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- All Subjects: World War II
- Creators: Ambus, Anthony
Description
With every generation comes a unique struggle or times of turmoil and tumult. Many of these stories are learned from elders and grandparents when they reminisce of events that have altered the course of their lives and the lives of those around them. I intend to persevere these anecdotes and experiences in order to keep them from becoming lost in time. With the change in technology and industrialization, our grandparents and elders have lived a vastly different life than their descendants. In my case, my grandparents and relatives lived in Greece during the Second World War and the Greek civil war. In order to preserve these unique experiences, I have documented them in the form of a digitally recorded interview and have transcribed the interviews for analysis. The interviews and analysis will be separated into three sections: World War II, The Greek Civil War, and Immigration to the United States. Historical context will be provided with an overview of the events that occurred during the wars in the Greek Arena. Each interviewee will then have their perspective presented with historical sources that will reconcile the events and experiences for historical accuracy. In addition the sentiments shared by the interviewees on their lives as a result of these events will be observed in order to truly understand their perception of the world. From doing so, their life stories will be better understood and the stories told to their young grandson or nephew will not be forgotten in their passing.
ContributorsAmbus, Anthony (Author) / Benkert, Volker (Thesis director) / Julian, Lim (Committee member) / WPC Graduate Programs (Contributor) / School of Accountancy (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12
Description
Civilian publics at large internalize death and killing in wartime as a given; after all, what is war if not fighting and dying? There exist popularized notions of “rules of war,” as put by a 2014 BBC ethics piece that accepted the notion “that soldiers must be prepared to put their own lives at risk in order to limit civilian casualties.” Here there is no denial that combatants kill and die in war. Yet in another sense, the public sanitizes the permanent reality of death and killing—it constructs careful euphemisms and erects psychological barriers that allow the perpetuation of violence without emotionally confronting the brutal reality of the battlefield. In spite of such concentrated cultural efforts at reconceptualization of death and killing, however, the soldiers and combatants who actually engage in this behavior irrevocably come face-to-face with the reality of death and killing in wartime. It is the “[i]ntimate acts of killing in war,” such as those “committed by historical subjects imbued with language, emotion, and desire” that necessarily challenge and threaten culturally-constructed sterilized preconceptions of deadly violence; still, as Joanna Bourke argues, “[k]illing in wartime is inseparable from wider social and cultural concerns.”
To this end, a war that involves not only the physical intimacy of killing but also mortal struggles between cultures and ideologies arguably complicates the extent to and manner by which individual combatants engage in such behavior. No war fulfills these criteria so cleanly as World War II—it was a conflict that cost more people their lives than any war before, and as a global conflict, it brought vastly differing perspectives of death and killing to the battlefield. World War II represented not simply a struggle for national-ideological survival (though that it clearly was), but more importantly a struggle for the retention of the self through identity.
To this end, a war that involves not only the physical intimacy of killing but also mortal struggles between cultures and ideologies arguably complicates the extent to and manner by which individual combatants engage in such behavior. No war fulfills these criteria so cleanly as World War II—it was a conflict that cost more people their lives than any war before, and as a global conflict, it brought vastly differing perspectives of death and killing to the battlefield. World War II represented not simply a struggle for national-ideological survival (though that it clearly was), but more importantly a struggle for the retention of the self through identity.
ContributorsLondono, Marlon William (Author) / Niebuhr, Robert (Thesis director) / Strand, Daniel (Committee member) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12