History Commons^™

Military memoirs are written in many western countries, but who writes them, who publishes them, what is written in them and why they are written can differ from country to country. Some aspects, such as the low number of female writers, are universal, other aspects are warrior nation related, such as the kind of soldiers that get published by traditional publishers, and some aspects are completely country dependent, such as whether reservists publish books, or not. This presentation, given to the PSP (Power, Space and Politics) research group at Newcastle University, gives a quick overview of some of the results …

For soldier-authors in any western country, it is very important to explicitly assure their audiences that what they write is the truth (either subjective (35%) or objective (22%). They provide truth guarantees to substantiate this claim, the most important one being their own or someone else's memory (41%). This is despite the fact that they also explicitly perform self-censorship, for example by anonymising names (84% of the disclaimers) or black barring photos (34%). In every one of the countries researched (Netherlands, Germany, United Kingdom, United States and Canada) at least one author mentions having been censored by their own ministry …