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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Other warfare & defence issues > War crimes
The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial has become a symbol of justice, the
pivotal moment when the civilized world stood up for Europe's Jews
and, ultimately, for human rights. Yet the world, represented at
the time by the Allied powers, almost did not stand up despite the
magnitude of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. Seeking justice
for the Holocaust had not been an automatic-or an obvious-mission
for the Allies to pursue. In this book, Graham Cox recounts the
remarkable negotiations and calculations that brought the United
States and its allies to this point. At the center of this story is
the collaboration between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert C.
Pell, Roosevelt's appointee as U.S. representative to the United
Nations War Crimes Commission, in creating an international legal
protocol to prosecute Nazi officials for war crimes and genocide.
Pell emerges here as an unheralded force in pursuing justice and in
framing human rights as an international concern. The book also
enlarges our perspective on Roosevelt's policies regarding European
Jews by revealing the depth of his commitment to postwar justice in
the face of staunch opposition, even from some within his
administration. What made the international effort especially
contentious was a debate over its focus-how to punish for
aggressive warfare and crimes against humanity. Cox exposes the
internal contradictions and contortions behind the U.S. position
and the maneuverings of numerous officials negotiating the legal
parameters of the trials. Most telling perhaps were the efforts of
Robert H. Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, to
circumscribe the scope of new international law-for fear of setting
precedents that might boomerang on the United States because of its
own racial segregation practices. With its broad new examination of
the background and context of the Nuremberg trials, and its
expanded view of the roles played by Roosevelt and his unlikely
deputy Pell, Seeking Justice for the Holocaust offers a deeper and
more nuanced understanding of how the Allies came to hold Nazis
accountable for their crimes against humanity.
The organization 'Genocide Watch' estimates that 100 million
civilians around the globe have lost their lives as a result of
genocide in only the past sixty years. Over the same period, the
visual arts in the form of documentary footage has aided
international efforts to document genocide and prosecute those
responsible, but this book argues that fictional representation
occupies an equally important and problematic place in the process
of shaping minds on the subject. Edited by two of the leading
experts in the field, The History of Genocide in Cinema analyzes
fictional and semi-fictional portrayals of genocide, focusing on,
amongst others, the repression of indigenous populations in
Australia, the genocide of Native Americans in the 19th century,
the Herero genocide, Armenia, the Holodomor (Stalin's policy of
starvation in Ukraine), the Nazi Holocaust, Nanking and Darfur.
Comprehensive and unique in its focus on fiction films, as opposed
to documentaries, The History of Genocide in Cinema is an essential
resource for students and researchers in the fields of cultural
history, holocaust studies and the history of film.
As the world becomes ever more unequal, people become ever more
'disposable'. Today, governments systematically exclude sections of
their populations from society through heavy-handed policing. But
it doesn't always go to plan. William I. Robinson exposes the
nature and dynamics of this out-of-control system, arguing for the
urgency of creating a movement capable of overthrowing it. The
global police state uses a variety of ingenious methods of control,
including mass incarceration, police violence, US-led wars, the
persecution of immigrants and refugees, and the repression of
environmental activists. Movements have emerged to combat the
increasing militarization, surveillance and social cleansing;
however many of them appeal to a moral sense of social justice
rather than addressing its root - global capitalism. Using shocking
data which reveals how far capitalism has become a system of
repression, Robinson argues that the emerging megacities of the
world are becoming the battlegrounds where the excluded and the
oppressed face off against the global police state.
Genocide involves significant death and trauma. Yet the enormous
scope of genocide comes into view when one looks at the factors
that lead to mass killing, the struggle for survival during
genocide, and the ways survivors reconstruct their lives after the
violence ends. Over a one hundred day period in 1994, the country
of Rwanda saw the genocidal slaughter of at least 800,000 Tutsi at
the hands of members of the Hutu majority government. This book is
a powerful oral history of the tragedy and its aftermath from the
perspective of its survivors. Based on in-depth interviews
conducted over the course of fifteen years, the authors take a
holistic approach by tracing how victims experienced the horrific
events, as well as how they have coped with the aftermath as they
struggled to resume their lives. The Rwanda genocide deserves study
and documentation not only because of the failure of the Western
world to intervene, but also because it raises profound questions
about the ways survivors create a new life out of the ashes of all
that was destroyed. How do they deal with the all-encompassing
traumas of genocide? Is forgiveness possible? And what does the
process of rebuilding teach us about genocide, trauma, and human
life?
Over the past 25 years, Rwanda has undergone remarkable shifts and
transitions: culturally, economically, and educationally the
country has gone from strength to strength. While much scholarship
has understandably been retrospective, seeking to understand,
document and commemorate the Genocide against the Tutsi, this
volume gathers diverse perspectives on the changing social and
cultural fabric of Rwanda since 1994. Rwanda Since 1994 considers
the context of these changes, particularly in relation to the
ongoing importance of remembering and in wider developments in the
Great Lakes and East Africa regions. Equally it explores what
stories of change are emerging from Rwanda: creative writing and
testimonies, as well as national, regional, and international
political narratives. The contributors interrogate which frameworks
and narratives might be most useful for understanding different
kinds of change, what new directions are emerging, and how Rwanda's
trajectory is shaped by other global factors. The international set
of contributors includes creative writers, practitioners,
activists, and scholars from African studies, history,
anthropology, education, international relations, modern languages,
law and politics. As well as delving into the shifting dynamics of
religion and gender in Rwanda today, the book brings to light the
experiences of lesser-discussed groups of people such as the Twa
and the children of perpetrators.
'Mowed them down wholesale!' With these words, a judge summed up
the last great punitive massacre of Aboriginal people in Australia.
Coniston, Central Australia, 1928: the murder of an itinerant
prospector at this isolated station by local Warlpiri triggered a
series of police-led expeditions that ranged over vast areas for
two months, as the hunting parties shot down victims by the dozen.
The official death toll, declared by the whitewash federal inquiry
as being all in self-defence, was 31. The real number was certainly
multiples of that. Coniston has never before been fully researched
and recorded; with this book that absence in Australia's history is
now filled. As the last great mass killing in our country's
genocidal past but an event largely unremembered, it reminds us
that, without truth, there can be no reconciliation.
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