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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > Political control & influence > Political oppression & persecution > General
In addressing the asylum controversy in Europe today, much of the literature assumes that asylum policies result from the struggle between national interest arguing to tighten asylum and humanitarianism arguing to loosen it. This book challenges this simple tug-of-war image by examining asylum in Germany, Switzerland, and Britain from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s. The findings reveal the complex and often counter-intuitive roles national interest, international norms, and morality play in shaping asylum. It forces us to reconsider how we think about asylum and to explore alternatives to conventional assumptions.
This book tells the history of modern Argentina through the lens of political violence and ideology. It focuses on the theory and practice of the fascist idea in Argentine political culture throughout the twentieth century. It analyzes the connections between fascist theory and the Holocaust, antisemitism and the military junta's practices of torture and state violence (1976-1983), its networks of concentration camps and extermination. The destruction of the rule of law and military state terror represent the end road of the twisted historical path of Argentine and Latin American dictatorships. The book emphasizes the genocidal dimensions of the persecution of Argentine Jewish victims, explaining why they were disproportionately victimized by the military dictatorship. The Dirty War was not a real war, Federico Finchelstein argues, but an illegal militarization of state repression. This popularized term needs to be explained in terms of the fascist genealogies that The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War explores. From a historical perspective, the Dirty War did not feature two combatants but rather victims and perpetrators. In fact, the state made "war" against its citizens. This state sanctioned terror had its roots in fascist ideology, tracing a history from the fascist movements of the interwar war years to the concentration camps. Argentine fascism shaped the country's political culture. The Argentine road to fascism was shaped in the 1920s and 1930s and from then on continued to acquire many political and ideological reformulations and personifications, from Peronism (1943-1955) to terrorist right-wing organizations in the 1960s (especially Tacuara and the Triple A) to the last military dictatorship (1976-1983).
Salvadoran refugee women tell their stories of escape from El Salvador during some of the worst years of civil unrest (1979-1981) and their subsequent adaptation to refugee life in Costa Rica. These stories--called "testimonios"--are interwoven against the backdrop of their children's daycare center. The women's complex relationships with one another and the ambiguous nature of their interactions with the author as ethnographer are examined. The author's voice is used in the text to place the women in their historical and cultural context. The daily lives and the "testimonios" of the refugees serve as an eloquent expression of the multidimensional feminism that has developed in Latin America. In contrast to mainstream feminism in the United States that focuses primarily on the power relationships between men and women, the concern of Latin American feminism is with power asymmetries in socioeconomic class, ethnicity, and religion, as well as gender. The women, whose daycare center is supported by international funding, rely on their cultural traditions to survive in the face of tragedy and oppression.
Connell uncovers a little known World War II top secret program. The United States demanded that Latin American governments deport--or allow the United States to take--anyone of Japanese ancestry and place them in camps in Texas and New Mexico. The plan was to trade them for American civilians held by the Japanese. Although Peru was the most enthusiastic participant in this program, expelling nearly 5,000 Peruvian citizens of Japanese ancestry, other Latin American countries participated as well. Connell traces the reasons for prejudice and discrimination, the specific programs, and the post-war efforts of those held in American relocation camps to secure restitution. Through the wide use of oral interviews as well as documents, Connell shows the very human side of this effort, which in many ways parallels the discrimination Americans of Japanese ancestry faced during the war. This book provides a thorough and intriguing story of interest to general readers as well as scholars, students, and other researchers involved with World War II and Latin American history.
Eugenia Ginzburg, a model communist, was a teacher & journalist. This first volume of her autobiography gives an account of how in 1937 she was expelled from the Party and arrested, having been accused of being part of a secret terrorist organization.
'[The Gulag Archipelago] helped to bring down an empire. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated' Doris Lessing, Sunday Telegraph WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY JORDAN B. PETERSON A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, The Gulag Archipelago is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's grand masterwork. Based on the testimony of some 200 survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile, it chronicles the story of those at the heart of the Soviet Union who opposed Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation. 'Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece...The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today' Anne Applebaum THE OFFICIALLY APPROVED ABRIDGEMENT OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO VOLUMES I, II & III
Moscow, 1937: the soviet metropolis at the zenith of Stalin's dictatorship. A society utterly wrecked by a hurricane of violence. In this compelling book, the renowned historian Karl Schlogel reconstructs with meticulous care the process through which, month by month, the terrorism of a state-of-emergency regime spiraled into the 'Great Terror' during which 1 1/2 million human beings lost their lives within a single year. He revisits the sites of show trials and executions and, by also consulting numerous sources from the time, he provides a masterful panorama of these key events in Russian history.He shows how, in the shadow of the reign of terror, the regime around Stalin also aimed to construct a new society. Based on countless documents, Schlogel's historical masterpiece vividly presents an age in which the boundaries separating the dream and the terror dissolve, and enables us to experience the fear that was felt by people subjected to totalitarian rule. This rich and absorbing account of the Soviet purges will be essential reading for all students of Russia and for any readers interested in one of the most dramatic and disturbing events of modern history.
A gripping history of China's deteriorating relationship with Hong Kong, and its implications for the rest of the world. For the 150 years that Hong Kong was a British colony, people, money and technology flowed freely, while Hong Kong residents enjoyed freedoms that simply did not exist in mainland China. When the territory was handed over to China in 1997, the Communist Party promised that Hong Kong would remain highly autonomous for fifty years. Now, at the halfway mark, it is clear that China has not kept its word. Universal suffrage and free elections have not been instituted and activists have been jailed en masse following the decree of a sweeping national security law by Beijing. As China continues to expand its global influence, Hong Kong serves as a chilling preview of how dissenters could be treated in regions that fall under the emerging superpower's control. A Hong Kong resident from 1992 to 2021, Mark L. Clifford has witnessed this transformation first-hand and has unrivalled access to the full range of the city's society, from student protestors to billionaire businessmen and senior government officials. A powerful and dramatic mix of history and on-the-ground reporting, Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World is the definitive account of one of the most important geopolitical standoffs of our time.
The Halbjuden of Hitler's Germany were half Christian and half Jewish but, like the rest of the Mischlinge (or "partial-Jews"), were far too Jewish in the eyes of the Nazis. Thus, while they were allowed for a time to coexist with the rest of German society, they were granted only the most marginal or menial jobs, restricted from marrying Aryans or even leading normal social lives, and sent eventually to forced-labor and concentration camps. More than 70,000 Germans were subjected to these restrictions and indignities, created and fostered by Hitler's morally bankrupt race laws, yet to this day few personal accounts of their experiences exist. James Tent movingly recounts how these men and women from all over Germany and from all walks of life struggled to survive in an increasingly hostile society, even as their Jewish relatives were disappearing into the East. It draws on extensive interviews with twenty survivors, many of whom were teenagers when Hitler came to power, to show how "half Jews" coped with conditions on a day-to-day basis, and how the legacy of the hatred they suffered has forever lingered in their minds. Tent provides gripping stories of life beneath the boot-heel of Nazi rule: a woman deemed unsuited for a career in nursing because the shape of her earlobes and breasts indicated she was not "racially suited," a man arrested for "race defilement" because he lived with an Aryan woman, and many others. Writing with a deep and abiding respect for his subjects, Tent shows how Nazi discrimination and persecution affected the lives of the Mischlinge beginning in 1933, and he tells how such treatment intensified through the later years of the war. These testimonies offer rare insight into how Nazi persecution functioned at a very personal level. Tent's witnesses share experiences in school and problems in the workplace, where the best survival strategy was to find an unobtrusive niche in a nondescript job. They tell of obstacles to personal and romantic relationships. And they soberly remind us that by 1944 they too were rounded up for forced labor, certain to be the next victims of Nazi genocide. "In the Shadow of the Holocaust" demonstrates the lengths to
which the Nazis were willing to go in order to eradicate Judaism-a
fanaticism that increased over time and even in the face of
impending military defeat. These people mostly survived the
Holocaust, yet they paid for their re-assimilation into German
society by remaining silent in the face of haunting memories. This
book breaks that silence and is a testament to human endurance
under the most trying circumstances.
On a perfect summer's day in August - as a faint breeze cooled the heat of the noonday sun and gently lifted the flags to display their mottoes and emblems - a huge crowd, mainly of working people, gathered on St Peter's Field in Manchester to discuss the universal right to vote that we now all take for granted. Conspicuously present at the meeting were women, the breeze dishevelling their long hair as they enthusiastically doffed their hats to cheer. Suddenly, before the proceedings could begin, the peaceful crowd was savagely dispersed, the work of charging cavalrymen wielding recently sharpened sabres, backed up by the truncheons of the constabulary and the bayonets of the infantry. When the screams had subsided and the dust had settled on the blood-stained ground, the true horror of the attack started to become clear. Over 650 were injured and more than 17 died, many women and children among them Drawing on eight surviving casualty lists, full of information about the victims and their attackers, Professor Michael Bush gives us the first truly objective assessment of the day's events. He shows that this was no mere act of dispersal. It was an act of terror and humiliation worthy of the epithet `massacre', and unequalled in the history of Britain.
New essays exploring the tension between the versions of the past in secret police files and the subjects' own personal memories-and creative workings-through-of events. The communist secret police services of Central and Eastern Europe kept detailed records not only of their victims but also of the vast networks of informants and collaborators upon whom their totalitarian systems depended. Theserecords, now open to the public in many former Eastern Bloc countries, reflect a textually mediated reality that has defined and shaped the lives of former victims and informers, creating a tension between official records and personal memories. Exploring this tension between a textually and technically mediated past and the subject/victim's reclaiming and retrospective interpretation of that past in biography is the goal of this volume. While victims' secret police files have often been examined as a type of unauthorized archival life writing, the contributors to this volume are among the first to analyze the fragmentary and sometimes remedial nature of these biographies and to examine the subject/victims' rewriting and remediation of them in various creative forms. Essays focus, variously, on the files of the East German Stasi, the Romanian Securitate (in relation to Transylvanian Germans in Romania), andthe Hungarian State Security Agency. Contributors: Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Ulrike Garde, Valentina Glajar, Yuliya Komska, Alison Lewis, Corina L. Petrescu, Annie Ring, Aniko Szucs. Valentina Glajar is Professor of German at Texas State University, San Marcos. Alison Lewis is Professor of German in the School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne, Australia. Corina L. Petrescu is Associate Professor of Germanat the University of Mississippi.
Among the various secret or staged processes in court that are all to some degree the focus of public attention, the process against Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy of the 1956 Revolution is especially noteworthy. This volume contains the most important documents of this process: the indictment, the death sentence, the prosecutor's motion 31 years later concerning the repeal of the death sentence, and the acquittal. The separate research papers analyze the historical background of the process and the unlawful practices followed in the administration of justice of the communist party-state, best exemplified by the most serious infringements in the process against Imre Nagy. This book may be read with interest not only by lawyers and historians, but by all interested in the struggle of human will against political terror.
Focusing on the Greek Civil War (1946-1949), the last major conflict in Europe before the end of the Cold War, this study examines the political prisoners whose fate encapsulates the dramatic conflicts and contradictions of that dark era. New sources such as prisoners' letters, memoirs, and official reports, the author describes the life of the prisoners and the effect the prison administration and the prisoners' collective had on their personality. Drawing comparisons to political prisoners in Germany and Spain, the author sheds new light on our understanding of the ideologies and policies and their effect on individuals, which marked European history in the 20th century.
Prospect Top 50 Thinker of 2021 British Academy Book Prize Finalist PROSE Award Finalist "Provocative, elegantly written." -Fara Dabhoiwala, New York Review of Books "Demonstrates how a broad rethinking of political issues becomes possible when Western ideals and practices are examined from the vantage point of Asia and Africa." -Pankaj Mishra, New York Review of Books In case after case around the globe-from Israel to Sudan-the colonial state and the nation-state have been constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. The model emerged in America, where genocide and internment on reservations created a permanent native minority. In Europe, this template would be used both by the Nazis and the Allies. Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this process. Mahmood Mamdani points to inherent limitations in the legal solution attempted at Nuremberg. Political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice but a rethinking of the political community to include victims and perpetrators, bystanders and beneficiaries. Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, he calls on us to delink the nation from the state so as to ensure equal political rights for all who live within its boundaries. "A deeply learned account of the origins of our modern world...Mamdani rejects the current focus on human rights as the means to bring justice to the victims of this colonial and postcolonial bloodshed. Instead, he calls for a new kind of political imagination...Joining the ranks of Hannah Arendt's Imperialism, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, and Edward Said's Orientalism, this book is destined to become a classic text of postcolonial studies and political theory." -Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? "A masterwork of historical comparison and razor-sharp political analysis, with grave lessons about the pitfalls of forgetting, moralizing, or criminalizing this violence. Mamdani also offers a hopeful rejoinder in a revived politics of decolonization." -Karuna Mantena, Columbia University "A powerfully original argument, one that supplements political analysis with a map for our political future." -Faisal Devji, University of Oxford
ON THE NIGHT TRAINS, THE LAST STOP WAS ALWAYS HELL.
Focusing on the Greek Civil War (1946-1949), the last major conflict in Europe before the end of the Cold War, this study examines the political prisoners whose fate encapsulates the dramatic conflicts and contradictions of that dark era. New sources such as prisoners' letters, memoirs, and official reports, the author describes the life of the prisoners and the effect the prison administration and the prisoners' collective had on their personality. Drawing comparisons to political prisoners in Germany and Spain, the author sheds new light on our understanding of the ideologies and policies and their effect on individuals, which marked European history in the 20th century.
Memory of the Argentina Disappearances examines the history of the production, public circulation, and the interpretations and reinterpretations of the Nunca Mas report issued by Argentina's National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP). It was established in 1983 by constitutional president Raul Alfonsin to investigate the fate of thousands of people who had been disappeared by the state during the seventies. Upon publication in 1984, Nunca Mas became a bestseller, was translated into several languages and won greater public importance when the military juntas were brought to trial and the court accepted the report as key evidence. The report's importance was further enhanced with the adoption of CONADEP and Nunca Mas as models for truth commissions established in Latin America, and when it was postulated as a means for conveying an awareness of this past to Argentina's younger generations. This book contributes to understanding the political processes that led to Nunca Mas becoming the way in which Argentines remembered the disappearances and the country's political violence, and how its meaning is modified by new interpretations. Given the canonical nature of Nunca Mas, the book sheds light on the most substantial changes and the continuities in Argentina's social memory of its recent past.
Bearing Witness While Black tells the story of this century's most powerful Black social movement through the eyes of 15 activists who documented it. At the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, African Americans filmed and tweeted evidence of fatal police encounters in dozens of US cities-using little more than the device in their pockets. Their urgent dispatches from the frontlines spurred a global debate on excessive police force, which claimed the lives of African American men, women, and children at disproportionate rates. This groundbreaking book reveals how the perfect storm of smartphones, social media, and social justice empowered Black activists to create their own news outlets, which continued a centuries-long, African American tradition of using the news to challenge racism. Bearing Witness While Black is the first book of its kind to identify three overlapping eras of domestic terror against African American people-slavery, lynching, and police brutality-and explain how storytellers during each period documented its atrocities through journalism. What results is a stunning genealogy-of how the slave narratives of the 1700s inspired the Abolitionist movement; how the black newspapers of the 1800s galvanized the anti-lynching and Civil Rights movements; and how the smartphones of today have powered the anti-police brutality movement. This lineage of black witnessing, Allissa V. Richardson argues, is formidable and forever evolving. Richardson's own activism, as an award-winning pioneer of smartphone journalism, informs this text. Weaving in personal accounts of her teaching in the US and Africa, and of her own brushes with police brutality, Richardson shares how she has inspired black youth to use mobile devices, to speak up from the margins. It is from this vantage point, as participant-observer, that she urges us not to become numb to the tragic imagery that African Americans have documented. Instead, Bearing Witness While Black conveys a crucial need to protect our right to look into the forbidden space of violence against black bodies, and to continue to regard the smartphone as an instrument of moral suasion and social change.
Truth commissions, official apologies and reparations are just some of the transitional justice mechanisms embraced by established democracies. This groundbreaking work of political theory explains how these forms of state redress repair the damage state wrongdoing inflicts upon political legitimacy. Richly illustrated with real-life examples, the book's 'legitimating theory' explains the connections, and the conflicts, between the transitional practice of administrative, corrective and restorative justice. The book shows how political responses to state wrongdoing are part of a larger transitional history of the post-War 'rights revolution' in the settler democracies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. The result is an incisive theoretical exploration that not only explains the rectificatory work of established democracies but also provides new ways to think about the broader field of transitional justice.
Lawrence R. Alschuler uses the ideas of Albert Memmi, Paulo Freire, and Jungian psychology to explain changes in the political consciousness of the oppressed. His analysis of the autobiographies of four Native people, from Guatemala and Canada, reveals how they attained "liberated consciousness" and healed their psychic wounds, inflicted by violence, exploitation, and discrimination. Their lessons and Alschuler's proposed public policies may be applicable to the oppressed in ethnically divided societies everywhere.
Infrastructure development projects are set to continue into the next century as developing country governments seek to manage population growth, urbanization and industrialization. The contributions in this volume raise many questions about 'development' and 'progress' in the late twentieth century. What is revealed are the enormous problems and disastrous affects which continue to accompany displacement operations in many countries, which raise the ever more urgent question of whether the benefits of infrastructure development justify or outweigh the pain of the radical disruption of peoples lives, exacerbated by the fact that, with some notable exceptions, there has been a lack of official recognition on the part of governments and international agencies that development-induced displacement is a problem at all. This important volume addresses the issues and shows just how serious the situation is.
Winner of the Sunday Times Literary Award for non-fiction.
‘A truly stunning book.’ - Jacob Dlamini Sunday, 9 November 1952. It should be remembered as a day of infamy in South Africa’s history but few know of a brutal massacre when police opened fire on people at an ANC Youth League-organised event in Duncan Village in East London. The official death toll was eight people killed by police gunfire and bayonet and two killed in retaliation, including an Irish nun and medical doctor, Sister Aidan Quinlan, who lived and worked in Duncan Village. Today it is believed that between 80 and 200 died that day, most buried quietly by their families, who feared arrest if they sought help at hospitals. In the cover-ups and long silences that followed, the real facts of this tragedy at the height of the ANC’s Defiance Campaign were almost lost to history. Bloody Sunday follows the trail of the remarkable Sister Aidan into the heart of a missing chapter in our country’s past – and what was one of the most devastating massacres of the apartheid era.
A Long Letter To My Daughter is award-winning South African author Marita van der Vyver's youth memoir. An unputdownable read that weaves together both love letter, to a daughter, a language and a country, whilst tracing Van der Vyver's early years. Above all, it is a mother's effort to make sense of a world that seems increasingly senseless.
Combining the intimacy of memoir and the precision of history, the story of psychologist Nicolae Margineanu's imprisonment and survival conveys in striking detail the corrosive impact of Communist rule in Romania. Nicolae Margineanu's journey started in 1905 in the village of Obreja in Transylvania and ended in 1980 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He began his life under Austro-Hungarian rule, was witness to the 1918 Union, lived under three kings(Ferdinand, Carol II, and Mihai), and survived all of Romania's dictatorships, from absolute monarchy to the Legionnaires' rebellion, the Antonescian dictatorship, and finally the years under Communist rule. Margineanu studied psychology at the University of Cluj and attended postgraduate courses in Leipzig, Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, and London. He was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship that enabled him to do research for two years in the United States, at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the University of Chicago, and Duke. He returned to Romania and became chair of the psychology department at the University of Cluj. In 1948, Margineanu was arrested on a charge of "high treason," based on his alleged membership in a resistance movement against Communist rule. He was sentenced to twenty-five years' imprisonment, of which he served sixteen, passing through the jails at Malmaison, Jilava, Pitesti,Aiud, and Gherla. This book, his autobiography, is a shocking testimony to the fate of the intellectual elite of Romania during the Communist dictatorship. It is a unique and invaluable addition to the literature in English on the experience of political prisoners, not only in Communist Romania but in authoritarian states in general. Nicolae Margineanu (1905-1980) was a Romanian psychologist and writer who was a political prisoner during theperiod of Communist rule. Dennis Deletant is the Visiting Ratiu Professor of Romanian Studies at Georgetown University. Calin Cotoiu is a translator based in Bucharest, Romania. |
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