Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World - Softcover

Makiya, Kanan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393311414 ISBN 13: 9780393311419

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994

Synopsis

"One of the most important books ever written on the state of the modern Middle East." ―Geraldine Brooks, Wall Street Journal

The Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya brought the attention of the world to the brutality of Saddam Hussein's regime in his powerful 1989 bestseller Republic of Fear. Now, writing for the first time under his own name, Makiya confronts the broad realities of tyranny in the Middle East and the moral failure of Arab and pro-Arab intellectuals to repudiate it.

Makiya first gives us the stories of Khalil, Abu Haydar, Omar, Mustafa, and Taimour―the Arab and Kurdish heroes of this book. Their testimony, revealing the true extent of occupation, prejudice, revolution, and routinized violence, is a compelling example of the literature of witness. He then links these tales of survival to an examination of the Arab intelligentsia's response to Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War, comparing the flood of condemnation of the West with the trickle of protest over Saddam's mass murder campaign against the Kurds.

In his exploration of these "landscapes of cruelty and silence," Kanan Makiya lays out the nationalist mythologies that underlie them. He calls for a new politics in the Arab world―a politics that puts absolute respect for human life above all else.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

A courageous examination of the moral failures of the Arab world, by the man who, as ``Samir al-Khalil,'' wrote perhaps the best book on modern Iraq, Republic of Fear (1989). Makiya believes that the Gulf crisis was ``an Arab moral failure of historic portions'' and that the responsibility for it lies in the cruelty endemic to the Arab world, as well as in the almost universal failure of Arab intellectuals to speak out on the subject. The author first presents stories of individual Iraqis and Kurds to illustrate the crimes that have been perpetrated throughout Iraq. He adduces persuasive evidence to show that, in Saddam's 1980's campaign against the Kurds, more than 100,000 were killed, using every method, including poison gas. The campaign, Makiya says, led to the destruction of 12,076 Kurdish villages, far more than the 369 Palestinian villages ``eliminated'' by the Israelis. Yet Arab intellectuals have seen fit not to dwell on the Iraqis' actions even as they draw attention to those of the Israelis. Nor has there been any interest in Iraqi army responsibility for the uprooting of parliamentary life inside Iraq after 1958 or for the deaths of between 500,000 and one million Iraqis and Iranians in the war between the two countries. The West, too, suffers Makiya's ire. While the author points out that the US had no obligation to act in the Gulf, once it did act, he says, it acquired a responsibility to end things differently. But even so, it's ``painfully self-evident'' to Makiya that Western culture ``is immeasurably more tolerant of cultural, religious, and ethnic differences than Arab culture.'' A powerful yet evenhanded indictment. (Photographs) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this urgently important, courageous polemic, Iraqui dissident Makiya challenges Arabs and pro-Arab intellectuals to end their collective silence on the represssion carried out against their own people by brutal thugs like Saddam Hussein. Makiya's Republic of Fear (1989), written under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil, likened Saddam's totalitarianism to Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany. Here Makiya, who is based in Cambridge, Mass., fleshes out those analogies, drawing on his return trip to Iraq in late 1991 to searingly portray ordinary Iraquis and Kuwaitis victimized by the Ba'th regime. He documents the Iraqi army's mass murder in 1988 of some 100,000 Kurdish civilians, a secret genocidal campaign launched by Saddam Hussein. Makiya calls attention to institutionalized cruelty throughout the Arab Middle East: torture in Syria, public beheadings and amputations in Saudi Arabia, Kuwaitis' murder of thousands of Palestinians. Attacking the anti-imperialist rhetoric of Edward Said and Noam Chomsky as simplistic, Mikaya views the Gulf crisis as symptomatic of an "Arab moral failure" and envisions an Iraq freed from Saddam Hussein's repressive dictatorship.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0393311414
• ISBN 13: 9780393311419
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368