Death Squads or Self-Defense Forces?

Death Squads or Self-Defense Forces?
Author: Julie Mazzei
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2009-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807898619

In an era when the global community is confronted with challenges posed by violent nonstate organizations--from FARC in Colombia to the Taliban in Afghanistan--our understanding of the nature and emergence of these groups takes on heightened importance. Julie Mazzei's timely study offers a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics that facilitate the organization and mobilization of one of the most virulent types of these organizations, paramilitary groups (PMGs). Mazzei reconstructs in rich historical context the organization of PMGs in Colombia, El Salvador, and Mexico, identifying the variables that together create a triad of factors enabling paramilitary emergence: ambivalent state officials, powerful military personnel, and privileged members of the economic elite. Nations embroiled in domestic conflicts often find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place when global demands for human rights contradict internal expectations and demands for political stability. Mazzei elucidates the importance of such circumstances in the emergence of PMGs, exploring the roles played by interests and policies at both the domestic and international levels. By offering an explanatory model of paramilitary emergence, Mazzei provides a framework to facilitate more effective policy making aimed at mitigating and undermining the political potency of these dangerous forces.

Hitler's Death Squads

Hitler's Death Squads
Author: Helmut Langerbein
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781585442850

"After the war, the German government investigated 1,770 former Einsatzgruppen members and brought 136 of these men to trial. Helmut Langerbein has systematically examined the trial evidence in search of characteristics shared by these mass murderers. Using a much broader data base than earlier studies, Langerbein identifies a number of factors that could explain their actions, illustrating each with a particular person or group of officers." "Given the extent of its data, its detailed analysis and its careful conclusions, Hitler's Death Squads: The Logic of Mass Murder will push historians and psychologists toward a reappraisal of the Nazi killing machine, the behavior of the men behind the battle lines, and the overwhelming power of circumstances."--Jacket.

Death Squad

Death Squad
Author: Jeffrey A. Sluka
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2010-08-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0812200489

"There is real personal danger for anthropologists who dare to speak and write against terror; by doing so, they potentially and sometimes actually bring the terror down on themselves."—Jeffrey A. Sluka, from the Introduction Death Squad is the first work to focus specifically on the anthropology of state terror. It brings together an international group of anthropologists who have done extensive research in areas marked by extreme forms of state violence and who have studied state terror from the perspective of victims and survivors. The book presents eight case studies from seven countries—Spain, India (Punjab and Kashmir), Argentina, Guatemala, Northern Ireland, Indonesia, and the Philippines—to demonstrate the cultural complexities and ambiguities of terror when viewed at the local level and from the participants' point of view. Contributors deal with such topics as the role of Loyalist death squads in the culture of terror in Northern Ireland, the three-tier mechanism of state terror in Indonesia, the complex role of religion in violence by both the state and insurgents in Punjab and Kashmir, and the ways in which "disappearances" are used to destabilize and demoralize opponents of the state in Argentina, Guatemala, and India.

Death Squads in Global Perspective

Death Squads in Global Perspective
Author: B. Campbell
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2002-10-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0230108148

Death squads have become an increasingly common feature of the modern world. In nearly all instances, their establishment is tolerated, encouraged, or undertaken by the state itself, which thereby risks its monopoly on the use of force, one of the fundamental characteristics of modern states. Why do such a variety of regimes, under very different circumstances, condone such activity? Death Squads in Global Perspective hopes to answer that question and explain not only their development, but also why they can be expected to proliferate in the early 21st century.

Death Squad

Death Squad
Author: Alan Hebden
Publisher: Rebellion
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2020-08-18
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 9781781087688

An all-out all-action, complete-in-one brutal war story from the pages of the classic war comic, Battle, hugely influential on Preacher and The Boys creator Garth Ennis. Meet the deadliest band of fighters on the Eastern Front! During world War Two the Eastern Front was hell on Earth. German Punishment Battalions were thrown into the thick of the conflict where they were expected to fight well and die hard. In these harshest of conditions only the strongest warriors survived. Enter the Death Squad – Grandad, Swede, Licker, Gus and Frankie. Alone they were failures and outcasts, but together they were one of the most formidable combat units the Russians ever faced!

Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror

Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror
Author: Oliver Villar
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2014-05-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1583673075

Since the late 1990s, the United States has funneled billions of dollars in aid to Colombia, ostensibly to combat the illicit drug trade and State Department-designated terrorist groups. The result has been a spiral of violence that continues to take lives and destabilize Colombian society. This book asks an obvious question: are the official reasons given for the wars on drugs and terror in Colombia plausible, or are there other, deeper factors at work? Scholars Villar and Cottle suggest that the answers lie in a close examination of the cocaine trade, particularly its class dimensions. Their analysis reveals that this trade has fueled extensive economic growth and led to the development of a "narco-state" under the control of a "narco-bourgeoisie" which is not interested in eradicating cocaine but in gaining a monopoly over its production. The principal target of this effort is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who challenge that monopoly as well as the very existence of the Colombian state. Meanwhile, U.S. business interests likewise gain from the cocaine trade and seek to maintain a dominant, imperialist relationship with their most important client state in Latin America. Suffering the brutal consequences, as always, are the peasants and workers of Colombia. This revelatory book punctures the official propaganda and shows the class war underpinning the politics of the Colombian cocaine trade.

Vlakplaas

Vlakplaas
Author: Robin Binckes
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2018-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526729229

Faced with the total onslaught by its enemies, in 1979, Apartheid South Africa established Vlakplaas lit. shallow farm, a 100-hectare farm nestling in the hills outside Pretoria on the Hennops River as a secret operation under the arm of C1, a counter-terrorism division of the South African Police headed by Brigadier Schoon.The first phase of Vlakplaas operations, up until 1989, was aimed at fighting the enemy: the armed wings of the liberation movements, the African National Congresss Umkhonto we Sizwe (or MK), the Pan Africanist Congresss Azanian Peoples Liberation Army (or APLA) and the South African Communist Party. The second phase was fighting organized crime in which Vlakplaas itself seamlessly adopted the mantle of organized crime in the notorious downtown area of Johannesburgs Hillbrow. The final phase, the most destructive, was as the murky Third Force that destabilized the country in an orgy of violence in the run-up to its first democratic elections, in 1994.Operating within South Africa as well as beyond the countrys borders, it will never been known how many victims can be attributed to the Vlakplaas agenda with much of the execution taking place on the farm itself but a conservative figure of 1,000 murders and assassinations has been mooted.

Masters of Death

Masters of Death
Author: Richard Rhodes
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307426807

In Masters of Death, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen’s role in the Holocaust. These “special task forces,” organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943, often by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar. These massive crimes have been generally overlooked or underestimated by Holocaust historians, who have focused on the gas chambers. In this painstaking account, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes profiles the eastern campaign’s architects as well as its “ordinary” soldiers and policemen, and helps us understand how such men were conditioned to carry out mass murder. Marshaling a vast array of documents and the testimony of perpetrators and survivors, this book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust and World War II.

Jallad

Jallad
Author: Tasneem Khalil
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Death squads
ISBN: 9780745335704

Throughout South Asia, people live in fear of death squads, from the Rapid Action Battalion of Bangladesh to the "encounter specialists" of India, army units in Nepal, the Frontier Corps of Pakistan, and the "men in white vans" of Sri Lanka. Their tools are disappearance, torture, and summary execution, and their supporters, Tasneem Khalil shows in Jallad, are the governments of these nations--and their patrons, like the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and Israel. An unsparing indictment of an international system of terror that is fully countenanced by the West, Jallad presents close-up, detailed accounts of incidents of state terror and targeted violence throughout South Asia. Khalil, a reporter who himself endured torture at the hands of agents in Bangladesh, and whose remarkable story was featured in the New York Times, draws on countless hours of on-the-ground reporting and a broad network of activists and human rights advocates to build an undeniable portrait of the domination and repression that lies at the very core of statecraft in South Asia. Shielded by their protectors in the developed world, the perpetrators of these abuses deploy them strategically to silence dissent and crush opposition. A brave, essential work of reporting and investigation, Jallad brings these horrific acts to prominence in order to make it impossible for Western governments to continue turning a blind eye to the human rights violations of their erstwhile allies.

SS Einsatzgruppen

SS Einsatzgruppen
Author: Gerry van Tonder
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2018-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526729105

“Provides important details about the Einsatzgruppen’s leadership . . . Numerous photographs illustrate the text. A grim read, but a necessary one.” —The Washington Times In June 1941, Adolf Hitler, whose loathing of Slavs and Jewish Bolsheviks knew no bounds, launched Operation Barbarossa, throwing four million troops, supported by tanks, artillery and aircraft into the Soviet Union. Operational groups of the German Security Service, SD, followed into the Baltic and the Black Sea areas. Their orders: neutralize elements hostile to Nazi domination. Combined SS and SD headquarters were set throughout Eastern Europe, each with subordinate units of the SD, the Einsatzgruppen, and lower echelons of Einsatzkommandos. Communist and Soviet federal agents were targeted, and from August 1941 to March 1943, 4,000 Soviet and communist agents were arrested and executed. In addition, far greater numbers of partisans and communists were shot to ensure political and ethnic purity in the occupied territories. In the early stages of the operation, Einsatzgruppe A, under Adolf Eichmann, executed 29,000 people listed as Jews or mostly Jews in Latvia and Lithuania. In the Einsatzgruppe C report for September 1941, 50,000 executions are foreseen in Kiev. In five months in 1941, Einsatzkommando III commander, Karl Jger, reported killing 138,272, 34,464 of them were children. The Einsatzgruppen were death squads, their tools the rifle, the pistol and the machine gun. It is estimated that the Einsatzgruppen executed more than 2 million people between 1941 and 1945, including 1.3 million Jews. Drawing on translated memos, operational reports from the field as well as other primary and secondary sources, historian Gerry van Tonder provides a comprehensive look at one of the darkest periods of human history.