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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > Other warfare & defence issues > War crimes
A philosophical investigation of dealing with guilt and its impact
on democracy, in the case of Austrian NazisDrawing on the work of
Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno, this book illustrates the
relevance and applicability of a political discussion of guilt and
democracy. It appropriates psychoanalytic theory to analyse court
documents of Austrian Nazi perpetrators as well as recent public
controversies surrounding Austria's involvement in the Nazi
atrocities and ponders how the former agents of Hitlerite crimes
and contemporary Austrians have dealt with their guilt. Exposing
the defensive mechanisms that have been used to evade facing
involvement in Nazi atrocities, Leeb considers the possibilities of
breaking the cycle of negative consequences that result from the
inability to deal with guilt. Leeb shows us that only by guilt can
individuals and nations take responsibility for their past crimes,
show solidarity with the victims of crimes, and prevent the
emergence of new crimes.
Gareth Jones (1905-1934), the young Welsh investigative journalist,
is revered in Ukraine as a national hero and is now rightly
recognised as the first reporter to reveal the horror of the
Holodomor, the Soviet Government-induced famine of the early 1930s,
which killed millions of Ukrainians. Gareth Jones - Eyewitness to
the Holodomor is a meticulous study of the efforts made by the the
Aberystwyth and Cambridge-educated journalist, a fluent
Russian-speaker, to investigate the Soviet Government's denials,
that its Five Year Plan had led to mass starvation, by visiting
Ukraine in 1933 and reporting what he saw and witnessed: `I walked
along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was
the cry, "There is no bread. We are dying"'. Determined to alert
the world to the suffering in Ukraine and to expose Stalin's
policies and prejudices towards the Ukrainian people, Jones
published numerous articles in the UK (The Times, Daily Express and
Western Mail) and the USA (New York Evening News and Chicago Daily
News) with headlines such as `Famine Grips Russia. Millions Dying',
but soon saw his credibility and integrity attacked and denigrated
by Soviet sympathizers, most famously by Moscow-based Walter
Duranty of the New York Times. Gareth Jones was killed by bandits
the following year, on the eve of his 30th birthday, whilst
travelling in Japanese-controlled China. There remain strong
suspicions that Jones' murder was arranged by the Soviets in
revenge for his eyewitness reporting which brought global attention
to the Holodomor.
From 1946 to 1949, the Dutch prosecuted more than 1000 Japanese
soldiers and civilians for war crimes committed during the
occupation of the Netherlands East Indies during World War II. They
also prosecuted a small number of Dutch citizens for collaborating
with their Japanese occupiers. The war crimes committed by the
Japanese against military personnel and civilians in the East
Indies were horrific, and included mass murder, murder, torture,
mistreatment of prisoners of war, and enforced prostitution.
Beginning in 1946, the Dutch convened military tribunals in various
locations in the East Indies to hear the evidence of these
atrocities and imposed sentences ranging from months and years to
death; some 25 percent of those convicted were executed for their
crimes. The difficulty arising out of gathering evidence and
conducting the trials was exacerbated by the on-going guerrilla war
between Dutch authorities and Indonesian revolutionaries and in
fact the trials ended abruptly in 1949 when 300 years of Dutch
colonial rule ended and Indonesia gained its independence. Until
the author began examining and analysing the records of trial from
these cases, no English language scholar had published a
comprehensive study of these war crimes trials. While the author
looks at the war crimes prosecutions of the Japanese in detail this
book also breaks new ground in exploring the prosecutions of Dutch
citizens alleged to have collaborated with their Japanese
occupiers. Anyone with a general interest in World War II and the
war in the Pacific, or a specific interest in war crimes and
international law, will be interested in this book.
After the Armenian genocide of 1915, in which over a million
Armenians died, thousands of Armenian-Turks lived and worked in the
Turkish state alongside those who had persecuted their communities.
Living under heavy censorship, and in an atmosphere of official
denial that the deaths were a genocide, how did Turkish Armenians
record their own history? Here, Talin Suciyan explores the life
experienced by Turkey's Armenian communities as Turkey's great
modernisation project of the 20th century gathered pace.Suciyan
achieves this through analysis of remarkable new primary material:
Turkish state archives, minutes of the Armenian National Assembly,
a kaleidoscopic series of personal diaries, memoirs and oral
histories, various Armenian periodicals such as newspapers,
yearbooks and magazines, as well as statutes and laws which led to
the continuing persecution of Armenians. The first history of its
kind, The Armenians in Modern Turkey is a fresh contribution to the
history of modern Turkey and the Armenian experience there.
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