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Mass violence is one of the defining phenomena of the twentieth century, which some have even called the 'century of genocides'. The study of how the dead body is treated can lead us to an understanding of the impact of mass violence on contemporary societies. Corpses of mass violence and genocide, especially when viewed from a biopolitical perspective, force one to focus on the structures of the relations between all that participates in the enfolding case study. Argentina is an extraordinary laboratory in the domain of struggle against impunity and of 'restoration of the truth'. It constitutes a useful paradigm in the context of reflection on the corpses of mass violence. Its special character, in the immediate aftermath of the military dictatorship, is to test almost the entirety of juridical mechanisms in the handling of state crimes. The trigger for both the intercommunal violence and the civil war was the mass murders by the Ustaša. This book discusses the massacres carried out by the Ustaša in Croatia during the Second World War. After a brief presentation of the historical background, the massacres carried out by the Ustaša militia and their corpse disposal methods are described. Using Rwanda as a case study, the book proposes an agenda for ethnographic research to explore the relationship between concealment and display in contexts of genocide. This relationship is explored in detail after a discussion of the historical background to the 1994 genocide.
humanitarian interventions. The topic was thrust upon me by events in Rwanda in 1994. As a teenage, second-generation Rwandan immigrant in Belgium, I was more personally affected than fellow classmates by the hypocrisy of the international community: the preaching of respect for human rights, followed by their omission during one hundred days of mass murder before the eyes of the world. It felt like there was more to the story than ‘good intentions versus regrettable outcomes’. Ever since, I have worried about the content and purpose of (Western
area. ‘The exhumations were a dreadful task’, the general said. ‘Nobody could enter the cave because the rotting bodies stank so badly. One man who we lowered down on a rope fainted and we had to pull him out again.’ 2 It seems that the soldiers were finally equipped with gas masks. During the Second World War, up to 45 million people lost their lives.3 Almost a quarter of them were victims of targeted attacks with the intent to kill and mass murders, rather than armed hostili ties. While the death of the victims can be said to have been well researched, many
Japan, Germany, Poland and Korea) act as reminders that the Soviet capital was the scene not only of mass murders, but also of mass cremations, well before the ovens of the Nazi camps. The vast majority of corpses from the gulags, however, remain buried in the vicinity of the camps. And so, given that the camps were for the most part situated in the vicinity of urban conglomer ations, the map of the gulags precisely matches the map of the population of the Soviet Union. Yet in spite of the proximity between the Soviet population, the camps and their mass graves
how the popular memory of slavery in Britain today reproduces white supremacy. Stuart Ward shows how the history of settler colonialism in Australia helps explain the actions of the mass murderer of Muslims in Christchurch. Bill Schwarz demonstrates the profound ways in which British and American politics were shaped in reaction to global demands for black equality. The next three sections offer case studies of how particular instances of transnational exchange shaped the development of white nationalism globally. Clive Webb examines the importance of the U.S. to
with Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP) MP John Hume, that the Parachute Regiment had carried out ‘cold-blooded mass murder; another Sharpeville; another Bloody Sunday’. Some news outlets reported Derry’s James Connolly Republican Club’s call for an ‘immediate general strike (to) bring the country to a standstill’.3 Monday 31 January On Monday morning, walkouts began from factories in the Shannon Industrial Estate. An estimated 2,000 workers marched to the airport terminal and demanded the tricolour be lowered to half-mast. By 9am Cork dockers had struck
successfully drown their captives en masse prior to their arrest. As with Scott’s nautical novels, the spectacle of mass murder at sea is offered up reproachfully as evidence of the uselessness of naval suppression. In the same vein as ‘Good Intentions’, ‘A Cape Coast Cargo’ claims verisimilitude by referring its readers to actual cases to affirm that its plot is not simply
’ inquisitiveness should be turned inward first, not outward to feast on the site (and thus, perhaps, irrationally, the sight) of the mass murder. 37 Keenly aware of the difficulty involved in avoiding monumentalizing Breivik and his deeds, and the dubious ethics of disaster tourism generally, he opted for a choreographed walk, first through the forest, then into the tunnel, with its quasi-romantic obstructed view to the newly created opposite shore of rock, with the names of the victims engraved on the surface of the
people present to observe the gassing through a window: According to reports, the patients generally fell into a sort of stupor before collapsing or falling from the benches. But some of them, who realized that they were being murdered, screamed, raged, and beat their fists against the walls and doors in sheer terror of death. 14 The Final Solution required the nefarious modern efficiency of Nazi Germany in order to perform such heinous and extreme form of mass murders: Nazi violence could only be so extreme precisely because it was so modern. To
This book explores the reasons and justifications for the Chinese state’s campaign to erase Uyghur identity, focusing, in particular, on how China’s manipulation of the US-led Global War on Terror (GWOT) has facilitated this cultural genocide. It is the first book to address this issue in depth, and serves as an important rebuttal to Chinese state claims that this campaign is a benign effort to combat an existential extremist threat. While the book suggests that the motivation for this state-led campaign is primarily China’s gradual settler colonization of the Uyghur homeland, the text focuses on the narrative of the Uyghur terrorist threat that has provided international cover and justification for the campaign and has shaped its ‘biopolitical’ nature. It describes how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was able to successfully implicate Uyghurs in GWOT and, despite a lack of evidence, brand them internationally as a serious terrorist threat within the first year of the war. In recounting these developments, the book offers a critique of existing literature on the Uyghur terrorist threat and questions the extent of this threat to the PRC. Finding no evidence for the existence of such a threat when the Chinese state first declared its existence in 2001, the book argues that a nominal Uyghur militant threat only emerged after over a decade of PRC suppression of Uyghur dissent in the name of counterterrorism, facilitating a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ that has served to justify further state repression and ultimately cultural genocide.