Download or read book The memories of an Anonymous political prisoner written by Cornel GOIA and published by Goia Cornel. This book was released on with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is not an adventure or horror novel, it is an account, as simple as the author of the memoirs. Personal events and experiences are written spontaneously and directly, the hero narrating the ordeal of the years spent in jail as if talking to his next door neighbour . The exceptions from the morphology and syntax rules only add to the authenticity of the story. As the reading of the text advances, a question arises, grows, then becomes overwhelming. How was it possible? How could these creatures thrust such suffering in the flesh and the spirit of a human being, a multiplied suffering, amplified on the scale of millions of people? The hero sees himself thrust in a moment in the hell of the Romanian political prisons and consequently treated as a political prisoner, with all the dark connotations that this title hides in its fatal folds. It is the "right" to be beaten up to the loss of conscience, the "right" to torment his comrades of suffering, only to escape torture himself, "the right" to starvation up to the point of dehumanization, the "right" to work over your powers , the "right" to die, or the "right" to find desperately that you have become a beast. And yet how close they were to success! They had crossed unnoticed the ploughed strip of the border separating them from freedom, or at least so they believed. Being in Yugoslavia they also dreamt of getting to America. But what disappointment and fear! A group of Serbian border guards cuts their way, arrests them, handcuffs them, and after an investigation they deliver them to the Romanian border guards; and the ordeal continues, or it has just begun. The horror of the story, which risks to slip the reader's attention, is that Popică is not a political criminal. His only "fault" is that he wanted to live in America. The communist authorities had declared the illegal border crossing to be a political offense. Popică did not even know the fact that the Yugoslav authorities extradited the Romanians they captured crossing the border. Even if he had known it, Popică, honest, simple-minded and God-fearing as he was, could not have understood how it was possible for a free people like the Serbs whom their leader, Tito, let leave and return to their country anytime, to extradite the Romanian fugitives seeking freedom. A Romanian curse seemed to let Romania have no common border with any free country in Europe. Popică's first story contains the escape, the crossing of the ploughed strip of land, the great flashing joy of success, followed by the most bitter disappointment of their being captured by the Yugoslav border guards. The story, until crossing the border, seems trivial, because all over the world tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people cross borders illegally, determined by political, social or economic injustices in their country, by unbearable climate changes, by war, or simply in the hope of a better life. The area of ​​the Great Lakes in the United States is to this day full of the descendants of the 1920s Romanian emigrants , whom no one asked why they left, why they returned, whether they returned or why they stayed. These emigrants were not arrested by anyone on the border to be accused of intending to betray their homeland. From now on, Popică's story turns into a tragedy. As in a horror film, the action takes a dramatic, unreal turn, it turns into a nightmare, into a long and unbearable suffering that will chase him and which he will try to escape from with a wounded animal roar. This roar will be the present book. In other words, telling his suffering, he could wake up from the nightmare. Confessing his suffering, the book becomes the confession of a martyr. By telling it to everyone, the author hopes to get rid of it, or at least to alleviate it. Without Franz Kafka, the writer's talent, Popică manages to thrill us, making us plunge into the kafkian universe: van-wagons with metallic structures heated mercilessly by the burning sun of triage stations; wagons packed to capacity with detainees, some of them sick and suffocating, screaming for lack of air, feeling like dying; the cells at Jilava, overcrowded with detainees, even sleeping under the overlapped beds; buckets full of fetid human waste, placed near the pots of drinking water; that transport of old detainees who are simply overturned in the mud at the gate of the camp and who can no longer rise up from the mud because of exhaustion to the amusement of the guards, sinister onlookers in security guard uniforms watching the spectacle of human humiliation. Popică with his story opens up the gates of the hell built in Romania by the Romanian Security at Stalin's order and executed by his loyal servants from the Central Committee of the Romanian Workers' Party. Popică understood that Dumitrache had already been dead when they brought him the bread roll and the kettle with water, but he played the innocent for fear of punishment. He understood that he had to play the role all the way, thus facilitating the scenario of Dumitrache's escape attempt. Up to the moment of Dumitrache's attempt to escape, the destiny of the memoirs’ author resembled that of Dumitrache’s. Both of them had been arrested, investigated, beaten and then sent to the Peninsula or the Poarta Albă to die of cold, starvation and working rules impossible to accomplish. Here the likeness of the two destinies ceases. Popică had remained "inside" while Ion Dumitrache had dared to go "outside" and had become a victim of the temptation to correct his destiny. He fell into the hands of the security guards who beat him to death, then they hung him with wires at the corner of the barracks and left him there as an example to scare the other prisoners. Dumitrache's figure, hanging from the pillar, his fallen head and his bruised face, impressed him strongly. Dumitrache looked there, on the pillar, like Christ crucified on the cross. This likeness shook him to non-oblivion. The emotional shock he lived through made him write this testimony over the years. Certainly Popică did not notice the directorial talent of the security guards who staged the great misfortune. Indeed, in the forced labor colony where the drama happened, no other escape attempts were reported. The questions that have arisen, deeply human questions, are: "Who has "triumphed" in the Dumitrache case? The security guards who tortured and killed Dumitrache? Isn’t it Dumitrache the real winner, who succeeded by his death to exchange the ordeal of detention with eternity !? Is it Popică the winner who endured the ordeal to the end and confessed it by writing these memoirs?" The answer to these questions is personal, it is the answer that every reader will whisper to himself/herself. Post scriptum: I cannot put an end to this warning without expressing my profound sense of admiration to professor Cornel Goia for his tireless work as a chronicler of these incredible sufferings undergone in the Romanian political prisons to keep them away from this dreadful death that is OBLIVION.

Download or read book Lucasville written by Staughton Lynd and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2011-03-07 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucasville tells the story of one of the longest prison uprisings in U.S. history. At the maximum-security Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, Ohio, prisoners seized a major area of the prison on Easter Sunday, 1993. More than 400 prisoners held L block for eleven days. Nine prisoners alleged to have been informants, or “snitches,” and one hostage correctional officer, were murdered. There was a negotiated surrender. Thereafter, almost wholly on the basis of testimony by prisoner informants who received deals in exchange, five spokespersons or leaders were tried and sentenced to death, and more than a dozen others received long sentences. Lucasville examines the causes of the disturbance, what happened during the eleven days, and the fairness of the trials. Particular emphasis is placed on the interracial character of the action, as evidenced in the slogans that were found painted on walls after the surrender: “Black and White Together,” “Convict Unity,” and “Convict Race.” An eloquent Foreword by Mumia Abu-Jamal underlines these themes. He states, as does the book, that the men later sentenced to death “sought to minimize violence, and indeed, according to substantial evidence, saved the lives of several men, prisoner and guard alike.” Of the five men, three black and two white, who were sentenced to death, Mumia declares, “They rose above their status as prisoners, and became, for a few days in April 1993, what rebels in Attica had demanded a generation before them: men. As such, they did not betray each other; they did not dishonor each other; they reached beyond their prison ‘tribes’ to reach commonality.”

Download or read book Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia written by Kwok Kian-Woon and published by NUS Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia applies a new theoretical literature on social memory to remembered events in Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia. Highlighting connections between theorizing based on European examples and unresolved memory issues in East and Southeast Asia, the authors show how comparative study of the interpenetration of politics and lived bodily experience, of communal and personal memories, and of dominant and suppressed narratives, can yield insights into the human potential to become either perpetrators, victims or bystanders. The memories found within different groups in any society are open to negotiation, suppression, contestation, or revision in the ever-evolving politics of the present. The searching and close-grained analyses of contemporary issues found in the volume vividly illustrate the essentially plural and multivocal nature of social memories, and demonstrate the intricate connection between transnational, national and sub-national politics. Readers seeking a more nuanced and complex understanding of the past and of its continued relevance to the present and future, will find here much food for thought.

Download or read book Heritage Memory and Punishment written by Shu-Mei Huang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-23 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a transnational study of decommissioned, postcolonial prisons in Taiwan (Taipei and Chiayi), South Korea (Seoul), and China (Lushun), this book offers a critical reading of prisons as a particular colonial product, the current restoration of which as national heritage is closely related to the evolving conceptualization of punishment. Focusing on the colonial prisons built by the Japanese Empire in the first half of the twentieth century, it illuminates how punishment has been considered a subject of modernization, while the contemporary use of prisons as heritage tends to reduce the process of colonial modernity to oppression and atrocity – thus constituting a heritage of shame and death, which postcolonial societies blame upon the former colonizers. A study of how the remembering of punishment and imprisonment reflects the attempts of postcolonial cities to re-articulate an understanding of the present by correcting the past, Heritage, Memory, and Punishment examines how prisons were designed, built, partially demolished, preserved, and redeveloped across political regimes, demonstrating the ways in which the selective use of prisons as heritage, reframed through nationalism, leaves marks on urban contexts that remain long after the prisons themselves are decommissioned. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, geography, the built environment, and heritage with interests in memory studies and dark tourism.

Download or read book Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist written by Alexander Berkman and published by . This book was released on 1912 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Reappeared written by Rebekah Park and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-22 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1976 and 1983, during a period of brutal military dictatorship, armed forces in Argentina abducted 30,000 citizens. These victims were tortured and killed, never to be seen again. Although the history of los desaparecidos, “the disappeared,” has become widely known, the stories of the Argentines who miraculously survived their imprisonment and torture are not well understood. The Reappeared is the first in-depth study of an officially sanctioned group of Argentine former political prisoners, the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Córdoba, which organized in 2007. Using ethnographic methods, anthropologist Rebekah Park explains the experiences of these survivors of state terrorism and in the process raises challenging questions about how societies define victimhood, what should count as a human rights abuse, and what purpose memorial museums actually serve. The men and women who reappeared were often ostracized by those who thought they must have been collaborators to have survived imprisonment, but their actual stories are much more complex. Park explains why the political prisoners waited nearly three decades before forming their own organization and offers rare insights into what motivates them to recall their memories of solidarity and resistance during the dictatorial past, even as they suffer from the long-term effects of torture and imprisonment. The Reappeared challenges readers to rethink the judicial and legislative aftermath of genocide and forces them to consider how much reparation is actually needed to compensate for unimaginable—and lifelong—suffering.

Download or read book Tortured Confessions written by Ervand Abrahamian and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of torture in recent Iranian politics is the subject of Ervand Abrahamian's important and disturbing book. Although Iran officially banned torture in the early twentieth century, Abrahamian provides documentation of its use under the Shahs and of the widespread utilization of torture and public confession under the Islamic Republican governments. His study is based on an extensive body of material, including Amnesty International reports, prison literature, and victims' accounts that together give the book a chilling immediacy. According to human rights organizations, Iran has been at the forefront of countries using systematic physical torture in recent years, especially for political prisoners. Is the government's goal to ensure social discipline? To obtain information? Neither seem likely, because torture is kept secret and victims are brutalized until something other than information is obtained: a public confession and ideological recantation. For the victim, whose honor, reputation, and self-respect are destroyed, the act is a form of suicide. In Iran a subject's "voluntary confession" reaches a huge audience via television. The accessibility of television and use of videotape have made such confessions a primary propaganda tool, says Abrahamian, and because torture is hidden from the public, the victim's confession appears to be self-motivated, increasing its value to the authorities. Abrahamian compares Iran's public recantations to campaigns in Maoist China, Stalinist Russia, and the religious inquisitions of early modern Europe, citing the eerie resemblance in format, language, and imagery. Designed to win the hearts and minds of the masses, such public confessions—now enhanced by technology—continue as a means to legitimize those in power and to demonize "the enemy."

Download or read book Of Captivity and Resistance written by Sharmila Purkayastha and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-31 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intervention in the field of dissenting writings by women political detainees in India in the 1970s, and it straddles three interlinked areas: politics, prison and writing. It focuses on writings arising out of Bengal's Naxalite movement (1967–1975) and from the pan-Indian period of Emergency (1975–1977).

Download or read book The Making of the Rape of Nanking History and Memory in Japan China and the United States written by Takashi Yoshida Assistant Professor of History Western Michigan University and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2006-02-24 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On December 13, 1937, the Japanese army attacked and captured the Chinese capital city of Nanjing, planting the rising-sun flag atop the city's outer walls. What occurred in the ensuing weeks and months has been the source of a tempestuous debate ever since. It is well known that the Japanese military committed wholesale atrocities after the fall of the city, massacring large numbers of Chinese during the both the Battle of Nanjing and in its aftermath. Yet the exact details of the war crimes--how many people were killed during the battle? How many after? How many women were raped? Were prisoners executed? How unspeakable were the acts committed?--are the source of controversy among Japanese, Chinese, and American historians to this day. In The Making of the "Rape of Nanking" Takashi Yoshida examines how views of the Nanjing Massacre have evolved in history writing and public memory in Japan, China, and the United States. For these nations, the question of how to treat the legacy of Nanjing--whether to deplore it, sanitize it, rationalize it, or even ignore it--has aroused passions revolving around ethics, nationality, and historical identity. Drawing on a rich analysis of Chinese, Japanese, and American history textbooks and newspapers, Yoshida traces the evolving--and often conflicting--understandings of the Nanjing Massacre, revealing how changing social and political environments have influenced the debate. Yoshida suggests that, from the 1970s on, the dispute over Nanjing has become more lively, more globalized, and immeasurably more intense, due in part to Japanese revisionist history and a renewed emphasis on patriotic education in China. While today it is easy to assume that the Nanjing Massacre has always been viewed as an emblem of Japan's wartime aggression in China, the image of the "Rape of Nanking" is a much more recent icon in public consciousness. Takashi Yoshida analyzes the process by which the Nanjing Massacre has become an international symbol, and provides a fair and respectful treatment of the politically charged and controversial debate over its history.

Download or read book Psychoanalysis collective traumas and memory places written by Robert D Hinshelwood and published by Frenis Zero. This book was released on 2015-12-05 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychoanalysis has always had to reckon with the epistemology of the witnessing of the analysand, but perhaps it has only recently been reckoning with the discourse of the ethics of testimony. “Here I am” is the answer addressed to those who call on us to testify. And who are the people who have answered with a “Here I am” in this book dedicated to the places of the memory of ‘Mediterranean civilisations and their discontents’? The reference to the work of the same name by Freud (1929) is clear here, but what many of the authors and of the essays in it seem to have in common is the attention to the traumatic nature of certain places of the memory: theatres of wars, such as the wars in the Balkans at the centre of the contribution by N. Janigro, lines in the diary of a father, who miraculously survived genocide, that a daughter-essayst (J. Altounian) wrenches from oblivion, or even non-places of a memory in which the witnesses-survivors are the many refugees who have fled their homelands. As Bohleber writes, psychoanalysis began as a theory of trauma. In this book, the places of the memory are often the rooms of analysis, places of re-evocation of collective traumas which have not always taken place historically along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. In some cases, the victims of collective traumas, undergone in the home Mediterranean countries, take their dramas of migrants and refugees to analysts in the North of Europe (as in the case of Varvin and Papadopoulos). In other pieces, neither the geographical origin of the analysand nor that of the analyst have apparently any connection with the Mediterranean. We are referring to the essay by M. Ritter and that of Halberstadt-Freud: however, in them, the consulting rooms are places of the memory in which the analyst reflects on the subject of trans-generational transmission of collective guilt connected with Nazism and with the Shoah, which also affected the history of Mediterranean countries. In other contributions in this book, the places of the memory are those of the Middle East caught up in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From different points of view, three authors, Y. Gampel, J. Deutsch and H.-J. Wirth, speak to us of places of the memory where the collective traumas have not been assigned once and for all to the work of historians (as in the case of the Shoah and of the other genocides of the 20th century) as, unfortunately, they are still on-going.

Download or read book Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid written by Fran Lisa Buntman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-10-27 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents

Download or read book Protest Analysing Current Trends written by Matthew Johnson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The politics of the twenty-first century is marked by dissent, tumult and calls for radical change, whether through food riots, anti-war protests, anti-government tirades, anti-blasphemy marches, anti-austerity demonstrations, anti-authoritarian movements and anti-capitalist occupations. Interestingly, contemporary political protests are borne of both the Right and Left and are staged in both the Global North and South. Globally, different instances of protest have drawn attention to the deep fissures which challenge the idea of globalisation as a force for peace. Given the diversity of these protests, it is necessary to examine the particular nature of grievances, the sort of change which is sought and the extent to which localised protest can have global implications. The contributions in this book draw on the theoretical work of Hardt and Negri, David Graeber and Judith Butler, among others, in order explore the nature of hegemony, the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, the responses of authorities to protest and emotion and public performance in, and representation of, protest. The book concludes with David Graeber’s reply to reviews of his recent The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement. This book was published as a special issue of Global Discourse.

Download or read book Revolutionary Memory written by Cary Nelson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revolutionary Memory is the most important book yet to be published about the vital tradition of leftwing American Poetry. As Cary Nelson shows, it is not only our image of the past but also our sense of the present and future that changes when we recover these revolutionary memories. Making a forceful case for political poetry as poetry, Nelson brings to bear his extraordinary knowledge of American poets, radical movements, and social struggles in order to bring out an undervalued strength in a literature often left at the canon's edge. Focused in part of the red decade of the 1930s, RevolutionaryMemory revitalizes biographical criticism for writers on the margin and shows us for the first time how progressive poets fused their work into a powerful chorus of political voices. Richly detailed and beautifully illustrated with period engravings and woodcuts, Revolutionary Memory brings that chorus dramatically to life and set a cultural agenda for future work.

Download or read book People in Auschwitz written by Hermann Langbein and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-12-15 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hermann Langbein was allowed to know and see extraordinary things forbidden to other Auschwitz inmates. Interned at Auschwitz in 1942 and classified as a non-Jewish political prisoner, he was assigned as clerk to the chief SS physician of the extermination camp complex, which gave him access to documents, conversations, and actions that would have remained unknown to history were it not for his witness and his subsequent research. Also a member of the Auschwitz resistance, Langbein sometimes found himself in a position to influence events, though at his peril. People in Auschwitz is very different from other works on the most infamous of Nazi annihilation centers. Langbein's account is a scrupulously scholarly achievement intertwining his own experiences with quotations from other inmates, SS guards and administrators, civilian industry and military personnel, and official documents. Whether his recounting deals with captors or inmates, Langbein analyzes the events and their context objectively, in an unemotional style, rendering a narrative that is unique in the history of the Holocaust. This monumental book helps us comprehend what has so tenaciously challenged understanding.

Download or read book Historical Geographies of Prisons written by Karen M. Morin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-12 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to provide a comprehensive historical-geographical lens to the development and evolution of correctional institutions as a specific subset of carceral geographies. This book analyzes and critiques global practices of incarceration, regimes of punishment, and their corresponding spaces of "corrections" from the eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It examines individuals' experiences within various regulatory regimes and spaces of punishment, and offers an interpretation of spaces of incarceration as cultural-historical artifacts. The book also analyzes the spatial-distributional geographies of incarceration, particularly with respect to their historical impact on community political-economic development and local geographies. Contributions within this book examine a range of prison sites and the practices that take place within them to help us understand how regimes of punishment are experienced, and are constructed in different kinds of ways across space and time for very different ends. The overall aim of this book is to help understand the legacies of carceral geographies in the present. The resonances across space and time tell a profound story of social and spatial legacies and, as such, offer important insights into the prison crisis we see in many parts of the world today.

Download or read book Dissensual Subjects written by Andrew C. Rajca and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Dissensual Subjects, Andrew C. Rajca combines cultural studies and critical theory to explore how the aftereffects of dictatorship have been used to formulate dominant notions of human rights in the present. In so doing, he critiques the exclusionary nature of these processes and highlights who and what count (and do not count) as subjects of human rights as a result. Through an engaging exploration of the concept of “never again” (nunca más/nunca mais) and close analysis of photography exhibits, audiovisual installations, and other art forms in spaces of cultural memory, the book explores how aesthetic interventions can suggest alternative ways of framing human rights subjectivity beyond the rhetoric of liberal humanitarianism. The book visits sites of memory, two of which functioned as detention and torture centers during dictatorships, to highlight the tensions between the testimonial tenor of permanent exhibits and the aesthetic interventions of temporary installations there. Rajca thus introduces perspectives that both undo common understandings of authoritarian violence and its effects as well as reconfigure who or what are made visible as subjects of memory and human rights in postdictatorship countries. Dissensual Subjects offers much to those concerned with numerous interlocking fields: memory, human rights, political subjectivity, aesthetics, cultural studies, visual culture, Southern Cone studies, postdictatorship studies, and sites of memory.

Download or read book Metaphors of Evil written by Hamida Bosmajian and published by Iowa City : University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the intellectual and emotional defensiveness of contemporary German culture as revealed in the form and content of literary works written in the wake of the Holocaust. Examines autobiographies, novels, and poems in terms of their images of defensive rigidity and chaos; states that no literary form can possibly contain the lived experience. Discusses Siegfried Lenz's "Deutschstunde", Günter Grass' "Hundejahre", Uwe Johnson's "Jahrestage", Rolf Hochhuth's "Der Stellvertreter", Peter Weiss' "Die Ermittlung", Nelly Sachs' "Landscape of Screams", and Paul Celan's "Engführung".