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125th anniversary of the Swiss Red Cross (1866–1991): Thoughts on past and future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2010

Philippe Bender
Philippe Bender*
Affiliation:
Department of Health and Social Affairs, Swiss Red Cross
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Extract

Rather than serving as a pretext for noisy celebration and self-congratulation, the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Swiss Red Cross should be an occasion for reflection on our institution's development, its role within the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and its special situation as the National Society of Switzerland. This is a worthy undertaking, an attempt, as the historian Marc Ferro put it, “to capture time and make it intelligible to others”. But anyone who embarks on such a venture must be careful to avoid rewriting the past according to his own preferences and giving an idealized picture of this humanitarian organization, which has had its share of tensions, setbacks and contradictions, some of them still unresolved.

Type
Switzerland’s Humanitarian Tradition
Information
International Review of the Red Cross (1961 - 1997) , Volume 31 , Issue 283 , August 1991 , pp. 359 - 370
Copyright
Copyright © International Committee of the Red Cross 1991

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References

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