Enlightenment and Genocide, Contradictions of Modernity


Book Description

On the threshold to the 21st century the cry «never again» seems illusory, even absurd. Did it ever harbour credibility? Were we so naive? The Holocaust was not a finality, not the end of «final solutions» in Europe. Genocide has continued to emerge as an active element in European politics and policies. Kosovo and Bosnia provide testament. This book presents the concept of genocide as a political and social tool in modern Europe, not only reconciled with modernity, but as what may be an integral component. Modernity, however, is also closely linked with the Enlightenment and its concepts of tolerance, equality and liberty. This volume sheds light upon the inherent contradictions of modernity between Enlightenment and genocide, and on how this ambivalent European heritage is confronted. This book was produced in the framework of the research project The Cultural Construction of Community in Modernisation Processes in Comparison in co-operation between the European University Institute in Florence and Humboldt University in Berlin.




Desolation and Enlightenment


Book Description

During and especially after World War II, a group of leading scholars who had been perilously close to the war’s devastation joined others fortunate enough to have been protected by distance in an effort to redefine and reinvigorate liberal ideals for a radically new age. Treating evil as an analytical category, they sought to discover the sources of twentieth-century horror and the potentialities of the modern state in the wake of desolation. In the process, they devised strikingly new ways to understand politics, sociology, and history that reverberate still. In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West’s moral bearing. In light of their epoch’s calamities, these intellectuals insisted that the tradition of Enlightenment thought required a new realism, a good deal of renovation, and much recommitment. This array of historians, political philosophers, and social scientists understood that a simple reassertion of liberal modernism had been made radically insufficient by the enormities and moral catastrophes of war, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. Confronting dashed hopes for reason and knowledge, they asked not just whether the Enlightenment should define modernity but also which Enlightenment we should wish to have.




Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and Their Legacies


Book Description

Robert Wokler was one of the world's leading experts on Rousseau and the Enlightenment, but some of his best work was published in the form of widely scattered and difficult-to-find essays. This book collects for the first time a representative selection of his most important essays on Rousseau and the legacy of Enlightenment political thought. These essays concern many of the great themes of the age, including liberty, equality and the origins of revolution. But they also address a number of less prominent debates, including those over cosmopolitanism, the nature and social role of music and the origins of the human sciences in the Enlightenment controversy over the relationship between humans and the great apes. These essays also explore Rousseau's relationships to Rameau, Pufendorf, Voltaire and Marx; reflect on the work of important earlier scholars of the Enlightenment, including Ernst Cassirer and Isaiah Berlin; and examine the influence of the Enlightenment on the twentieth century. One of the central themes of the book is a defense of the Enlightenment against the common charge that it bears responsibility for the Terror of the French Revolution, the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth-century and the Holocaust.




The Historiography of Genocide


Book Description

The Historiography of Genocide is an indispensable guide to the development of the emerging discipline of genocide studies and the only available assessment of the historical literature pertaining to genocides.




A Companion to Psychological Anthropology


Book Description

This Companion provides the first definitive overview of psychocultural anthropology: a subject that focuses on cultural, psychological, and social interrelations across cultures. Brings together original essays by leading scholars in the field Offers an in-depth exploration of the concepts and topics that have emerged through contemporary ethnographic work and the processes of global change Key issues range from studies of consciousness and time, emotion, cognition, dreaming, and memory, to the lingering effects of racism and ethnocentrism, violence, identity and subjectivity




Genocide Perspectives IV


Book Description

Genocide isn't past tense and the Nazi and Bosnian eras are not yet closed. The demonising of people as 'unworthy' and expendable is ever-present and the consequences are all too evident in the daily news. These fourteen essays by Australian scholars confront the issues: the need for a measuring scale that encompasses differences and similarities between seemingly divergent cases of the crime; the complicity of bureaucracies, the healing professions and the churches in this 'crime of crimes'; the quest for historical justice for genocide victims generally following the Nuremberg Trials; the fate of children in the Nazi and postwar eras; the 'worthiness' of Armenians, Jews and Romani people in twentieth century Europe; and the imperative to tackle early warning signs of an incipient genocide. Colin Tatz is a founding director of the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, visiting fellow in Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University, and honorary visiting fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. He teaches and publishes in comparative race politics, youth suicide, migration studies, and sports history.




Decolonizing Enlightenment


Book Description

Do norms of justice, human rights and democracy enable disenfranchised communities? Or do they simply reinforce relations of domination between those who are constituted as dispensers of justice, rights and aid, and those who are coded as receivers? Critical race theorists, feminists and queer and postcolonial theorists confront these questions and offer critical perspectives.




Empire, Colony, Genocide


Book Description

In 1944, Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” to describe a foreign occupation that destroyed or permanently crippled a subject population. In this tradition, Empire, Colony, Genocide embeds genocide in the epochal geopolitical transformations of the past 500 years: the European colonization of the globe, the rise and fall of the continental land empires, violent decolonization, and the formation of nation states. It thereby challenges the customary focus on twentieth-century mass crimes and shows that genocide and “ethnic cleansing” have been intrinsic to imperial expansion. The complexity of the colonial encounter is reflected in the contrast between the insurgent identities and genocidal strategies that subaltern peoples sometimes developed to expel the occupiers, and those local elites and creole groups that the occupiers sought to co-opt. Presenting case studies on the Americas, Australia, Africa, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Nazi “Third Reich,” leading authorities examine the colonial dimension of the genocide concept as well as the imperial systems and discourses that enabled conquest. Empire, Colony, Genocide is a world history of genocide that highlights what Lemkin called “the role of the human group and its tribulations.”




Ambacide: The Genocide and Extermination Reminiscent of Extermination of Jews (Holocaust) by Adolf Hitler


Book Description

Genocide and extermination are no longer mere words, promises, hopes, etc. These acts are already a law which can be enforced. In practical terms, this law means no more extermination, no more mass killings, no more concentration camps, no more sterilisations, no more wanton rapes, no more killings and burning of people to conceal evidence, no more torching of habitats, no more breaking up of families. The call to stop genocide is often presented as the paramount moral obligation in contemporary global politics. The 'Never Again' refrain and the consistent references to the ethical value of Responsibility to Protect genocide stand as calls for urgent political mobilisation. Taking a look at the internet blackouts, the militarisation of towns and cities all across Southern Cameroons (Ambazonia), the indiscriminate torching of hundreds of villages, schools and health centres, the rampant gang rape of females by HIV-infected troops, mass killings of civilians, burning of innocent civilians in their sleep, disembowelling pregnant women and slaughtering them and their unborn babies, arbitrary arrests and detentions, dehumanising raids of residential areas in search of "Anglophones", mindless torture, extortions, and looting by La Rpublique du Cameroun troops, the genocide and extermination were well planned in advance. Professor Tatah Mentan argues that the bloodbath was designed with a clear kinetic theological foundation as its centrepiece. The theologians of the genocide were ironically not clerics. They were rather journalists and sycophantic pro-regime intellectuals who apparently served as the echo chamber of the Biya genocidal regime for his Hitler-like "Final Solution" to crush and assimilate "Anglophones" - the "rats", "cockroaches", "secessionists", "separatists", or "microbes" as they were stigmatised. The suffering inflicted by Hitler on Jews fell outside the realm of expression. Often depicted as the savage lunatic who plunged the world into World War II, Adolf Hitler's name has been on the tongues of historians, psychologists, economists, and laymen for ages. Similarly, President Paul Biya like Hitler the Monster is being depicted as the epitome of Lucifer himself. Finally, Professor Tatah Mentan concludes that the pandemic genocide and extermination of Ambazonians by La Rpublique du Cameroun gnocidaires can only be peacefully resolved by an internationally negotiated separation of both warring Former UN Category B Trust Territories.




Rafał Lemkin


Book Description