Download or read book Democracy Blindfolded written by Patrick Smyth and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Blindfold written by Theo Padnos and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning journalist’s extraordinary account of being kidnapped and tortured in Syria by al Qaeda for two years—a revelatory memoir about war, human nature, and endurance that’s “the best of the genre, profound, poetic, and sorrowful” (The Atlantic). In 2012, American journalist Theo Padnos, fluent in Arabic, Russian, German, and French, traveled to a Turkish border town to write and report on the Syrian civil war. One afternoon in October, while walking through an olive grove, he met three young Syrians—who turned out to be al Qaeda operatives—and they captured him and kept him prisoner for nearly two years. On his first day, in the first of many prisons, Padnos was given a blindfold—a grime-stained scrap of fabric—that was his only possession throughout his horrific ordeal. Now, Padnos recounts his time in captivity in Syria, where he was frequently tortured at the hands of the al Qaeda affiliate, Jebhat al Nusra. We learn not only about Padnos’s harrowing experience, but we also get a firsthand account of life in a Syrian village, the nature of Islamic prisons, how captors interrogate someone suspected of being CIA, the ways that Islamic fighters shift identities and drift back and forth through the veil of Western civilization, and much more. No other journalist has lived among terrorists for as long as Theo has—and survived. As a resident of thirteen separate prisons in every part of rebel-occupied Syria, Theo witnessed a society adrift amid a steady stream of bombings, executions, torture, prayer, fasting, and exhibitions, all staged by the terrorists. Living within this tide of violence changed not only his personal identity but also profoundly altered his understanding of how to live. Offering fascinating, unprecedented insight into the state of Syria today, Blindfold is “a triumph of the human spirit” (The New York Times Book Review)—combining the emotional power of a captive’s memoir with a journalist’s account of a culture and a nation in conflict that is as urgent and important as ever.
Download or read book Oral Democracy written by Vijayendra Rao and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies citizens' deliberation on governance and development in Indian democracy, and the influence of state policy and literacy, analysing three hundred village assemblies. This title is also available as Open Access.
Download or read book Democracy is the Answer written by Alaa Al Aswany and published by Gingko Library. This book was released on 2015-02-15 with total page 1023 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Egyptian revolution unfolded throughout 2011 and the ensuing years, no one was better positioned to comment on it—and try to push it in productive directions—than best-selling novelist and political commentator Alaa Al-Aswany. For years a leading critic of the Mubarak regime, Al-Aswany used his weekly newspaper column for Al-Masry Al-Youm to propound the revolution’s ideals and to confront the increasingly troubled politics of its aftermath. This book presents, for the first time in English, all of Al-Aswany’s columns from the period, a comprehensive account of the turmoil of the post-revolutionary years, and a portrait of a country and a people in flux. Each column is presented along with a context-setting introduction, as well as notes and a glossary, all designed to give non-Egyptian readers the background they need to understand the events and figures that Al-Aswany chronicles. The result is a definitive portrait of Egypt today—how it got here, and where it might be headed.
Download or read book The Demon in Democracy written by Ryszard Legutko and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ryszard Legutko lived and suffered under communism for decades—and he fought with the Polish anti-communist movement to abolish it. Having lived for two decades under a liberal democracy, however, he has discovered that these two political systems have a lot more in common than one might think. They both stem from the same historical roots in early modernity, and accept similar presuppositions about history, society, religion, politics, culture, and human nature. In The Demon in Democracy, Legutko explores the shared objectives between these two political systems, and explains how liberal democracy has over time lurched towards the same goals as communism, albeit without Soviet style brutality. Both systems, says Legutko, reduce human nature to that of the common man, who is led to believe himself liberated from the obligations of the past. Both the communist man and the liberal democratic man refuse to admit that there exists anything of value outside the political systems to which they pledged their loyalty. And both systems refuse to undertake any critical examination of their ideological prejudices.
Download or read book Rewriting Democracy written by Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illuminating and comprehensive, this excellent volume addresses the problematic relationship between democratic institutions and the current critique of enlightenment and modernity. It focuses on the terms and conditions under which it would be possible to prevent events such as 9/11 or the genocide in Darfur in the future.
Download or read book Blindfold and Alone written by John Hughes-Wilson and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2015-10-29 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three hundred and fifty-one men were executed by British Army firing squads between September 1914 and November 1920. By far the greatest number, 266 were shot for desertion in the face of the enemy. The executions continue to haunt the history of the war, with talk today of shell shock and posthumous pardons. Using material released from the Public Records Office and other sources, the authors reveal what really happened and place the story of these executions firmly in the context of the military, social and medical context of the period.
Download or read book Concepts of Indoctrination International Library of the Philosophy of Education Volume 20 written by Ivan A. Snook and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indoctrination is an important concept in educational philosophy. It bears on many areas of study, including ethics, epistemology and philosophy of science, and opens up new paths of investigation into such questions as classroom method and the rights of parents and their children. This book brings together a number of key articles which discuss indoctrination in relation to aspects of religion and morals, dotrines and moral responsibility. This volume combines both American and English interpretations of a crucial idea in the philosophy of education and helps bridge the gap between the teaching of the subject in the USA and the UK.
Download or read book Censorship written by Derek Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2001-12-01 with total page 2950 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Torture and Democracy written by Darius Rejali and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-08 with total page 865 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe. As Rejali traces the development and application of one torture technique after another in these settings, he reaches startling conclusions. As the twentieth century progressed, he argues, democracies not only tortured, but set the international pace for torture. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more indiscriminately, but the United States, Britain, and France pioneered and exported techniques that have become the lingua franca of modern torture: methods that leave no marks. Under the watchful eyes of reporters and human rights activists, low-level authorities in the world's oldest democracies were the first to learn that to scar a victim was to advertise iniquity and invite scandal. Long before the CIA even existed, police and soldiers turned instead to "clean" techniques, such as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so too did these methods. Rejali makes this troubling case in fluid, arresting prose and on the basis of unprecedented research--conducted in multiple languages and on several continents--begun years before most of us had ever heard of Osama bin Laden or Abu Ghraib. The author of a major study of Iranian torture, Rejali also tackles the controversial question of whether torture really works, answering the new apologists for torture point by point. A brave and disturbing book, this is the benchmark against which all future studies of modern torture will be measured.
Download or read book Blindfold on a Tightrope written by Ramfis S. Firethorn and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2001-03-11 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes a Man? Perhaps the question ought to be: How is a Man made? --Lets try again. By what process is the boy, the young male human, transformed into that kind of adult human male whom societies recognize as a Man? If it were merely a process of physical maturation, then the Twentieth Century would not have spent nearly a quarter its literary substance on exploring the question. There would be no massive accumulation of psychological difficulties associated with insecurity about the matter. Ramfis S. Firethorn asserts, in Blindfold on a Tightrope, that Manhood is a real psychological state, attained through ritual Mysteries which a healthy society provides to its young males; and that the absence of these Mysteries in post-industrial times has been psychologically debilitating to the individual (both male and female) and culturally devastating to society. No one can teach you the Mysteries; but in this book (which is part anthropological exploration, part poetic evocation) Firethorn points out some guideposts along the way. From the hunt to the dance, from ancient myths to modern misconceptions, exploring Manhood and Godhead, the author offers exercises that may help you identify the Gateway. Not for the faint-hearted nor prudish: this is a journey for those who want a spiritual challenge! When first published in 1993 the book was well-received by men and women alike: but there were those who did not like it, and perhaps the best review, the most important, came from a Southern California High Priestess who stormed into the publishers office, slammed her first down on the desk, and proclaimed: Men must not be allowed to think these thoughts! It can be transformative: it can also be dangerous.
Download or read book Democracy s Body written by Sally Banes and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judson Dance Theater involved such collaborators as Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Carolee Schneemann, Trisha Brown, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, et al.
Download or read book ETransformation in Governance written by Matti Mälkiä and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: eTransformation in Governance: New Directions in Government and Politics is about transformation in government and governance due to the information society development. The book provides conceptual clarification of the e-transformation in governance, and presents empirical findings on the recent developments in Western countries. The book provides innovative and fresh views to recent developments and practices of e-governance.
Download or read book Democracy s Spectacle written by Jennifer Greiman and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2011-01-03 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What is the hangman but a servant of law? And what is that law but an expression of public opinion? And if public opinion be brutal and thou a component part thereof, art thou not the hangman's accomplice?" Writing in 1842, Lydia Maria Child articulates a crisis in the relationship of democracy to sovereign power that continues to occupy political theory today. Is sovereignty, with its reliance on singular and exceptional power, fundamentally inimical to democracy? Or might a more fully realized democracy distribute, share, and popularize sovereignty, thus blunting its exceptional character and its basic violence? In Democracy's Spectacle, Jennifer Greiman looks to an earlier moment in the history of American democracy's vexed interpretation of sovereignty to argue that such questions about the popularization of sovereign power shaped debates about political belonging and public life in the antebellum United States. In an emergent democracy that was also an expansionist slave society, Greiman argues, the problems that sovereignty posed were less concerned with a singular and exceptional power lodged in the state than with a power over life and death that involved all Americans intimately. Drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of the sovereignty of the people in Democracy in America, along with work by Gustave de Beaumont, Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, Greiman tracks the crises of sovereign power as it migrates out of the state to become a constitutive feature of the public sphere. Greiman brings together literature and political theory, as well as materials on antebellum performance culture, antislavery activism, and penitentiary reform, to argue that the antebellum public sphere, transformed by its empowerment, emerges as a spectacle with investments in both punishment and entertainment.
Download or read book Justice Blindfolded written by Adriano Prosperi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Justice Blindfolded gives an overview of the history of “justice” and its iconography through the centuries. Justice has been portrayed as a woman with scales, or holding a sword, or, since the fifteenth century, with her eyes bandaged. This last symbol contains the idea that justice is both impartial and blind, reminding indirectly of the bandaged Christ on the cross, a central figure in the Christian idea of fairness and forgiveness. In this rich and imaginative journey through history and philosophy, Prosperi manages to convey a full account of the ways justice has been described, portrayed and imagined. Translation of Giustizia bendata. Percorsi storici di un'immagine (Einaudi, 2008).
Download or read book California Politics written by Edgar Kaskla and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2007-07-02 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: California is full of myths and legends, but its political system shouldn’t be. In this refreshingly critical take, Edgar Kaskla brings an analysis of power—how it is distributed, how it is used, and to what end—to bear on California’s political system and the many troubling issues it currently faces. Starting from the premise that California is in deep crisis politically, economically, culturally, and environmentally, Kaskla traces the state’s economic and political development as a process controlled by and for the elite, be they land barons, the Hollywood glitterati, or Silicon Valley execs. Kaskla focuses on what he calls growth machine politics—elites and their land use as promoters of development and redevelopment—to show students how the gap between the rich and poor in California continues to widen. As minority communities increase in size, as the cost of campaigning in the state balloons, and as the state’s debt crisis mounts, the socio-economic and cultural issues at play in California add up to a real threat to democratic governance. Kaskla clearly outlines how each of the state’s institutions are organized, but also shows how they are affected—indeed distorted—by a host of serious economic and social inequalities. Not one to mince words, Kaskla is in places irreverent, but his text is thoroughly researched and well argued, never crossing the line into the polemical. Tables, figures, maps, and lists for further reading help reinforce the book’s substantive points and critical approach, and a host of student and instructor ancillaries help with study, review, and preparation.
Download or read book When The Blindfold Falls written by Kim Schulz and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018-11-16 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The face of freedom is not always pretty flags of red, white and blue dancing in the wind, but rather dark faces hanging from the branches of a tree, or a display of breathless bodies frozen along a trail of tears. If we are to address the broken political system we have now, then we must address the social injustice taking place. Not poke the bear with a stick and watch the anger fester to the point the bear attacks back.
