Religion,Greed, and the Insanity of War

Abstract

This article quantifies only a brief encounter with the violent intersection of religion, business, and war. It surveys war in the modern world by including the following topics: the effects of war such as environmental degradation; psychological costs, including post-traumatic stress syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome; violence against females; children at war; costs of war; causes of war and globalization. It wonders if there is such a thing as a killer-instinct that needs an antidote. Several religions from East and West, violent and non-violent, are discussed against the backdrop of war noting the presence of warrior gods and sacrifice. Finally the economic and pseudo-creative benefits of war are summarized. Selvidge poses a final question to readers, "How can we change the direction of a world gone mad?"     

A CAPTIVE'S STORY: PURITANS,PIRATES, AND THE DRAMA OF RECONCILIATION

Abstract

This essay examines the use of Hebrew sources in debates on church and state in civil war England. It fits within a developing historiography that seeks to uncover the deeper texture of early modern political discourse, and also poses questions about the prevalence of statist and secular understandings of public power in the context of the English civil war. Its specific focus is on debates on church government in the 1640s, studies of the Hebrew commonwealth in the 1650s, and the use of Hebraism by Hobbes and Harrington as an antidote to clericalism.     

Max Weber,charisma and nationalist leadership1

ABSTRACT. One of Max Weber's most well‐known achievements was the formulation of three concepts of legitimate authority: traditional, legal‐rational and charismatic. However, there are particular problems with the last of these, which is not historically grounded in the manner of the other two concepts. The charisma concept originated with Weber's sociology of religion, was pressed into service in pre‐war writing on the sociology of domination, shifted focus in his wartime political writings and changed meaning again in his post‐war writing on basic sociological concepts. To use the concept in historical‐political analysis, I argue, one must distinguish between a pre‐modern and modern form of charismatic domination. I argue that doing this enables us to understand features of the leadership of colonial nationalist and fascist movements.     

20世纪30年代法国军事辩论的惨痛教训

1940年法国战败,军事理论落后是其重要原因之一,而祸根在30年代的军事辩论时就已经种下。30年代法国军事辩论的主要内容是如何认识坦克集群战争。艾蒂安纳、杜芒克、戴高乐等人根据当时欧洲新的军事思潮,主张坦克战;反对派昧于历史新趋势,简单化地、过分乐观地认为,法国已经建立可靠的防线,法军已拥有足够的坦克,坦克只需掩护步兵,而组织坦克部队进攻将是一种冒险,敌人即使突破或绕过防线仍旧无法取胜。1940年法国的溃败,对这场军事辩论做了实际的总结。法国关于坦克集群战争的辩论和它屈服于坦克集群的事实,为我们提供了若干颇有价值的启示：军事理论的辩论一般具有长远意义;必须认识传统的力量及其限度;军事上的正确判断是打败对手的基本条件之一;必须看到军事理论、战争皆和社会生产、国家经济密切相关;落后的军事理论与压制先进军事思想的政策,势必对国家民族造成不可弥补的损失。     

清末银两汇价波动与外债偿付(1901—1911)

有清一代,始终实行银两制度,银两是国内外商贸往来或债务清算等的主要流通支付手段.由于中国白银产量不多,为了满足币材需要,必须不时地从国外输入大量白银,银两价格不能不受世界市场白银价格波动的影响.     

甲午战争与近代日本国民的形成——近代媒体的发展与作用

培养近代国民是国民国家建设的重要目标,同时具备民族特质和公民特质是国民的内在属性。甲午战争是日本进入近代以来的第一次大规模对外战争,＂印刷资本主义＂的出现和发展形成了能够构成民族共同体的舆论条件。战争与媒体交互影响,使＂日本人＂的自我意识得以强化,对外形成了对朝鲜和中国的优越感和蔑视感,军人被英雄化、神圣化,围绕战争也形成教育方式多样性,民众由此达成了对天皇和国家的认同,甲午战争成为近代日本国民＂民族＂特质的重要标志。     

4. PARTISANS AND POPULATIONS: THE PLACE OF CIVILIANS IN WAR,ALGERIA (1954–62)

Carl Schmitt's influential text The Theory of the Partisan (1963) serves in this article to read the history of civilians in modern warfare, examining the case of Algeria (1954–62). Schmitt's argument that the partisan leads to a dangerous conceptual blurring in war, confusing soldier and civilian, friend and enemy, reveals important questions about the war, questions that are otherwise invisible in conventional readings of the archives. Notably it places in relief the figure of the “population,” a way that the French military conceptualized Algerian civilians and their place on the battlefield. The article argues that the population, as constituted in military theory, needs to be understood as the partisan's partner in contributing to the normlessness of violence. This offers both a new reading of the war in Algeria and the violence suffered by civilians, as well as a correction to Schmitt's politically one‐sided explanation of the problem of normlessness and modern warfare. Whereas Schmitt's revolutionary partisan is a figure of the left, the notion of the population originated among counter‐revolutionary French officers who rethought war in an effort to stop decolonization and reshape their own society along military lines. For them Algerian civilians served as a primary weapon against the National Liberation Front (FLN) by breaking up the nationalists’ claim to lead a single, undivided, and sovereign Algerian people. In effect, the notion of the population made Algerian civilians appear as potential enemies to the FLN, blurring the nationalists’ own understanding of the political configuration of the war, directly exposing civilians to its violence.     

战争期间日本妇女运动家市川房枝的政治转向

市川房枝是日本近代著名的妇女解放思想家,妇女运动的领导者,在战前和战后致力于日本妇女解放运动,但是曾因战争期间参加法西斯军国主义的战时体制,战后一度被解除公职,本文探讨的是1937年日本发动全面侵华战争时市川房枝的政治转向,即由争取妇女参政权运动转到为战时体制服务,在翼赞体制下号召和组织妇女支持侵略战争,并试图通过市川房枝为代表的妇女运动的转向,探求其转向的深层根源。     

Trauma,Mourning and Resistance in Spozhmai Zaryab's Short Stories

The war in Afghanistan (1978 to the present) is one of the longest and bloodiest wars in modern history. From the early 1980s war intensified between the Leftist regime and the opposition Mujahideen and touched the life of every citizen. Bombardments, rockets and landmines killed and injured hundreds of thousands of civilians and caused massive displacement. Women were the direct and indirect targets of the war; some women lost members of their immediate family, others were displaced and emigrated, some were raped, and others were enslaved and sold. Thus trauma and mourning mark the lives of the majority of Afghanistani women. Given the political nature of the conflict—with superpowers and regional powers behind the warring sides—and the nature of socio-cultural bonds that required women to keep silent, how did women deal with these traumas? One of the areas in which this can best be seen is in women's literature—most notably narrative works. These works, in which the authors were themselves either victims or witnesses, voice women's resistance to the war and portray war and its consequences for ordinary women's everyday lives. In the narrative works of Spozhmai Zaryab (the pioneer of the anti-war fiction in Afghanistan), women and trauma are multi-dimensional. In some of her short stories women mourn publicly; in others, women cope with war and resist it by whatever means available to them. In others, women visualize war, invasion and destruction of all socio-cultural bonds. Women are transformed by a profound change, including in their perception of gender relations.     

Whose Theology? Which Theology?

Abstract

This is a response to Gareth Jones's critique of Changing Worlds, arguing that while this critique largely misunderstands the approach taken in the book, it does raise important questions about the prospect of war in the modern world. Crucial differences are identified in the use of theological rhetoric as a means of resolving differences about the legitimacy of war in the modern world.     

金戈铁马 烽火硝烟——历史节点上的山海关之战

在山海关石河东岸、角山南麓，有一个美丽的村庄，名叫回马寨，传说村庄得名与明朝末年农民起义军领袖李白成及发生在这里的石河大战有关。     

高技术条件下的人类、战争与环境--以1991年海湾战争为例

科技进步和军事变革互为条件、共同发展。战争作为“流血的政治”,其根本属性并没有随着科技进步而改变。它不仅是人类社会内部的严重冲突,更是特定生态系统中人与环境的对立。与以往的战争模式相比,高技术战争看似“人道”,却凸显出人与环境之关系更趋紧张的态势。以1991年海湾战争为例,战争双方滥用科技带来的破坏,几乎超出了自然环境的自我恢复能力和人类重建家园能力。无论联军还是伊军,都是环境的破坏者,他们连同平民一起又是环境破坏后果的最终承担者。从人与环境的关系入手审视高技术战争,使我们看到了现有的战争伦理的局限性。     

中国近代工业地理分布、变化及其影响

鸦片战争后，中国社会经济发生剧烈变动。工业（包括手工业）的地理分布及其变化，是其中的一个重要方面。它大致经历了1840－1894、1895—1913、1914－1936、1937－1949年四个阶段的发展演变。其间，中国近代工业虽然从无到有，但受历史条件的制约，其发展速度和规模都很有限，其地域分布也始终没有突破偏于沿海沿江地带的基本格局，这种状况限制了其社会影响，有碍中西部地区的经济开发和工业发展。     

日本资本主义制度确立时期的财政政策

1877年的西南战争使明治政府真正实现了中央集权。从1877年西南战争结束至1889年《大日本帝国宪法》的颁布,为日本近代资本主义制度确立时期。此间明治政府建立并完善内阁制,开设国会,制定并颁布宪法,建立近代天皇制;与其相适应,财政上,在致力于建立、完善近代财政金融制度的同时,开始由积极财政政策向财政紧缩政策转变。本文重点探讨此间明治政府财政政策转变的原因、内容及影响。     

Ending Cold War fears: expectation and interpretation in Mass Observers’ responses to the Gulf War, 1990–1991

This article considers responses to the Mass Observation Project’s Gulf Crisis sub-directive. It argues firstly that observers’ responses show how a potential war within Iraq in 1990/1991 was framed by fear of global conflagration and suggests that these fears were rooted in memories of the later cold war. Secondly it argues that the Gulf War was interpreted as a rapid and successful conflict, which dispelled pre-war fears of global conflagration/nuclear war, and demonstrated that the UK could be involved in large-scale modern military conflicts without risking escalation and global catastrophe.     

"总体战"和现代日本"间接金融体制"的形成

日本近代银行虽然早在明治初期已经发端 ,但是明治时代的日本企业基本上是依靠股份和企业内部资金储备扩大再生产 ,即所谓“内部金融时代”。直至 2 0世纪 30年代中期 ,日本企业仍处于主要以发行股票和债券融资的“直接金融” ,和主要以向银行借贷融资的“间接金融”二者并存 ,但以前者为主要的状态。在发动侵华战争、构筑总体战体制以后 ,日本金融体制发生了急剧变化 ,主要表现为资本市场日趋衰微 ,以向银行借贷为主的间接金融体制开始形成。这种体制在战后仍然得以延续。由美国主导的日本战后民主化改革 ,并没有使战时形成的金融体制发生根本性变革。     

Warfare,Imperialism, and the Making of Modern Chinese History: A Review Essay

This historiographic essay contends that warfare made and unmade the Qing dynasty between 1644 and 1911, and its study has helped to create the field of modern Chinese history during the past seventy years. It advances three principal claims. First, the literature on war, especially interstate conflict, can serve as a synecdoche for the development of the modern China field as a whole since the 1950s. The research interests of late Qing specialists have oscillated along an “external-internal-external” axis that corresponds with three distinct periods of intellectual inquiry, scholarly production, and generational dominance. Second, historians have reached inaccurate conclusions about the state capacity of the Qing Empire after 1840 through a crude analysis of the First Sino-Japanese War, a mistake they can rectify by adopting a longer-term perspective on the state-making process. Third, scholars have deftly traced the changing role of military power in modern Chinese politics but have also adopted the interpretive categories of wen and wu from literati discourse without sufficient critical reflection. In the future, researchers may seek to explore the intersection of warfare and the environment, technology, and ethnic identity, approaches that will continue to move the field in comparative, global, and Inner Asian directions.     

Vattel's law of nations and just war theory

It has often been said that Vattel's treatise on the law of nations breaks with the tradition of modern natural law and just war theory. Based on a closer examination of Vattel's justification of preventive war and of his assessment of the balance of power in Europe, the paper argues that this criticism is greatly exaggerated, if not entirely misleading.     

Reason and lovelessness: Tagore,war crimes,and Justice Pal

Rabindranath Tagore, whose oeuvre provincialized Europe, thought about the Nation-State’s wars and crimes in ways congruent with that of another man from Calcutta: Radhabinod Pal, the Indian judge at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. Several themes intersect here. Tagore was prescient about the aeroplane as the colonial vehicle of atrocity in modern war, anticipating the atomic bombs. He began with high hopes for Japan and an Asia that was one, but his story is a transition from innocence to experience of Japan’s militarism. In the face Japanese scorn at his criticisms Tagore expressed a profound moral teaching about defeat, so called, and the extent to which even victorious civilizations might dishonor themselves. Justice Pal, naively thought by the great powers to be an ally in their legal endeavors to ratify a ‘victor’s justice’, arrived in Tokyo in 1946 with a secret weapon strapped to his heart: his faith in ancient Hindu law, which covertly informs the post-colonial tenor of his ‘dissentient’ judgment, first fully published in Calcutta in 1953. The argument here rests, if that’s possible, where Ashis Nandy ends his illuminating essay on Pal: culpability in matters of war is not easily divisible.