The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment - Hardcover

Millett, Kate

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393035751 ISBN 13: 9780393035759

Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co Inc, 1994

Synopsis

Looks at the practice of torture as conscious policy and analyzes the fear of government as it is expressed in such texts as "The Gulag Archipelago" and "Kaffir Boy"

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Reviews

In an awkward mix of reportage, literary meditation and political analysis, Millett ( Sexual Politics ) here contemplates the widespread modern use of torture. Beginning with Stalin's state terror and Hitler's extermination camps, she goes on to consider French troops' torture of Algerians, British torture of Irish political prisoners since the 1920s and South African practices under apartheid. She ponders photographs of torture victims and the enormity of torture through the prism of Sartre, Primo Levi, Solzhenitsyn, George Bataille; she profiles dissenters who were transformed by their prison experiences in Kenya, China, India. Millett reports on legalized torture in Iran, and draws on testimonies of recent torture victims in Central and South America. She concludes this disturbing survey by calling for popular pressure to compel governments to abolish torture. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The legal and routine torture of criminals was abolished in the 19th century, Millett (The Loony-Bin Trip, 1990, etc.) maintains; but torture made a comeback in the 20th century against political enemies of the state, and now half the world's countries use torture to control and intimidate their own citizens. Here, Millett aims to rouse the reader from apathy and despair to efficacious anger. To combat the notion that torture is a barbaric practice found only in the Third World, she starts her survey with Europe: Soviet terror first, followed by Hitler and the Holocaust; then she looks at French and British torture of colonials in Algeria and Northern Ireland, respectively. The US, in Vietnam and Latin America, picked up where these left off, and Millett accordingly describes the creation--with US money, training, and technology--of ``national security states'' in Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala and El Salvador. A grim saga, and all true enough, yet much of what Millett has to say will be known to anyone who's read the papers or watched PBS in recent years. It doesn't hurt to have it all in one place, however, and the sheer accumulation of lengthy quotes from torture- survivors, remarkable for their courage and intelligence, gives the book its moral force. The very existence of survivors' testimony as a 20th-century literary genre she sees as a cause for hope. But the almost total absence of research or firsthand interviews, and the heavy-handed use of ``patriarchy'' as a generic explanation for the world's ills are disappointing. Millett's final analysis, too, doesn't rise far over the level of op-ed exhortation: We must combat the state's power to lock us up and throw away the key. Not greatly argued, then, but a high and useful appeal for action. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Millett offers a harrowing portrait of torture as a method of citizen control in modern nation-states. Her catalog of officially authorized horror is not comprehensive, but she surveys major categories of state terrorism--Hitler's concentration camps and Soviet gulags, colonial repression in Algeria in the 1950s and in Ireland over the past quarter-century, South African apartheid--as well as victims' narratives from Central and South America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The Politics of Cruelty argues convincingly that, despite worldwide postwar revulsion at Nazi and Soviet crimes against humanity, national security today "justifies" formally proscribed but secretly sanctioned torture in dozens of nations, "cancelling the most fundamental reforms of the last two hundred years." Millett probes the experience of confinement, isolation, and physical and psychological torture in novels, memoirs, and photography and film. Her powerful essay challenges the "imperial circularity" of the disease model of torture; she insists that both torture and resistance to torture are political acts with moral consequences and that individuals have the power, over time, to bring state terrorism to an end. A painful, provocative exploration of the ugly, brutal underside of the vaunted "global economy." Mary Carroll

Millett ( Sexual Politics , LJ 8/70; The Loony-Bin , LJ 4/1/90) has written an important book on incarceration and torture. Using literature, film, and photographs, she discusses the various aspects of modern cruelty. Tracing the history of torture, she describes how Stalin and Hitler established cruelty and imprisonment as the basis of the modern political state. In her chapters on Solzhenitsyn, Bataille, and the prison writings of Aurobindo, Ngugi, and Nien Chang, Millett fearlessly explains her reactions to the witnesses of torture. She describes various authoritarian regimes and indicts present-day state cruelty. Her section on the witnesses of cruelty ("The Imagination") is especially valuable. Written from a feminist perspective, this is a compelling view of the human condition. Highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/93.
- Gene Shaw, NYPL
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393035751
• ISBN 13: 9780393035759
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 335