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qkirkpatrick

World War One: How 250,000 Belgian refugees didn't leave a trace - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-28857769

wwi culture history Belgian Refugees

shared by qkirkpatrick on 25 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The UK was home to 250,000 Belgian refugees during World War One, the largest single influx in the country's history. So why did they vanish with little trace?
  • Germany had invaded Belgium, forcing them to flee. The exodus had started in August and the refugees continued to arrive almost daily for months, landing at other ports as well, including Tilbury, Margate, Harwich, Dover, Hull and Grimsby.
  • "It was the largest influx of refugees in British history but it's a story that is almost totally ignored," says Tony Kushner, professor of modern history at the University of Southampton.
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  • Official records from the time estimate 250,000 Belgians refugees came to Britain during WW1. In some purpose-built villages they had their own schools, newspapers, shops, hospitals, churches, prisons and police. These areas were considered Belgian territory and run by the Belgian government. They even used the Belgian currency.
  • Within 12 months of the war ending more than 90% had returned home, says Kushner. They left as quickly as they came, leaving little time to establish any significant legacy.
  • "The events of 1939 to 1945 completely overtook the First World War in people's minds," says Sheffield. "There was a new wave of refugees to dominate the memory. So many things about the First World War were forgotten, all the nuances of the subject."
qkirkpatrick

Lessons to be learned from how Britain handled a refugee crisis in 1914 | Letters | Wor... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ndled-a-refugee-crisis-in-1914

refugees crisis britain politics history culture

shared by qkirkpatrick on 26 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Why did Robert Winder in his survey of refugees fleeing to Britain not include the closer parallel to today’s problem: that of Belgians coming in 1914
  • Estimates of 100,000 Belgians, mostly in family groups, and overwhelmingly coming in the three months of September to November 1914 were welcomed throughout Britain as victims of a war their government did not seek, and ours did little to avoid.
  • These families were welcomed in towns and villages by a spontaneously formed scattering of committees which raised cash, found empty houses, organised brass bands to greet them at railway stations.
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  • Leek housed more than 50 refugees in three different properties by Christmas 1914 and silk-mill workers led a fund-raising scheme which made over £2,500 by May 1916.
  • One very obvious observation is that in 1914 the government was slow and clumsy in its response to the flood of humanity. Churchill flatly rejected any idea of receiving them, and the Local Government Board had no part in distributing the families. This was done by volunteers
jlessner

They Are Us - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...betraying-ourselves.html

syria refugees politics history US crisis culture policy

shared by jlessner on 20 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • et in January 1939, Americans polled said by a two-to-one majority that the United States should not accept 10,000 mostly Jewish refugee children from Germany.
  • If the Islamic State wanted to dispatch a terrorist to America, it wouldn’t ask a mole to apply for refugee status, but rather to apply for a student visa to study at, say, Indiana University. Hey, governors, are you going to keep out foreign university students?
  • Or the Islamic State could simply send fighters who are French or Belgian citizens (like some of those behind the Paris attacks) to the U.S. as tourists, no visa required. Governors, are you planning to ban foreign tourists, too?
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  • Refugee vetting has an excellent record. Of 785,000 refugees admitted to the United States since 9/11, just three have been arrested for terrorism-related charges, according to the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.
  • If Republican governors are concerned about security risks, maybe they should vet who can buy guns. People on terrorism watch lists are legally allowed to buy guns in the United States, and more than 2,000 have done so since 2004. The National Rifle Association has opposed legislation to rectify this.
sarahbalick

Paris attacks: Geneva alert raised as police hunt suspects - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-35058958

paris attacks geneva alert police

shared by sarahbalick on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • They said they were acting on information of suspicious individuals thought to be in the city or the area.
  • Investigations have been launched in several European countries, with two men linked to the attacks - Salah Abdeslam and Mohammed Abrini - still on the run, and others found to have travelled to France posing as refugees.
  • Security guards holding sub-machine guns are also stationed outside the UN office in Geneva
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  • The number of police on the streets of Geneva has been increased, so too has their level of alert.
  • Security at the frontiers was stepped up in the wake of the Paris attacks, as well as at the UN where the world's senior diplomats regularly meet.
  • This week, details emerged of a failed operation involving Belgian and Greek police to capture a suspected ringleader of the Paris terror attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud.
qkirkpatrick

Opinion: How a century-old war affects you - CNN.com - 1 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

war culture history economics today

shared by qkirkpatrick on 25 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • World War I began a hundred years ago this summer, but for many of us it might as well be a thousand. We know it, if we know it at all, as a dimly remembered chapter in high school history, or as scenes from old black-and-white movies of soldiers hunkered in trenches doing battle with Germans in pointy helmets
  • Gas masks evolved quickly, though, and by the end of the war even some horses and dogs at the front had their own.
  • The weapons it introduced -- submarines, machine guns, poison gas, grenades, tanks -- are all still part of our arsenals. And it was World War I that made airpower and strategic bombing central to the success of any future war.
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  • At home and on the battlefield, World War I put new objects and words into circulation: "cooties" are something no kid wants to get, but for GIs in the trenches, they were real and they were lice; and sanitary napkins developed from the handy alternative use nurses found for cellulose bandage material produced for the war. The war popularized Kleenex and tea bags and zippers.
  • Empires fell, and new nations--Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Poland among them-- were born in the ashes. Leaders of the still-powerful French and British empires used the conflict to redraw borders in ways that set the stage for future conflicts that stretch on today, in the Middle East, for example.
  • All told, more than 9 million died in the conflict, and 21 million were wounded, psychologically scarring a generation. Soldiers were at pains to explain this new human experience of battle to those back home.
  • Women gained new visibility in society, moving into the jobs vacated by enlisted men.
  • They drove streetcars, smelted iron, built bombs and then, after a long day at the factory, scrounged for food for their families. Civilians working for the war effort meant that anyone could be a target: German Fokker planes attacked at the front, but Zeppelin airships bombed London and Paris. "Total war" made the home front a dangerous place.
  • All parties thought the war would be a short one; none imagined the speed with which the conflict would degenerate into a series of local atrocities (the Belgians became the conflict's first group of refugees, as they fled German rape and plunder) and mass slaughter across many fronts.
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