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jaxredd10

Ottoman Empire - WWI, Decline & Definition - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...ottoman-empire

shared by jaxredd10 on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The Ottoman Empire was one of the mightiest and longest-lasting dynasties in world history.
  • The chief leader, known as the Sultan, was given absolute religious and political authority over his people.
  • Osman I, a leader of the Turkish tribes in Anatolia, founded the Ottoman Empire around 1299. The term “Ottoman” is derived from Osman’s name, which was “Uthman” in Arabic.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • In 1453, Mehmed II the Conqueror led the Ottoman Turks in seizing the ancient city of Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire’s capital. This put an end to 1,000-year reign of the Byzantine Empire.
  • Sultan Mehmed renamed the city Istanbul, meaning “the city of Islam” and made it the new capital of the Ottoman Empire.
  • By 1517, Bayezid’s son, Selim I, brought Syria, Arabia, Palestine, and Egypt under Ottoman control.
  • The Ottoman Empire reached its peak between 1520 and 1566, during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent
  • The Ottomans were known for their achievements in art, science and medicine.
  • Some of the most popular forms of art included calligraphy, painting, poetry, textiles and carpet weaving, ceramics and music.
  • The Ottomans learned and practiced advanced mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, physics, geography and chemistry.
  • Under Sultan Selim, a new policy emerged, which included fratricide, or the murder of brothers.
  • The threat of assassination was always a concern for a Sultan. He relocated every night as a safety measure.
  • the millet system, a community structure that gave minority groups a limited amount of power to control their own affairs while still under Ottoman rule.
  • The devshirme system lasted until the end of the 17th century.
  • Starting in the 1600s, the Ottoman Empire began to lose its economic and military dominance to Europe.
  • n 1878, the Congress of Berlin declared the independence of Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria.During the Balkan Wars, which took place in 1912 and 1913, the Ottoman Empire lost nearly all their territories in Europe.
  • At the start of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was already in decline. The Ottoman Turks entered the war in 1914 on the side of the Central Powers (including Germany and Austria-Hungary) and were defeated in 1918.
  • In 1915, Turkish leaders made a plan to massacre Armenians living the Ottoman Empire. Most scholars believe that about 1.5 million Armenians were killed.
  • After ruling for more than 600 years, the Ottoman Turks are often remembered for their powerful military, ethnic diversity, artistic ventures, religious tolerance and architectural marvels.
  • The mighty empire’s influence is still very much alive in the present-day Turkish Republic, a modern, mostly secular nation thought of by many scholars as a continuation of the Ottoman Empire.
Javier E

U.N. Court Acquits 2 Serbs of War Crimes - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-of-crimes-in-balkan-wars.html

war crimes court UN

shared by Javier E on 31 May 13 - No Cached
  • a United Nations court on Thursday acquitted two close aides of the former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, spurning the prosecution’s demand for life sentences for his once all-powerful secret police chief and the chief’s deputy.
  • The judges, voting 2 to 1, found that the men had formed, directed and paid special secret combat units during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia from 1991 to 1995, but that they were not criminally liable for crimes committed by those units.
  • Legal experts expressed astonishment at the acquittals, which apparently rested on new standards applied by senior judges.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This and other recent acquittals have effectively absolved Serbia of any responsibility for atrocities committed by proxy armies in Croatia and Bosnia and by the covert network of paramilitary combat units trained, paid and supervised by the secret police.
  • “The entire doctrine of command responsibility has been ditched,” said Eric Gordy, who teaches the politics of Eastern Europe at the University College London and follows the trials closely. “So has the liability for aiding and abetting.”
  • “This and several other recent decisions have become completely irrational,” he said, citing as evidence the Serbian attack in late 1991 that virtually leveled the town of Vukovar in eastern Croatia, where both Mr. Stanisic and Mr. Simatovic were present with special units and giving directions. “There is no way they could not have known there were crimes involved,” he said.
Javier E

National Review - 0 views

link.nationalreview.com/...836d9435

trump politics election 2016 significance

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • My friend Cam is a lot more Trump-friendly than I am. We talked before yesterday’s show and we concurred that a Trump victory would be a genuine shock to the system that might just spur changes in the right direction. All of the groups and forces allied with the Left and largely thriving in Obama’s America – Silicon Valley, the media, academia, would have to stop and look hard at the rest of the country and its problems. And they wouldn’t be able to ignore it or sneer at the rest of the country as being uneducated, unwashed, racist, sexist, backward, and destined to wither away. Identity politics turns America’s e pluribus unum into the Balkans. If you want to build a better America, you have to see everybody as part of it, not just the parts that agree with you politically.
Javier E

The Donald Trump Show - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-donald-trump-show.html

nativism trump crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • That message was a long attack, not on liberalism per se, but on the bipartisan post-Cold War elite consensus on foreign policy, mass immigration, free trade. It was an attack on George W. Bush’s Iraq war and Hillary Clinton’s Libya incursion both, on Nafta and every trade deal negotiated since, on the perpetual Beltway push for increased immigration, on the entire elite vision of an increasingly borderless globe.
  • it gave full voice to sentiments that are widely held on both sides of the Atlantic — sentiments rooted in the broken promises of both right and left, in 15 years of economic disappointment and military quagmire, in the percolating threat of globalized jihad, in an ever-more-balkanized culture governed by an ever-more-insulated elite.
malonema1

The Limits of American Realism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...imits-of-american-realism.html

us politics Russia Putin

shared by malonema1 on 11 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • The Limits of American Realism
  • Realists had a field day with that carnage, beginning with former Secretary of State James Baker’s early assessment that, “We don’t have a dog in that fight.” This view was echoed by various self-serving assessments from the Clinton White House that justified inaction through the portrayal of the Balkans as the locus of millennial feuds neither comprehensible nor resolvable.
  • The moral case was, however, overwhelming, beginning with the Serbian use in 1992 of concentration camps to kill Bosnian Muslim men deemed threatening, and expel Muslim women and children.
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  • Realists tend to dismiss human suffering; it’s just the way of the world.
  • utin has created havoc precisely in the no man’s lands — Georgia and Ukraine — rather than in the NATO lands. Russia’s interest, post-1990, was in the dismemberment of the European-American bond, most potently expressed in NATO. That was the real problem
  • Syria has illustrated the limits of White House realism. Realism has dictated nonintervention as hundreds of thousands were killed, millions displaced, and Islamic State emerged. Realism has been behind acquiescence to Assad’s barrel-bomb brutality. If Iraq illustrated disastrous American pursuit of an “ideological blueprint,” Syria has demonstrated a disastrous vacuum of American ideas.
  • But this is more a time to acknowledge the limits of realism — as a means to deal with the evil of ISIS, the debacle of Syria, or the desperate European refugee crisis — than to cry out for more, or suggest that it is underrepresented in American discourse.
Javier E

If Franz Ferdinand Had Lived - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...franz-ferdinand-had-lived.html

origins WWI austria empire balkan history crisis

shared by Javier E on 28 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • There were many possibilities before 1914. One ingenious proposal was for a United States of Austria, which would have carved the empire into a series of federal language-based states, including small urban enclaves to protect (but also isolate) German speakers. This could have been achieved only by the destruction of Magyar imperialism, but Franz Ferdinand at different points seems to have seen this as worth risking. The archduke also toyed with universal suffrage, knowing that the threat alone might keep the Magyar and German minorities in line.
  • these are ghosts that have haunted Europe ever since — possibilities whose disappearance unleashed evils inconceivable in the stuffy, hypocritical, but relatively decent and orderly world of the Hapsburg empire.
  • The Hapsburg rulers might have been shortsighted, cynical and incompetent, but they ruled over a paradise compared to the horrors that followed. The successor states were desperately weak, and almost all contained fractions of those minorities that had caused the Hapsburgs such problems.
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  • There were many reasons Franz Ferdinand was the perfect target for the Serbian-sponsored terrorists of 1914. They knew that his plans for reform within the empire were a profound threat to them.
  • The fates of the countries of the former empire, as they fell into the hands first of Hitler and then of Stalin, represented nightmarish “solutions” to the challenge of multinational rule, solutions based on genocide, class war and mass expulsions of kinds unimaginable in 1914.
  • Franz Ferdinand was probably the most senior antiwar figure in Central Europe, a man acutely aware of Hapsburg weakness, scathing about the delusions of his generals and a close friend of the German monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm. The recklessness and stupidity of the Hapsburg response to the assassination — the ultimatum of humiliating demands served on Serbia, a response so crucial to the outbreak of the World War I — would not have occurred in the face of some other provocative outrage that had left Franz Ferdinand alive.
Javier E

'Empire of Cotton,' by Sven Beckert - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...of-cotton-by-sven-beckert.html

cotton history economics global violence government intervention capitalism

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The history of an era often seems defined by a particular commodity.
  • The 18th century certainly belonged to sugar. The race to cultivate it in the West Indies was, in the words of the French Enlightenment writer Guillaume-Thomas de Raynal, “the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the Universe.”
  • In the 20th century and beyond, the commodity has been oil: determining events from the Allied partitioning of the Middle East after World War I to Hitler’s drive for Balkan and Caspian wells to the forging of our own fateful ties to the regimes of the Persian Gulf.
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  • Harvard historian Sven Beckert makes the case that in the 19th century what most stirred the universe was cotton.
  • Today some 350 million people are involved in growing, transporting, weaving, stitching or otherwise processing the fibers of this plant.
  • the slave plantations that spread across the American South, a form of outsourcing before the word was invented. These showed that cotton could be lucratively cultivated in bulk for consumers as far afield as another continent, and that realization turned the world upside down. Without slavery, he says, there would have been no Industrial Revolution.
  • Beckert’s most significant contribution is to show how every stage of the industrialization of cotton rested on violence.
  • As soon as the profit potential of those Southern cotton fields became clear in the late 1780s, the transport of slaves across the Atlantic rapidly increased. Cotton cloth itself had become the most important merchandise European traders used to buy slaves in Africa.
  • Then planters discovered that climate and rainfall made the Deep South better cotton territory than the border states. Nearly a million American slaves were forcibly moved to Georgia, Mississippi and elsewhere, shattering many families in the process.
  • The search for more good cotton-­growing soil in areas that today are such states as Texas, Arkansas, Kansas and Oklahoma was a powerful incentive to force Native Americans off their traditional lands and onto reservations, another form of violence by the “military-cotton complex.”
  • by 1850, two-thirds of American cotton was grown on land that had been taken over by the United States since the beginning of the century.
  • Beckert practices what is known as global or world history: the study of events not limited to one country or continent.
  • another major theme of “Empire of Cotton” is that, contrary to the myth of untrammeled free enterprise, this expanding industry was fueled at every stage by government intervention.
  • it was not just in the United States that planters’ thirst to sow large tracts with cotton pushed indigenous peoples and self-sufficient farmers off their land; colonial armies did the same thing in India, West Africa and elsewhere
  • it was not only white Southerners who were responsible for the harsh regime of slave-grown cotton: merchants and bankers in the North and in Britain lent them money and were investors as well.
  • From Denmark to Mexico to Russia, states lent large sums to early clothing manufacturers. Whether it was canals and railways in Europe or levees on the Mississippi, governments jumped in to build or finance the infrastructure that big cotton growers and mills demanded
  • Britain forced Egypt and other territories to lower or eliminate their import duties on British cotton.
  • he wants to use that commodity as a lens on the development of the modern world itself. This he divides into two overlapping phases: “war capitalism” for the stage when slavery and colonial conquest prepared the ground for the cotton industry, and “industrial capitalism” for the period when states intervened to protect and help the business in other ways
  • Today, a “giant race to the bottom” by an industry always looking for cheaper labor has shifted most cotton growing and the work of turning it into clothing back to Asia
  • violence in different forms is still all too present. In Uzbekistan, up to two million children under 15 are put to work harvesting cotton each year
  • In China, the Communist Party’s suppression of free trade unions keeps cotton workers’ wages down, just as British law in the early 1800s saw to it that men and women who abandoned their ill-paid jobs and ran away could be jailed for breach of contract.
  • in Bangladesh, the more than 1,100 people killed in the notorious collapse of the Rana Plaza building in 2013 were mostly female clothing workers, whose employers were as careless about their safety as those who enforced 14- or 16-hour workdays in German and Spanish weaving mills a century before
Javier E

André Glucksmann, French Philosopher Who Renounced Marxism, Dies at 78 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ounced-marxism-dies-at-78.html

France philosophers marxist right conservatism intellectual

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • In 1975, in “The Cook and the Cannibal,” Mr. Glucksmann subjected Marxism to a scalding critique. Two years later, he broadened his attack in his most influential work, “The Master Thinkers,” which drew a direct line from the philosophies of Marx, Hegel, Fichte and Nietzsche to the enormities of Nazism and Soviet Communism. It was they, he wrote in his conclusion, who “erected the mental apparatus which is indispensable for launching the grand final solutions of the 20th century.”
  • An instant best seller, the book put him in the company of several like-minded former radicals, notably Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pascal Bruckner. Known as the nouveaux philosophes, a term coined by Mr. Lévy, they became some of France’s most prominent public intellectuals, somewhat analogous to the neoconservatives in the United States, but with a lingering leftist orientation.
  • Their apostasy sent shock waves through French intellectual life, and onward to Moscow, which depended on the cachet afforded by Jean-Paul Sartre and other leftist philosophers
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  • “It was André Glucksmann who dealt the decisive blow to Communism in France,”
  • “In the West, he presented the anti-totalitarian case more starkly and more passionately than anyone else in modern times,
  • “He was a passionate defender of the superoppressed, whether it was the prisoners of the Gulag, the Bosnians and Kosovars, gays during the height of the AIDS crisis, the Chechens under Putin or the Iraqis under Saddam,” he said. “When he turned against Communism, it was because he realized that Communists were not on the same side.”
  • After earning the teaching degree known as an agrégation from the École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud in 1961, Mr. Glucksmann enrolled in the National Center for Scientific Research to pursue a doctorate under Raymond Aron — an odd matchup because Aron was France’s leading anti-Marxist intellectual.
  • His subsequent turn away from Marxism made him a reviled figure on the left, and former comrades looked on aghast as he became one of France’s most outspoken defenders of the United States. He argued for President Ronald Reagan’s policy of nuclear deterrence toward the Soviet Union, intervention in the Balkans and both American invasions of Iraq. In 2007, he supported the candidacy of Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency.
  • “There is the Glucksmann who was right and the Glucksmann who could — with the same fervor, the same feeling of being in the right — be wrong,” Mr. Lévy wrote in a posthumous appreciation for Le Monde. “What set him apart from others under such circumstances is that he would admit his error, and when he came around he was fanatical about studying his mistake, mulling it over, understanding it.”
  • In his most recent book, “Voltaire Counterattacks,” published this year, he positioned France’s greatest philosopher, long out of favor, as a penetrating voice perfectly suited to the present moment.
  • “I think thought is an individual action, not one of a party,” Mr. Glucksmann told The Chicago Tribune in 1991. “First you think. And if that corresponds with the Left, then you are of the Left; if Right, then you are of the Right. But this idea of thinking Left or Right is a sin against the spirit and an illusion.”
rachelramirez

Winter Poses New Danger for Migrants - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...nger-for-europe-migration.html

winter Syria crisis

shared by rachelramirez on 19 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Winter Poses New Danger for Migrants
  • If the numbers increase drastically or, worse, if there are more border closings, there would be an almost immediate backup that would quickly repopulate border camps within a week — some of them open-air, others consisting mostly of unheated tents.
  • Hungary completed a 108-mile razor-wire fence along its border with Serbia last month, following a free-for-all this summer that saw squalid encampments
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  • Migration officials warned that it might be a matter of days before the system collapses under the strain, as the migrants keep crossing from Turkey into Greece and through the Balkans,
qkirkpatrick

Bosnian Serbs erect statue to nationalist who ignited World War I - LA Times - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...rincip-ww1-20140627-story.html

world war i politics culture Balkans Serbia Ferdinand

shared by qkirkpatrick on 23 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Bosnian Serbs unveiled a bronze statue Friday in Sarajevo of Gavrilo Princip, the nationalist who assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand a century ago and set in motion the First World War, which took 10 million lives and shattered empires
  • Princip was a 19-year-old radical whose assassination of the Austro-Hungarian royal in line for the Hapsburg throne is considered by most historians to have been an act of terrorism, although he is revered by Serb nationalists who credit him with freeing Bosnia and Serbia from respective occupation by the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires
  • Jovan Mojsilovic, the actor who played Princip in the theatrical presentation during the statue-unveiling ceremony, called the Vienna orchestra's visit to Sarajevo a "pure provocation," the Reuters news agency reported.
qkirkpatrick

How World War I gave birth to the modern (Opinion) - CNN.com - 0 views

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

world war i war modern history culture

shared by qkirkpatrick on 25 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The years preceding World War I in Europe are generally referred to as the "Belle Epoque" -- a cultural and economic golden age. The period was hardly one of utter utopia for all citizens.
  • Modernism in art and literature had gathered momentum well before the First World War, which began in earnest 100 years ago this fall.
  • But with its eruption, those earlier Victorian forms no longer seemed adequate in the face of the period's upheavals, the destruction to bodies, to landscape, to culture itself. New experiments took up the task.
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  • Picasso already practiced the form during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, often using the very newsprint that announced the latest battles.
  • While many artists claimed Cubism itself as a renewed form of classicism, French nationalists derided it as a decadent German import (and spelled it "Kubism" accordingly).
  • The British Vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth not only painted canvases in the sharp lines characteristic of his circle's aggressive imagery, but also supervised the "dazzle" camouflage
  • Along with their rhetoric of jingoistic virility, Futurist painting and poetry nurtured a playful and subversive "anti-aesthetic" that would inspire artists for the rest of the 20th century. Ironically enough, it was the anti-war stirrings of Dada that bore out its most immediate influence, first in Switzerland and then post-war Berlin.
  • These artists drew not only upon Futurist experiments with newsprint, but also the Metaphysical cityscapes of the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, which conjure up a sense of both post-apocalyptic stillness and disquieting anticipation.
jongardner04

Germany Now Paying For Migrants To Go Home - 0 views

www.breitbart.com/...ny-now-paying-migrants-go-home

germany

shared by jongardner04 on 25 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Failed asylum seekers in Germany are voluntarily returning home, but only because the government is paying them.
  • The Federal Government has set aside some €2.14 million to pay for voluntary repatriations, which includes travel subsidies of €200 per person, although this does not include people who have entered Germany without a visa.
  • The figures come as Germany tightens its asylum laws, allowing for faster deportation and classifying the Balkan nations of Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro as “safe”, thus making it more difficult for people from those countries to claim asylum, and much easier to deport them.
Javier E

A Good Book for This Centenary - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...a-good-book-for-this-centenary

WWI ending Eastern Europe interwar

shared by Javier E on 12 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • In the West, mainly for England, France, and Belgium, the war took a catastrophic toll. But it was conducted largely within accepted distinctions between combatants and civilians. Just as importantly it ended with a rapid and full transition from war to peace, hostilities to demobilization
  • The history is dramatically different the further we look to the east.
  • The German Imperial state collapsed with the signing of the armistice and unwound into months of paramilitary violence and revolution from which a moderate socialist parliamentary government, which we know as the Weimar Republic, eventually consolidated power only with the assistance of rightist paramilitaries which would provide the seedbed for the growth of Nazism over the following decade. Italy, a nominal victor state, entered a comparable if less bloody period of trial from which emerged the “fascist” dictatorship of Benito Mussolini in 1922.
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  • it was in the east, in the regions we now know as Poland, Ukraine, Austria, Hungary, Belarus, Russia. the Baltics and the Balkans where the fighting really never ended. Here the formal war of 1914 and 1918 was conducted in a more total fashion than it had been in the West. Armistice brought state collapse and a period of state building and regeneration through violence, population transfers and mass killing.
  • the war that nominally ended in late 1918 didn’t really end until the early 1920s. From a longer perspective this end of hostilities in the early 1920s was itself more of an interruption or lull from which hostilities picked up again in the late 1920s and continued, with continuing cycles of brutalizing violence and innovations in organized killing by ‘racial’ categories, which continued right through the middle 1940s
  • It is only today that we see the beginnings of comparable breakdowns in state relations, the rise of aggressive nationalisms and racialist movements that were the great story of that period
Javier E

Europe's Glorious Years of Peace and Prosperity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...an-kershaw-the-global-age.html

europe peace prosperity politics economics

shared by Javier E on 05 May 19 - No Cached
  • In synthesizing this period in European history in a long but very readable volume
  • Kershaw reminds us that the Continent has faced other large challenges in the postwar era and survived; that some long-term trends of peace, prosperity and democracy are both robust and remarkable; and that individuals have agency, and can alter the course of events — they are not mere expressions of those events.
  • Today’s Europe, thankfully, is not haunted by the specter of nuclear war. The probability of a Russian invasion of a NATO member is low.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • During this “golden age” for Europe, imperial powers had to navigate decolonization. The French wars in Indochina and Algeria and the Portuguese wars in Angola and Mozambique were difficult, regime-threatening challenge
  • Europe endured domestic violence during this golden age, be it from the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Group in West Germany, nationalists in Northern Ireland or separatists in the Basque region.
  • war, sometimes in the form of ethnic cleansing, erupted in the Balkans in the 1990s. Brexit, immigration, populism and even Jihadist-inspired terrorism seem like much smaller challenges than genocide.
  • Kershaw traces several positive, long-term trends in European history from 1950 to 2017 that are downright miraculous. Most important, most of the Continent lived in peace during the Global Age, a sharp contrast to the horrific atrocities chronicled in Kershaw’s previous volume in this series, “To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949.”
  • Europeans on average became richer than at any time before. In Kershaw’s estimation, the period between 1950 and 1973 was especially prosperous — a “golden age” or an “economic miracle” for the western part of the Continent, and even a “silver age” for the Communist bloc
  • As Kershaw sums up, “Europe is more peaceful, more prosperous and more free than at any time in its long history.” Alongside these three positive trends of peace, prosperity and democracy, cooperation among European countries expanded dramatically, culminating in the creation of the European Union and the euro.
  • It would be premature, however, to predict a new negative trajectory. Peace, prosperity and democracy in Europe still have serious momentum.
  • Kershaw allows for the possibility that individuals — not just innate structural forces — can shape history
  • Kershaw ascribes the greatest agency of all to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. “The magnitude of Gorbachev’s personal contributions to the dramatic change, not just in the Soviet Union itself but throughout Eastern Europe, can scarcely be exaggerated.
  • European leaders should read “The Global Age” to be reminded of the incredible progress of the last 70 years — and told that such progress is something they have the power to sustain through their individual actions
manhefnawi

The Last days of the Habsburg Monarchy | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...last-days-habsburg-monarchy

End of Habsburg Monarch Charles German War

shared by manhefnawi on 15 May 18 - No Cached
  • a Habsburg Emperor attended mass in the Imperial Chapel of Schönbrunn for the last time
  • The congregation, made up of loyal servants of the dynasty, knew that this was to be the last occasion of its kind
  • They knew that a whole political and social order had come to an end, that a whole way of life had become empty and meaningless. The next day, as the armies in France stopped fighting, Charles formally renounced his share in the government of the Austrian Empire; that evening, he left Schönbrunn with his family
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  • Two days later, he was entreated by some Hungarian noblemen who came there to renounce his share of government in the Kingdom of Hungary also
  • The dynasty’s subjects, supported by the western powers, violently renounced the unity that had been given them under the Habsburg Monarchy, and declared their national independence
  • Men had been predicting the collapse of the Habsburg Empire since the days of Napoleon: in an age of national states, this Empire, which included eleven peoples, seemed to defy the spirit of The Times in a particularly flagrant manner
  • the peoples had developed a national consciousness
  • This new national consciousness ran side by side with, and often counter to, the patriotism inspired by the Emperor. First the ‘historic’ peoples—Germans, Hungarians, Italians and Poles—thought of themselves as nations, rather than as Habsburg subjects, and many of them demanded to have their own states
  • expected to redeem the Monarchy’s prestige in a short war; he was taken aback when the Russians and French came in, and still more so when the war dragged on beyond October 1914
  • The Habsburg Monarchy was not fitted for a long war. The Empire was not very highly industrialized, and had to take a large part of her arms from Germany
  • This was the decisive moment in the collapse of Austria-Hungary
  • The Germans did not bully the Habsburgs as they bullied their satellites a generation later
  • most of the Austrian Germans and most of the Hungarians wished to fight to a victorious conclusion. Charles therefore stood by, wringing his hands as the Germans resolutely went on tearing Europe apart. He could do nothing but make ineffectual gestures. The last Habsburg had become a ‘good German’
  • Some of the peoples were pro-German, hoping to profit from German victory in Europe: if the Germans ruled Belgium and Poland, who would worry if their Bohemian cousins took their bit of Bohemia for themselves, and who would worry if the Hungarians went on ruling Slavs and Romanians in a high-handed manner
  • Clearly, if Germany defeated France, then the German language would become obligatory in Bohemian courts
  • In 1918, the situation inside Austria-Hungary was desperate; strikes and mutinies became commonplace
  • It was clear that only German victory in the west could solve the internal problems of the Monarchy
  • Up to the spring of 1918, few people had really wanted to see the Habsburgs expelled from Vienna, for they solved too many problems, or at least allowed these problems to be forgotten
  • These men answered the Allies’ problem: they offered at once an obstacle to German success, and a guarantee against the consequences of German failure
  • All this gave the Germans a whip-hand over the Monarchy, so that there could be no question of a separate peace. To the Emperor Charles, who succeeded Francis Joseph at the end of 1916, it looked as if he was fighting only to make the Germans masters of Europe
  • To the end, Hungary refused to make concessions to anyone, and pointed to Austria as a woeful example
  • As a result, Hungary remained remarkably solid until the end, as Austria staggered from one liberal nostrum to another.
  • Charles decided that he must sue for peace
  • By this, the Habsburg dynasty pledged itself to carry out the Fourteen Points
  • Thus, when the Monarchy was overthrown in Prague and other centres, there was a minimum of fuss— military commands simply handed over nominal powers to the National Councils
  • It was revolution by telephone
  • In reality, Austria-Hungary had been finished from the beginning of September, for no one would now wish to be associated with the Habsburg dynasty
  • In the manifesto, these professors and the Emperor sought to win recognition by associating themselves with the nationalists
  • the embrace of the Habsburg dynasty was by this time regarded as the kiss of death, and all the National Councils, without exception, rejected the manifesto
  • the last asset of the Monarchy
  • In the Balkans, the Austro-Hungarian front went through much the same process of dissolution
  • in Albania
  • By November nth, the new authorities were functioning everywhere. Fear of popular disturbance, however, and of Bolshevik outbreaks, prompted them to request that Charles should abdicate
  • persuading Charles to renounce his part in the government of his lands—there was never a formal abdication
  • Hungary was declared a republic on November 16th. The following spring Charles, a lonely and dignified figure, went into exile in Switzerland
manhefnawi

Fourteen Points | United States declaration | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Fourteen-Points

World War 1 Covenant Peace Turks Russia France Italy Balkans

shared by manhefnawi on 16 May 18 - No Cached
  • essential nature of a post-World War I settlement
  • peace
  • freedom of navigation upon the seas
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • establishment of an equality of trade conditions
  • national armaments will be reduced
  • adjustment of all colonial claims
  • the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight
  • The evacuation of all Russian territory
  • 7. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored
  • restore confidence among the nations
  • All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored
  • the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all
  • A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy
  • occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea
  • The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development
  • An independent Polish state should be erected
  • A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity
  • On Oct. 3–4, 1918, Prince Maximilian of Baden, the German imperial chancellor, sent a note, via Switzerland, to President Wilson, requesting an immediate armistice and the opening of peace negotiations on the basis of the Fourteen Points
  • Germans would later argue a “betrayal” when faced by the harsher terms of the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles
manhefnawi

Eugene of Savoy | Austrian general | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Eugene-of-Savoy

House of Savoy Leopold I Joseph Charles VI

shared by manhefnawi on 18 May 18 - No Cached
  • statesman of the Carignan line of the House of Savoy, who, in the service of the Austrian Holy Roman emperor, made his name as one of the greatest soldiers of his generation
  • against the Turks in central Europe and the Balkans (1683–88, 1697, 1715–18) and against France in the War of the Grand Alliance (1689–97) and in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14)
  • His paternal ancestors were the dukes of Savoy, who later became kings of Sardinia, Sicily, and eventually of all Italy, while on his mother’s side the family included not only Roman patricians
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  • A rumour once had it that Eugene was actually the son of Louis XIV, the Sun King, who, although he always denied it, was said to have had an affair as a young man with Olympia Mancini.
  • left France altogether and offered his sword to the emperor Leopold I, who was busy fighting the Turks
  • In his first battle, at the relief of Vienna from siege by the Turks in 1683, Eugene so distinguished himself
  • He lost only Spain, and that because of the political ineptitude of the emperor Charles VI
  • Eugene’s battles were among the bloodiest encounters of that sanguinary period
  • During a span of 39 years he continued to lead the Emperor’s armies from the River Save all the way to Lombardy, through the Tirol back again to Bavaria and the Rhine, down once more to Hungary against the Turks, and back up again to Flanders
  • He served three emperors: Leopold I, Joseph I, and Charles VI. Toward the end of his life, Eugene observed that, whereas the first had been a father to him and the second a brother, the third (who was perhaps least worthy of so great a servant) had been a master
  • Belgrade (1718) was Eugene’s most famous victory
anonymous

Resignation syndrome: Sweden's mystery illness - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-41748485

asylum trauma immigration health sweden

shared by anonymous on 05 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Resignation syndrome: Sweden's mystery illness
  • Resignation Syndrome, it affects only the children of asylum-seekers, who withdraw completely, ceasing to walk or talk, or open their eyes. Eventually they recover.
  • When her father picks her up from her wheelchair, nine-year-old Sophie is lifeless. In contrast, her hair is thick and shiny - like a healthy child's. But Sophie's eyes are closed. And under her tracksuit bottoms she wears a nappy. A transparent feeding tube runs into Sophie's nose - this is how she has been nourished for the past 20 months.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The health professionals who treat these children agree that trauma is what has caused them to withdraw from the world. The children who are most vulnerable are those who have witnessed extreme violence - often against their parents - or whose families have fled a deeply insecure environment.
  • Resignation Syndrome was first reported in Sweden in the late 1990s. More than 400 cases were reported in the two years from 2003-2005.
  • It remains the case that children from particular geographical and ethnic groups are the most vulnerable: those from the former USSR, the Balkans, Roma children, and most recently the Yazidi.
  • Numerous conditions resembling Resignation Syndrome have been reported before - among Nazi concentration camp inmates, for example. In the UK, a similar condition - Pervasive Refusal Syndrome - was identified in children in the early 1990s, but there have been only a tiny handful of cases, and none of them among asylum seekers.
saberal

How the 'good war' went bad: elite soldiers from Australia, UK and US face a reckoning | Australian military | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...lia-uk-and-us-face-a-reckoning

US politics

shared by saberal on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • As the post-9/11 Afghanistan conflict dragged deep into its second decade, with persistent rumours alleging impropriety, brutality, and even possible war crimes swirling among Australia’s tight-knit defence community, Dr Samantha Crompvoets, a civilian sociologist, was commissioned to investigate alleged cultural failings within its special forces.
  • Roberts-Smith, a former SAS corporal, is suing the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Canberra Times over a series of 2018 articles he claims defamed him because they portrayed him as committing war crimes while on deployment in Afghanistan. He strenuously denies all allegations and has previously rejected them as malicious and deeply troubling.
  • US soldiers were convicted over the deaths of two unarmed Afghan civilians on Bagram airbase in 2002. Two soldiers from a self-declared “kill team” pleaded guilty to murder while deployed, while Staff Sergeant Robert Bales pleaded guilty to the murder of 16 Afghan civilians during a shooting spree in Kandahar province in 2012. Members of the storied Seal Team 6 have been accused of war crimes, including beheading and mutilating slain enemies.
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  • These were soldiers from the militaries of liberal democracies, avowedly promoting the rule of law and seeking to bring peace and stability to a country that has known little but conflict for generations. Yet some have been accused of the most serious crimes imaginable, of targeting civilians, of torturing captives, of slaughtering children.
  • In her 45-page report sent to Australian defence force chiefs, Crompvoets wrote of the “well-crafted reports” of special forces operations that offered legal justification for the actions of soldiers.
  • During Major Chris Green’s deployment with the UK’s Grenadier Guards in Helmand province in 2012, he became increasingly concerned that special forces tactics were undermining the coalition’s broader counterinsurgency mission.
  • “People knew laws were being broken, people understood the modus operandi of the night raids. But every time an operator reported back from these raids and didn’t find themselves in front of a tribunal that just further convinced them they were doing the right thing, that the laws didn’t apply to them.”
  • “War is dynamic and imperfect and the freedom and autonomy in special forces is a double-edged sword,” one SAS member told Crompvoets.
  • Frank Ledwidge, a barrister and former military officer who served in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan, argues that over the course of the Afghan war, a culture developed among coalition special forces that celebrated violence, prioritised kill statistics and dehumanised those they fought.
  • The JPEL was a list of “kill or capture” objectives – targets that were considered combatants and could be lawfully killed. It was a dynamic document, with names being added or subtracted as intelligence came in. Allegedly this dynamism was exploited.
  • Australia’s initial involvement, between 2001 and 2002, was focused on combating al-Qaida: “We weren’t trying to seize and hold ground. It was a mission entirely appropriate for our special forces.”
  • “The multiple rotations of people into Afghanistan particularly, some operators went there 12 times. That must affect their mental health ... or impact the way they went about their operations. Certainly it would impact upon the judgment questions about why they are there.
  • Saul argues there are drivers, too, of non-compliance with international humanitarian law. Moral disengagement emerges from combatants finding justifications for violations, and from a dehumanisation of the enemy.
  • When Sergeant Alexander Blackman of the Royal Marines shot a wounded, unarmed insurgent at point-blank range in the chest in Helmand in September 2011, he turned to his comrades and said: “Obviously this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas. I’ve just broke the Geneva convention.”
  • “If there’s no structural change that challenges those power dynamics within special forces, there won’t be enduring changes.”
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