of the most depressing addresses of modern times. Since his firm is a large manufacturer of automation machines it was probably natural that he should say: ‘Automation is inevitable. Its use is rapidly increasing. Positive action by the makers of automation machines must be taken now to preserve the human values which could otherwise become cannon fodder of the automation barrage.’

Timothy Dwight and His Connecticut

Previous articleNext article No AccessTimothy Dwight and His ConnecticutPercy H. BoyntonPercy H. Boynton Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 38, Number 2Nov., 1940 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/388473 PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Lessons of the War in Shifting Labor

TO one who has struggled night and day for many months over the problem of mobilizing and demobilizing war labor there can be but one answer to the query suggested for the title of this article by the Editor of these Annals. Without an industrial army of from four to ten members for each soldier, military forces would be literally cannon fodder. Without food, clothing, shelter, transportation and ordnance furnished, not by levy upon occupied territory, but by well organized forces at home, the modern army is entirely helpless. At the lowest estimate made by statisticians, that of four industrial workers per fighter, our army of three and a half million was demanding in November, 1918, the full productive efforts of fourteen million persons, or two-fifths of the entire number of men, women and children computed to be engaged in gainful occupations in this country. To attempt to recruit and properly place this number of workers by any other than federal means, at the same time drawing from the ranks of wage-earners for the armed forces, would have been as impossible as to have left the formation of our army and navy entirely to private and state initiative. The need of a federal employment service for mobilization and demobilization is a lesson of the war that would seem to require no demonstration. Yet the actual methods by which workers secured employment and employers labor before the war and in the early months of the war before appropriations were made for the government emergency employment service throw light on various phases of the general problem and suggest other lessons that are pertinent to the subject. The successes and failures of the United States Employment Service in attempting to use every available method and employment agency in recruiting labor as rapidly as our expanding war program necessitated, throw still more light and suggest other lessons that should contribute to any discussion of after-the-war handling of problems of employment meas-