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In the post 9/11 world, the emotionally charged concepts of
identity and ideology, enmity and political violence have once
again become household words. Contrary to the serene assumptions of
the early 1990s, history did not end. Civilisations are busy
clashing against one another, and the self-proclaimed pacified
humanity is once again showing its barbaric roots.Religion mixes
with politics to produce governments that abuse even their own
citizens, and victorious insurgents too often fail to carry out the
promised reforms. Terrorists blow up unsuspecting pedestrians, and
allegedly democratic nations threaten to bomb allegedly less
democratic ones back to the Stone Age. Mass demonstrations
materialise like flash mobs out of nowhere, prepared to hold their
ground until the bitter end.Where does all this passionate
intensity come from? To better understand how the ideological
enmity of today is moulded, spread and managed, this book
investigates the propaganda operations of the past. Its topics
range from the ruthless portrayal of female enemy soldiers in an
early-20th-century civil war setting to the multiple enemy images
cherished by Adolf Hitler, and onwards, to the WWII Soviet Russians
as a subtype of a more ancient notion of the Eastern Hordes. Of
more recent events, the book covers the Rwandan genocide of 1994
and the still ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. The closing
chapter on cyber warfare introduces the reader to the invisible
enemies of the future.
Defining things through binary opposition - male/female,
familiar/foreign, life/death - forms the base of human thinking.
Adding moral assessment to logic, we often represent binaries even
as divisions into good and evil. Exclusions based on the division
of Us vs. Them make their presence felt during any conflict, and
become crucial in times of war. However, binary thinking is
inherent also in peaceful, everyday conversation, when politics,
social issues, ethnicities and religious identities are described
and debated.Binaries in Battle: Representations of Division and
Conflict is a wide-ranging multidisciplinary anthology that
presents the fundamental rationale of binary thinking from many
different angles. The evidence is drawn from cases ranging from
historical to contemporary and near future, covering both wartime
and peacetime conflicts. The writers apply a wide variety of
methods, including linguistics, visual semiotics, ethnography, and
leadership and organisational analysis. Seemingly unconnected
topics, such as humanitarianism and warfare, or death and tourism,
appear strangely connected, and the relevance of speed to cyber
warfare is revealed to contain a paradox. Mass immigration is
observed from several, mutually exclusive angles to provide a 360
degree view.Despite its multifaceted baselines, the book provides a
solid understanding of the manifestations of binary thinking. By
deconstructing ideological discourses it dispels black-and-white
imageries, replacing them with softer shades of grey.
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