This book provides up-to-date coverage of the policies, strategies, and effects of suicide in war, examining this subject from societal and military perspectives to shed light on the justifications for using human beings as expendable weapons. Suicide warfare has expanded over the years and become a global phenomenon. In some parts of the world, it has become rooted in the fabric of society. Westerners often find it difficult to grasp why someone would be willing to sacrifice their life in order to take the lives of others. Suicide Warfare: Culture, the Military, and the Individual as a Weapon provides a thorough examination of the topic that enables readers to understand the justification for suicide warfare and better appreciate how the ideology of the individuals and organizations that resort to suicide warfare greatly complicates security issues in the 21st century. The book covers the policies, strategies, and effects of suicide in war, examining suicide warfare in its entirety from a theoretical standpoint, and then applying those theories to the actual manifestations of and politico-military responses to suicide warfare. The author discusses specific organizations such as Al Qaeda and the Chechen rebels, analyzing each within its societal context, military justification, individual motivation, and outcomes, and addresses principles of sociological and conflict theory to place suicide warfare in a clearer conceptual framework. The book presents case studies that allow readers to better understand abstract theories and make distinctions between individual cases of suicide warfare. Includes primary documents and statistical data Provides resources for further study

He was one of America's most exciting and secretive generals--the man Franklin Roosevelt made his top spy in World War II. A mythic figure whose legacy is still intensely debated, "Wild Bill" Donovan was director of the Office of Strategic Services (the country's first national intelligence agency) and the father of today's CIA. Donovan introduced the nation to the dark arts of covert warfare on a scale it had never seen before. Now, veteran journalist Douglas Waller has mined government and private archives throughout the United States and England, drawn on thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and interviewed scores of Donovan's relatives, friends, and associates to produce a riveting biography of one of the most powerful men in modern espionage.
William Joseph Donovan's life was packed with personal drama. The son of poor Irish Catholic parents, he married into Protestant wealth and fought heroically in World War I, where he earned the nickname "Wild Bill" for his intense leadership and the Medal of Honor for his heroism. After the war he made millions as a Republican lawyer on Wall Street until FDR, a Democrat, tapped him to be his strategic intelligence chief. A charismatic leader, Donovan was revered by his secret agents. Yet at times he was reckless--risking his life unnecessarily in war zones, engaging in extramarital affairs that became fodder for his political enemies--and he endured heartbreaking tragedy when family members died at young ages.
Wild Bill Donovan reads like an action-packed spy thriller, with stories of daring young men and women in his OSS sneaking behind enemy lines for sabotage, breaking into Washington embassies to steal secrets, plotting to topple Adolf Hitler, and suffering brutal torture or death when they were captured by the Gestapo. It is also a tale of political intrigue, of infighting at the highest levels of government, of powerful men pitted against one another. Donovan fought enemies at home as often as the Axis abroad. Generals in the Pentagon plotted against him.
J. Edgar Hoover had FBI agents dig up dirt on him. Donovan stole secrets from the Soviets before the dawn of the Cold War and had intense battles with Winston Churchill and British spy chiefs over foreign turf. Separating fact from fiction, Waller investigates the successes and the occasional spectacular failures of Donovan's intelligence career.
It makes for a gripping and revealing portrait of this most controversial spymaster.

This timely book sets out how ordinary citizens can reform our broken economy.

Politicians curry favour with interest groups such as trade unions, public service workers, teachers and the unemployed, instead of serving the general public. Trade unions exploit labour laws to get benefits for their members without increasing productivity. Teachers enjoy sheltered employment without producing properly qualified learners. Formal employees abuse the bargaining-council system to push up labour costs imposed on employers and employees outside the system. Notoriously unproductive “public servants” enjoy above-market salaries in a growing sector that creates little to no economic value. Unemployed people, of whom there are 11 million, form the bedrock of our community of 18 million recipients of welfare grants. They produce nothing in return. The glue holding together all these forms of rent-seeking, is centralised government power, undergirded by laws and government spending.

The author highlights that the system of rent-seeking has damaged moral fabric in this country, eating at it like a virus. It does not let go, because it contains the seed of destruction of any argument deployed towards dismantling it. Rent-seeking is embarked upon – invariably almost – in the name of some noble cause or other. And noble causes demand that we be on the right side of them, or risk being tainted as unfair, oppressive, right-wing or simply bad.

Who in their right mind doesn’t want to protect workers against unemployment or exploitation, advance previously disadvantaged black citizens, improve the matric pass rate, help the poor with housing and money, build a strong public service?

On his way into Parliament on 2 February 1990 FW de Klerk turned to his wife Marike and said, referring to his forthcoming speech: 'South Africa will never be the same again after this.'

Did white South Africa crack, or did its leadership yield sufficiently and just in time to avert a revolution? The transformation has been called a miracle, belying gloomy predictions of race war in which the white minority went into a laager and fought to the last drop of blood. Why did it happen?

Professor Welsh views the topic against the backdrop of a long history of conflict spanning apartheid’s rise and demise, and the liberation movement’s suppression and subsequent resurrection. His view is that the movement away from apartheid to majority rule would have taken far longer and been much bloodier were it not for the changes undergone by Afrikaner nationalism itself.

There were turning points, such as the Soweto uprising of 1976, but few believed that the transition from white domination to inclusive democracy would occur as soon – and as relatively peacefully – as it did. In effect, however, a multitude of different factors led the ANC and the National Party to see that neither side could win the conflict on its own terms.

Utterly dissimilar in background, culture, beliefs and political style, Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk were an unlikely pair of liberators. But both soon recognised that they were dependent on each other to steer the transformation process through to its conclusion.

After 20 years of freedom in South Africa we have to ask ourselves difficult questions: are we willing to perpetuate a lie, search for facts or think wishfully? Freedom has been enabled by apartheid's end, but at the same time some of apartheid's key institutions and social relations are reproduced under the guise of 'democracy'. This collection of essays acknowledges the enormous expectations placed on the shoulders of the South African revolution to produce an alternative political regime in response to apartheid and global neo-liberalism. It does not lament the inability of South Africa's democracy to provide deeper freedoms, or suggest that since it hasn't this is some form of betrayal. Freedom is made possible and/or limited by local political choices, contemporary global conditions and the complexities of social change. This book explores the multiplicity of spaces within which the dynamics of social change unfold, and the complex ways in which power is produced and reproduced. In this way, it seeks to understand the often non-linear practices through which alternative possibilities emerge, the lengthy and often indirect ways in which new communities are imagined and new solidarities are built. In this sense, this book is not a collection of hope or despair. Nor is it a book that seeks to situate itself between these two poles. Instead it aims to read the present historically, critically and politically, and to offer insights into the ongoing, iterative and often messy struggles for freedom.

Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in October 2007, after eight years of exile, hopeful that she could be a catalyst for change. Upon a tumultuous reception, she survived a suicide-bomb attack that killed nearly two hundred of her compatriots. But she continued to forge ahead, with more courage and conviction than ever, since she knew that time was running out--for the future of her nation and for her life.

In Reconciliation, Bhutto recounts in gripping detail her final months in Pakistan and offers a bold new agenda for how to stem the tide of Islamic radicalism and to rediscover the values of tolerance and justice that lie at the heart of her religion. She speaks out not just to the West but also to the Muslims across the globe. Bhutto presents an image of modern Islam that defies the negative caricatures often seen in the West. After reading this book, it will become even clearer what the world has lost by her assassination.

From the million reader Substack phenomenon comes a vital narrative that explains how America, once a beacon of democracy, now teeters on the brink of autocracy - and how we can turn back.

In Democracy Awakening, American historian Heather Cox Richardson examines how, over the decades, an elite minority have made war on American ideals. By weaponising language and promoting false history, they are leading Americans into authoritarianism and creating a disaffected population.

Many books tell us what has happened over the last five years. In Democracy Awakening, Richardson wrangles America's meandering and confusing news feed into a coherent story to explain how America got to this perilous point, what we should pay attention to, and what the future of democracy holds.

In his now classic Voices of Collective Remembering, James V. Wertsch (2002) examines the extent to which certain narrative themes are embedded in the way the collective past is understood and national communities are imagined. In this work, Wertsch coined the term schematic narrative templates to refer to basic plots, such as the triumph over alien forces or quest for freedom, that are recurrently used, setting a national theme for the past, present and future. Whereas specific narratives are about particular events, dates, settings and actors, schematic narrative templates refer to more abstract structures, grounded in the same basic plot, from which multiple specific accounts of the past can be generated. As dominant and naturalised narrative structures, schematic narrative templates are typically used without being noticed, and are thus extremely conservative, impervious to evidence and resistant to change. The concept of schematic narrative templates is much needed today, especially considering the rise of nationalism and extreme-right populism, political movements that tend to tap into national narratives naturalised and accepted by large swathes of society. The present volume comprises empirical and theoretical contributions to the concept of schematic narrative templates by scholars of different disciplines (Historiography, Psychology, Education and Political Science) and from the vantage point of different cultural and social practices of remembering (viz., school history teaching, political discourses, rituals, museums, the use of images, maps, etc.) in different countries. The volume's main goal is to provide a transdisciplinary debate around the concept of schematic narrative templates, focusing on how narratives change as well as perpetuate at times when nationalist discourses seem to be on the rise. This book will be relevant to anyone interested in history, history teaching, nationalism, collective memory and the wider social debate on how to critically reflect on the past.