Katyn Materski, Wojciech; Cienciala, Anna M; Lebedeva, Natalia S
01/2008
eBook
The 14,500 Polish army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians taken prisoner by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939 were held in three special NKVD camps and executed at ...three different sites in spring 1940, of which the one in Katyn Forest is the most famous. Another 7,300 prisoners held in NKVD jails in Ukraine and Belarus were also shot at this time, although many others disappeared without trace. The murder of these Poles is among the most monstrous mass murders undertaken by any modern government.
Three leading historians of the NKVD massacres of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn, Kharkov, and Tver-now subsumed under "Katyn"-present 122 documents selected from the published Russian and Polish volumes coedited by Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski. The documents, with introductions and notes by Anna M. Cienciala, detail the Soviet killings, the elaborate cover-up, the admission of the truth, and the Katyn question in Soviet/Russian-Polish relations up to the present.
What would political thought look like without the foundation of ethics? Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, Madeleine Fagan puts forward a radical and ...far-reaching refusal of foundational ethics. Instead, she proposes an account of the inseparability of ethics and politics. The 'ethical' should not be understood as a label; it does not mean 'good' or 'right', it is not an evaluation or guide. Rather, both the ethical and the political are descriptions of the context in which we find ourselves. The book highlights the necessity of a practice-based rethinking of the relationship between ethics and politics and so denaturalises a series of commonplaces about poststructuralist ethics.
In 1997, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, invited to Princeton University to lecture on the moral status of animals, read a work of fiction about an eminent novelist, Elizabeth ...Costello, invited to lecture on the moral status of animals at an American college. Coetzee's lectures were published in 1999 asThe Lives of Animals, and reappeared in 2003 as part of his novelElizabeth Costello; and both lectures and novel have attracted the critical attention of a number of influential philosophers--including Peter Singer, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell.
InThe Wounded Animal, Stephen Mulhall closely examines Coetzee's writings about Costello, and the ways in which philosophers have responded to them, focusing in particular on their powerful presentation of both literature and philosophy as seeking, and failing, to represent reality--in part because of reality's resistance to such projects of understanding, but also because of philosophy's unwillingness to learn from literature how best to acknowledge that resistance. In so doing, Mulhall is led to consider the relations among reason, language, and the imagination, as well as more specific ethical issues concerning the moral status of animals, the meaning of mortality, the nature of evil, and the demands of religion. The ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature here displays undiminished vigor and renewed significance.
If politics is about how we perceive and relate to the world, then how the world is constructed, disclosed and disrupted are matters of politics. By exploring the force of aesthetic experience and ...the role of space, Mustafa Dikeç offers an understanding of politics based on apprehension and revelation. Dikeç's theory rests on a particular relationship between space and politics. Here, space is not the background for relations between things; rather, space implies a capacity for things to appear and exhibit relations of simultaneity and order. Space is a form of appearance and a mode of actuality, and its disruption is the sublime element in politics.
The Soviet massacre of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn and in other camps in 1940 was one of the most notorious incidents of the Second World War. The truth about the massacres was long suppressed, ...both by the Soviet Union, and also by the United States and Britain who wished to hold together their wartime alliance with the Soviet Union.
This informative book examines the details of this often overlooked event, shedding light on what took place especially in relation to the massacres at locations other than Katyn itself. It discusses how the truth about the killings was hidden, how it gradually came to light and why the memory of the massacres has long affected Polish-Russian relations.
George Sanford is a reader in politics Bristol University and a leading academic specialist on Poland and Eastern Europe. He is the author of ten books, including most recently the Historical Dictionary of Poland (2003), Democratic Government in Poland (2002) and Poland: The Conquest of History (1999).
'This study is the fullest investigation to date of this atrocity...It is based on considerable research in various archives and is written dispassionately and objectively and is thereby all the more moving.' - Contemporary Review
List of tables Preface Introduction Acknowledgements List of abbreviations 1. Poland and Russia 2. The Sovietisation of East Poland 3. The Stalinist Terror and Prisoner of War System 4. The Indoctrination, Screening/Investigation and Selection 5. Course, Mechanisms and Technology of the Massacre 6. The Struggle for Historical Truth 7. Management and Control of the Truth about the 1940 Massacre: American-British lies, hypocrisy and self-delusion 8. Soviet and Polish Communist Control of the Truth about Katyn: The conflict with national memory 9. Closure of the 1940 Soviet Massacre Issue Bibliography Index
France's new deal Nord, Philip G
2010., 20120826, 2012, 2010, 2010-01-01
eBook
France's New Deal is an in-depth and important look at the remaking of the French state after World War II, a time when the nation was endowed with brand-new institutions for managing its economy and ...culture. Yet, as Philip Nord reveals, the significant process of state rebuilding did not begin at the Liberation. Rather, it got started earlier, in the waning years of the Third Republic and under the Vichy regime. Tracking the nation's evolution from the 1930s through the postwar years, Nord describes how a variety of political actors--socialists, Christian democrats, technocrats, and Gaullists--had a hand in the construction of modern France.
At 18.57 hours on Sunday, 26 May 1940, the Admiralty issued the directive which instigated the start of Operation Dynamo. This was the order to rescue the British Expeditionary Force from the French ...port of Dunkirk and the beaches surrounding it. The Admiralty believed that it would only be able to rescue 45,000 men over the course of the following two days, 'at the end of which', read the signal to Admiral Ramsey at Dover, 'it was probable that evacuation would be terminated by enemy action'. The Admiralty, however, was wrong.Between 26 May and 4 June 1940, when Dynamo officially ended, an armada of ships, big and small, naval and civilian achieved what had been considered impossible. In fact, in this period a total of 338,682 men had been disembarked at British ports. Such a figure has exceeded the expectations of most. Little wonder, therefore, that an editorial in The New York Times at the beginning of June declared, 'So long as the English tongue survives, the word Dunkirk will be spoken with reverence'.Through 100 objects, from the wreck of a ship through to a dug-up rifle, and individual photographs to large memorials, all of which represent a moving snapshot of the past, the author sets out to tell the story of what came to be known as The Miracle of Dunkirk. The full-color photographs of each 100 items are accompanied by detailed explanations of the object and the people and events which make them so special or relevant.
This book examines in depth for the first time the origins, development, and reception of the major dramatic screen representations of 'The Few' in the Battle of Britain produced over the past ...seventy years.
A. Ernaux and É. Louis – writers of the real, between silence and noise In A. Ernaux’s steps, É. Louis writes to account for truth, to bear witness for the real. They experience sounds, noises and ...silences as particularly meaningful signs of the social classes that they live in. Their original, popular environment is made of constant noise, whether coming from inside the body or the surrounding working-place. Later as they rise socially, they realise that more privileged classes live in a filtered, muffled world. But being loud may also be a move toward freedom, an expression of the lived experience. The theatre stage is a particularly apt media for the telling of É. Louis’s stories as it enables the varied experiences to be heard and felt through their vibrations, and all noises on stage make sense.