War Aims Research Articles

Empirical Studies of Russian–Ukrainian War Related Fake News (Part 2)

The Russian–Ukrainian war, which broke out on 24 February 2022, resulted in several paradigm shifts in cyberwarfare. One aspect of these changes is psychological operations. Russia and Ukraine have conducted extensive psychological operations campaigns to fulfil their war aims, which have since been intense along modified objectives. This series of studies examines the impact of war-related fake news through various empirical research. In the first part of the paper, the authors read the emergence of psychological operations and related terms in the international academic literature using network analysis methodology. In the second part of the paper, the authors use sentiment and network analysis to investigate the spread of different fake news. In the third study, the authors measure the attitudes toward the perception of the Hungarian Defence Forces from the perspective of the war in the neighbouring country.

Tonga and the British Empire in the Great War: Loyalty and Neutrality

ABSTRACT The historiography of Tonga in the First World War is very sparse. It is dominated by Elizabeth Wood-Ellem’s authoritative biography of Queen Salote (Tupou III). She does not make use of the Colonial Office files stored in the British National Archives and underestimates the threat that the War posed to Tonga’s autonomy in its association with the British Empire. The Tongan government under King Tupou II and Prime Minister Tu‘ivakano felt threatened not by Germany but by Great Britain and by New Zealand. They warmly endorsed British war aims because they could identify them with the defence of small, vulnerable nations such as Belgium and Tonga. They hoped to hold London to that principle. While ostentatiously supporting the war effort, they took no measures against the large German commercial community. Tonga had, legally, to be considered neutral. London required a change in this policy in 1916. At the same time a new, inexperienced, and zealous acting consul, G.B.W. Smith-Rewse, manufactured a political crisis to force the dismissal of Tu‘ivakano and the disempowerment of the king. Wood-Ellem largely ignores this crisis, and it is now almost completely forgotten. Smith-Rewse mishandled it and was not backed by his more cautious superiors. In 1917 a substantive consul, Islay McOwan, took over and restored the close co-operation with the king, which he had established on a previous posting to Tonga. Tu‘ivakano remained prime minister, but strengthened his anti-German rhetoric, which he could now link with the statements of American as well as British aims in January 1918. The new policy survived the unexpected death of Tupou II and the succession of his totally inexperienced teenaged daughter in April 1918. This article will try to show how Tongan autonomy was strengthened by the war and how Tonga was one of the few states to profit from the ‘Wilsonian moment’.

The Extermination of Red Army Soldiers in German Captivity, 1941–1945: Causes, Patterns, Dimensions

ABSTRACT Captive Red Army soldiers made up the majority of victims of Nazi Germany’s starvation policy against Soviet civilians and other non-combatants and thus constituted the largest single victim group of the German war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. Indeed, Soviet prisoners of war were the largest victim group of all National Socialist annihilation policies after the European Jews. Before the launch of Operation Barbarossa, it was clear to the Wehrmacht planning departments on exactly what scale they could expect to capture Soviet troops. Yet, they neglected to make the necessary preparations for feeding and sheltering the captured soldiers, who were viewed by the economic staffs and the military leadership alike as direct competitors of German troops and the German home front for precious food supplies. The number of extra mouths to feed was incompatible with German war aims. The obvious limitations on their freedom of movement and the relative ease with which large numbers could be segregated and their rations controlled were crucial factors in the death of over 3 million Soviet POWs, the vast majority directly or indirectly as a result of deliberate policies of neglect, undernourishment, and starvation while in the ‘care’ of the Wehrmacht. The most reliable figures for the mortality of Soviet POWs in German captivity reveal that up to 3.3 million died from a total of just over 5.7 million captured between June 1941 and February 1945 — a proportion of almost 58 percent. Of these, 2 million were already dead by the beginning of February 1942. In English, there is still neither a single monograph nor a single edited volume dedicated to the subject. This article now provides the first detailed stand-alone synthesis in that language addressing the whole period from 1941 to 1945.

Strengthening the EU’s defence cooperation

In an expeditiously changing world, security challenges have become more intricate, multifaceted and complex. The 21st century is an epoch of strategic competition and multisided relations. The influence and rate of occurrence of hybrid security threats are constantly rising and deepening. World is in era of transition, characterized by creating new dynamics by emerging players along with significant shift of geopolitical and economic power, and currently, global attention is drawn to the Russian aggression against Ukraine, which is the consequent catalyst for the EU states, obligating them to take more responsibility and improve security and defence. Russia does not use force only to dominate on Ukraine, but this war aims to reverse and strike down western dominance - it is a big threat-economically, militarily, and politically. In an international competition, other powers are challenging the European countries’ ability to protect their interests and values that was the motivation for the idea of collective security building called "strategic sovereignty". For this reason, both defence and security fields are essentially important for the European Union. The EU leaders have long been trying to improve common defence policy - the European Union External Action Service in 2011, and later in 2016, the EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker called for a common defence fund, a “European headquarters.“ In March 2022, the EU council approved the Strategic Compass. The Compass gives the European Union an ambitious plan of action for strengthening the EU's security and defence policy by 2030 (EU, 2022. French President Emmanuel Macron urged Europe to invest in its own collective security framework in the face of Russian military moves on the bloc’s doorstep - "Europe needs to finally build its own collective security framework on our continent." We argue about the prospects of collective security and the fact that it may now be time for the EU member States to take the necessary decisions.

Woodrow Wilson's Influence on WWI and the Paris Peace Treaties: Assessing the Impact and Challenges of a Visionary Leader

World War I (WWI) had a big impact on territories in Asia, Africa, and Europe and led to the fall of some monarchies, resulting in the rise of empires like the British and French. WWII broke out despite these changes and established a new world order, with the Soviet Union and the United States becoming the dominant global superpowers. The United States played an important role in ending WWI and later in the peace negotiations through President Woodrow Wilson (Cooper Jr, 2008). In this passage, I will assess Woodrow Wilson's influence on the war aims and the Paris peace treaties.

Gestalt theory in 20th-century history.

During the century from the 1890 publication of Ehrenfels's proposition on Gestaltqualitäten to the 1989 dissolution of the European states governed by Marxist orthodoxy, Gestalt theory was drawn into the political fray in several ways. It was grotesquely misappropriated during the Nazi regime in support of race, territorial expansion, and war aims. On the other side, because it was seen as having a subjectivist taint, the Gestalt approach was anathema where dialectical materialist dogma reigned. In contrast, close reading of the seminal 1912 Wertheimer paper and the 1920 Köhler book reveals that the Gestalt founders' views accord well with current Gestalt research.

Concert of the World: Early British Efforts to Articulate a Post-War Grand Strategy, 1939-1942

ABSTRACT This essay examines in detail the early years of British planning for a post-war security policy. The first years of the war saw British statesmen and officials consumed by concerns over the military conflict and hesitant to commit the government to specific war aims. This tendency changed by 1940 and 1941, due largely to fears that a failure to counter German propaganda about a ‘new order’ for Europe would lead European populations to accept Nazi designs for future economic and political order on the continent. Though there was an active, if amorphous, debate taking place within Britain about the future international order and Britain’s place within, there remained a lack of concrete policy development. The Atlantic Charter, while a profound moment in hindsight, was not exactly viewed as such by British officials at that time. The true strategic re-direction came in the summer of 1942, when the Foreign Office produced its ‘Four Power Plan’. Though the subject of heated debate in the autumn of 1942, the policy recommendation was eventually accepted in principle by the British Cabinet and would go on to define Britain's grand strategy for the remainder of the war.

Should Weaponised Moral Enhancement Replace Lethal Aggression in War?

AbstractSome have proposed the development of technologies that improve our moral behaviour – moral enhancement – in order to address global risks such as pandemics, global warming and nuclear war. I will argue that this technology could be weaponised to manipulate the moral dispositions of enemy combatants. Despite being morally controversial, weaponised moral enhancement would be neither clearly prohibited nor easily prohibitable by international war law. Unlike previous psychochemical weapons, it would be relatively physically harmless. I argue that when combatants are liable to lethal aggression to achieve an aim of war, they are also liable to weaponised moral enhancement to achieve that same aim. Weaponised moral enhancement will loosen just war requirements in both traditional and revisionist normative just war theories. It will particularly affect revisionist theories’ jus ad bellum requirements for humanitarian and preventive wars. For instance, weaponised moral enhancement could be more proportional and efficacious than lethal aggression to effect institutional changes in preventive and humanitarian wars. I will conclude that, despite evading international war laws and loosening normative just war requirements, the intuition that weaponised moral enhancement would gravely harm combatants can be defended by arguing that it would severely disturb personal identity, which could potentially ground future prohibitions.

Patriotism and Culture during World War I

Patriotism and Culture during World War I Colleen M. Moore V. B. Aksenov, Slukhi, obrazy, emotsii: Massovye nastroeniia rossiian v gody voiny i revoliutsii (1914–1918) (Rumors, Images, Emotions: The Mass Moods of Russians in the Years of War and Revolution [1914–18]). 992 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2020. ISBN-13 978-5444812105. K. A. Tarasov, ed., Kul´tury patriotizma v period Pervoi mirovoi voiny: Sbornik statei (Cultures of Patriotism in World War I: A Collection of Articles), ed. B. I. Kolonitskii. 318 pp. St. Petersburg: Izdatel´stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge, 2020. ISBN-13 978-5943802850. During World War I, Russian officials seemed obsessed with assessing popular moods. The police were required to compile monthly reports that summarized the moods of the population under their jurisdiction, in addition to the separate incident reports that documented criminal activities.1 Starting in October 1915, the Ministry of the Interior ordered the empire's provincial gendarme administrations (the secret police) to fill out a monthly questionnaire that solicited Russian subjects' attitudes on a wide variety of issues connected with the war effort: the food supply situation, the resettlement of refugees, the presence of prisoners-of-war in the rear, and the spread of the cooperative movement, to name just a few.2 [End Page 425] Still reeling from the events of 1904–6, during which Russia experienced a disastrous defeat in its war against Japan and a revolution that weakened the power of the autocracy, the tsarist regime's objectives in surveilling public opinion were twofold: to ensure Russia's victory in the current war, and to stave off another revolution.3 Based on subsequent developments, the regime appears to have failed on both accounts. Russia was not alone in conducting such assessments. Most belligerent powers, to a greater or lesser degree, attempted to gauge popular attitudes during the war. This preoccupation with moods stemmed from the fact that World War I required the mass mobilization of civilian populations that were deeply divided politically, economically, and often ethnically. To overcome the atomization associated with modern society and unite the people, to each other and to the state, for the realization of war aims, political and military leaders tried to foster and appeal to their subjects' patriotic sentiments. Similarly, political parties, classes, and ethnic or national groups participated in patriotic demonstrations to solidify their membership in a given polity or community at war. But what does patriotism look like, and how does one harness it? These questions concerned Russia's ministers and military high command, who debated whether their country's mostly peasant conscripts would fight for a Russian national idea or required material enticements.4 They have also concerned historians. Writing in 1995, Hubertus Jahn argued that the failure of Russian patriotic culture to articulate a unified vision of the Russian nation explained the success of the revolution: in popular imaginations, there existed no concept of Russia worth preserving.5 Subsequent English-language histories of World War I in Russia evaluated the tsarist regime's (in)ability to foster a Russian national identity, whether through military conscription, the identification of enemy aliens, or the resettlement of refugees.6 The two books examined here offer new approaches and answers to these questions [End Page 426] and suggest that patriotism assumed complex, sometimes paradoxical, and often unpredictable forms. ________ Cultures of Patriotism originated from an international conference that was held on the occasion of the centenary of World War I in June 2014 at the European University in St. Petersburg and organized by Laura Engelstein and Boris Kolonitskii. The volume includes chapters on patriotic culture in Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Belgium, France, the United States, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire, which, taken together, highlight three key patterns or trends in wartime manifestations of patriotism across national (or imperial) borders. The first of these trends concerns the coexistence and interdependence of loyalty to a national community and loyalty to an imperial polity. The postwar creation of new nation-states across much of East-Central Europe retroactively imposed a false antagonism between national and imperial identities that did not necessarily exist during the war proper. Conversely, for some national minorities, allegiance to an imperial...

There Are No Good Deaths in War: Rebecca Harding Davis's "John Lamar" and the White Feminist Foundations of U.S. Antiwar Literature

Studies of (anti)war literature continue to devalue Rebecca Harding Davis's contributions to the genre. This essay reaffirms Davis's status as a foundational writer of U.S. antiwar literature whose exposure to emergent guerilla conflict in the borderlands of western Virginia made her critical of northern and southern attempts to reconcile the Civil War's carnage with martial codes of conduct and domestic narratives of mourning. Reibsome argues that Davis's 1862 short story "John Lamar" employs a multivalent Good Death/Bad Death rhetoric to convey the horror of unconventional warfare and to force readers to contemplate the irreconcilable differences between Confederate and emancipatory war aims. Combining contemporary criticism and new historical research, Reibsome problematizes the story's reconciliationist conclusion, suggesting that Davis's familial participation in slavery distorted her perception of race, as evidenced by her penchant for incorporating racist tropes and caricatures in her writing.

Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America

Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America

European Disintegration and Integration During the First World War Revisited

This article introduces a partially special issue exploring the ways in which diverse political, economic, military, and technical actors in both camps perceived the techno-economic integration and disintegration of Europe during and after the First World War. How to deal with the severing of ties forged over the previous decades? How to go about re-establishing new ties, and with whom? To what extent did wartime reflection and experience relating to these issues shape post-war responses? Research focusing on war aims and peace negotiations shows that in terms of international cooperation and the organisation of Europe, these years were neither the polar opposite nor a simple pause of pre-1914 integration. Our aim is to use specific case studies to document how this disintegration unfolded or was contained, as well as to examine why and how new integration was implemented during the war and subsequently called into question when peace returned, before often re-emerging in Europeanist movements and expert networks linked to state foreign policy after Locarno. We will especially focus on transport (rail and road) and patents, two of the most hotly debated issues on both sides, albeit asymmetrically.

Propagandaslag om Europa

Propaganda battle for Europe. Interactions between the Dutch pro-Nazi and pro-Allied press after Operation Barbarossa During the German occupation of the Netherlands the occupying authorities, Dutch collaborators, and journalists writing under censorship frequently invoked the notion of ‘Europe’ in order to legitimize Nazi-Germany’s occupation and war aims. Hitler’s invasion of Russia was justified as a crusade in defence of European civilization which justified the involvement of Dutch volunteers. While in Dutch language media the propaganda initiative lay with nazified newspapers and radio, resistance newspapers and in particular Radio Orange – the mouthpiece of the Dutch government-in-exile in London – waged a vigorous counter-campaign. This article analyzes the various ways in which Radio Orange and the Dutch underground press strove to combat Nazi narratives on Europe. They rejected any associations between National-Socialist Europe and ‘Christianity’, ‘civilization’ and ‘preservation of Dutch national sovereignty’ and exposed the methods, motives, and inefficacy of Nazi propaganda.

Виправлення іменувань речей: примус війни у освіті і суспільному житті

Education reveals itself as an area of priority use of the basic vocabulary of society, and at the same time that is why in the education it is best field to start correcting and refining this vocabulary. The war aims to radically reconsider social values, to abandon unjustified compromises, and the proper way to do this is to correct the names. At one time, with the help of naming, people recorded important characteristics of the world, categorized and classified them, set appropriate markers for vital phenomena and processes. This is reflected, in particular, in the biblical myth of Adam, who gave names to living beings. The Chinese philosopher Confucius had explained and conceptualized the situation of name rectification as a necessary procedure to which society should periodically turn. However, one should not wait until a war or other deep social crisis necessitates the rectification of names – the correction of names should be carried out constantly, as a routine procedure, as an element of the application of critical thinking. However, in contrast to the traditional view of critical thinking, the correction of names also requires faith – to establish those values that are not subject to critical review. In times of war, it is faith in Victory. Correction of names has its bearer – a new generation, whose values were formed by participation in the war. Russia’s current war against Ukraine largely reproduces the value disposition of the Southern Confederate war against the North in the United States in 1861-1865 – important lessons from the war can be learned from this. One of the most important tasks is to properly name evil as evil, to oppose the unanimous public outrage at the desire of the strong to establish themselves at the expense of the weak. The naming of evil as evil opens up the possibility of establishing good as a force, of discovering the economic, political, and military advantages of moral right.

The War Aims of the Belligerent Parties of the First World War in Central and Eastern Europe for the Disintegration of Russia and Austria - Hungary

The War Aims of the Belligerent Parties of the First World War in Central and Eastern Europe for the Disintegration of Russia and Austria - Hungary

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack and a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles, and: On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed

Reviewed by: All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack and a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles, and: On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed Catherine Clinton All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack and a Black Family Keepsake. Tiya Miles. New York: Random House, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-9848-5499-5, 416 pp., cloth, $28.00 On Juneteenth. Annette Gordon-Reed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1, 152 pp., cloth, $15.95. A few years ago I began labeling my graduate course "Civil War and Emancipation," in recognition of the turn within the academy, with scholarship rippling outward into a more diverse audience and perhaps trickling down into textbooks and curriculum. A slow, deliberate change from the days of the Civil War centennial—as the 1960s was an era of racialized conflagrations, and a national commemoration fraught with competing, explosive agendas. By the Civil War sesquicentennial in 2011–15, the destruction of slavery was acknowledged as a major war aim of the federal government. During the past half century, historians of nineteenthcentury America escalated the debates over war's cause and effect to include the significance of Emancipation and the struggles during and after Reconstruction by former slaves and Black Americans seeking rights and citizenship. This new era has yielded a bounty of important, prizewinning work. A large contingent of Civil War scholars are engaged in including Black perspectives and African American resources to reshape the era. During this same transformative turn, women have come to the forefront, both as scholars of the slave experience and as a dynamic topic within Black history: African American women in slavery and freedom. When I dipped my toe into the Civil War field during the 1980s after being immersed in African American history during the '60s and women's history during the '70s, little did I imagine the creative and interventionist ways these fields might meet to create an era of intersectionalism. However, there were clearly visionary scholars at work, paving the way. These two new books by Tiya Miles and Annette Gordon-Reed herald an era of metanarrative, whereby prizewinning authors challenge the fallacy of objectivism. Their bracing, interrogative [End Page 217] accounts allow readers to experience the full powers of their intellects and narrative gifts. Surely the bevy of prizes won in 2021 by Thavolia Glymph's The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (from the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Society of Civil War Historians, and the Southern Association for Women Historians, among others) signals the way Civil War studies is seeking important new terrain to bring this burgeoning field into alignment with the twenty-first century. Tiya Miles's new volume, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack and a Black Family Keepsake, follows a productive parade of impressive books, including a novel (The Cherokee Rose). Miles's historical talents were evident from her first monograph, Ties That Bound (winning the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize in 2006) to her 2017 Dawn of Detroit (awarded the Frederick Douglass Prize), receiving a MacArthur Fellowship (2011) along the way. Her scholarship has always been praised as meticulous, and she earns accolades for her prose style, which is characterized as both "luminous" and "accessible." In the story of Ashley's sack, we are given layered lessons about the historian's craft. How does one approach an object? What are the objectives for the story to be told? What is the value of speculation? How does the empowerment of context supply content when no particulars are evident, when no evidence is forthcoming? Miles patiently pieces together her story as brilliantly and creatively as the recovered sack deposited at Middleton plantation. It is not just an object for a repository, but the beginning of a journey for Miles—who takes the family history of the ancestor Rose, who lovingly prepared this cotton bag for her nine-year-old daughter Ashley's sale and departure. Ripped away from her home, from her family—with a tattered dress, three handfuls of nuts, a lock of her mother's hair, and the...

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

Reviewed by: A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac by Zachery A. Fry Barbara A. Gannon A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac. By Zachery A. Fry. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xvi, 319. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5445-4.) Rarely does one find a study that intersects with so many critical Civil War scholarly debates. A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac by Zachery A. Fry, an assistant professor of military history at U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, does so. In this study, Fry examines the famed and sometimes defamed Army of the Potomac—the military organization that operated around the United States' and the Confederacy's capitals. This study focuses less on its military campaigns against the Confederate army and more on its internal political battles. Much of this conflict centered on the Army of the Potomac's controversial commander—George B. McClellan—a Democrat who rejected Republican Abraham Lincoln's war aims, particularly emancipation. However, this study is not about one man but instead examines the officers and enlisted men who agreed with McClellan's dissent and those who loyally supported Lincoln's actions. Despite the dominance of Democrats in this organization, all ranks in the main eastern army included Republicans. Fry focuses on the junior officers in the Army of the Potomac and "the struggle between Democratic and Republican ideologues in shoulder straps to persuade and educate the army's ranks" (pp. 1–2). Fry argues that "Republicans decisively won the struggle for the army's allegiance" (p. 2). He cites as evidence of this victory the resolutions in support of the Lincoln administration in 1863 and, more convincingly, Lincoln's victory over McClellan in the 1864 presidential election. Fry's book is extraordinarily well researched and well written. One would be hard-pressed to find a better example of documenting the political culture of a military organization. Fry makes an enormous contribution to several intensely debated issues related to the Civil War, including soldier motivation through his examination of the decision to reenlist or not and the embrace of Lincoln and his policies as demonstrated by soldiers' votes in the 1864 election. Despite these critical contributions, Fry does not convince this reader that officers' political activism changed soldiers' minds. Fry analyzes unit resolutions supporting the administration's war efforts, including emancipation. He explains that officers wrote these resolutions and read them aloud to their units on dress parades. As someone who once stood in the ranks when officers spoke, [End Page 395] I guarantee that silence in a military formation does not equal assent. In addition, enlisted soldiers formulated their own, perhaps less articulate, political views. Irish Democrats held strong opinions on war aims and emancipation, despite their limited education. While I agree that junior officers played a role in their subordinates' political education, Fry documents diverse factors that shaped their political activism, including their anger at "Copperheads"—antiwar Democrats at home. Despite this shortcoming, A Republic in the Ranks is an astonishing book. Fry's most convincing and important argument is not who prompted this mobilization but its effect on the army. Republican activism gave "the downtrodden rank and file of the Army of the Potomac a previously elusive sense of purpose," particularly in their darkest hour—the 1864 Overland campaign (p. 4). Fry also contributes to a recent scholarly debate over the 1864 election and demonstrates that soldiers willingly voted for Lincoln and rejected the candidacy of their former commander—George B. McClellan. In my own research, I found that as veterans, these men remembered how their views evolved from the beginning of the war to its end, specifically, how they ultimately embraced Lincoln's policies and rejected the restoration of the Union without emancipation. Restoring these men's political agency represents an essential corrective to studies of Civil War soldiers. Barbara A. Gannon University of Central Florida Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Infrastructures, Circulation and the Limits of Empire: German War Aims in the First World War

German war aims in the First World War developed over the course of the war in part as a response to shifts in the structure of global markets. Germany's industrial economy before the war relied substantially on access to global markets for raw materials, which were mediated by networks of infrastructure constructed as collaborative efforts by private capital and states, particularly the American and British imperial states. During the war, Great Britain and eventually the United States leveraged their position within those networks to isolate the German economy. In response, the German state sought to generate its own public-private alliances to develop German-dominated infrastructures of circulation and exchange in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. This often entailed working through other states, appropriating their sovereignty to further German ambitions. Military victory, however, so weakened these dependent states that they were unable to serve their expected role in advancing German imperial goals.

“Real war ammunition:” Artists for Victory, the National War Poster Competition, and the Hostile Imagination on the United States World War II Home Front

“Real war ammunition:” Artists for Victory, the National War Poster Competition, and the Hostile Imagination on the United States World War II Home Front

David and Goliaths

Abstract This article explores the content of wartime sermons in eighteenth-century Russia, delivered by the Orthodox bishops during the pivotal military conflicts of early imperial period. Apart from communicating war aims and current events to the laity, these sermons also presented an image of the enemy to the masses. This imagery manifested bishops’ support for the Petrine and Catherinian cultural opening to the West, on the one hand, while promoting a myth of an existential antagonism against the Ottoman South, on the other. Unlike their seventeenth-century predecessors, eighteenth-century sermons avoided the stereotypes of heterodoxy or heresy when describing Russia’s Western enemies, preferring instead the language of just or unjust wars, protection of European neighbors or the metaphor of David facing titanic Goliaths. The non-sectarian imagery, however, did not extend to Islam. Sermons of the Russo-Ottoman wars presented the conflict as a purely religious and Russia’s involvement as a holy war.