Between Genius and Genocide

Between Genius and Genocide PDF Author: Daniel Charles
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9780224064446
Category : Chemical agents (Munitions)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The astonishing story of the man who developed nitrogen fertilizer and the first chemical weapons. In January 1934, as Hitler's shadow began to fall across Europe, a short, bald man carrying a German passport arrived at the Hotel Euler in Basle. He seemed haunted and restless, as though he urgently needed to be elsewhere. Fritz Haber, Nobel laureate in chemistry, confidante of Albert Einstein and German war hero, had arrived in Basle a broken man and, three days later, he died leaving an uncertain legacy. For some, the great German chemist was a benefactor of humanity, winner of a Nobel prize for inventing a way to nourish farmers' fields with nitrogen captured from the air. (Our bodies bear witness to this invention's power: half of the essential nitrogen atoms in our flesh come from a Haber-style factory.) For others, he was a war criminal who personally supervised the unleashing of chlorine clouds against British, French and Canadian troops in World War I. Tragedy marked his life. A week after the first gas attack in 1915, Haber's wife took his pistol and shot herself. And in 1933, when Hitler came to power, 'the Jew Haber' was among the first scientists driven out of Germany. Haber's friend Albert Einstein wrote sardonically. Within a year, Haber was dead - denied honour both in his homeland and abroad. No life reveals the moral paradox of science - its capacity to create and destroy - more clearly than Fritz Haber's. Loving the Blonde Beast reveals a life filled with ambition, patriotism, hubris and tragedy, set amidst huge technological advances, arms races, mounting imperialism and war.

Between Genius and Genocide

Between Genius and Genocide PDF Author: Daniel Charles
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 9780224064446
Category : Chemical agents (Munitions)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The astonishing story of the man who developed nitrogen fertilizer and the first chemical weapons. In January 1934, as Hitler's shadow began to fall across Europe, a short, bald man carrying a German passport arrived at the Hotel Euler in Basle. He seemed haunted and restless, as though he urgently needed to be elsewhere. Fritz Haber, Nobel laureate in chemistry, confidante of Albert Einstein and German war hero, had arrived in Basle a broken man and, three days later, he died leaving an uncertain legacy. For some, the great German chemist was a benefactor of humanity, winner of a Nobel prize for inventing a way to nourish farmers' fields with nitrogen captured from the air. (Our bodies bear witness to this invention's power: half of the essential nitrogen atoms in our flesh come from a Haber-style factory.) For others, he was a war criminal who personally supervised the unleashing of chlorine clouds against British, French and Canadian troops in World War I. Tragedy marked his life. A week after the first gas attack in 1915, Haber's wife took his pistol and shot herself. And in 1933, when Hitler came to power, 'the Jew Haber' was among the first scientists driven out of Germany. Haber's friend Albert Einstein wrote sardonically. Within a year, Haber was dead - denied honour both in his homeland and abroad. No life reveals the moral paradox of science - its capacity to create and destroy - more clearly than Fritz Haber's. Loving the Blonde Beast reveals a life filled with ambition, patriotism, hubris and tragedy, set amidst huge technological advances, arms races, mounting imperialism and war.

Between Vengeance and Forgiveness

Between Vengeance and Forgiveness PDF Author: Martha Minow
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 080704508X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
The rise of collective violence and genocide is the twentieth century's most terrible legacy. Martha Minow, a Harvard law professor and one of our most brilliant and humane legal minds, offers a landmark book on our attempts to heal after such large-scale tragedy. Writing with informed, searching prose of the extraordinary drama of the truth commissions in Argentina, East Germany, and most notably South Africa; war-crime prosecutions in Nuremberg and Bosnia; and reparations in America, Minow looks at the strategies and results of these riveting national experiments in justice and healing.

Worse Than War

Worse Than War PDF Author: Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 0786746564
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 674

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Book Description
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's books are events. They stir passionate public debate among political and civic leaders, scholars, and the general public because they compel people to rethink the most powerful conventional wisdoms and stubborn moral problems of the day. Worse Than War gets to the heart of the phenomenon, genocide, that has caused more deaths in the modern world than military conflict. In doing so, it challenges fundamental things we thought we knew about human beings, society, and politics. Drawing on extensive field work and research from around the world, Goldhagen explores the anatomy of genocide -- explaining why genocides begin, are sustained, and end; why societies support them, why they happen so frequently and how the international community should and can successfully stop them. As a great book should, Worse than War seeks to change the way we think and to offer new possibilities for a better world. It tells us how we might at last begin to eradicate this greatest scourge of humankind.

A Problem from Hell

A Problem from Hell PDF Author: Samantha Power
Publisher: Fourth Estate
ISBN: 9780008359386
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction 2003 A shattering history of the last hundred years of genocidal war that itemises in authoritative, persuasive manner exactly what the West knew and when, and what it chose to do, and what not to do, with that knowledge.

Final Solutions

Final Solutions PDF Author: Richard M. Lerner
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271007939
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Examines the ideas of biological and cultural determinism and discusses how these philosophical concepts were used to justify the Nazis' program of genocide

Journey from Genesis to Genocide

Journey from Genesis to Genocide PDF Author: Peter J. DiDomenica
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781434923530
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description


Raphaël Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide

Raphaël Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide PDF Author: Douglas Irvin-Erickson
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081229341X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Raphaël Lemkin (1900-1959) coined the word "genocide" in the winter of 1942 and led a movement in the United Nations to outlaw the crime, setting his sights on reimagining human rights institutions and humanitarian law after World War II. After the UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, Lemkin slipped into obscurity, and within a few short years many of the same governments that had agreed to outlaw genocide and draft a Universal Declaration of Human Rights tried to undermine these principles. This intellectual biography of one of the twentieth century's most influential theorists and human rights figures sheds new light on the origins of the concept and word "genocide," contextualizing Lemkin's intellectual development in interwar Poland and exploring the evolving connection between his philosophical writings, juridical works, and politics over the following decades. The book presents Lemkin's childhood experience of anti-Jewish violence in imperial Russia; his youthful arguments to expand the laws of war to protect people from their own governments; his early scholarship on Soviet criminal law and nationalities violence; his work in the 1930s to advance a rights-based approach to international law; his efforts in the 1940s to outlaw genocide; and his forays in the 1950s into a social-scientific and historical study of genocide, which he left unfinished. Revealing what the word "genocide" meant to people in the wake of World War II—as the USSR and Western powers sought to undermine the Genocide Convention at the UN, while delegations from small states and former colonies became the strongest supporters of Lemkin's law—Raphaël Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide examines how the meaning of genocide changed over the decades and highlights the relevance of Lemkin's thought to our own time.

East West Street

East West Street PDF Author: Philippe Sands
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0385350716
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
"A ... personal detective story, an uncovering of secret pasts, and a book that explores the creation and development of world-changing legal concepts that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitler's Third Reich"--Dust jacket flap.

"Exterminate All the Brutes"

Author: Sven Lindqvist
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620977052
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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Book Description
Now part of the eponymous HBO docuseries written and directed by Raoul Peck, “Exterminate All the Brutes” is a brilliant intellectual history of Europe’s genocidal colonization of Africa—and the terrible myths and lies that it spawned “A book of stunning range and near genius. . . . The catastrophic consequences of European imperialism are made palpable in the personal progress of the author, a late-twentieth-century pilgrim in Africa. Lindqvist’s astonishing connections across time and cultures, combined with a marvelous economy of prose, leave the reader appalled, reflective, and grateful.” —David Levering Lewis “Exterminate All the Brutes,” Sven Lindqvist’s widely acclaimed masterpiece, is a searching examination of Europe’s dark history in Africa and the origins of genocide. Using Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as his point of departure, the award-winning Swedish author takes us on a haunting tour through the colonial past, interwoven with a modern-day travelogue. Retracing the steps of European explorers, missionaries, politicians, and historians in Africa from the late eighteenth century onward, “Exterminate All the Brutes” exposes the roots of genocide in Africa through Lindqvist’s own journey through the Saharan desert. As he shows, fantasies not merely of white superiority but of actual extermination—“cleansing” the earth of the so-called lesser races—deeply informed the colonialism and racist ideology that ultimately culminated in Europe’s own Holocaust. Conquerors’ stories are the ones that inform the self-mythology of the West—whereas the lives and stories of those displaced, enslaved, or killed are too often ignored and forgotten. “Exterminate All the Brutes” forces a crucial reckoning with a past that still echoes in our collective psyche—a reckoning that compels us to acknowledge the exploitation and brutality at the heart of our modern, globalized society. As Adam Hochschild has written, “Lindqvist’s work leaves you changed.”

Enlightenment and Genocide, Contradictions of Modernity

Enlightenment and Genocide, Contradictions of Modernity PDF Author: James Kaye
Publisher: P.I.E-Peter Lang S.A., Editions Scientifiques Internationales
ISBN: 9789052019192
Category : Enlightenment
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
On the threshold to the 21st century the cry «never again» seems illusory, even absurd. Did it ever harbour credibility? Were we so naive? The Holocaust was not a finality, not the end of «final solutions» in Europe. Genocide has continued to emerge as an active element in European politics and policies. Kosovo and Bosnia provide testament. This book presents the concept of genocide as a political and social tool in modern Europe, not only reconciled with modernity, but as what may be an integral component. Modernity, however, is also closely linked with the Enlightenment and its concepts of tolerance, equality and liberty. This volume sheds light upon the inherent contradictions of modernity between Enlightenment and genocide, and on how this ambivalent European heritage is confronted. This book was produced in the framework of the research project The Cultural Construction of Community in Modernisation Processes in Comparison in co-operation between the European University Institute in Florence and Humboldt University in Berlin.