Why Comrades Go to War

Why Comrades Go to War PDF Author: Philip G. Roessler
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190864559
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 519

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Book Description
An account of the AFDL's rise in 1996, crushing the dictatorship within Zaire/Congo and their subsequent collapse only months later as the Pan-Africanist alliance fell apart

Why Comrades Go to War

Why Comrades Go to War PDF Author: Philip G. Roessler
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190864559
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 519

Get Book Here

Book Description
An account of the AFDL's rise in 1996, crushing the dictatorship within Zaire/Congo and their subsequent collapse only months later as the Pan-Africanist alliance fell apart

For Cause and Comrades

For Cause and Comrades PDF Author: James M. McPherson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199741050
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
General John A. Wickham, commander of the famous 101st Airborne Division in the 1970s and subsequently Army Chief of Staff, once visited Antietam battlefield. Gazing at Bloody Lane where, in 1862, several Union assaults were brutally repulsed before they finally broke through, he marveled, "You couldn't get American soldiers today to make an attack like that." Why did those men risk certain death, over and over again, through countless bloody battles and four long, awful years ? Why did the conventional wisdom -- that soldiers become increasingly cynical and disillusioned as war progresses -- not hold true in the Civil War? It is to this question--why did they fight--that James McPherson, America's preeminent Civil War historian, now turns his attention. He shows that, contrary to what many scholars believe, the soldiers of the Civil War remained powerfully convinced of the ideals for which they fought throughout the conflict. Motivated by duty and honor, and often by religious faith, these men wrote frequently of their firm belief in the cause for which they fought: the principles of liberty, freedom, justice, and patriotism. Soldiers on both sides harkened back to the Founding Fathers, and the ideals of the American Revolution. They fought to defend their country, either the Union--"the best Government ever made"--or the Confederate states, where their very homes and families were under siege. And they fought to defend their honor and manhood. "I should not lik to go home with the name of a couhard," one Massachusetts private wrote, and another private from Ohio said, "My wife would sooner hear of my death than my disgrace." Even after three years of bloody battles, more than half of the Union soldiers reenlisted voluntarily. "While duty calls me here and my country demands my services I should be willing to make the sacrifice," one man wrote to his protesting parents. And another soldier said simply, "I still love my country." McPherson draws on more than 25,000 letters and nearly 250 private diaries from men on both sides. Civil War soldiers were among the most literate soldiers in history, and most of them wrote home frequently, as it was the only way for them to keep in touch with homes that many of them had left for the first time in their lives. Significantly, their letters were also uncensored by military authorities, and are uniquely frank in their criticism and detailed in their reports of marches and battles, relations between officers and men, political debates, and morale. For Cause and Comrades lets these soldiers tell their own stories in their own words to create an account that is both deeply moving and far truer than most books on war. Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Civil War, was a national bestseller that Hugh Brogan, in The New York Times, called "history writing of the highest order." For Cause and Comrades deserves similar accolades, as McPherson's masterful prose and the soldiers' own words combine to create both an important book on an often-overlooked aspect of our bloody Civil War, and a powerfully moving account of the men who fought it.

Comrades Betrayed

Comrades Betrayed PDF Author: Michael Geheran
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501751034
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
At the end of 1941, six weeks after the mass deportations of Jews from Nazi Germany had begun, Gestapo offices across the Reich received an urgent telex from Adolf Eichmann, decreeing that all war-wounded and decorated Jewish veterans of World War I be exempted from upcoming "evacuations." Why this was so, and how Jewish veterans at least initially were able to avoid the fate of ordinary Jews under the Nazis, is the subject of Comrades Betrayed. Michael Geheran deftly illuminates how the same values that compelled Jewish soldiers to demonstrate bravery in the front lines in World War I made it impossible for them to accept passively, let alone comprehend, persecution under Hitler. After all, they upheld the ideal of the German fighting man, embraced the fatherland, and cherished the bonds that had developed in military service. Through their diaries and private letters, as well as interviews with eyewitnesses and surviving family members and records from the police, Gestapo, and military, Michael Geheran presents a major challenge to the prevailing view that Jewish veterans were left isolated, neighborless, and having suffered a social death by 1938. Tracing the path from the trenches of the Great War to the extermination camps of the Third Reich, Geheran exposes a painful dichotomy: while many Jewish former combatants believed that Germany would never betray them, the Holocaust was nonetheless a horrific reality. In chronicling Jewish veterans' appeal to older, traditional notions of comradeship and national belonging, Comrades Betrayed forces reflection on how this group made use of scant opportunities to defy Nazi persecution and, for some, to evade becoming victims of the Final Solution.

Comrades

Comrades PDF Author: Harry Fisher
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803268999
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
The Spanish Civil War served as an ideological and physical battleground for visionary Americans wishing to combat the spread of fascism. Harry Fisher was one such idealist who became a solider in the famed Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the American contingent of international volunteers dedicated to defeating Franco's forces. ø Fisher was one of the earliest American volunteers and one of the few to participate in all the major battles. Under a barrage of shells, bombs, and bullets for eighteen months, he lost his illusions about war's efficacy in solving political issues. To this day a despondence often overwhelms him when he recalls a family photograph he found jutting from the pocket of a slain fascist soldier. His involvement taught him that up close, the dead, whether fascist soldiers or his own fallen comrades, looked alike. ø This is a war story, simply told. Yet it is also a complex story about a young man testing his ideology in the harsh realities of battle.

Comrades of Color

Comrades of Color PDF Author: Quinn Slobodian
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782387064
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
In keeping with the tenets of socialist internationalism, the political culture of the German Democratic Republic strongly emphasized solidarity with the non-white world: children sent telegrams to Angela Davis in prison, workers made contributions from their wages to relief efforts in Vietnam and Angola, and the deaths of Patrice Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh, and Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired public memorials. Despite their prominence, however, scholars have rarely examined such displays in detail. Through a series of illuminating historical investigations, this volume deploys archival research, ethnography, and a variety of other interdisciplinary tools to explore the rhetoric and reality of East German internationalism.

Comrades and Commissars

Comrades and Commissars PDF Author: Cecil D. Eby
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271029102
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
In the summer of 1936, Generalissimo Francisco Franco led a group of right-wing nationalists in a military attack on the Republican government of Spain&—the start of what would become the Spanish Civil War. Despite U.S. laws banning participation in foreign conflicts, American volunteers began pouring into Barcelona in January 1937. The most famous of these anti-Franco groups was the band of 2,800 American fighters who called themselves the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. In Comrades and Commissars, Cecil D. Eby pushes beyond the bias that has dominated study of the Lincoln Battalion and gets to the very heart of the American experience in Spain. Controversy has plagued the Lincoln Battalion from the very start. Were these men selfless defenders of liberty or un-American Communists? Eby has long been regarded as one of the few balanced interpreters of their history. His 1969 book, Between the Bullet and the Lie, won accolades for its rigorous and fair treatment of the Battalion. Comrades and Commissars builds upon that earlier study, incorporating a wealth of information collected over intervening decades. New oral histories, previously untranslated memoirs, and newly declassified official documents all lend even greater authority and perspective to Eby&’s account. Most significant is Eby&’s use of Lincoln Battalion archives sequestered in a Moscow storeroom for sixty years. These papers draw renewed focus on some of the most provocative questions surrounding the Battalion, including the extent to which Americans were persecuted&—and even executed&—by the brigade commissariat. The Americans who served in the Lincoln Battalion were neither mythic figures nor political abstractions. Poorly trained and equipped, they committed themselves to back-to-the-wall defense of the doomed Spanish Republic. In Comrades and Commissars, we at last have the authoritative account of their experiences.

Churchill and Stalin

Churchill and Stalin PDF Author: Martin H. Folly
Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
ISBN: 9781781590492
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Based on documents from the Russian archives, this comprehensive study charts the tumultuous wartime relationship between Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It highlights the secret correspondence between the two leaders, records their meetings and conversations in Moscow and at the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam summits, and discloses the confidential communications of Stalin and his diplomats. Churchill and Stalin has been compiled and edited by three leading Russian and British historians of the Second World War. Their narrative brings together military and political history, documentary analysis and biography in an illuminating way. It reveals how Stalin and Churchill clashed and collaborated in order to achieve victory, and it demonstrates the deep personal relationship between these two great personalities as well as their profound political differences. Even when the Grand Alliance collapsed after the war, they retained their respect and affection for each other. Other important wartime personalities also feature in the documents -President Roosevelt, the British and Soviet foreign ministers, Anthony Eden and Vyacheslav Molotov, Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London and Averell Harriman, the American ambassador in Moscow. This fascinating documentary record is linked by a detailed narrative and commentary on the Stalin-Churchill relationship in the context of Anglo-Soviet relations during the war and the politics of the Grand Alliance. A landmark book - it will appeal to all those interested in Churchill and Stalin and in the politics and diplomacy of the Second World War.

Walking with Comrades

Walking with Comrades PDF Author: Arundhati Roy
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 8184755899
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 85

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Book Description
‘The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with “India’s single biggest internal security challenge”. I’d been waiting for months to hear from them...’ In early 2010, Arundhati Roy travelled into the forests of Central India, homeland to millions of indigenous people, dreamland to some of the world’s biggest mining corporations. The result is this powerful and unprecedented report from the heart of an unfolding revolution.

Three Comrades

Three Comrades PDF Author: Erich Maria Remarque
Publisher: London : Hutchinson
ISBN:
Category : World War, 1914-1918
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Why Comrades go to War

Why Comrades go to War PDF Author: Philip Roessler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197548075
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 519

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Book Description
In October 1996, a motley crew of ageing Marxists and unemployed youth coalesced to revolt against Mobutu Seso Seko, president of Zaire/Congo since 1965. The rebels of the AFDL marched over 1500km in seven months to crush the dictatorship, heralding liberation as a second independence for Central Africa as a whole. US President Bill Clinton toasted AFDL leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila and his regional allies -- having developed a unique camaraderie and personal trust on the region's battlefronts -- as a 'new generation of African leaders' ushering in an 'African Renaissance.' Within months, however, the Pan-Africanist alliance fell apart. The AFDL's collapse triggered a cataclysmic fratricide between the heroes of liberation that became the deadliest conflict since the Second World War, drawing in eight African countries. This book draws on hundreds of interviews with protagonists from Africa and the international community to offer a novel theoretical and empirical account of Africa's Great War. Bridging the gap between comparative politics and international relations, it argues that the renewed outbreak of calamitous violence in August 1998 was a function of the kind of regime the AFDL was and how its leaders saw Congo, the region and themselves. As a Pan-Africanist liberation movement, the collapse of the AFDL government internally and the unravelling of regional order externally were inextricably linked.