Book Description
Why did almost one thousand highly educated "student soldiers" volunteer to serve in Japan's tokkotai (kamikaze) operations near the end of World War II, even though Japan was losing the war? In this fascinating study of the role of symbolism and aesthetics in totalitarian ideology, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney shows how the state manipulated the time-honored Japanese symbol of the cherry blossom to convince people that it was their honor to "die like beautiful falling cherry petals" for the emperor.
Drawing on diaries never before published in English, Ohnuki-Tierney describes these young men's agonies and even defiance against the imperial ideology. Passionately devoted to cosmopolitan intellectual traditions, the pilots saw the cherry blossom not in militaristic terms, but as a symbol of the painful beauty and unresolved ambiguities of their tragically brief lives. Using Japan as an example, the author breaks new ground in the understanding of symbolic communication, nationalism, and totalitarian ideologies and their execution.
Customer Reviews:
"Many people would sooner die than think -.......2006-06-24
- in fact, they do so"
--Bertrand Russell
So it turns out that these were good guys after all, were they?
Right on.
If only the (not so?) Yamato People had prevailed.
Peace and harmony, and rule by "fluency in Marxism
and Western Philosophy" might have reigned throughout
Asia, the Pacific, portions of Oregon, The Bay Area,
Southern California, and the Near West Side of Madison, WI.
I dare say that there might have been, and still even remain,
some benighted line of resistance from Tacoma to Anchorage.
College sophomores from D.C. and Oconomowoc might
have, in bashful but bold transgression, held hands
with Kamikaze pilots at coffee shops on State Street,
and rest assured, 'pro rege et patria NON mori' on the
part of Japanese Imperial Forces would have most certainly
been immediately, decisively, and finally demonstrated,
'Primus Post Laurus.'
I might be impressed if these nutters had been reading
The Federalist Papers, James Joyce, or Freud.
But Nietszche and Marx? Sounds like a more or less
predictable fixation with the concerns of The Third
Reich to me. At least the Nazis made a few good movies.
When will they ever learn?
When will they ev-ver learn.
La la.
Japan was and remains, in some ways, a catalog of caricatures --
this perhaps owing to its remarkably unique historical circumstances.
It can be sometimes mesmerizing and sometimes unsettling
in its general intensity and amplitude. Every imaginable
quality of human nature and creativity are brilliantly displayed.
Barring, that is, just those that are taken most for
granted in the West: unfettered individuality and the
casual exercise of personal judgment in the public realm.
One must keep this in mind in order to take in its
extraordinary tapestry without becoming overly
charmed by any of it in its details or particulars.
The contemporary wish, where sincere, to extend the
principles and values of democracy to the sphere of
international relations is to be encouraged.
The attempt to wish any such attributes onto a past
that simply was not so, is suspect.
Call it 'The Cosmopolitical Fallacy,'
or, maybe, 'Fantasy.'
Historical parallels to current events
must, as a rule, be made and taken with
all care and judiciousness.
Excellent Book.......2005-12-01
From my experiences in reading historical non-fiction, there are generally two types of books. One of these simply tells you what happend, while the others, while also accomplishing the recount, also provide an analysis of perhaps why soemthing happend.
This is a must-read and an incredible in depth look at the japanese culture and the pride they have for their country and history.
Excellent.......2005-04-27
I read this book this semester in Professor Ohnuki-Tierney's class on Political and Cultural Symbolism. A must for any undergraduate student of symbolic or political anthropology. The book traces the use of the cherry blossom as a symbol throughout history, eventually arriving at the tokkotai (kamikaze) pilots of WWII.
EOT does a great job dispelling the myth that tokkotai pilots died for the emperor and committed suicide. Instead, she shows the lives of five young men, all highly intelligent university students fluent in Marxism and Western philosophy. These young men joined the Navy to herald a new age for Japan, they did not believe in the pro rege et patria mori ideology American media has assumed.
Don't watch the History Channel specials on tokkotai pilots. Read this book and learn about the harsh reality of war, the cruelty of government manipulation of symbol, and the brilliance of the Japanese men who lost their lives in WWII.
Highly Recommended.......2005-03-08
Exceptional book, I took a class with this professor. The western conception of "suicide pilots" is completly wrong.
Book Description
Tribes and Power provides a comprehensive understanding of the structure, functioning, and change of today's Middle Eastern tribes. In some Middle Eastern countries, tribalism has been strengthened by centralized policies, modern technology, and the market economy. This stimulating collection scrutinizes the complexities of kinship structures in Arab and Islamic cultures, and contains case studies of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia.
Book Description
How did Pol Pot, a tyrant comparable to Hitler and Stalin in his brutality and contempt for human life, rise to power? This authoritative book explores what happened in Cambodia from 1930 to 1975, tracing the origins and trajectory of the Cambodian Communist movement and setting the ascension of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime in the context of the conflict between colonialism and nationalism. A new preface bring this edition up to date.
Praise for the first edition:
“Given the highly secretive nature of Pol Pot’s activities, the precise circumstances and manoeuvres that propelled him to the top of the heap will perhaps never be known. But Kiernan has come impressively close to it. . . . And he has presented it in a wide perspective, drawing interesting comparisons with communist movements in Indonesia, Thailand, Burma and India. . . . Incisive.”—T. J. S. George, Asiaweek, “Editor’s Pick of the Month”
“A rich, gruesome and compelling tale. . . fascinating, well-researched and measured. . . a model of judgement and scholarship.”—Fred Halliday, New Statesman
“[Kiernan’s] capacity for dogged research on three continents, and his mastery of every ideological nuance. . . [are] awe-inspiring.”—Dervla Murphy, Irish Times
Customer Reviews:
Scholarly but Relatively Narrow Focus.......2006-01-31
The secondary title of the first edition of this book was A History of Communism in Kampuchea, 1930-1975. This is perhaps a more accurate description of the nature of this book. Kiernan presents a careful reconstruction primarily of the politics of leftist-communist movements in Cambodia, focusing in the later part of the book on how Pol Pot and his associates came to dominate the Cambodian Communist Party. This is not really a history of the Cambodian independence movement and while a very valuable book for understanding the events leading up to the Khmer Rouge accession to power, is not really a narrative/analysis of that phenomenon. Kiernan undertook the difficult task of reconstructing the internal politics of the Cambodian Communist movement and placing this in the context of leftist/nationalist movements in Cambodia from 1930 to the Khmer Rouge victory. In many ways, this is the story of how circumstances and the ruthless efforts of a small group of determined ideologues, mainly though not exclusively of relatively privileged background, conspired to allow this clique to dominate what was originally a relatively broad based nationalist/revolutionary movement. Because of scanty documentation and the deliberate efforts of the Khmer Rouge to obscure their history, this is quite a difficult undertaking which Kiernan carries off well. Kiernan covers the history of nationalist and leftist movements in Cambodia, the emergence of the Cambodian Communist movement, the internal struggles within the party between Vietnamese influenced communists and the Pol Pot group, and how the events of the civil wars of the 60s and early 70s allowed Pol Pot's group to dominate.
Kiernan is not, unfortunately, a gifted writer. His method is primarily to present a narrative with primary reliance of provision of much of the primary data. This can lead to a losing sight of the forest for the trees effect. He also does not produce much formal analysis, tending to make his interpretations implicitly. In some ways, the best piece of structural analysis in the book is the brief overview in the Introduction.
All of that said, there are quite a few compelling aspects to the book. There are multiple, often cruel ironies. In the second half of the 50s, Sihanouk, in an effort to divide the left, actually provided patronage for the urbanized intellectual leftists like Pol Pot who later became the most bitter opponents of his regime. Kiernan shows that the virulent nationalism of the Khmer Rouge in some ways had more in common with the bizarre nationalism of the corrupt and incompetent American client Lon Nol than with their Vietnamese-influenced competitors. The Nixon administration's bombing campaign in 1973 probably saved the Lon Nol regime but also allowed Pol Pot's group to consolidate their grip on power. Khmer Rouge success in 1973 would probably have resulted in a less brutal regime. This is an important book, though not easy to read.
Indispensible.......2003-02-16
This is THE book on the history of Cambodia in that era and the Khmer Rouge. There are very few Western scholars who know the Khmer language and are therefore able to do serious research. Ben Kiernan is one of those few. His book is well documented, an excellent introduction with many suggestions for further reading.
Book Description
Prasenjit Duara offers the first systematic account of the relationship between the nation-state, nationalism, and the concept of linear history. Focusing primarily on China and including discussion of India, Duara argues that many historians of postcolonial nation-states have adopted a linear, evolutionary history of the Enlightenment/colonial model. As a result, they have written repressive, exclusionary, and incomplete accounts.
The backlash against such histories has resulted in a tendency to view the past as largely constructed, imagined, or invented. In this book, Duara offers a way out of the impasse between constructionism and the evolving nation; he redefines history as a series of multiple, often conflicting narratives produced simultaneously at national, local, and transnational levels. In a series of closely linked case studies, he considers such examples as the very different histories produced by Chinese nationalist reformers and partisans of popular religions, the conflicting narratives of statist nationalists and of advocates of federalism in early twentieth-century China. He demonstrates the necessity of incorporating contestation, appropriation, repression, and the return of the repressed subject into any account of the past that will be meaningful to the present. Duara demonstrates how to write histories that resist being pressed into the service of the national subject in its progress—or stalled progress—toward modernity.
Customer Reviews:
A Provocative look at Nationialism and History .......2005-11-03
Prasenjit Duara weaves together theoretical and historical material on China and India in this insightful look at how history has become "nation-centric." Although historical writing has a long, diverse history beyond the nation-state, "modern history" in the Western sense began with the rise of the European nation-states in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.
Duara presents a series of brilliant, yet challenging arguments regarding the prevalence of the Nation in historiography. His main argument is that "national history secures for the contested and contingent nation the false unity of a self-same, national subject evolving over time (page 2)." This basically means that history, in the nation-centric sense, homogenizes difference, while separating itself from the "Other." After expanding on this argument, Duara lays out several counter-narratives, primarily focused on periods in Chinese "nation-building" history, that attempt to "bifurcate" (i.e. complicate)the simplistic "Enlightenment history" that has become the staple of Chinese historiography. His essays on civil society and provincial narratives (Chapters 5 and 6) are especially interesting.
I enjoyed reading Duara, and found his arguments very useful towards writing history that's not so nation-oriented (e.g. world-history, comparative studies). His writing was clear, but still difficult because of the many postmodernist terms (be sure to read Foucault or at least have a postmodernist dictionary at hand). I'd recommend reading Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities" first, if only because Anderson serves as a useful introduction to the debates over the nation-state concept/discourse.
History of China in a Modern Age.......2000-08-03
This book is highly theoretical and inspiring work in modern Chinese history studies. I read this book with great pleasure and comfort. No doubt Professor Duara is both a wonderful historian and narrator of conflicting forces inside the Baboon Curtain. As an Indian-born historian, he made very interesting comparation between Indian and Chinese history. As we all know, most historian were hired by the government( in Duara's word " nation-state"), so in their works, China is supposed to be enjoying a monolithic power in the middle of world. But with the method of Duara, we see more distinctive accounts of the so called colonial age in ancient Chinese History. One of most important argument which Duara made in his book is that Enlightment historian suppose ancient China based on a homogenous community that corresponds to the instrumental ideology of the modern state. He pointed out there are some basic difference in Modern China and ancient Chinese traditions
especially after the May,4th movement. Another point which I agree is that it is awkward to impose some Western classification machanism on the Chinese history. A lot of China-centered historians are well trained by Western ideology and tradition which is radically different from Asian heritage. For example, some historian argues that there is no real "feudalism" existed in Ancient China. So in this field, attempts to analyze the forces behind the account is very prone to be western-minded. Another claim he made is that the so called "nationlism" is far from from unique in the history. In this work, some important currents in the Pre-modern and Modern notion and figured are discussed, such as Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, Mao and Communism, Fictions in the 1920s etc.
Amazon.com
The Arab world, writes Palestinian scholar Fouad Ajami, has been beset for years by divisions: religious, social, economic, and political. Many of these divisions came to the fore during the time of the Persian Gulf War, a "foreigners' rescue" in response to Saddam Hussein's attempt to seize Kuwait, which was, Ajami hints, in part a reaction against Iranian designs on the Gulf. Even those Arab intellectuals who supported Allied intervention at the time are now questioning whether it was the best solution to what they believe was a local problem. Ajami writes of the role of some of these intellectuals in shaping the culture of the region, among them the Lebanese writer Khalil Hawi, who committed suicide in the wake of Israel's invasion of his country in 1982. He also examines the terror that religious fundamentalists have been visiting on secular states such as Egypt, "a country with a remarkable record of political stability" that, Ajami believes, will be able to ride out the present storm. Ajami's essays will be most revealing for students of contemporary politics and Arabic history.
Book Description
From Fouad Ajami, an acclaimed author and chronicler of Arab politics, comes a compelling account of how a generation of Arab intellectuals tried to introduce cultural renewals in their homelands through the forces of modernity and secularism. Ultimately, they came to face disappointment, exile, and, on occasion, death. Brilliantly weaving together the strands of a tumultuous century in Arab political thought, history, and poetry, Ajami takes us from the ruins of Beirut's once glittering metropolis to the land of Egypt, where struggle rages between a modernist impulse and an Islamist insurgency, from Nasser's pan-Arab nationalist ambitions to the emergence of an uneasy Pax Americana in Arab lands, from the triumphalism of the Gulf War to the continuing anguished debate over the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords.
For anyone who seeks to understand the Middle East, here is an insider's unflinching analysis of the collision between intellectual life and political realities in the Arab world today.
Customer Reviews:
The Failed Awakening .......2005-10-23
This book is an absorbing blend of history and literary criticism. A somewhat melancholy narrative of the political and economic failure of the Arab World in the 20th century, it is also a study of Arab intellectual currents of the time. The author chronicles the lives and the thoughts of these intellectuals from the heyday of modernity in the middle of the century through pan-Arabism, secular nationalism and Nasserism.
The great dream of an Arab Awakening failed miserably. The total defeat of 1967 was a turning point in the move towards religious fundamentalism whilst the increased oil revenue after 1973 only exacerbated the fragmentation of the Arab World into brutal fascist regimes, medieval theocracies and oiligarchies.
There were and are exceptions to the majority of intellectuals who were united mainly in their hatred of Israel, like the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, the Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibeh and a few others. According to Ajami's insightful analyses, repeated failure led to extremism and further disasters and thus the cycle of hopelessness continued.
This book was published in 1998 so it preceded the expressions of more murderous nihilism as seen in 9/11, the further intifada against Israel and the genocide in Darfur. The embrace of religious fundamentalism has been facilitated by the nihilistic utopianism of writers like Edward Said and others. One of the results of this regrettable trend has been the more severe oppression of minorities like the Christian Copts in Egypt.
The book is illuminating on many levels: the Shia/Sunni divide, The Iranian revolution and Arab perceptions of it, The Oslo accords, Iraq's war against Iran and Kuwait, the assassination of Sadat and the attitudes of the Arab intelligentsia towards Israel.
Dream Palace Of The Arabs is a most enlightening read for those who wish to understand the tragic history of the Middle East. The work is scholarly and well researched, but the writing has a riveting and poetic quality that keeps the reader captivated throughout.
engaging.......2005-05-05
Perhaps Ajami's best: a legendary (and, for some, inconveniently seminal) text in the field of Middle Eastern studies and Arab psychology.
The basic thesis is that the hopelessness of modern Arabs (in such fields as medicine, politics, education, economics -- even warfare) stems from their insistence on perceiving and, in turn, constructing their reality out of words, out of rhetoric, out of the incantatory and soothing effect of flowery or mystical verbiage, rather than out of the zillions of nagging and undeniable clues that the external world keeps jabbing them with.
It's a lot more interesting than I'm making it sound, though.
Obituary for a modernizing generation.......2004-09-28
The extremism that seems to pervade the Middle East is neither the region's predestined endpoint nor is it a historical inevitability-rather, it is a condition that sprung out from the failure of a great generation of reformers and free-thinkers that lived in the middle of the twentieth century, and whose passing away by the 1990s marked the triumph of theocracy and backwardness in the Middle East.
"The Dream Palace of the Arabs" is the sequel to the "Arab Predicament," which Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese professor at Johns Hopkins, published in 1980; back then, Mr. Ajami was younger and "approached [his] material more eager to judge." In the "Arab Predicament," he bemoaned the Arab political experience; in "The Dream Place of the Arabs" he tries to "appreciate what had gone into the edifice that Arabs had built."
This literary journey chronicles the birth of a generation of modernizing Arabs that fought and lost the case for modernity. The history of the past seventy years is narrated through the life of authors and their works-what they wrote, how the societies around them reacted, and how the political condition merged with their literary expression, only to suppress it and silence it.
As a parallel history, "The Dream Palace of the Arabs" could accompany any book. But in looking at the literary interplay between modernizing authors and their surroundings, Mr. Ajami has not only dug deeper in his probe of what brought about the present Arab political condition, but has analyzed the issue on a whole other level.
The reader who is familiar with Middle Eastern history will not feel burdened by the material. The refreshing tone and approach allows Mr. Ajami to deal with such issues as the Iranian revolution, the Egyptian peace with Israel, the Palestinian battle with Israel, or the Iran-Iraq with refreshing erudition and acumen that always excites and never bores.
"The Dream Palace of the Arabs" cannot serve as an introduction to the Middle East; it is too subtle and perceptive for that; but for anyone who is tired of reading about oil politics, religious fundamentalism and elusive peace deals, and who is actually interested in the underlying intellectual currents upon which the Arab political storm thrives, "The Dream Palace of the Arabs" is a sure bet.
Uncle Tom.......2003-12-19
As was written by another "(Fouad Ajami) has no axe to grind unlike Ed (sic) Said". True anough Ajami is far too busy being a perfect hound fetching and in his case delivering his master's newspaper. If you want to hear the message you expect to hear because it comforts you read this. But if you wish to know about what is out there give it a rain check
Just OK..........2003-03-11
I found any of Tom Friedman's books to be an easier and more comprehensible read. I am not a full time student of the middle east, although I like Dr. Ajami.
Book Description
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.
Customer Reviews:
Particularity and Difference.......2002-10-01
In this well documented study, Partha Chatterjee challenges the view held by many western scholars that nationalism in Asia and Africa has been based on various modular forms supplied by the rise of nationalism in Europe. Chatterjee is concerned nationalism plays itself out in two very distinct "spaces": the "material" and the "spiritual." For Chatterjee there is the material (external) and the spiritual (internal). One is not touched by the other. The aim is to dispel the myth that post-colonial status assumes a western form. For Chatterjee language is important -- very important. It is the space that makes each unique situation, well, unique. The notion of what is not touchable by the outside forms of the colonial are what resides inside, a space that only language can provide. While the colonized had to adopt western technology to survive, this mechanism is balances out by preserving the spiritual.
To flesh this out a bit, Chatterjee does acknowledge the contribution of the West to Asia and African nationalism, but only in what he identifies as the space of the "outside." This space is comprised by such things as the economy, statecraft, science and technology. There is more, apparently, the more important previously unreflected upon area of the "inner" domain of the spiritual.
In his groundbreaking study, Chatterjee takes a page out of Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities" but he reacts to it. If nationalism is relegated to the realm of the rise of modernity, it misses lots of nuance and may be missing some very important elements. Chatterjee takes aim at the problematic head on at, as I mentioned earlier, the rise of nationalism as a process of modernity. His examination of the peasants in relation not only to Indian nationalism, but as a group within its own, often paradoxical values. Is this cultural nationalism an elite movement as discussed by Leah Greenfeld (Nationalism - Five Roads to Modernity) and E. J. Hobsbawm (Nations and Nationalism since 1780)? (both available on Amazon.com) Is so, how did the peasants come to be involved? This almost "subaltern" approach is indicative of its postcolonial/postmodern roots. Chatterjee argues that it must be superseded by `concrete forms of democratic community' that transcend hierarchical and bourgeois equality models. If you see the rise of a nation simply (or exclusively) within the framework of a function of modernity, do you then lose a sense of how the nation was formed from a cultural perspective? Gandhi's notion of family, community and group, based on mutual respect seems to pale in significance by the political and bureaucratic power of the modern state. Chatterjee then offers us the exception that the rise of Bengali nationalism. The items engaged in by Chatterjee are provocative to say the least and does challenge us to question what we feel or know about nationalism. Particularity and difference comes to the forefront of consideration in this book. We all need to take a long hard look at it.
Miguel Llora
Worthwhile study.......2001-10-25
Chatterjee is a typical `postmodern' scholar, and he has a rather jargon-filled and oblique writing style. In some cases, knowledge of Indian and Bengali history, to say nothing of familiarity with contemporary Bengali society and the intricacies of the caste system, would seem to be required to truly understand certain sections of this book. Also, while Chatterjee states that his argument is meant to clarify (to some extent) the conditions of nations, nationalism and society/communities in the postcolonial states of Asia and Africa, his examination is almost exclusively restricted to Bengal in India. There is nothing wrong with this as such, since he deals with the area with which he is most familiar. However, one of his principal underlying themes is a (rather persuasive) criticism of European or `Western' scholars for mis-applying European philosophies and sociological models to non-European, postcolonial societies, and he seems to commit the same error by assuming that his Bengali example can be used to explain circumstances in the vast, diverse lands from the western shores of Africa to southeast Asia.
Nevertheless, "The Nation and Its Fragments" is a very strong argument against simply assuming that nationalism, postcolonial development, industrialization and modernity itself in India (or elsewhere in the so-called `Third World') are simply following `models' already formulated in Europe/America. Chatterjee's most important point is perhaps his call for scholarship on postcolonial societies to commence from completely different fundamental assumptions, rather than trying to force upon it outside (read European) `scientific' models.
An alternative view of nationalism.......2000-07-13
Pranab Chatterjee wisely cautions us to remember that there are ways of expressing nationalism that differ from the Western models. With examples from literature and history the author helps us explore the "inner" spiritual or cultural world of Bengalis in colonial India, a world they tried to keep safe and distinct from the "outer" world of British-imposed politics. The writing in places is a bit vague, but the reading is worth the effort to remind us that wisdom does not begin and end in the West.
This book,like many others, pleads for acceptance........1997-07-11
The text is one of many in the field. It is asking to be accepted in the domains of the (white Western) colonial overlord, while, at the same time, attempting to mount a palace coup. These ex-colonials, who so eloquently plead from the "margins" are really to be pitied. They are NOT on the perameter; they are right there at the center, with Homi B Babha and Stewart Hall etc
Book Description
This incisive study adds a new dimension to discussions of Egypt's nationalist response to the phenomenon of colonialism as well as to discussions of colonialism and nationalism in general. Eve M. Troutt Powell challenges many accepted tenets of the binary relationship between European empires and non-European colonies by examining the triangle of colonialism marked by Great Britain, Egypt, and the Sudan. She demonstrates how central the issue of the Sudan was to Egyptian nationalism and highlights the deep ambivalence in Egyptian attitudes toward empire and the resulting ambiguities and paradoxes that were an essential component of the nationalist movement. A Different Shade of Colonialism enriches our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egyptian attitudes toward slavery and race and expands our perspective of the "colonized colonizer."
Book Description
The murder of more than one million Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish government in 1915 has been acknowledged as genocide. Yet almost 100 years later, these crimes remain unrecognized by the Turkish state. This book is the first attempt by a Turk to understand the genocide from a perpetrator's, rather than victim's, perspective, and to contextualize the events of 1915 within Turkey's political history and western regional policies. Turkey today is in the midst of a tumultuous transition. It is emerging from its Ottoman legacy and on its way to recognition by the west as a normal nation state. But until it confronts its past and present violations of human rights, it will never be a truly democratic nation. This book explores the sources of the Armenian genocide, how Turks today view it, the meanings of Turkish and Armenian identity, and how the long legacy of western intervention in the region has suppressed reform, rather than promoted democracy.
Customer Reviews:
Taner AkCam.......2006-12-14
To those attempting to discredit Taner AkCam's writing due to "terrorist" connections and warning readers of one sided depictions: to pull information about this author from a website dedicated to providing propaganda discrediting the Armenian Genocide is extremely transparent, and weak at best. The negative side of the existence of a debate on this subject, is the allowance for "scholars" to question the slaughter of over a million people, and insult the few survivors of this atrocity. Furthermore, it is unfortunate but of no surprise that the first outspoken Turkish individual to write on the subject openly and without apology has received resentment and exile from his home country. Debate is healthy, but facts are facts, and it is irresponsible to continue to deny the deaths of over a million Armenians. Taner's writings, including the recent, "A Shameful Act" are long awaited.
Worth a look.......2006-12-11
I am astonished by the other reviews of this book: by the name-calling, by the character-assassination, by the slander, by the claims that a scholar at a top American school is only "mediocre" in Turkey (!).
The other reviewers prove the point of this book, and other books on the subject, are trying to make: that many people, especially Turks, are not psychologically prepared to have a calm, intelligent discussion about this topic, are not able to admit even the slightest possibility that the Turkish government may be, even to the smallest extent, in the wrong. It's a valid point.
Know who you read........2006-12-11
I just want to make sure that people who are contemplating buying and reading this book are aware of some of the facts about this books author. Akcam is a convicted *terrorist*.
Here's a bit of history about Akcam, copy&pasted from another web site:
Taner Akcam became involved in radical leftist activities while he was still a lycee student. His radicalism intensified while he was a university student in the early 1970s. Akcam moved from student activism into political terrorism by joining the THKP-C (Turkiye Halk Kurtulus Partisi-Cephesi-Turkish People's Liberation Party-Front) in 1972 -- a terrorist organization that was implicated in the assassinations and killings of numerous far-right militants, Turkish security officials, and American and NATO military personnel. In the mid-1970s, Akcam became a leading member of DEV-YOL (Devrimci Yol-Revolutionary Path) and the editor of its periodical Devrimci Genclik Dergisi (Revolutionary Youth Magazine). It might be recalled that DEV-YOL was one of the two principal leftist terrorist organizations (the other being DEV-SOL) that played a major role in the bloody escalation of political violence in Turkey during the 1970s. In the bizarre ideological divisions among the leftist groups that proliferated on the Turkish political scene at the time, DEV-YOL was known as following a "pro-Soviet" line in terms of its international loyalties. DEV-YOL's bloody terrorist activities, which claimed hundreds of fatalities and a large number of serious injuries, included assassinations, armed attacks, bombings, and bank robberies. The group also achieved notoriety when it set up a so-called "liberated zone" in the town of Fatsa on the Black Sea coast where DEV-YOL militants established their control for several months before being routed by the security forces.
During this period of heightened terrorism, Akcam was an active participant in the planning of assassinations and armed attacks against the targets chosen by DEV-YOL. He was in the inner leadership circle of the terrorist organization and worked as the right-hand man of its leader Oguzhan Muftuoglu. In addition, as the editor of DEV-YOL's magazine, he wrote numerous articles exhorting DEV-YOL militants to engage in violence to bring down "the oligarchy", to punish "the fascists", and to get rid of "American imperialism." By the mid-1970s, as political violence between the far-left and ultra-nationalist groups escalated, Akcam had become one of the leading "theoreticians" of leftist terrorism and violence in Turkey.
Taner Akcam was arrested in 1976. After a trial that lasted several months he was sentenced to eight years and nine months for his role in fomenting terrorism and political violence. However, Akcam did not stay in jail for long: in a spectacular incident that made the headlines in the Turkish press, he escaped from a prison in Ankara along with four other convicted terrorists in March 1977. After hiding in Turkey for several months, he managed to find his way to Germany where he asked -- and received -- political asylum.
Keep this in mind if you ever buy and read this 'book'.
Thanks
Well written, but one-sided.......2006-12-02
Professor Akcam does not take into account the effects of the Armenian Revolt, which lasted from the 1890s to 1920. Armenian revolutionary groups, the Hinchaks and Dashnaks, launched a campaign of terror against Ottoman officials and citizens. They began killing Muslims 20 years before the Armenian deportations took place in 1915. Also, from 1915 to 1920, Armenian soldiers, rebels and gangs massacred a half-million Turks, Kurds and Azeris. If we are willing to call what happened to the Armenians a genocide, then what do we call what the Armenians did to the Muslims?
In April 2006, Professor Akcam made the unbelievable statement on PBS that the massacre of Muslims by Armenians was "legend." He is either sadly misinformed about the history of his own country, or he indeed has become a mouthpiece for a political agenda that chooses to ignore historical reality.
Anyone who seeks to learn about the Armenian/Ottoman tragedy should start with a book published in 1964 by the Armenian scholar, Louise Nalbandian: "Armenian Revolutionary Movements." She wrote her book shortly before the Armenian Diaspora began to politicize their claims to genocide. It doesn't matter to me whether a person believes the Armenians were victims of genocide in 1915. What matters to me is that "academics" such as Professor Akcam insist on discussing only one side of this tragic story, and continue to pretend that Armenians did no wrong.
Horrible atrocities were committed on all sides; it is the responsibility of Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan to deal with this legacy. In the U.S. and Europe, this issue has become too politicized. Anyone who disagrees with the Armenian viewpoint is automatically labeled a "genocide denier." Unfortunately, most of the media and politicians have naively chosen to support the Armenian genocide claims without conducting their own research. And they choose to believe that "scholars" such as Professor Akcam are basing their writings on thorough research that takes the Armenian revolutionary movement into account; such is not the case.
From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide.......2006-09-24
I have no words in my vocabulary for Mr. Akcam's book, except four letter words. They are inappropriate to use in a book review. Akcam is/was a mediocre academician in Turkey. I am sure there are others in Turkey who think that the Ottomans committed atrocities against Armenians. Some of these folks are the descendants of Armenian orphans that were adopted by Turkish families @ the end of World War I, where as, others are moslem Turks. Turkey is a free democracy where people have very diverse opinions and beliefs. Mr. Akcam may be part Armenian, maybe not. I really don't care. However, since he was a mediocre academician in Turkey, diaspora Armenians have made him the cause' celebre'for the supposed Armenian genocide by declaring him as a great Turkish historian. What a farce. This book has rendered him a visiting asst. professorship @ University of Michigan due to insistance of the rich Armenian Americans who donated a lot of money to the university. He has also hung on to his job in Turkey. The armenian hardlines claim that everything he wrote is/was the truth and he is a very brave soul for bucking the city hall. WOW! The book contains only information from sources that were anti-Turkish. Materiale' from Turkish archieves have been slanted and/or distorted. The book is a fairy tale about a very serious matter. It is noth worth reading.
Book Description
Millenarian movements have been mainly studied from a monotheistic perspective. Traditional explanations for millenarian movements may not be applicable to Asian cases, since Asian millenarian views of salvation differ from non-Asian ones. This groundbreaking book re-examines the Taiping and the Tonghak movements in nineteenth-century Asia using a much wider range of sources than have been used by scholars in the past. It provides an understanding of the movements as an expression, in part, of deeply-rooted Asian spiritual ideas. It also offers historical and philosophical reflections on what studies of Asian millenarianism can contribute to the comparative study of millenarianism. The foreword is by eminent Asian Studies scholar, F. Hilary Conroy.
Book Description
On October 27, 1991, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic declared its independence from the Soviet Union. Hammer and sickle gave way to a flag, a national anthem, and new holidays. Seven decades earlier, Turkmenistan had been a stateless conglomeration of tribes. What brought about this remarkable transformation?
Tribal Nation addresses this question by examining the Soviet effort in the 1920s and 1930s to create a modern, socialist nation in the Central Asian Republic of Turkmenistan. Adrienne Edgar argues that the recent focus on the Soviet state as a "maker of nations" overlooks another vital factor in Turkmen nationhood: the complex interaction between Soviet policies and indigenous notions of identity. In particular, the genealogical ideas that defined premodern Turkmen identity were reshaped by Soviet territorial and linguistic ideas of nationhood. The Soviet desire to construct socialist modernity in Turkmenistan conflicted with Moscow's policy of promoting nationhood, since many Turkmen viewed their "backward customs" as central to Turkmen identity.
Tribal Nation is the first book in any Western language on Soviet Turkmenistan, the first to use both archival and indigenous-language sources to analyze Soviet nation-making in Central Asia, and among the few works to examine the Soviet multinational state from a non-Russian perspective. By investigating Soviet nation-making in one of the most poorly understood regions of the Soviet Union, it also sheds light on broader questions about nationalism and colonialism in the twentieth century.
Customer Reviews:
needed something more.......2005-08-28
This book was decent for what it was. The author explores how the Soviets created Turkmenistan back in the 1920s and 1930s, and she did a great deal of research and used many good sources. However, I was hoping for more. She basically talks about this creation occuring in the 1920s and 1930s throughout the entirety of a not-very-lengthy book, and then has one 5 page chapter where she suddenly fast-forwards up to present day. I found this very disappointing, since it would've been interesting to know what happened between then and now, especially considering the fact that a second world war occurred, the cold war occured, and the USSR collapsed between then and now. I would imagine at least some of that had an effect on the creation and continued building of Turkmenistan as a country.
Helpful original work on Central Asia.......2005-03-07
This new and original contribution to texts on Central Asia under the Communist empire is necessary, original, insightful and typically liberal. The irony of the liberalism here is that in the 1930s and 1970s the same liberalism was used to describe how Soviet Communism would triumph over western capitalism. Then the academics heralded the progress in central asia, whereby women were no longer stoned for adultery, whereby women could actually show their faces in public, whereby women could go to school and, worst of all perhaps for the touchy `culture' women might actually speak their minds, vote, enroll in the military and get divorces.
Today those liberal triumphs are condemned by the same liberals for being against the culture. One thing can be sure, if you read through the lines of this book, Communism did reform the backward cultures, it brought light to people who only 40 years before had never had Veils, but had created a Veil in response to Sufi missions, and then Communism came and removed the degrading Veils. It was an assault on a fake culture that had never existed. The communist obsession with finding tribal identities amongst the many turko-mongolian peoples of Central Asia is perhaps more interesting and less biased. And for these two topics this is worth reading, but be careful not to be taken in by the idea that wearing a veil is somehow liberating to a women, because actually it just makes women into objects.
Seth J. Frantzman
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Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers
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