Undeclared War Research Articles

Truman, Congress, and Korea: The Politics of America’s First Undeclared War, written by Larry Blomstedt

Truman, Congress, and Korea: The Politics of America’s First Undeclared War, written by Larry Blomstedt

APA Members Speak Out During Vietnam War

APA Members Speak Out During Vietnam War

Ett svenskt bakslag. Kontextskapande i diskussioner om Susan Faludis Backlash

In the 1990s, the publication of Susan Faludi’s Backlash. The Undeclared War Against American Women provoked discussions amongst literary critics in Sweden. Particularly feminist and Women’s Studies communities embraced the book’s thesis and probed whether Swedish women had experienced a backlash similar to the one revealed and conceptualised by Faludi. The aim of this article is to study the ways in which these communities used Backlash to interpret the political context in Sweden. A key player in the discussions of Backlash and in promoting the idea of a Swedish backlash was a newly established political network called Stödstrumporna (The Support Stockings). The network was initiated by a number of well-known Swedish feminists and as a reaction to the outcome of the general election in 1991, in which the representation of women in the Parliament decreased. In addition, recent national statistics had shown that the income gap between men and women had widened during the 1980’s. Stödstrumporna interpreted both of these events as examples of a broader backlash against Swedish women. My supposition is that the labelling of specific contexts as examples of backlash can be understood as a kind of context making. Through an intersectional analysis, this article inquires to what extent the naming of contexts produces ideas of nation and gender. In Historical Studies, context has been used as a way to conceptualise how historical events are products of the time and place in which they occur. Without disputing this view of context, this article argues that context to a large extent is a narrative produced by contemporary actors who have a vested interest in presenting a context, which promotes their own positions and agendas.

Wartime-Out for Prosecutors: Examining the Extent of the Wartime Statute of Limitations Act

Instances of contractor fraud became overwhelming to prosecutors in the wake of the First World War, compelling congress to enact a statute that granted prosecutors a powerful “time-out” that extended the statute of limitations. When federal prosecutors encountered the same problem in World War Two, Congress made this extension permanent, enacting the Wartime Suspension of Limitations Act (WSLA), which suspended the tolling of the statute of limitations on fraud against the United States until after three years after the war’s end. The WSLA went unused during the United States’ involvement in Korea and Vietnam and eventually resurfaced during the Persian Gulf War. During the Persian Gulf war, a district court held that the WSLA was intended for large conflicts and was not applicable to undeclared wars. The law was unsettled, however, as a separate district court disagreed with this ruling and held that the WSLA was applicable to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Confronted with widespread allegations of contractor fraud arising out of the United States’ involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and under the impression that the WSLA was not applicable to the current state of warfare, Congress decided to amend the WSLA in 2008 to ensure that federal prosecutors would have the time necessary to identify and prosecute fraud against the United States. This amendment left several questions unanswered including: (1) how courts should address issues of fraud that occured before the 2008 amendment and (2) whether courts should be concerned with a potentially indefinite tolling of the statute of limitations for these crimes. These problems have been brought to light by several discordant lower court opinions and a recently granted writ of certiorari that may soon provide some answers. This paper addresses these issues and suggests yet another amendment to the WSLA: one that balances society’s interest in preserving reasonable statutes of limitation with the need for effective prosecution of fraud during wartime.

‘Trotskii's Consul’: Peter Simonoff's Account of His Years as Soviet Representative in Australia (1918–21)

In the months and years immediately following the Bolshevik seizure of power, relations between the new Soviet state and Great Britain, and therefore Australia, were marked by a level of hostility not seen since the Crimean War of 1854–56. Indeed, during part of this period Britain and Soviet Russia were engaged in an undeclared war, to which Australia made its contribution in the form of troops in the British intervention force in the north, and naval support in the south; the destroyer HMAS Swan visited Kerch and Mariupol in December 1918, in support of the White armies in the region. Diplomatic relations were subject to great strain: in August 1918, Captain Francis Cromie, hero of the Royal Navy’s submarine fleet and British Naval Attache, perished — revolver in hand — when Bolshevik troops stormed the British Embassy in Petrograd. For some

DEVELOPMENT OF WARFARE AND COUNTER-TERRORISM

In the XX-th and early XXI-st century оnе phenomenon has more acutely occurred in social and political life and although it has been going along with human development over centuries, today it contraries to the objective needs of the time, gets alarming proportions and becomes the primary global problem. This phenomenon is terrorism. It changes its forms аnd it is attaining more and more dangerous character for people through spreading to more countries; it is creating new threats to national security and political stability of countries and international relations. Today terrorism is a form of undeclared war against civilization and freedom of democratic societies and countries.

Standing Up to Giants: Thailand’s Exit from 20th Century War Partnerships

This article examines the U.S.-Thai relationship through various changes, paying close attention to strategic military operations within the Kingdom and into neighbouring countries. Multifaceted impacts of American outsourcing and corporate expansion are discussed. Thailand’s role in the War on Terror amid domestic political turmoil and global economic uncertainty draw questions of the value of the 20 th century relationship model. Controversy about undeclared wars within the United States supports argument that Thailand should further remove itself from American-led foreign wars. As the ASEAN partnership continues to play a more dominant role in Thai government policy, with regional concerns more relevant than transpacific issues, Thailand is urged to revise legislation to protect its own security and interests. Such a focus is expected to reestablish Thailand as a regional leader.

Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture. By Kristina HornSheeler and Karrin VasbyAnderson. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013. 242 pp.

Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture. By Kristina Horn Sheeler and Karrin Vasby Anderson. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013. 242 pp. Why America yet to elect a woman president? By assembling the disparate discourses of women presidential candidates--campaign oratory, political journalism, punditry, and popular culture--Kristina Horn Sheeler and Karrin Vasby Anderson have written a solidly scholarly book that seeks answers to this question. In doing so, Woman President takes the reader from Victoria Woodhull's radical outspokenness to Hillary Clinton's carefully choreographed Internet announcement speech of 2008. The book focuses on the backlash against female presidential candidates, or their presidentiality, as the authors consistently write (p. 1). Sheeler and Anderson argue that there is an undeclared war (p. 3) against the American woman president, and in each chapter they present the many weapons used in that war. In the first chapter, the authors explore the constraint of the pioneer as a frame for women presidential candidates. This frame, the authors assert, has been applied to each woman candidate for the U.S. presidency since the nineteenth century (p. 17), and erodes her credibility by accentuating the oddity of a woman as president. The authors do a fine job of arguing that what seems like an accolade--being the first in uncharted waters--instead becomes a liability, as it more often than not makes each woman seem more a novelty than a viable candidate. The authors also deconstruct four women presidential candidates' announcement speeches to determine how each woman managed the pioneer metaphor to position herself as a presidential candidate--choosing Victoria Woodhull, Shirley Chisholm, Elizabeth Dole, and Carol Moseley-Braun as the rhetors. The longest chapter in the book, on fictional portrayals of the presidency, argues that viewing women presidents on screen is a propositional argument that women can serve as chief executives. The analysis asserts that television and film are good vehicles for negotiating the multiple perspectives of women and the presidency. This chapter is entertaining, but of course, one must first accept the argument that these screen portrayals matter. If the reader accepts that screen appearances do make an impact on the electability of women presidential candidates, then the authors' considerable attention to those portrayals will be convincing. In contrast, the chapter on presidential campaign oratory offers a less comprehensive analysis of the words of women candidates. A review of convention speeches of candidates from 1980 to 2008 demonstrates a consistent attempt to masculinize the male nominees as a means of showing their fitness for office. …

Interest-divergence and the colour of cutbacks: race, recession and the undeclared war on Black children

Drawing on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and illustrating with examples from the English system, the paper addresses the hidden racist dimension to contemporary education reforms and argues that this is a predictable and recurrent theme at times of economic crisis. Derrick Bell's concept of ‘interest-convergence’ argues that moments of racial progress are won when White power-holders perceive self-interest in accommodating the demands of minoritised groups; such moments are unusual and often short-lived. Presently, we are witnessing the reverse of this process; a period of pronounced interest-divergence, when White power-holders imagine that a direct advantage will accrue from the further exclusion and oppression of Black groups in society. Behind rhetoric that proclaims the need to improve educational standards for all and celebrates a commitment to closing the existing achievement gaps; in reality education reforms are being enacted that systematically disadvantage Black students and demonstrably widen educational inequalities.

Algeria: France's undeclared war

Invaded in 1830, populated by one million settlers who co-existed uneasily with nine million Arabs and Berbers , Algeria was different from other French colonies because it was administered as an integral part of France, in theory no different from Normandy or Brittany. The depth and scale of the colonization process explains why the Algerian War of 1954 to 1962 was one of the longest and most violent of the decolonization struggles. An undeclared war in the sense that there was no formal beginning of hostilities, the war produced huge tensions that brought down four governments, ended the Fourth Republic in 1958, and mired the French army in accusations of torture and mass human rights abuses. In carefully re-examining the origins and consequences of the conflict, Martin Evans argues that it was the Socialist led Republican Front, in power from January 1956 until May 1957, which was the defining moment in the war. Predicated on the belief in the universal civilizing mission of the Fourth Republic, coupled with the conviction that Algerian nationalism was feudal and religiously fanatical in character, the Republican Front dramatically intensified the war in the spring of 1956. Drawing upon previously classified archival sources as well as new oral testimonies, this book underlines the conflict of values between the Republican Front and Algerian nationalism, explaining how this clash produced patterns of thought and action, such as the institutionalization of torture and the raising of pro-French Muslim militias, which tragically polarized choices and framed all subsequent stages of the conflict.

Defamiliarizing the Demographic Doomsday Diagram

The two-dimensional diagram, which contains the “demographic doomsday curve” (DDC), is designated as the “demographic doomsday diagram”. In that diagram, the “global human population in billion” and the “time in year” are measured along the vertical axis/axes and the horizontal axis respectively. The DDC was introduced by Heinz von Foerster, an engineer of the University of Illinois, and his two co-authors in 1960. They projected/predicted that the “dynamic time-path of global human population” could be likened to an “elongated J-shaped curve” in a two-dimensional diagram. Such an elongated J-shaped curve is renamed as the DDC. The DDC indicates that global human population must increase exponentially, and ultimately reach infinity at some finite point of time, which is estimated to be Friday, 13 November 2026. But this article emphasizes that the defamiliarization of the DDC is inevitable and such inevitability will occur owing to the operation of the multitude of determinants. Defamiliarization means making/creating something, which is fresh, new, strange, or different from what is familiar and known. Among all the determinants of the defamiliarization of the DDC, the vital one is the undeclared war against women by men equipped with monopolistic power as well as monopolistic means, mechanisms and methods. Despite the continuing natural relation of complenentarity between men and women, such masculinized war against women, which started since the birth of the primitive society, still persists. By the principle of destructive self-interest, as opposed to enlightened self-interest, women are treated as “another species” like other sublunary non-human species. Such treatment compels the “woman species” to go through the four successive stages - rare species, vulnerable species, endangered species and extinct species. The awfully downward movement of woman species through the foregoing four stages gives rise to the eventual substitution of an “elongated L-shaped dynamic time-path of global human population” for an “elongated J-shaped DDC” in a two-dimensional diagram. Such an elongated L-shaped curve reveals that since the year 2026 A.D, the human population of the world will be steadily diminishing prior to the year 2050 A.D and eventually, since the year 2050 A.D, it will be stable at a minimum positive level. The secular constancy of global human population at a minimum positive level since the year 2050 A.D discloses that the global human population is locked/caught in a “low level population trap”.

Algeria: France’s Undeclared War by Martin Evans

Algeria: France’s Undeclared War by Martin Evans

Japan im Pazifischen Krieg: Herrschaftssystem, politische Willensbildung und Friedenssuche (review)

Reviewed by: Japan im Pazifischen Krieg: Herrschaftssystem, politische Willensbildung und Friedenssuche Peter Pantzer Japan im Pazifischen Krieg: Herrschaftssystem, politische Willensbildung und Friedenssuche. By Gerhard Krebs. Munich: Iudicium, 2010. 936 pages. Hardcover €98.00. Upon finishing this formidable tome of almost one thousand pages, my sense was that readers could only find it, as I did, emotionally stirring. The book—whose title translates into English as Japan in the Pacific War: The System of Government, the Political Decision-making Process, and the Quest for Peace—tells the story of the rise and fall, and the fortunes and misfortunes, of an influential Japanese elite—events constituting the most dramatic years in modern Japanese history. By choosing the ideals of civilization and enlightenment, Japan joined the West to become a responsible member of the international community, its diplomats an asset to the nation. The country then took a path that would lead to dire consequences. How did all this come about? Why, during the 1930s, did Japan turn so militaristic? Aggressive toward its neighbors and ruthlessly exploiting the interests of other powers, Japan justified its crimes with a litany of excuses about their necessity for security and prosperity while suffocating its population under the guise of patriotism. Gerhard Krebs focuses on the Pacific War and on the opportunities Japan missed to maintain a peaceful status quo. The book begins at a time when the clear leadership that circumstances called for was not forthcoming and foreign relations had become conspicuously messy. The government, under the control of the army and navy, who—as the constitution unfortunately allowed—overturned the cabinet ad libitum, was caught up in the wrong kind of choices. Britain and the United States could no longer accept Japan's expansionism to the south and into the Asian continent, especially not its undeclared war in China. The situation [End Page 193] was worsened by Japan's growing alignment with the totalitarian regime in Nazi Germany. It was obvious the country was playing with fire. Joined by the Netherlands, including the Dutch Indies, Britain and the United States imposed an embargo on imports, which hit Japan hard as it badly needed energy and natural resources. The sanctions were not intended as mere economic measures but were an unambiguous strategy to force Japan to abandon her belligerent actions. But by August 1941, when China had been at war for four years and Europe was fearful that its own war would widen, Japan's radical militarists were already bent on taking Japan even further along its hostile path. The book aims to analyze the decision-making processes and to offer a close-up view of the councils, boards, and governmental bodies that in one way or another served the public interest. In doing so, it draws attention to new sources that have only become available in recent years. They include material hitherto unknown, often because people were hesitant to go public with diaries and records—whether because they were unaware of their historical value or reluctant to reveal themselves in a bad light, or out of consideration for their colleagues and their families. The first chapter discusses the constitutional background and lays out the main players. Many democratic institutions still in existence are easily recognizable, though of course they were under pressure from the military at the time. The emperor was surrounded by a considerable body of court officials, among them the minister of the Imperial Household (kunaidaijin), the lord keeper of the privy seal (naidaijin), the lord high chamberlain (jijūchō), and the aide-de-camp to the emperor (jijūbukanchō), the highest attendant to report on military affairs. From 1933, it was customary for former prime ministers to be selected as jūshin, serving as informal advisers to the emperor and replacing the select group of elder statesmen who had performed that function as genrō, a designation established in the early days of the Meiji government. Also near to the emperor were the Privy Council (sūmitsuin), and last but not least the Imperial Princes, who did not always agree with the emperor but were in a favorable position to tell him the truth when circumstances required. The princes were respected and were...

Guiding Public Opinion on the Far Eastern Crisis, 1931–1941: The American State Department and Propaganda on the Sino–Japanese Conflict

From 1931 to 1941, when China and Japan were at undeclared war, China's propaganda was fairly well-circulated in America through her American friends who played a leading role in shaping American opinions on the Far Eastern crisis. But the United States State Department maintained a neutral stance toward the Sino–Japanese conflict until after 1939 and considered the pro-Chinese opinion not so much a national consensus for policy consideration as a partisan view propped up by propaganda groups. Thus, the State Department guarded its Asian policy from the pressure of propaganda activities and partisan opinions on the Asian conflict, whilst utilising them occasionally as tools of diplomacy toward China and Japan. This article examines the State Department's attitude toward public opinion and propaganda on the Far Eastern conflict from 1931 to 1941 to illustrate how American officials handled partisan opinions on a foreign crisis when most of the information on foreign policy was privately initiated and circulated.

Backlash: From Nine To Five to The Devil Wears Prada

Susan Faludi's 1991 bestselling book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women described the position of women in the United States that year. Faludi pointed out the media pundits who dec...

The Deception Dividend: FDR's Undeclared War

When do leaders resort to deception to sell wars to their publics? Dan Reiter and Allan Stam have advanced a “selection effects” explanation for why democracies win the wars they initiate: leaders, because they must secure public consent first, “select” into those wars they expect to win handily. In some cases, however, the “selection effect” breaks down. In these cases, leaders, for realist reasons, are drawn toward wars where an easy victory is anything but assured. Leaders resort to deception in such cases to preempt what is sure to be a contentious debate over whether the use of force is justified by shifting blame for hostilities onto the adversary. The events surrounding the United States' entry into World War II is useful in assessing the plausibility of this argument. President Franklin Roosevelt welcomed U.S. entry into the war by the fall of 1941 and attempted to manufacture events accordingly. An important implication from this finding is that deception may sometimes be in the national interest.

Beyond Rivalry?: Rethinking Community in View of Apocalyptical Violence

Beyond Rivalry?Rethinking Community in View of Apocalyptical Violence Andreas Oberprantacher (bio) But the republic of crime must also be the republic of the suicide of criminals, and down to the last among them—the sacrifice of the sacrificers unleashed in passion. —Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community The Crisis and Apocalyptic Intensification of Rivalry At first it seemed as if the "rivalry between two rates of speed"1 set at the center of Derrida's essay "No Apocalypse, Not Now," published more than twenty years ago in Diacritics, had finally come to an end, at least in the form of a general and unmistakable division of the world into two competing geopolitical units. Following the breakdown of the USSR, the former super-enemy of the industrialized Northwest, that part of the world that claimed and still claims to be the sole referent of the adjective free, the dynamics of ideological rivalry had, at first, lost considerable momentum. After half a century of mostly symmetrical even if undeclared wars, the period from 1989 to 1991 was truly significant, [End Page 175] for it marked a moment of epistemological crisis, a moment when political fractions that derived their identity from a binary tension were all of a sudden stunned: no visible enemy anymore to deter, no willing scapegoat to blame, just eschatological abandonment. The aftershocks of this historical event can be traced in today's commentaries on and analyses of the political situation: It is certainly no coincidence that two of the most influential US-American political analysts, Samuel Huntington and Bruce Hoffman, both at the same time direct their attention toward questions about the conditions of social identity and cohesion, though from inverted perspectives. In his recent book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (2004), Huntington bemoans the "deconstruction of the American identity,"2 as it challenges—along with certain political developments—"the substance, and the desirability of this concept of America."3 Huntington's fervent interest in US-American identity and his call for its renewal become readily comprehensible when read against the background of his concern that an existential threat might again be imminent, possibly in the form of jihadist terrorism. In Huntington's argument, however, the United States's potential confrontation with militant Islamist movements—the explicit subtext of his book—is not assessed only in terms of political risks and military expenditures; for Huntington, this confrontation also holds out a unique chance of rediscovering one's own (lost, forgotten) identity. Revealing himself as an attentive reader of Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political, Huntington argues that "the absence of an ideological threat produced an absence of purpose. . . . The ideal enemy for America would be ideologically hostile, racially and culturally different, and militarily strong enough to pose a credible threat to American security."4 While Huntington is concerned with reaffirming and securing a phantasmagoric vision of the United States's past glory, Hoffman, on the other hand, may be mentioned as a political analyst deeply worried about the inverse aspect of the epistemological crisis, i.e., worried by the fact that "the United States has utterly failed to fulfill the timeless admonition to 'know your enemy'"5 by declaring an all too abstract global war on terrorism. In his commentary, published in March 2007 under the title "Fighting Blind: We Can't Win if We Don't Know the Enemy" in the Washington Post, he argues that a long-term strategy is desperately needed to identify "our adversaries, who are much too elusive and complicated to be vanquished by mere decapitation."6 Taking Huntington's and Hoffman's positions seriously as paradigmatic examples of a wider and well-established discursive strategy that calls for a renewed need for binary-opposed collective identities—us/them; the coalition [End Page 176] of the willing/the axis of evil—in order to affirm a state of potentially ubiquitous and highly moralized rivalry, one may well argue with Schmitt that "a new nomos of the earth" is immanent.7 In Schmitt's understanding, such a new paradigm of warfare will no longer be characterized by relative understandings of enmity, but by enemies declared "totally criminal...

Anti-, Neo-, Post-, and Proto-: Conservative Hybrids, Ironic Reversals, and Global Terror(ism)*

Conservatism has always been a reluctant ideology, more a pragmatic response to events than a coherent system of fundamental principles. The Newest Right, which has now emerged with renewed vigor in America, Europe, and beyond, is no exception. It continues to invoke powerful traditions and deeply rooted identities as the enduring foundations of social order and political authority. However, conservatives today also refuse to set limits on personal ambitions, economic programs, government activities, and even leverage their fundamental values. In America, the “War on Terror”— an undeclared war against an unknown enemy— has unleashed a global politics, indeed, a global crusade, that is redefining national borders and constitutional doctrines with astonishing speed. In this article, I draw on four prefixes—” anti,” “neo,” “post,” and “proto,”—to characterize the implications of this newest conservatism without limits for the continuing evolution of conservative ideology. I claim that the Newest Right has invoked an unprecedented concept of national community, a homeland whose borders they would secure by terror, now on a global scale. This new conservatism gone global, I argue, poses a greater threat to democracy than its presumed enemies ever could.

Science

We live in an unethical society, but perhaps all societies are unethical. It may be a normal condition for human organizations that rules, like phonograph records, are made to be broken. There is no need here to litanize the obvious unethical conduct that surrounds us daily. We have survived a philandering President, the Blue Wall of silence of the police (who will not police themselves), insider traders on Wall Street, and an unconscionable, invasive, undeclared war with a non-threatening country at peace with us half a world away. The list is endless and the entries all too familiar, but the point here is that along with the moral backsliders and others at the bottom grabbing for more than they earn or deserve, our leaders commonly indulge in unethical conduct at the top.In its most general form, unethical conduct by our leaders is simply another form of power politics. It is a way for those in the establishment to stay established. It is not enough that they can make the rules (and laws) to suit themselves and then selectively enforce them to help themselves: For some reason, they feel free if not compelled to break the rules as well. Perhaps this is all as obvious as unethical conduct is itself, but to those super-egoists who believe in ideals, there is a need to address the most serious problem confronting our civilization. Surprisingly, it is not a problem of politics-nor of economics, social values, ecology, or overpopulation. It is a problem of ethics (or lack thereof). It is the question of whether or not we are going to abide by our own standards of conduct. And, more to the point, are our leaders going to do so?This is a more perplexing problem for those of us in the scientific community because we are the educated elite of society. Only the medical profession could possibly rival us in formal education, and we might justly claim physicians to be our own. However, for all our formal training, something is obviously missing. Somewhere along the way, some of us got lost in a maze of egoism and strayed from what we are supposed to be doing. Worse yet, so have some of our leaders.1Like all academicians, scientists are supposed to be searching for the truth. All the codification of methodology in science is directed toward that end, but without the guiding ethic of an innocent commitment to truth, all the intellectual training in the world is wasted if not perverted by those committed to promoting their own images. It may be that those with Machiavellian personalities simply have risen to the posts of authority in science as they have in most other fields. They are the people who crave power and love to wield it, so the others, who are devoted to their ideals, let the power mongers have their sway, but beyond that, a number of factors built into the minds of scientists and the fabric of science contribute to its corruption.We can start by recognizing the occasional failure of conscience of individual scientists themselves and then deal with the pressure generated by the publish or perish syndrome and the failure of the several institutional mechanisms which are supposed to promote self-correction but foster corruption instead. Among these are the referee system for evaluating articles submitted to journals, the peer review process for judging grant proposals, the practice of replicating reported experimental results, professional organizations' disciplinary processes, and the role of the media in putting the spotlight of attention on those who err.Of all of these, the conscience of the individual scientist is most crucial. Indeed it is central in that all of the institutional mechanisms are effected by people according to their consciences. It is rather trite but nonetheless impor- tant to note that most scientists are ethical most of the time. While we focus here on the constant failings of intellectual morality among the few and the occasional lapses among the many, we must recognize that the individual conscience is the first bastion of ethical conduct in science. …

Undeclared War and the Future of U.S. Foreign Policy by Kenneth B. Moss

Undeclared War and the Future of U.S. Foreign Policy <i>by Kenneth B. Moss</i>