Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Human Rights and Crimes Against Humanity) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Human Rights and Crimes Against Humanity)? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Human Rights and Crimes Against Humanity). Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Human Rights and Crimes Against Humanity) ReviewMarnia Lazreg is a Professor in the Sociology Department at Hunter College, the City University of New York. In this brilliant and disturbing book, she studies France's war against Algeria (1954-62).
She shows how a militarised colonial state used torture and terror to forestall the collapse of its empire in the age of decolonisation. The political economy of colonial rule required violence, including torture.
Once torture was permitted, it became routine. Euphemised as `screening' and `pacification', its purpose was to enforce obedience. It continued right to the end of the war. The only way to stop it was to end the war.
Torture routinely practised was routinely denied. Politicians tried to excuse it as coming from `a few rotten apples', as `occasional excesses' and `regrettable incidents', and blamed the victims, claiming that Algerians `only understood force'.
Novelist Albert Camus condemned the violence by both sides, yet defended France's claim to Algeria, which could only be upheld by violence. He supported the settlers against the colonised, using the same arguments as the colonial state, calling for peace and coexistence within colonial rule.
Today, apologists for torture like Alan Dershowitz, Michael Walzer, Jean Elshtain and Michael Ignatieff assist politicians who destroy civil liberties at home and cause chaos abroad. Blair seeks solace in confession and God's forgiveness, preferring these to democratic accountability.
Lazreg shows that despite the cultural differences, French, British and American war practices and rhetorics are similar. Their wars of occupation disguise material and strategic interests as civilising or democracy-building. The French, like the US and British occupiers today, used the rhetoric of women's emancipation, claiming that they were `protecting' women from Islam.
And torture of prisoners was part of every French colonial war, part of every British colonial war, from Malaya in the 1940s to Kenya in the 1950s, Oman in the 1960s and Northern Ireland in the 1970s, and part of the current wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.
Finally, Lazreg argues that acts of terror, like any other crimes, do not threaten democracy. They do not even affect democracy - unless states respond by violating democratic rights, as the French state did and as the British and US states are doing. As she concludes, "The `war on terror' has become a war of terror."
Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Human Rights and Crimes Against Humanity) Overview
Torture and the Twilight of Empire looks at the intimate relationship between torture and colonial domination through a close examination of the French army's coercive tactics during the Algerian war from 1954 to 1962. By tracing the psychological, cultural, and political meanings of torture at the end of the French empire, Marnia Lazreg also sheds new light on the United States and its recourse to torture in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This book is nothing less than an anatomy of torture--its methods, justifications, functions, and consequences. Drawing extensively from archives, confessions by former torturers, interviews with former soldiers, and war diaries, as well as writings by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and others, Lazreg argues that occupying nations justify their systematic use of torture as a regrettable but necessary means of saving Western civilization from those who challenge their rule. She shows how torture was central to guerre rvolutionnaire, a French theory of modern warfare that called for total war against the subject population and which informed a pacification strategy founded on brutal psychological techniques borrowed from totalitarian movements. Lazreg seeks to understand torture's impact on the Algerian population--especially women--and also on the French troops who became their torturers. She explores the roles Christianity and Islam played in rationalizing these acts, and the ways in which torture became not only routine but even acceptable.

Written by a preeminent historical sociologist, Torture and the Twilight of Empire holds particularly disturbing lessons for us today as we carry out the War on Terror.


Want to learn more information about Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Human Rights and Crimes Against Humanity)?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...

The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II ReviewI do not recommend this book, which is a jungle of deconstructionist jargon in which there are a few lucid lakes in plain English containing important quotes and insights about the challenge of war to morality. The theme is that war has always challenged the rule of law (Cicero: "Silent enim leges inter arma" -- in time of war the law is silent [pg. 200]) and the fog of war confuses any sense of moral rectitude and certainty (Clausewitz: "`In the conduct of war, perception cannot be governed by laws.' War produces `a kind of twilight, which, like fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque.'" -- I had not appreciated that Clausewitz applied "the fog of war" far beyond the battlefield.). For those who believe that language defines thought and law and culture (as Dawes does), war tortures language to such a degree that it must be reconstructed (in literature) after the war's end to return to a sense of moral meaning to life. I do not share his views, as I find a greater meaning and deception in the power of symbols than in the power of words. Further, he seems to believe in an idealistic precision of language, and is perplexed, not by change, but by the twists of ambiguity that war engenders. For my part, I find that the flexibility of language allows it to cover the unparseable complexity of the real world, with the down side that humans can sea-lawyer their way out of almost any intended meaning (as in the application of the Geneva Conventions -- Dawes cites the Netherlands attempted refusal to classify Indonesian prisoners in the 1950 war as Prisoners of War under the convention of 1949 because the convention states that it should apply "even if the state of war is not recognized by one of [the parties]" -- it did not say "one or more" and neither side did... The pressure of the international community forced them to back down, and the wording of the COnvention was subsequently changed. [pg. 206])
His thesis: in the literature of the U.S each major war has brought forth authors with a different post-war perspective which has revised the language and its use (Catch-22: "` Didn't they show it to you?' Yossarian demanded, stamping about in anger and distress. `Didn't you even make them read it?' `They didn't have to show us Catch-22, the old woman answered. `They don't have to.' `What law says they don't have to. What law says they don't have to?' `Catch-22.'" [pg 180] -- la plus ça change...). The book is interesting for calling one's attention to such forgotten passages as this one that are so relevant today, and particularly for his deconstructive analysis of Hart Crane and Hemmingway...
However, his "insights" are not at all original or exceptional (although our present regime in its war enthusiasm blithely ignores them and their implications). They are certainly hard won for the author through the obscurity of the borrowed jargon he uses in his approach to literature -- and thus the more so for the reader.The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II Overview
The Language of War examines the relationship between language and violence, focusing on American literature from the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. James Dawes proceeds by developing two primary questions: How does the strategic violence of war affect literary, legal, and philosophical representations? And, in turn, how do such representations affect the reception and initiation of violence itself? Authors and texts of central importance in this far-reaching study range from Louisa May Alcott and William James to William Faulkner, the Geneva Conventions, and contemporary American organizational sociology and language theory.

The consensus approach in literary studies over the past twenty years has been to treat language as an extension of violence. The idea that there might be an inverse relation between language and violence, says Dawes, has all too rarely influenced the dominant voices in literary studies today. This is an ambitious project that not only makes a serious contribution to American literary history, but also challenges some of the leading theoretical assumptions of our day.
(20021001)

Want to learn more information about The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now

Read More...