Torture

About: Torture is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 8173 publications have been published within this topic receiving 109895 citations.

Against the grain : memoirs of a Zimbabwean newsman

Abstract: Geoff Nyarota was the editor of the Daily News, Zimbabwe's only independent newspaper, for four years. In this time, he chronicled the decline of the country under Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF-controlled regime, and was subjected to extreme harassment by the state. As a young man, Nyarota fervently believed that his children would know the freedom of democracy that he himself had been denied under colonial rule. But after the war of liberation and Mugabe's accession to power in 1980, Nyarota discovered that the returned war heroes were more interested in enriching themselves than in uplifting the poverty-stricken millions, and he unflinchingly began to expose the wholesale corruption perpetrated by the Mugabe government. It took several arrests, torture and intimidation, costly legal fees and, finally, a contract on Nyarota's life before he fled his homeland at the end of 2004 to go into permanent exile.

'Native Christians Massacred': The Ottoman Genocide of the Assyrians During World War I

Abstract: The Ottoman Empire's widespread persecution of Assyrian civilians during World War I constituted a form of genocide, the present-day term for an attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, or religious group, in whole or in part. Although there were no extermination camps on the scale of Auschwitz, the genocide of the Assyrians resembled the Holocaust of Jews, Slavs, Roma people, leftists, homosexuals, and other minorities under Nazi occupation during World War II because Ottoman soldiers and their Kurdish and Persian militia allies subjected hundreds of thousands of Assyrians to a deliberate and systematic campaign of massacre, torture, abduction, deportation, impoverishment, and cultural and ethnic destruction. According to the American ambassador to Constantinople from 1913 to 1916, Henry I. Morgenthau, widely regarded as a principal source of information on the Armenian genocide: "The story which I have told about the Armenians I could also tell with certain modifications about the Greeks and the Syrians," as Assyrians were often known to the West. He added that the Ottoman Empire "decided to apply the same methods [of "wholesale massacre"] on a larger scale not only to the Greeks but to the Armenians, Syrians, Nestorians [i.e., Assyrians], and others of its subject peoples." In 1918, according to the Los Angeles Times, Ambassador Morgenthau confirmed that the Ottoman Empire had "massacred fully 2,000,000 men, women, and children?Greeks, Assyrians, Armenians; fully 1,500,000 Armenians."This article will argue that the hesitation to recognize the Assyrian genocide is unjustified, for the evidence is overwhelming that Turks and their Kurdish allies massacred hundreds of thousands of Assyrians in order to exterminate the Christian population; raped and enslaved thousands of Assyrian women in a systematic fashion; and deported the Assyrians en masse from their ancestral lands under conditions that led to famine and widespread death. Established principles of international law outlawed this war of extermination against Ottoman Christian civilians before it was embarked upon, and ample evidence of genocidal intent has surfaced in the form of admissions by Ottoman officials. Nevertheless, the international community has been hesitant to recognize the Assyrian experience as an instance of genocide. The more rapid legal recognition of the Armenian genocide is attributable to the larger numbers of Armenian victims and survivors, the dispersion and political voicelessness of the Assyrian people, and more copious evidence of an intention on the part of the Ottomans to wipe out the Armenians.In conclusion, I will contend that the legal and historical recognition of the Assyrian genocide at the hands of the Ottomans is vital to focus the world's attention on the Assyrian remnant in Iraq. That remnant has been scattered by more than a century of massacre, discrimination, and religious persecution into non-viable communities that are still waiting for their homelands and human rights to be restored. U.S. officials have documented an "ethnic-cleansing campaign" against Assyrians in present-day Iraq, with "systematic attacks" against Assyrian civilians, bombings of Assyrian churches, and the driving of most Assyrians out of Iraq. Genocide and ethnic cleansing give rise to legally enforceable claims for reparation and restoration of property and the value of lives lost. But because their genocide has rarely been recognized, the Assyrians driven from their homes over the past century have received relatively little by way of compensation or assistance with rebuilding. This article calls upon the international community to focus its efforts on the security and resettlement of the Assyrian people.

The specificity of torture as trauma: the human wilderness when words fail.

Abstract: The author attempts to situate the specificity of torture--understood as the product of political violence and of totalitarian states--within the historical framework of the concept of trauma in psychoanalysis When the mind and social ties are simultaneously affected, the intrapsychic and transpersonal aspects of the suffered damage intertwine in a complex and unique web The author aims to dismantle the notion of victim, considering it both stigmatizing and inaccurate The goal is not just to identify the after-effects and the disabilities suffered by those affected by torture, but also to integrate their experiences and their narratives into a life project Rather than individual psychopathology, this essay reflects upon those phenomena of suggestion and hypnosis that are at work in human groups under ordinary conditions and that are exacerbated under social crises, following the Freudian axis developed in Group psychology and the analysis of the ego

Terror in the Time of Troubles

Abstract: Russia's nightmarish Time of Troubles (1598-1613) produced, in addition to war and famine, numerous terrifying examples of political violence, atrocities, mass killings, and grotesque public displays of torture and execution that man- aged to surpass even the high level of violence associated with the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1547-84). Therefore, the Troubles ought to be a prime candidate for scrutiny by students of political violence in Russian history. Unfortunately, interested readers will encounter many misleading descriptions of "revolutionary violence" and "cossack terror" in the Time of Troubles that are inaccurate by- products of a long-held view of the period as one of social revolution. 1 Recent scholarship has decisively overturned the traditional class war interpretation of the Troubles; 2 nonetheless, it continues to haunt historical literature, source crit- icism, and studies of revolutionary violence in Russian history. The purpose of this article is to start moving beyond outdated Marxist explanations of the use of 1

How This Was Possible: Interpreting the Holocaust

Abstract: Moral exclusion occurs when individuals or groups are seen as outside the boundary in which moral values, rules, and considerations of fairness apply. It can render violence and injustice normal and acceptable. This talk describes research conducted at the House of Wannsee Conference, a cultural institution near Berlin, where the liquidation of Europe's Jews was planned in 1942. Now a commemorative site and education center, this institution's interpretive strategies increase visitors’ knowledge about past exclusionary processes. The House of Wannsee's interpretive strategies emphasize the role of occupational groups in society. Consistent with that focus, this talk discusses psychology at two points in time: Gestalt psychology, which flourished in Germany from 1920 to 1933, and psychology from 2002 to the present in light of contemporary concerns about psychologists’ involvement in detention and torture.