A Century of Repression

A Century of Repression
Author: Ralph Engelman
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2022-10-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252053567

A Century of Repression offers an unprecedented and panoramic history of the use of the Espionage Act of 1917 as the most important yet least understood law threatening freedom of the press in modern American history. It details government use of the Act to control information about U.S. military and foreign policy during the two World Wars, the Cold War, and the War on Terror. The Act has provided cover for the settling of political scores, illegal break-ins, and prosecutorial misconduct.

Modernizing Repression

Modernizing Repression
Author: Jeremy Kuzmarov
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 1558499172

A probing analysis of the impact of American policing operations abroad

Political Repression in 19th Century Europe

Political Repression in 19th Century Europe
Author: Robert Justin Goldstein
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1135026696

Originally published in 1983. The nineteenth century was a time of great economic, social and political change. As Europe modernized, previously ignorant and apathetic elements in the population began to demand political freedoms. There was pressure also for a freer press, for the rights of assembly and association. The apprehension of the existing elites manifested itself in an intensification of often brutal form of political repression. The first part of this book summarizes on a pan-European basis, the major techniques of repression such as the denial of popular franchise and press censorship. This is followed by a chronological survey of these techniques from 1815 – 1914 in each European country. The book analyzes the long and short-term importance of these events for European historical development in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Policing Rio de Janeiro

Policing Rio de Janeiro
Author:
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 1993-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804765537

When in 1808 members of the Portuguese royal entourage arrived in Rio de Janeiro, the capital of a colony most had previously known only through administrative reports and balance sheets, they encountered a hostile and dangerous population that included a large number of African slaves. One of the institutions they brought from Lisbon was the General Intendancy of Police, which was the foundation on which the city's police institutions were built. The government met the challenge of bringing the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro under control with a repressive apparatus that grew along with the problem it was created to solve. Policing Rio de Janeiro is a history of one of the fundamental institutions of the modern world through which the power of the state intrudes on public space to control and direct behavior. It is also a study of the way people resisted the repressive arm of the state, including heretofore unreported cases of slave rebellion as well as forms of everyday resistance. The author shows how the historical development of the police of Rio de Janeiro, through a dialectic of repression and resistance, was part of a more general transition from the traditional application of control through private hierarchies to the modern exercise of power through public institutions. Using the rich records - which include internal correspondence and official reports - of the police system and its civilian counterparts the judicial and jail systems, the author explores the point at which repression and resistance collided, on the squares, streets, and back alleys of Brazil's capital city. The resulting disturbances served as a catalyst for the formation of institutions and procedures that provided a veneer of modernity over traditional attitudes and relationships, protecting and strengthening them. In a conceptual context that includes the ideas of Foucault, Weber, and Gramsci, the author goes beyond institutional history to examine the changing social conditions of Rio de Janeiro and the exercise of power by its elites.

Political Economy of Labor Repression in the United States

Political Economy of Labor Repression in the United States
Author: Andrew Kolin
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 437
Release: 2016-11-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1498524036

This book presents a detailed explanation of the essential elements that characterize capital labor relations and the resulting social conflict that leads to repression of labor. It links repression to the class struggle between capital and labor. The starting point involves an historical approach used to explore labor repression after the American Revolution. What follows is an examination of the role of government along with the growth of American capitalism to analyze capital-labor conflict. Subsequent chapters trace US history during the 19th century to discuss the question of the role assumed by the inclusion/exclusion of capital and labor in political-economic structures, which in turn lead to repression. Wholesale exclusion of labor from a fundamental role in framing policy in these institutions was crucial in understanding the unfolding of labor repression. Repression emerges amid a social struggle to acquire and maintain control over policy-making bodies, which pits the few against the many. In response, labor attempts to push back against institutional exclusion in part by the formation of labor unions. Capital reacts to such actions using repression to prevent labor from having a greater role in social institutions. For instance, this is played out inside the workplace as capital and labor engage in a political struggle over the function of the workplace. Given capital’s monopoly of ownership, capital employs various means to repress labor at work, including the introduction of technology, mass firings, crushing strikes, and the use of force to break up unions. The role of the state is not to be overlooked in its support of elite control over production, as well as aiding through legal means the growth of a capitalist economy in opposition to labor’s conception of greater economic democracy. This book explains how and why labor continues to confront repression in the 20th and 21st centuries.

What Every Radical Should Know about State Repression

What Every Radical Should Know about State Repression
Author: Victor Serge
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2024-05-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1644213680

This classic manual on repression by revolutionary activist Victor Serge offers fascinating anecdotes about the tactics of police provocateurs and an analysis of the documents of the Tsarist secret police in the aftermath of the Russian revolution. With a new introduction by Howard Zinn collaborator, Anthony Arnove. “Victor Serge is one of the unsung heroes of a corrupt century.” —Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost As we approach the 100th anniversary of Victor Serge’s (1926) classic exposé of political repression, the specter of fear as a tool of political repression is chillingly familiar to us in world increasingly threatened by totalitarianism. Serge’s exposé of the surveillance methods used by the Czarist police reads like a spy thriller. An irrepressible rebel, Serge wrote this manual for political activists, describing the structures of state repression and how to dodge them—including how to avoid being followed, what to do if arrested, and tips on securing correspondence. He also explains how such repression is ultimately ineffective. “Repression can really only live off fear. But is fear enough to remove need, thirst for justice, intelligence, reason, idealism…? Relying on intimidation, the reactionaries forget that they will cause more indignation, more hatred, more thirst for martyrdom, than real fear. They only intimidate the weak; they exasperate the best forces and temper the resolution of the strongest.” —Victor Serge

State of Repression

State of Repression
Author: Lisa Blaydes
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2020-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691211752

A new account of modern Iraqi politics that overturns the conventional wisdom about its sectarian divisions How did Iraq become one of the most repressive dictatorships of the late twentieth century? The conventional wisdom about Iraq's modern political history is that the country was doomed by its diverse social fabric. But in State of Repression, Lisa Blaydes challenges this belief by showing that the country's breakdown was far from inevitable. At the same time, she offers a new way of understanding the behavior of other authoritarian regimes and their populations. Drawing on archival material captured from the headquarters of Saddam Hussein's ruling Ba'th Party in the wake of the 2003 US invasion, Blaydes illuminates the complexities of political life in Iraq, including why certain Iraqis chose to collaborate with the regime while others worked to undermine it. She demonstrates that, despite the Ba'thist regime's pretensions to political hegemony, its frequent reliance on collective punishment of various groups reinforced and cemented identity divisions. At the same time, a series of costly external shocks to the economy—resulting from fluctuations in oil prices and Iraq's war with Iran—weakened the capacity of the regime to monitor, co-opt, coerce, and control factions of Iraqi society. In addition to calling into question the common story of modern Iraqi politics, State of Repression offers a new explanation of why and how dictators repress their people in ways that can inadvertently strengthen regime opponents.

The Rise of Digital Repression

The Rise of Digital Repression
Author: Steven Feldstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2021
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190057491

"A Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Book" -- dust jacket.

Repression and Realism in Post-War American Literature

Repression and Realism in Post-War American Literature
Author: E. Mercer
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2011-04-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781349293933

This study of fiction produced in America in the decade following 1945 examines literature by writers such as Kerouac and Bellow. It examines how, though such fiction seemed to resolutely avoid the events and implications of World War II, it was still suffused with dread and suggestions of war in imagery and language.

Securing Sex

Securing Sex
Author: Benjamin A. Cowan
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2016-03-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469627515

In this history of right-wing politics in Brazil during the Cold War, Benjamin Cowan puts the spotlight on the Cold Warriors themselves. Drawing on little-tapped archival records, he shows that by midcentury, conservatives--individuals and organizations, civilian as well as military--were firmly situated in a transnational network of right-wing cultural activists. They subsequently joined the powerful hardline constituency supporting Brazil's brutal military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. There, they lent their weight to a dictatorship that, Cowan argues, operationalized a moral panic that conflated communist subversion with manifestations of modernity, coalescing around the crucial nodes of gender and sexuality, particularly in relation to youth, women, and the mass media. The confluence of an empowered right and a security establishment suffused with rightist moralism created strongholds of anticommunism that spanned government agencies, spurred repression, and generated attempts to control and even change quotidian behavior. Tracking how limits to Cold War authoritarianism finally emerged, Cowan concludes that the record of autocracy and repression in Brazil is part of a larger story of reaction against perceived threats to traditional views of family, gender, moral standards, and sexuality--a story that continues in today's culture wars.