The German invasion of the Soviet Union during the Second World War was central to Nazi plans for territorial expansion and genocidal demographic revolution. To create 'living space', Nazi Germany ...pursued two policies. The first was the systematic murder of millions of Jews, Slavs, Roma, and other groups that the Nazis found undesirable on racial, religious, ethnic, ideological, hereditary, or behavioral grounds. It also pursued a parallel, albeit smaller, program to mobilize supposedly Germanic residents of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union - so-called Volksdeutsche or ethnic Germans - as the vanguard of German expansion. This study recovers the intersection of these two projects in Transnistria, a portion of southern Ukraine that, because of its numerous Volksdeutsche communities, became an epicenter of both Nazi Volksdeutsche policy and the Holocaust in conquered Soviet territory, ultimately asking why local residents, whom German authorities identified as Volksdeutsche, participated in the Holocaust with apparent enthusiasm.
Satellite Empire is an in-depth investigation of the political and social history of the area in southwestern Ukraine under Romanian occupation during World War II. Transnistria was the only occupied ...Soviet territory administered by a power other than Nazi Germany, a reward for Romanian participation in Operation Barbarossa. Vladimir Solonari's invaluable contribution to World War II history focuses on three main aspects of Romanian rule of Transnistria: with fascinating insights from recently opened archives, Solonari examines the conquest and delimitation of the region, the Romanian administration of the new territory, and how locals responded to the occupation. What did Romania want from the conquest? The first section of the book analyzes Romanian policy aims and its participation in the invasion of the USSR. Solonari then traces how Romanian administrators attempted, in contradictory and inconsistent ways, to make Transnistria "Romanian" and "civilized" while simultaneously using it as a dumping ground for 150, 000 Jews and 20, 000 Roma deported from a racially cleansed Romania. The author shows that the imperatives of total war eventually prioritized economic exploitation of the region over any other aims the Romanians may have had. In the final section, he uncovers local responses in terms of collaboration and resistance, in particular exploring relationships with the local Christian population, which initially welcomed the occupiers as liberators from Soviet oppression but eventually became hostile to them. Ever increasing hostility towards the occupying regime buoyed the numbers and efficacy of pro-Soviet resistance groups.
This first complete history of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip allows us to see beyond the smoke screen of politics in order to make sense of the dramatic changes that have ...developed on the ground over the past forty years. Looking at a wide range of topics, from control of water and electricity to health care and education as well as surveillance and torture, Neve Gordon's panoramic account reveals a fundamental shift from a politics of life—when, for instance, Israel helped Palestinians plant more than six-hundred thousand trees in Gaza and provided farmers with improved varieties of seeds—to a macabre politics characterized by an increasing number of deaths. Drawing attention to the interactions, excesses, and contradictions created by the forms of control used in the Occupied Territories, Gordon argues that the occupation's very structure, rather than the policy choices of the Israeli government or the actions of various Palestinian political factions, has led to this radical shift.
Unlikely Allies offers the first comprehensive and
scholarly English-language analysis of German-Ukrainian
collaboration in the General Government, an area of occupied Poland
during World War II. ...Drawing on extensive archival material, the
Ukrainian position is examined chiefly through the perspective of
Ukrainian Central Committee head Volodymyr Kubiiovych, a prewar
academic and ardent nationalist. The contact between Kubiiovych and
Nazi administrators at various levels shows where their
collaboration coincided and where it differed, providing a full
understanding of the Ukrainian Committee's ties with the occupation
authorities and its relationship with other groups, like Poles and
Jews, in occupied Poland.
Ukrainian nationalists' collaboration created an opportunity to
neutralize prewar Polish influences in various strata of social
life. Kubiiovych hoped for the emergence of an autonomous Ukrainian
region within the borders of the General Government or an
ethnographic state closely associated with the Third Reich. This
led to his partnership with the Third Reich to create a new
European order after the war. Through their occupational policy of
divide to conquer, German concessions raised Ukrainians to the
position of a full-fledged ethnic group, giving them the respect
they sought throughout the interwar period. Yet collaboration also
contributed to the eruption of a bloody Polish-Ukrainian ethnic
conflict. Kubiiovych's wartime experiences with Nazi politicians
and administrators-greatly overlooked and only partially referenced
today-not only illustrate the history of German-Ukrainian and
Polish-Ukrainian relations, but also supply a missing piece to the
larger, more controversial puzzle of collaboration during World War
II.
Castes of mind Dirks, Nicholas B
2001., 20111009, 2011, 2001, 2002-01-01
eBook
When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places ...while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization.
Camus at Combat Camus, Albert; Lévi-Valensi, Jacqueline; Goldhammer, Arthur ...
11/2023
eBook
Paris is firing all its ammunition into the August night.
Against a vast backdrop of water and stone, on both sides of a
river awash with history, freedom's barricades are once again being
erected. ...Once again justice must be redeemed with men's blood.
Albert Camus (1913-1960) wrote these words in August 1944, as Paris
was being liberated from German occupation. Although best known for
his novels including The Stranger and The Plague ,
it was his vivid descriptions of the horrors of the occupation and
his passionate defense of freedom that in fact launched his public
fame. Now, for the first time in English, Camus at
'Combat' presents all of Camus' World War II resistance and
early postwar writings published in Combat , the resistance
newspaper where he served as editor-in-chief and editorial writer
between 1944 and 1947. These 165 articles and editorials show how
Camus' thinking evolved from support of a revolutionary
transformation of postwar society to a wariness of the radical left
alongside his longstanding strident opposition to the reactionary
right. These are poignant depictions of issues ranging from the
liberation, deportation, justice for collaborators, the return of
POWs, and food and housing shortages, to the postwar role of
international institutions, colonial injustices, and the situation
of a free press in democracies. The ideas that shaped the vision of
this Nobel-prize winning novelist and essayist are on abundant
display. More than half a century after the publication of these
writings, they have lost none of their force. They still speak to
us about freedom, justice, truth, and democracy.
In the twenty-first century, political conflict and militarization have come to constitute a global social condition rather than a political exception. Military occupation increasingly informs the ...politics of both democracies and dictatorships, capitalist and formerly socialist regimes, raising questions about its relationship to sovereignty and the nation-state form. Israel and India are two of the world's most powerful postwar democracies yet have long-standing military occupations. Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Turkey have passed through periods of military dictatorship, but democracy has yielded little for their ethnic minorities who have been incorporated into the electoral process. Sri Lanka and Bangladesh (like India, Pakistan, and Turkey) have felt the imprint of socialism; declarations of peace after long periods of conflict in these countries have not improved the conditions of their minority or indigenous peoples but rather have resulted in "violent peace" and remilitarization. Indeed, the existence of standing troops and ongoing state violence against peoples struggling for self-determination in these regions suggests the expanding and everyday nature of military occupation. Such everydayness raises larger issues about the dominant place of the military in society and the social values surrounding militarism.
Everyday Occupationsexamines militarization from the standpoints of both occupier and occupied. With attention to gender, poetics, satire, and popular culture, contributors who have lived and worked in occupied areas in the Middle East and South Asia explore what kinds of society are foreclosed or made possible by militarism. The outcome is a powerful contribution to the ethnography of political violence.
Contributors:Nosheen Ali, Kabita Chakma, Richard Falk, Sandya Hewamanne, Mohamad Junaid, Rhoda Kanaaneh, Hisyar Ozsoy, Cheran Rudhramoorthy, Serap Ruken Sengul, Kamala Visweswaran.
In this book, the prominent theorist Partha Chatterjee looks at the creative and powerful results of the nationalist imagination in Asia and Africa that are posited not on identity but on difference ...with the nationalism propagated by the West. Arguing that scholars have been mistaken in equating political nationalism with nationalism as such, he shows how anticolonialist nationalists produced their own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before beginning their political battle with the imperial power. These nationalists divided their culture into material and spiritual domains, and staked an early claim to the spiritual sphere, represented by religion, caste, women and the family, and peasants. Chatterjee shows how middle-class elites first imagined the nation into being in this spiritual dimension and then readied it for political contest, all the while "normalizing" the aspirations of the various marginal groups that typify the spiritual sphere. While Chatterjee's specific examples are drawn from Indian sources, with a copious use of Bengali language materials, the book is a contribution to the general theoretical discussion on nationalism and the modern state. Examining the paradoxes involved with creating first a uniquely non-Western nation in the spiritual sphere and then a universalist nation-state in the material sphere, the author finds that the search for a postcolonial modernity is necessarily linked with past struggles against modernity.
On time Barak, On
2013., 20130725, 2013, 2013-07-19
eBook
In this pioneering history of transportation and communication in the modern Middle East, On Barak argues that contrary to accepted wisdom technological modernity in Egypt did not drive a sense of ...time focused on standardization only. Surprisingly, the introduction of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone in colonial Egypt actually triggered the development of unique timekeeping practices that resignified and subverted the typical modernist infatuation with expediency and promptness. These countertempos, predicated on uneasiness over “dehumanizing” European standards of efficiency, sprang from and contributed to non-linear modes of arranging time. Barak shows how these countertempos formed and developed with each new technological innovation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributing to a particularly Egyptian sense of time that extends into the present day, exerting influence over contemporary political language in the Arab world. The universal notion of a modern mechanical standard time and the deviations supposedly characterizing non-Western settings “from time immemorial,” On Time provocatively argues, were in fact mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing.
This book is an exploration of the scope and methods used by Germany in its extermination and Germanization policy aimed at Polish children in the years 1939 to 1945. The German leadership remained ...firmly convinced that the crimes they committed on children would never see the light of day.
