Bokus
Stanley Cohen - States of Denial, Häftad

Häftad, Engelska, 2000

States of Denial

Av Stanley Cohen

265 kr

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Beskrivning
Blocking out, turning a blind eye, shutting off, not wanting to know, wearing blinkers, seeing what we want to see ... these are all expressions of 'denial'. Alcoholics who refuse to recognize their condition, people who brush aside suspicions of their partner's infidelity, the wife who doesn't notice that her husband is abusing their daughter - are supposedly 'in denial'. Governments deny their responsibility for atrocities, and plan them to achieve 'maximum deniability'. Truth Commissions try to overcome the suppression and denial of past horrors. Bystander nations deny their responsibility to intervene. Do these phenomena have anything in common? When we deny, are we aware of what we are doing or is this an unconscious defence mechanism to protect us from unwelcome truths? Can there be cultures of denial? How do organizations like Amnesty and Oxfam try to overcome the public's apparent indifference to distant suffering and cruelty? Is denial always so bad - or do we need positive illusions to retain our sanity?States of Denial is the first comprehensive study of both the personal and political ways in which uncomfortable realities are avoided and evaded. It ranges from clinical studies of depression, to media images of suffering, to explanations of the 'passive bystander' and 'compassion fatigue'. The book shows how organized atrocities - the Holocaust and other genocides, torture, and political massacres - are denied by perpetrators and by bystanders, those who stand by and do nothing.
Produktinformation
  • Utgivningsdatum: 2000-12-14
  • Mått: 147 x 226 x 28 mm
  • Vikt: 522 g
  • Format: Häftad
  • Språk: Engelska
  • Antal sidor: 360
  • Förlag: John Wiley and Sons Ltd
  • ISBN: 9780745623924
  • Utmärkelser: Winner of American Society of Criminology's International Division Award 2008 (UK)
Utforska kategorier
Betyg & recensioner

1 recensioner, genomsnitt 2/5

  1. 2/5 Max

    There are reason to be very sceptical about attempts to explain events and conditions of world history and world society by means of concepts borrowed from human mind - not least "unconscious" human mind. Today all scientific researchers in the field agree that Sigmund Freud was a totalt swindler, who never cured any patient, and who abused his patients to such extreme degree that they can only be compared with the must cruel colonial powers robbery of the third way. The same is true of his followers. To apply his ideas as the basis for fight against colonialism and its disastrous aftermath may help Freudianism to survive for a while, but it will lead the fight for international justice into a blind alley. Truly, we deny that WE started the war in Rwanda. It would have cost no more than a movement of a hand to prevent it. But why should we care about the murder of 800 000 people, when there is nothing worth stealing in Rwanda? Some variety of denial was involved when we abstained from prevented that war. But listen to Freud's variety of denial. A family friend thrice her age tried to seduce 15-year-old Dora. She told her parents. Doing so proved that she was mentally ill. No 15-year-old girl who was exposed to a seduction attempt, would ever tell her parents about the event unless she was mentally ill. But Dora was "in-denial" and did not know that she was mentally ill. Is this a good point of departure for explaining the colonial aftermath? The whole Western world agreed that God had created the third world so that we could steal all its assets. I was an adult in 1950 when prime minister Mohammad Mussadiq of Iran tried to stop our stealth of the oil. With great enthusiasm over the entire Western world we send Mussadiq in prison and established a fascist dictatorship that burned partisans alive. Without this abominable crime the Khomeiní dictatorship had never emerged. We need only look up YouTube in order to learn that the greatest miracle since the resurrection of Christ is that airplane gasoline can melt steel. But we got a wonderful pretext for conquering the area on earth where oil is most affluent. Why don't it occur to somebody that we had escaped the enormous problem of fugitives if we had not started to conquer Afghanistan. Cohen might have learned something from Lichtenberg. It is not always the best thing to explain the Northern Light as the reflection of herrings.

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