Remembering 1968 in Mexico: Elena Poniatowska's La noche de Tlatelolco as Documentary Narrative

This article considers Elena Poniatowska's La noche de Tlatelolco [ Massacre in Mexico ] as an example of documentary narrative. It examines the narrative strategies she uses to articulate a tripartite interpretation of the events of 2 October 1968. First, it argues that Poniatowska's text represents the Tlatelolco massacre as a crime against humanity constituted by multiple abuses of human rights. Second, the text is shown to expose the cover-up that occurred as a result of the deliberate manipulation of information by the Mexican state. Third, from a more positive perspective, it is argued that the text represents Tlatelolco as a milestone in the ongoing struggle for democracy. Overall, attention is drawn to the importance of Poniatowska's text in the construction of cultural memory as a counter to official history in narrative representations of this particular trauma in Mexican history.     

The Dreyfus affair in the British press

Stone argues that, although German anthropologists were relatively liberal thinkers before 1900, they nevertheless advocated an understanding of race that encouraged hierarchical thinking. Such thinking saw colonized peoples as primitive and culturally inferior. When, around 1900, anthropologists became increasingly reactionary and drawn to social Darwinist and racist ideas, their work served as a scientific legitimation for colonial atrocity, as the case of the Herero genocide in German South West Africa (1904-5) demonstrates. At this point anthropologists, along with the colonial military, were more sanguine about the disappearance of 'backward races'.     

A Review of: “Jarret M. Brachman. Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice.”

ABSTRACT

The genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 appears as one of the most totalitarian manifestations of political violence in the 20th century. This article explores the ideological framework constructed by the Khmer Rouge, and looks into whether and how this influences and motivates individual low-level cadres in their participation. Our findings show that toxification as a genocidal ideology was present in the Khmer Rouge discourse, and provided a lens of legitimacy for individuals to engage in acts of violence. But such a genocidal ideology was not a motivating factor for individual perpetrators in the Cambodian genocide. This research forwards the comparative investigation of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia as an important case of genocide, both at the societal and individual levels, as well as the general study of toxification as a genocidal ideology.     

Selective Perceptions: The Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust

Abstract

Adamson's conference report focuses on those speeches delivered at the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust that evinced a nationalistic tendency, particularly those given by delegates from Bulgaria, Latvia, Hungary and Turkey. He addresses the relationship between social conditions and solidarity with local Jewish communities, and shows, for instance, that whereas the representatives from Latvia and Turkey suggested that hardship was likely to threaten solidarity, the representative from Bulgaria argued rather that hardship was likely to enhance it. Another issue taken up concerns how moments from the historical past are put to use as constituents of national myths: whereas the speakers extolled resistance against the Nazis as the heroic acts of individuals, any collaboration was drained of intelligibility and a sense of responsibility, and reduced to being merely an episode of the national tragedy. Adamson also observes that the representatives from Latvia and Hungary put considerable emphasis upon their respective domestic legal statutes and their prohibition of racial hatred; this, he argues, is a very weak source of moral justification. Adamson then goes on to analyse and criticize the speeches delivered by the Bulgarian and Latvian delegates. On this subject he concludes that, in terms of, for instance, self-sacrifice or resistance against the Nazis, the former's speech considerably exaggerated the benevolent character of the Bulgarian people as a whole; it also, falsely, suggested that deportations of Jews in particular areas outside Bulgarian borders were not carried out by ‘Bulgarians’, and described, contrary to the evidence, the Bulgarian parliament as unanimously opposed to antisemitism. The Latvian delegate, in her turn, offered a rather subjective theory of the origins of ‘barbarity’ that was historically dubious.     

Europe,the Final Solution and the dynamics of intent

ABSTRACT

The scale and scope of the ‘final solution’ of the ‘Jewish question’ were extreme even in the horrific annals of genocide. Bloxham attempts to shed light on the pattern of mass murder in its expansion and contraction by viewing the Holocaust in a set of temporally and culturally specific contexts. It places the Holocaust into a broader European framework of violent ethnopolitics and geopolitics from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. The Holocaust is depicted as an only partially discrete part of a continental process of traumatic flux, and a part, furthermore, that can itself be partially disaggregated into national and regional components. Bloxham moves from a general consideration of patterns of ethnic violence in the period to a closer causal explanation that shows the different valences of Nazi policy towards Jews in the lands directly ruled by Germany and those of Germany's allies respectively. He shows that the peculiarly extensive ambitions of the ‘final solution’ at its most expansive can only be explained when wider geopolitical and strategic contextual terms are factored in along with consideration of Nazi ideology and the internal dynamics of some of the key institutions of the perpetrator state.     

Beyond the ‘Auschwitz syndrome’: Holocaust historiography after the Cold War

ABSTRACT

The end of the Cold war has seen an explosion in Holocaust history, and some significant changes in the main historiographical explanations. The ‘return of ideology’ that began displacing the ‘functionalist’ or ‘structuralist’ dominance of the 1980s remains strong. But it is being supplemented by very detailed regional and local studies, by analyses of different experiences of ghettoization in different places, and by a focus on the widespread plunder and corruption that accompanied the killing process. This enormous attention to detail reveals that the Holocaust unfolded differently in different places; but it also demonstrates the existence of an overall framework in which all the operations took place, what we might call an ‘antisemitic consensus’. Simultaneously, historians have broadened the discussion of the Holocaust, situating it into a transnational or world-historical context of imperialism and colonialism. Stone outlines in broad brush some of these themes, and asks what effects they have had and will continue to have on Europeans' self-understanding in an age in which the post-war anti-fascist consensus has been dismantled while Holocaust-consciousness is officially enshrined into European identity.     

Roads diverged: An examination of violent and nonviolent pathways in the aftermath of the Bosnian war*

Despite renewed interest among criminologists in war and genocide, still understudied are the implications of mass violence for human development and behavior over the life course. By drawing on detailed life history data gathered from 55 male Bosnian refugees and nationals, in this work, I examine the shared beginnings of men who experienced the Bosnian war and genocide (1992–1995) in their youth, as well as examine their divergent pathways over time and across two distinct postwar contexts. My findings reveal that violent pathways are shaped by the confluence of social–psychological mechanisms (e.g., the normalization of violence) and exogenous risk factors (e.g., family disruption and loss of male role models). Compared with nonviolent men, who emphasize themes of catharsis and resilience, and the emulation of prosocial models of masculinity, violent men's narratives are distinguished by themes of persecution and exile, the emulation of violent role models, and contextual barriers to attaining valued masculine identities. Beyond the experience of war, these findings have implications for understanding how early experiences of chronic violence and community disruption shape turning points and cultural frames over the life course, and they indicate that studies of violent pathways should grant greater primacy to the social–historical context and the meaning individuals ascribe to their experiences.     

Reconciliation in Times of Impunity: Challenges for Social Justice

In human history there is no lack of malice, revenge, or savagery. The twentieth century has seen 33 million military deaths. Victimization deaths are estimated at six times that number, at 205 million people. The past decade has seen people enslaved, tortured, raped, and persecuted as members of political, racial, ethnic, or religious groups in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. Yet we have not seen meaningful prosecution of crimes that have occurred on a massive scale. Former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights José Ayala Lasso has stated that a person stands a better chance of being tried and judged for killing one human being than for killing 100,000. This paper examines reconciliation in the aftermath of protracted, deadly, wide scale conflict characterized by impunity when crimes against individuals, groups, and humanity go unpunished. It describes the relevance of moral exclusion theory to conflicts in which dehumanization and violence are normalized, and it argues that impunity is an urgent matter for psychology and social justice research.     

The Aporia of Collective Violence

From the theoretical perspective of René Girard, Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida the Rwanda genocide of 1994 may be interpreted as an instance of foundational violence. Given the constant reference in the Rwanda genocide discourse to the failed revolution of 1959, it is perhaps rather a case of deferred foundational violence. Useful as this notion of ‘foundational violence’ may be, as theoretical category it is also hugely challenging because the implicit claim is not just historical (‘states are routinely founded on violence’) but analytical (‘founding moments are per definition violent’). The result is a profound tension between, on the one hand, the need to understand the event as somehow unexceptional or typical of the founding of new socio-political orders and, on the other hand, the need to judge it as exceptional, an ‘outrage’, a crime against humanity. This paper treats the tension between the unexceptional and exceptional as aporetic, that is, as a profound puzzle consisting of two equally valid imperatives which are nonetheless mutually exclusive. It is also an attempt to find a way beyond the impasse.