War & Society
- Puck cartoon marking the new year in 1914. A young man (the New Year) in a smoking jacket and a vest labeled 1914 says to the old year, dressed as Uncle Sam, "Have something on me, old man! Whatll it be?" The choices are two whiskeys, one marked "hope" and the other "fear". They are in a well-furnished upper middle class salon with an overhead electric lamp lighting their faces. Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011649657.
- Cartoon sketch by John T. McCutcheon titled "Is that the best he can wish us?," published in the Chicago Tribune on December 31, 1917. It portrays an old man, 1917, disappearing into the annals of history (literally pages, one marked "history") as he wishes a younger man with a globe for a head ("The World"), "Scrappy New Year!" The new year is dressed as a soldier and is weighed down by infantry kit as well as a few artillery tubes and merchant ships. Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010717171/.
- Red, white, and blue New Year’s poster with Baby 1919 flanked by Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty. Behind them is a big red sun with the text, “World Peace with Liberty and Prosperity 1919.” Europe was still in turmoil and experiencing violence, but Americans had reason to be optimistic. Thus, this lithograph from United Cigars (logo at Liberty’s feet) seems apropos for the time. Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2003652819/.
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World War I poster advertising savings stamps for the war effort, via the Library of Congress. ↩︎
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On this last point, see Simone Lässig, “The History of Knowledge and the Expansion of the Historical Research Agenda,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 59 (Fall 2016): 29–32. ↩︎
Images of Returned POWs
I just saw images in The Telegraph of emaciated Ukrainian POWs recently traded back from Russia. These stark images were taken after the men had regained some 10 kilograms of their lost weight. If you look closely, you’ll actually see life in the photographed eyes. How did the same eyes and severely weakened bodies look before the exchange?
Starved and no contact with the International Red Cross—I’m trying to grasp what this intentionally extreme mistreatment means. After all, the Ukrainians are holding Russians. As far as I know, food as such is not in short supply in Russia. Was this the result of extreme mistreatment in one location? Or was it more widespread, systematic? Was it about torture with specific mission-related objectives? Was it zeal, resentment, sadism, corruption, indifference? Will this have any impact on Russian POWs in Ukraine? Or will Ukraine’s leadership continue striving to keep the higher ground?
Reading about Netanyahu's Clusterfuck of a War
"Amid the Fighting in Gaza, the Bitter War Between Netanyahu and Israel's Generals Is Intensifying" by Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz, June 17, 2024.
"Netanyahu and the IDF Top Brass Fight Over Gaza Cease-fire While Spiraling Towards Total War With Hezbollah" by Amos Harel, Haaretz, June 16, 2024.
Anshel Pfeffer’s analysis draws on the time-tested framework of civil-military relations. First and foremost, there is the conflict between the prime minister and his generals. Netanyahu is right to insist on the primacy of civilian political control of the army, but he has apparently never learned the value of taking counsel from his generals. Worse, he is resorting to using a stab-in-the-back conspiracy theory about the generals. People familiar with fascist takeovers will get very uncomfortable with this rhetoric.
Besides the conflict between the civilian and military leadership, there is the army itself, the IDF, whose ranks include conscripts and men and women called back because of their obligations in the reserves. There might be people who escape military service in Israel, but its army is more closely linked to civilian society than any in countries that use all-volunteer professional militaries. That places limits on how irresponsibly it can be used.
Reading about Evidence of Russia Using Starvation as a Weapon in its War on Ukraine
"New Report: 'Deliberate Pattern' of Starvation Tactics against Ukrainian Civilians by Russian Forces in Siege of Mariupol City" by Global Rights Compliance, June 13, 2024. (Summary in Ukrainian followed by English)
Full report in English (PDF) — "The Hope Left Us": Russia’s Siege, Starvation, and Capture of Mariupol City
Full report in Ukrainian (PDF) — "Надія залишила нас": Облога, моріння голодом і захоплення Маріуполя Росією
I still need to process this report, but its outline already lines up with the reporting presented in the prize-winning Frontline/AP documentary, “20 Days in Mariupol” (available in full on the Internet Archive). Its chapters include:
Reading about Israel's Universities during War
"Israel’s Universities: The Crackdown", The New York Review of Books, June 5, 2024.
Teaser: “Last October, Palestinian students and academic staff in Israel faced unprecedented penalties for their speech. Now the repression persists.”
Takeaway: This piece shows just how far academic institutions in Israel have been willing to go in order to serve the state’s goals at the expense of academic freedom, free speech, and the rule of law.
Question: How are universities governed in Israel? How vulnerable are they to outside political pressure under less fraught conditions? I am wondering about the political effects of Israel’s extreme right-wing government, on one hand, and the broad effects of the current wartime climate, on the other.
Waging War with Factories
Production. B-17F heavy bomber. Working on the roof of a B-17F (Flying Fortress) bomber swung over on its side in the Boeing plant at Seattle. A turret will be mounted over the large circular opening. The Flying Fortress, a four-engine heavy bomber capable of flying at high altitudes, has performed with great credit in the South Pacific, over Germany and elsewhere.
– Andreas Feininger, December 1942, United States, Office of War Information, Library of Congress
The library has a large collection of photos showing the manufacture of B-17 bombers under the subject heading United States–Washington–King County–Seattle.
Links: Russo-Ukrainian War
Here are some worthwhile articles related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. No paywalls – all links lead to freely available texts.
Under Cover of War: The Kremlin’s Fascist Project" by Nancy Ries, Today’s Totalitarianism, August 2022.
The war is a profound turning point, ending any pretense of “soft” authoritarianism with its modicum of space for resistance. The Kremlin’s fascist project may not succeed in the end, but it is crucial to see its effects within Russia as a fundamental component of the 2022 attack on Ukraine…. The Kremlin structures its war-making machine in ways that deliberately produce atrocity…. [And on TV, there is] a “pedagogy” of exterminist consciousness and practice, a key tool of the fascist project unfolding within and beyond Russia.
In Ukraine, I saw the greatest threat to the Russian world isn’t the west – it’s Putin" by Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian, December 17, 2022.
The Kremlin’s imperial war has made its own culture and language a common enemy for people across its former empire.
“The Skill Involved in Zelensky’s Congressional Address” by James Fallows, Breaking the News, December 23, 2022.
The words of the speech were ‘left brain,’ with careful writerly eloquence. The in-person performance was ‘right brain,’ with emotional power beyond the words. The combination was remarkable.
“Special Issue: Weaponizing History in the Russo-Ukrainian War,” edited by Beatrice de Graaf and Lien Verpoest, Journal of Applied History, December 2022.
Art by @neivanmade on Instagram. The term "rashism" is what Ukrainians call Russian fascism.
Ringing in the New Year: Peace and War, Hope and Fear
Red Cross Poster with Christkind, circa 1917
"Christmas collection of the Bavarian Red Cross for our men in field gray" reads the caption of this Red Cross poster from Germany during the Great War. The angelic Christkind it features shines bright yellow in the dark Christmas night as she delivers parcels wrapped in field grey to men on the front. Stars twinkle above her, and there is snow underfoot. To her left is a sled heavy with more parcels, and to her right is a dependable, mustached soldier, pipe in mouth, a freshly delivered parcel in his hands.
A photograph taken in Louisville, Kentucky the same year, shows a similar effort by the American Red Cross: women preparing Christmas parcels for American soldiers.
Repository: Library of Congress.
Death Wish for Their Soldiers
I can’t shake these lines from Stasik’s “Lullaby for the Enemy” about Ukraine’s Donbas:
You wanted this land
Now mix with it
You are my land now
Sleep, sleep, sleep . . .
I’m guessing that “earth” would be another translation option.
More than a Euphemism
Perhaps Putin’s phrase “special military operation” should be seen as something more insidious than a euphemism for war. At the very least, it is consistent with Russia’s genocidal aims and practices in Ukraine.
If we take the Clausewitzian metaphor of war as a duel somewhat literally, the Russian invasion of Ukraine becomes a struggle between two equals, two entities with the same dignity, the same right to exist. After all, duels have traditionally been fought between two parties capable of giving satisfaction for a perceived injury by one to the other’s honor. An officer could duel another officer, but not a sergeant, a lowly conscript, or a civilian occupying a more modest social position.
By calling its invasion a “special military operation,” Russia denies Ukraine’s worthiness and sovereignty. It casts Ukraine and Ukrainians as other, fundamentally inferior, or devoid of honor, so to speak. Rejecting Ukrainian statehood outright, the term “special military operation” facilitates what the talking heads in Russia discuss openly on state TV: genocide, the elimination of Ukrainian culture, ethnicity, and language.
At the same time, the term “special military operation” renders Ukrainian resistance illegitimate in Russian eyes. Thus, Russia brands the soldiers who defended Mariupol to the end “terrorists.” And its leaders become apoplectic when Ukraine dares to fire on targets inside Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea.
Given the logic of Russia’s rhetoric and violence, the problem with “special military operation” becomes one not only of euphemism hiding war from Russians. The euphemism also creates space for, even favors, genocidal rhetoric and policy.
Russian Anti-Austrian War Propaganda, 1914–15
“An Austrian went to Radziwill and came right on to a peasant woman’s pitchfork,” Russian print by Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, 1914–15, New York Public Library Digital Collections. The library has digitized five more prints in this series.
Munitions Workers
Female employees of the German munitions factory WASAG in their work clothes, 1916. The one on the right seems to have been “conscripted” (zwangsverpflichtet), though it is unclear on what basis. She was also apparently highly skilled insofar as she was a production manager of some kind.
Source: Haus der Geschichte Wittenberg, “Arbeiterinnen der WASAG Reinsdorf.”
War Savings Stamps Poster, 1917
I find this 1917 poster interesting because it seems to target urban, working-class immigrants.1 Besides the dress of the people waiting in line to lend Uncle Sam some money, there is the American flag held by the child, whose enthusiasm attracts the attention of the adults around her.
Children, whether immigrants themselves or native born, seem to have played a special role in immigrant families, mediating in different ways the adults' encounter with the culture and institutions of the new country. Certainly the authorities saw such potential in these children.2
'Dead, but the remains are still with us'
Mars, the god of war, from late 1918. Repository: Library of Congress.
Duck and Cover: 1951 Civil Defense Film for Kids
Interesting to consider that this was a reality for school kids in the early days of the Cold War. By the 1970s, when I was in school and aware of such things, such an understanding of nuclear weapons would have seemed extremely naive.
In the mid-1980s, in the field artillery, we were taught to drop to the ground, asses to the blast and hands between our legs. That was for tactical nuclear artillery rounds, but it felt just as silly.
Source and further details: Prelinger Archives, hosted by the Internet Archive.
A Hard Thing to Teach
What was once seen as standing ‘outside’ history, demanding silent contemplation but resisting explanation or contextualisation, has now been firmly historicised. Comparative genocide studies, histories of colonialism and genocidal violence, studies of western penal practice and more besides have demonstrated that the processes which led to the Holocaust were integral to modern history, not an aberration from it.
Neil Gregor, “‘To Think is to Compare’: Walther Rathenau, Trump and Hitler,” History Today, February 20, 2017.
Military History
Check out Mark Grimsley, “Why Military History Sucks Sucked,” Blogging Them out of the Stone Age, June 2, 2016 (originally 1996). This is an older critique, and I agree there has been much improvement. Still, negative examples abound, making this short piece as worthwhile as ever.
Preparing to Fight the Last War? Maybe Not
Prussian War Academy ca, 1900 via Wikimedia Commons.
I've been taking some time to think more about a slow-moving article on Wilhelm Groener I've been working on. It has received a big boost recently from the GHI's new focus on the history of knowledge.
A truism holds that generals prepare to fight the last war, not the next one. Unable to peer into the future, they make do with the lessons of the past. Fair enough, perhaps, but this common-sense wisdom presupposes that military leaders will necessarily understand the salient features of the last war without preconceptions about war and officering affecting their discernment. In other words, the truism fails to account for the effects of prior training, experience, and acculturation in the production of knowledge about war. Instead, it implicitly assumes the existence of universal soldierdom, as if officering and soldiering—but for technology—were not culturally and historically contingent.
Wilhelm Groener (1867–1939) offers a case in point. A general staff officer in the German army who rose to prominence quickly in the First World War, Groener became an important spokesman in the interwar period for the so-called Schlieffen school, offering an interpretation of the war seemingly at odds with what actually happened. Instead of deriving new lessons from the stalemate, as his contemporary Erich Ludendorff did in a nightmarish vision of politics serving war instead of vice versa, Groener doubled down on the knowledge he had internalized in peacetime Wilhelmine Germany. Issuing from neither a military outsider nor an original thinker and steeped in antebellum military thoughtways and culture, Groener’s interpretation of the First World War can be analyzed in relation to his prewar training and wartime experiences to show the inner logic of the professional military knowledge and culture in which he was steeped.
Grafenwöhr 1983
A younger historian on Facebook called this picture a “Nice primary source of the late Cold War!” I don’t know what that makes me, the guy in front, but I decided to share here too.