36 results
11 - Collateral Damage and the Greater Good
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- A Darkling Plain
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- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 166-179
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Summary
Referred to as the Second Gulf War, Operation Iraqi Freedom, or the Occupation of Iraq, the controversial Iraq war began on March 20, 2003, when the United States and the United Kingdom invaded Iraq. Before the invasion and following the bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the United States and United Kingdom claimed their security was threatened by Iraq, especially by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). UN Security Council Resolution 1441, passed in 2002, called for Iraq to cooperate with UN weapon inspectors sent to ascertain whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and cruise missiles. The United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) was granted access by Iraq but the head of the weapons inspection, Hans Blix, was not allowed to complete his investigation and thus could not verify whether Iraq actually did possess such weapons. General consensus holds that the Bush and the Blair administrations misled their citizens and it later appeared Iraq had ended its biological, chemical, and nuclear programs in 1991. After the invasion, remnants of pre-1991 chemical weapons did surface but these were not the type of weapons used to justify the invasion. The charge that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had harbored and supplied al-Qaeda also was found to be false. In the end, the Bush administration justified the invasion as part of a broader policy of bringing democracy to Iraq. Saddam Hussein eventually was captured, tried, and executed by the new Iraqi government but partisan fighting between Iraqi Sunni and Shiites continues and any al-Qaeda in the area simply relocated. Statistics vary but most authorities hold that by 2012, over 500,000 Iraqis had died of war-related causes and the displacement crisis is the largest in the Middle East since the Palestinian flight of 1948. An estimated 4.7 million refugees (some 16% of the population) had fled by 2008, with 2 million abroad, 2.7 million internally displaced, and 5 million children (35% of all Iraqi children) orphaned. The current (2014) refugee situation is confounded by the 2 million Syrians who fled their country, many escaping to Iraq, leaving Iraq's humanitarian situation among the most critical in the world, according to the Red Cross..
17 - Care about other People
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- Book:
- A Darkling Plain
- Published online:
- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 232-237
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From 1971 to 1979 Uganda was ruled by Idi Amin Dada, a military leader in the British colonial regiment known as the King's African Rifles, where he rose to the rank of Major General and Commander of the Ugandan Army before taking power in a 1971 coup. Idi Amin was one of the most notorious of the post-independence dictators in Africa, called the “Butcher of Uganda” for his brutal, despotic rule. Estimates of the carnage under Amin range from 100 thousand to half a million opponents killed, tortured, or imprisoned. Amin's rule was characterized by massive human rights abuse, ethnic persecution, nepotism, corruption, and political repression, including extrajudicial killings. Despite Amin's brutal crushing of opposition, dissent continued within Uganda. After Amin attempted to annex the Kagera province of Tanzania (1978), the Uganda–Tanzania War broke out and led to his downfall. Amin fled to Libya and Saudi Arabia, where he died in exile on August 16, 2003.
I am Okello, born in Gulu, Uganda, on August twenty-fourth, 1955. In my immediate family I have ten siblings. Six boys, five girls. I am number four. That is my immediate family. My parents are both dead. Three of my brothers and three sisters are alive; four are dead.
4 - Everything Went Downhill after that
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- A Darkling Plain
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- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 76-95
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My name is Gunther. Usually when somebody asks me where I was born I always say I’m not from around here. My earliest recollection is of the fancy sort of a castle near Vienna that was a refugee station for the war. My actual birthplace as far as I know, well some people say the Northern part of Yugoslavia. But that's not what I understand. I understand Novi Sad. This was initially Serbia. It didn't become Yugoslavia until 1918. That would be on the border of Croatia, close to the border of southern Austria. I have no recollection of that since we had to get out because of the war. It was not popular to be German in what was considered Russian territory. We had to get out of there. We got half of a train because my people were part of the military and we went to Vienna through various steps. How we got to Novi Sad in the first place is beyond me. It could have been for religious reasons. We initially came from the Black Forest region, sometime around the First World War. All the way from there to Czechoslovakia. So we come from there. That's a long way from Germany.
20 - The Fundamental Things Apply
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- Book:
- A Darkling Plain
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- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 261-290
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What lessons can we draw from the stories in this book? Are there shared patterns in wartime struggles for survival? Common themes in efforts to compose meaningful postwar lives? Can these stories help us think about the influences shaping our own abilities to retain humanity during times so searing they challenge our most basic values and underlying assumptions about what it means to flourish as human beings? The topic does not lend itself to facile answers, but insights are nonetheless discernible.
Simply put, we find the fundamental things apply. Those things that center us and provide meaning to our lives during peacetime – so unremarkable, yet precious once lost – prove critical in keeping our sanity, let alone our humanity, during war: love, friends, family, a sense of who we are, of belonging, of having value as a person. Beyond this, analysis underlines the importance of the human psychology, provides vital details concerning psychological mechanisms that contribute to emotional well-being, and suggests these can operate in ways that seem counterintuitive on first glance. (Table 20.1 summarizes our findings and links them with prior work in the field.)
6 - Belonging to Something
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- A Darkling Plain
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- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 103-115
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I was born in 1927 in Vienna. My parents came from Eastern Galicia, which during World War I was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My father was actually a soldier in the Austrian Army. My mother came separately. They both came from the same area, now part of Western Ukraine. My wife and I just visited there in ’97. This was the first time I was there. But I was born in Vienna and I was eleven years old when Anschluss came. I was there for a year after the Anschluss experience. We managed to get visas. They were semi-legal visas to go to Belgium in the spring of 1939. After about a year under Nazi rule we went to Belgium where we were refugees waiting for our American visas to come through. It took a year, but fortunately by the spring of 1940, we got our visas and left for the States. We made it out by just a few weeks. The war had started in the meantime; the French were already in the middle of the war. Our boat was sunk by a U-boat on its next voyage. Not on our voyage fortunately. We arrived in New York April eighth, 1940.
Part Four - Civil Wars and Genocides, Dictators and Domestic Oppressors
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- A Darkling Plain
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- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 189-190
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Index
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- A Darkling Plain
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- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 307-312
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19 - Religion Mixed with Politics Creates Bad Things
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- A Darkling Plain
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- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 249-258
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Summary
The 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution overthrew the Iranian monarchy under the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and replaced it with an officially Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Public demonstrations against the Shah and his repressive government began in October 1977. They intensified and erupted into widespread civil resistance – both secular and religious – with demonstrations and strikes that paralyzed oil-rich Iran from August until December 1978. The Shah left for exile mid-January 1979, and Ayatollah Khomeini returned within weeks, to a great welcome. Iran held a national referendum, voting to become an Islamic Republic and to approve a theocratic constitution making Khomeini Supreme Leader of the country in 1979. The Iranian revolution surprised the world, partly because it was precipitated without the usual triggers of revolution: defeat during war, a financial crisis, a disgruntled military, or a peasant uprising. The speed and the popularity of the rebellion further startled observers because it was the first time a modernizing monarchy was replaced by a theocratic state.
Things have not improved in Iran since Leyla left. The 1980–88 war with Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of people and cost Iran billions of dollars. The United States–imposed economic sanctions and emigration of 2–4 million skilled craftsmen, entrepreneurs, and educated professionals – such as Leyla – resulted in income levels below those of pre-revolutionary Iran. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the controversial president of the Islamic Republic of Iran from 2005 to 2013, was condemned for both his economic failures and his violations of human rights. His support for Iran's nuclear energy program and his anti-Semitic statements denying the Holocaust further isolated Iran and the current situation remains unclear under the present (2014) leadership in Iran.
16 - Too Much was Seen
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- Book:
- A Darkling Plain
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- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 224-231
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Raging from 1975 to 1990, the Lebanese Civil War was complex and multifaceted. Estimates suggest between 150 thousand to 230 thousand civilians were killed, with roughly a quarter of the population (one million) wounded. As Marie's story illustrates, a further one million people fled Lebanon, with the postwar occupation of Lebanon by Syria driving into exile more of the Christian population, especially the leadership. Assassinations were random and not uncommon. Little consensus exists on what triggered the Lebanese Civil War. Perhaps the most widely accepted explanation is one emphasizing the breakdown of the fragile institutional and political arrangements designed to maintain balance despite underlying sectarian divisions. This breakdown was precipitated by unequal birthrates of the diverse communities within Lebanon plus the influx and militarization of a large Palestinian refugee population, especially the arrival of Palestinian Liberation Organization guerrilla forces. The result was a militarization of feudal militia and a resulting arms race among the diverse Lebanese political factions. The war involved shifting alliances and great political uncertainty as much of Beirut lay in ruins during the 1980s.
My name's Marie and I’m eighty-two. [Marie smiled and winked.] I had five children; now I have four. I lost my eldest daughter a long time ago. During the war in ’75, I was living in Beirut. During the war, they were all shooting at us.
Bibliography
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- A Darkling Plain
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- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 299-304
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Introduction
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- A Darkling Plain
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- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 1-8
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An opportunity to think more systematically about how people keep their humanity during war occurred in the fall of 2010 when I taught a course on psychology and international politics. I had just finished a book on the psychology of genocide and was interested in seeing how the book manuscript played when I taught it. But I also wanted to explore a slightly different aspect of the problem, wanted to understand and show students how people keep their humanity during genocide and war and how they reclaim it later in life. Uncertain what to call this course, in a rash moment I dubbed it “Ethics in a time of terror and genocide,” ordered the books, and promptly forgot about the course until the late summer, when I wandered into the Department office and asked the Departmental Secretary if any of the books had arrived.
“Sure. They’re over there.”
“Thanks,” I said, as I turned to the shelf where desk copies were stored.
“Do you want to get the books for your TA, too?” Natalie asked.
Part Two - Guarding One’s Humanity During War: World War II
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- Book:
- A Darkling Plain
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- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 37-38
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Raging from 1939 to 1945, World War II was the deadliest, most widespread war in human history, involving more than 100 million military personnel from over thirty nations throughout the world. The war also resulted in the mass deaths of civilians, including deaths from the Holocaust and the first use of nuclear weapons. Estimates range from 50 to 75 million deaths, with countless injuries and untold human suffering.
Most agree WWII grew naturally from World War I and its punitive Versailles Peace Treaty. WWI killed an entire generation of young men and radically altered the political map, erasing the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, indirectly putting the Bolsheviks in power in the USSR, and establishing many new, weak, small states throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Political instability was exacerbated by the Great Depression of the 1930s, which, along with the reparations from WWI, hit central Europe especially hard. Germany’s response turned militaristic with the coming to power of the Nazis (National Socialist Party) in 1933. The Nazis immediately instituted a series of racist and anti-Semitic laws and over the following years led Germany in campaigns of territorial expansion in Austria and Czechoslovakia. In August 1939, Germany and Russia signed a nonaggression pact, effectively dividing Poland. Now free to invade Poland without Russian interference, Germany did so on September 1, 1939. The violation of Poland’s sovereignty, which Great Britain had sworn to protect, led both Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany. On September 3, 1939 WorldWar II officially began.
14 - A Resistance to Keep You Alive
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- Book:
- A Darkling Plain
- Published online:
- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 199-212
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The Berlin Conference (1884–85) divided the African continent, making what we think of as Kenya a British colony. After Kenya became its protectorate, the British used “divide and rule” to play off the ethnic groups in the new country, thereby both creating and solidifying perceived differences among various groups and allowing the British to introduce a settler class – akin to the British landed upper middle classes – to establish and export cash crops. British colonists benefited from colonial policies producing unequal legal rights, punitive labor laws, identity cards, and native reserves. To stifle African resentment at this ill treatment, Britain banned all African political groups, allowing only the formation of organizations concerned with “people's welfare.” Disturbed at these injustices, Kenyans staged an uprising from 1952 to 1960. The uprising enjoyed mixed public support and pitted a Gĩkũyũ-dominated anticolonial group (the Mau Mau) against the British Army, auxiliaries, and anti–Mau Mau Gĩkũyũ. The Mau Mau rebellion set fracture points that endured into independence, creating long-standing divisions within the Gĩkũyũ community. In response to demands for independence, the British grudgingly allowed formation of political parties. Two main parties – the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU) – were established in 1960. Kenya achieved independence in 1964 but remained effectively a one-party state, ruled by the KANU and a Kikuyu-Lui alliance under Jomo Kenyatta from 1963 to 1978. Kenyatta's successor – Daniel Arap Moi – held power until 2002. Pressured by the United States to restore a multi-party system, Moi did so in 1991 but won the elections in 1992 and 1997, with political killings involved on both sides. Moi's involvement in corruption and human rights abuses led to his disbarment from running in the 2002 election, an election won by Mwai Kibaki. Widely reported electoral fraud continues.
Ngũgĩ's life was caught up in the anticolonial fight. His father had multiple wives and the family was divided during the Mau Mau rebellion, with brothers fighting on both sides and Ngũgĩ's mother reportedly tortured at the Kamriithu homeguard post. Ngũgĩ attended schools in Uganda and England, publishing his first novel (1964) in English. His second novel takes the Mau Mau rebellion as its background. Ngũgĩ later renounced English, Christianity, and his given name, arguing that all three reflect colonial repression.
8 - For My Family
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- Book:
- A Darkling Plain
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- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 133-142
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My name is Tuan. I am about fifty-eight. My childhood was spent in Vietnam in the small village where I was born. I go to high school, then one year of college. After that I have to go to the army. My family has three brothers, then two sisters. I was drafted at twenty. I was studying law and was disappointed. I tried to study more but I had no choice. I had to join the army.
Q. What did your parents say?
They were disappointed but no choice because of the war.
Q. Were you married already?
After the communists took over my country in 1975, I met my wife. We got married in June 1975. After the communists took over my country they put me in a re-education camp for a year. Like a jail. You have to work the fields. Like Cambodia, like prison. They took me because I joined the army in South Vietnam. We lost the war so they took me to go to the re-education camp. So, stop there?
Preface
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- A Darkling Plain
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- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp ix-xii
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Frank was at Stanford when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. An Irish Catholic with a father in the Navy, Frank enlisted and spent two years in the Pacific in the Army Air Corps, assigned to the Navy. Frank took part in the invasion of the Marianas, Iwo Jima, and Palau, and was scheduled to go in as part of the home island invasion of Japan. Frequently in battle areas as a support soldier dealing with technical aspects that drew on his engineering background, Frank quickly learned the “terrible impact of war.”
It's not glamorous. You’ve got to realize there was a lot of propaganda in World War II to develop patriotism and support. You found out that was an awful lot of baloney! It was a very messy thing.…When you think in terms of the destruction…you learn to hate. The tendency for all of us in the Pacific was to hate the Japanese. We hated them for [what] they did on the Bataan Death March. To them, if you were willing to become a prisoner then you ceased to be a human. You were no better than an animal, maybe not even that good.…The samurai code caused them to be very brutal. If you look at the history of the Japanese in China and what they did to American prisoners, that leads to the ability to hate. It led to the view that the only good Japanese was a dead one. Ask and give no quarter.…I get a bit cynical when I hear all these things about the Geneva Convention. You fought the war the same way the enemy fought it.…Like for like. You only go to war to win. It's not a game, and you don't win by scoring a certain amount of points.
After the war, Frank simply closed a door.
e just didn't talk about it. It was one of those things you repress. That's how you cope with things.…I never talked about the war. I’ve probably talked about it more tonight than I ever have. To me it was a chapter and when the chapter was over, you closed it and put it behind you.
Epigraph
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- A Darkling Plain
- Published online:
- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp v-vi
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2 - If Something’s Going to Get You, It’ll Get You
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- Book:
- A Darkling Plain
- Published online:
- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 39-54
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You should probably realize that I’m eighty-nine, so that gives you a perspective. When I grew up we didn't have television or a lot of other things that we all take for granted today. As a matter of fact, when I was growing up we still had horse carts delivering things in various neighborhoods. My father was a Navy Chief Petty Officer. That's like a Master Sergeant in the Army; it's the top-ranked enlisted man. He had been in the military pretty much all of his life. He ran away to the Spanish-American War when he was seventeen. He lied about his age and told them he was nineteen so they’d take him. He spent three years in the Philippines, during which time the Spanish were defeated at the Battle of Manila, which was a presage to what we have today. When the Americans threw the Spanish out, the Filipinos weren't all that interested in just trading them for Americans as colonial masters. They wanted to be independent so there was a Philippine insurrection led by a man named Aguinaldo. My father was in the 13th Minnesota Regiment, along with the Dakota regiments. Many of the senior enlisted men and officers were old Indian fighters who had fought the Sioux on the plains in the 1870s and 1880s, so they had experience in, as they put it, “good old fighting.”
Part Three - Other Voices, Other Wars: From Indochina to Iraq
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- Book:
- A Darkling Plain
- Published online:
- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 131-132
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Part Cold War military conflict, part decolonization, the Vietnam War raged through Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, involving France, the United States, plus some other anticommunist countries, from November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. The Viet Cong were a dedicated if lightly armed South Vietnamese communist-controlled insurgent group and the official U.S. government justification for participation was to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam and, eventually, all of South Asia, as part of a wider strategy of containment of communism. (The so-called “domino theory” argued that if Vietnam fell, so would the rest of Asia.) The North Vietnamese government considered the war a fight against colonialism, fought initially against France, backed by the United States, and later against South Vietnam, widely regarded as a corrupt puppet state.
Although U.S. military advisors began arriving in 1950, the war did not escalate until the early 1960s. After 1965, U.S. combat units were widely deployed. The Vietnam People’s Army (also called the North Vietnamese Army) fought both a guerrilla and a conventional war. U.S. andSouth Vietnamese forces initially reliedonair superiority and overwhelming firepower, engaging in search and destroy operations using groundforces,artillery,andair strikes. Just prior to the period described by Tuan (Chapter 8), the conflict spilled over into Laos and Cambodia. Events climaxed in 1968 with the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive. Facing increasinganddivisive public opposition at home, the United States began withdrawing ground forces as part of its Vietnamization policy. The Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973 and the Case-Church Amendment passed by the U.S. Congress (1973) prohibited further U.S. military action in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. In April 1975, the North Vietnamese captured Saigon, and North and South Vietnam were reunified formally in 1976.
1 - Constructing an Analysis of the Unspeakable
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- Book:
- A Darkling Plain
- Published online:
- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 11-36
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Introduction
There is little doubt about the negative impact of war on the human psyche. But what do we know about the ability to recover from the trauma of war, to heal wounds and flourish as we construct a meaningful life? Playwrights, poets, biographers, and writers of fiction often provide revealing insights into war, asking how to best protect and draw forth humanity during war, and suggesting what does this best. Indeed, how people deal with the moral choices such catastrophes present and how people manage to cling to their humanity – if they do – constitutes a familiar theme in great literature. Sophocles’ Antigone and the updated version presented in Nazi-occupied France during World War II by Jean Anouilh, the eighth-century BCE Iliad and the Odyssey, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, John Steinbeck's The Moon is Down, Arthur Koestler's Arrival and Departure, and Steven Galloway's The Cellist of Sarajevo are but a few illustrations of literary treatments touching on this issue. Biographies and autobiographies abound with such themes. Christabel Bielenburg's Once I Was a German, Albert Speer's autobiography and Gitta Sereny's counterbiography, as well as fictionalized biographies, such as Elie Wiesel's Night or Tom Keneally's Schindler's List, all illustrate this genre's recent treatment of moral choice during war, in this instance World War II. Hollywood, too, frequently features issues of moral choice and humanity during war, in films such as Casablanca, Life is Beautiful, The Deerhunter, Coming Home, and The Hurt Locker, to mention just a few.
Surprisingly, it is the political science literature that is lacking, with philosophical literature equally sparse. Psychologists address the topic in a variety of ways. Social psychologists note the importance of both personality and the environment. Researchers on post-traumatic stress disorder highlight factors from positive beliefs about the world and control to a sense of agency, and the hardiness literature emphasizes the importance of not remaining isolated and the desire to participate in and learn from new experiences.
Conclusion
- Kristen Renwick Monroe, University of California, Irvine
- With Chloe Lampros-Monroe, University of California, Irvine, Jonah Pellecchia, University of California, Irvine
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- Book:
- A Darkling Plain
- Published online:
- 05 October 2014
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- 27 October 2014, pp 291-298
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War is a horrifying, brutal thing, so ferocious, dark, and foul it lies beyond words, perhaps beyond human comprehension. In the last century alone, war claimed more than 160 million lives and touched countless others. The statistics stagger and overpower, leaving us struggling to fathom the experiences of loved ones who were soldiers or civilians trapped in wars. How can we expect to help our children and students understand the reality of war, when we ourselves remain overwhelmed, simply by the numbers and the contemplation of war's devastation? Even those who live through war find it difficult to grasp fully what they endured and the extent of its effect on them.
As I write this, I think of my own father, a young man just out of law school and newly married when he enlisted in World War II. Daddy wore glasses so thick he was the last person you would want to turn loose in combat with a gun. The army had little idea what to do with lawyers anyway in those days, so my father was assigned desk jobs, spared the worst of the war. But he was kept on after the war to hear war crimes in the Far East. He lived through air raids in China and recorded legal testimony on both civilian and military atrocities. After being assigned as the American member of the British Commission of War Crimes in the Pacific, Daddy heard far too many stories of abuse in prisoner-of-war camps in Formosa, of American soldiers getting drunk and raping civilians, of random violence, and of bombs falling from the skies. My father died in 1973, when he was only 55, before he reached the age where people tend to step back and try to make sense of their lives and before I became interested in war as a topic of research. He never talked about the war with me or my brother. At the time, I did not think much of this silence. Kids can be remarkably cavalier and blasé about their parents’ lives, and I was certainly no different. But after speaking with so many others about their wartime experiences, I now wonder if this distancing signifies something deeper.