Stasi Hell Or Workers' Paradise?
Author: Brunhild De La Motte
Publisher:
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780955822834
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A People’s History of the Cold War
Author: Colin Turbett
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
Published: 2023-03-23
Total Pages: 400
ISBN-13: 1399087533
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBetween the closing battles of the Second World War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Cold War cast a shadow over the lives of people throughout the world. while open conflict was avoided between the ideologically competing superpowers and their principal allies, millions died in battlegrounds in parts of the world that were usually far from Moscow, Washington and London. The threat of nuclear annihilation was omnipresent, but at the same time mutually assured destruction tempered conflict and focused minds. Subtle (and not so subtle) attempts to influence popular opinion either way were apparent in everyday life on both sides of the divide. while the power of the dollar and the burgeoning costs of the arms race eventually broke the Soviet economy, the idea that capitalism ‘won’ the the Cold War seems misplaced, especially if one considers events that have happened since, including very recent armed conflict. The book takes the reader through main events of the period, but focuses on the impact on ordinary citizens East and West and the view of events from their perspective. This is a story of how economies on both sides were built around war preparations and the advance of destructive technologies that had no social benefits apart from the provision of employment. Sources used are unusual in not fitting the western-based narratives that pervade both academic histories and popular accounts. However, this book is not an apology for the more oppressive aspects of Soviet policy as the USSR struggled to build ‘really existing socialism’ within its own borders and the Eastern Bloc countries under its immediate influence. Instead, it brings a people’s perspective from both sides onto this important period of recent history, whose consequences are very much still with us as we face modern challenges around climate change and growing inequality across our world. A People’s History of the Cold War – Stories from East and West captures the mood of the times with its extensive contemporary illustrations.
Riots and Political Protest
Author: Simon Winlow
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-06-19
Total Pages: 341
ISBN-13: 1317909976
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe years 2008 to 2013 saw a new generation of political protestors take to the streets. Riots disrupted many Western cities and new protest movements emerged, keen to address a bleak context of economic collapse and austerity politics. In this groundbreaking new study, Winlow, Hall, Briggs and Treadwell push past the unworldly optimism of the liberal left to offer an illuminating account of the enclosure and vacuity of contemporary politics. Focusing on the English riots of 2011, the ongoing crisis in Greece, the Indignados, 15M and Podemos in Spain, the Occupy movement in New York and London and the English Defence League in northern England, this book uses original empirical data to inform a strident theoretical critique of our post-political present. It asks: what are these protest groups fighting for, and what are the chances of success? Written by leading criminological theorists and researchers, this book makes a major contribution to contemporary debates on social order, politics and cultural capitalism. It illuminates the epochal problems we face today. Riots and Political Protest is essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of political sociology, criminological theory, political theory, sociological theory and the sociology of deviance.
The Media of Testimony
Author: S. Jones
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2014-08-06
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781137364036
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Media of Testimony explores testimony relating to the Stasi in different cultural forms: autobiographical writing, memorial museums and documentary film. Combining theoretical models from diverse disciplines, it presents a new approach to the study of testimony, memory and mediation.
Stasi State Or Socialist Paradise?
Author: Bruni De la Motte
Publisher:
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780955822865
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Much has been written about how awful the German Democratic Republic supposedly was: a people imprisoned by a wall and subjugated by an omnipresent Stasi security apparatus. Such descriptions are based largely on prejudice, ignorance and wilful animosity. This book is an attempt to provide a more balanced evaluation and to examine GDR-style socialism in terms of what we can learn from it. The authors, while not ignoring the real deficiencies of GDR society, emphasise the many aspects that were positive, and demonstrate that alternative ways of organising society are possible. This volume is an updated and much expanded edition of the authors' booklet first published in 2009. Thee have added more detail on how the GDR came into being as a separate state, about how society functioned and what values determined the every-day life of its citizens. There is also a whole new section on what happened in the aftermath of unification, particularly to the economy. While unification brought East Germans access to a more affluent society, freedom to travel throughout the world and the end to an over-centralised political system, it also brought with it unemployment, social breakdown and loss of hope, particularly in the once thriving rural areas." -- From back cover.
Manifesto
Author: Ernesto Che Guevara
Publisher: Ocean Press
Published: 2015-04-10
Total Pages: 186
ISBN-13: 0987228331
DOWNLOAD EBOOK“If you are curious and open to the life around you, if you are troubled as to why, how and by whom political power is held and used, if you sense there must be good intellectual reasons for your unease, if your curiosity and openness drive you toward wishing to act with others, to ‘do something,’ you already have much in common with the writers of the three essays in this book.” — Adrienne Rich With a preface by Adrienne Rich, Manifesto presents the radical vision of four famous young rebels: Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution and Che Guevara’s Socialism and Humanity.
A Socialist Defector
Author: Victor Grossman
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Published: 2019-02-22
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 1583677380
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe circumstances that impelled Victor Grossman, a U.S. Army draftee stationed in Europe, to flee a military prison sentence were the icy pressures of the McCarthy Era. Grossman – a.k.a. Steve Wechsler, a committed leftist since his years at Harvard and, briefly, as a factory worker – left his barracks in Bavaria one August day in 1952, and, in a panic, swam across the Danube River from the Austrian U.S. Zone to the Soviet Zone. Fate – i.e., the Soviets – landed him in East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic. There he remained, observer and participant, husband and father, as he watched the rise and successes, the travails, and the eventual demise of the GDR socialist experiment. A Socialist Defector is the story, told in rare, personal detail, of an activist and writer who grew up in the U.S. free-market economy; spent thirty-eight years in the GDR’s nationally owned, centrally administered economy; and continues to survive, given whatever the market can bear in today’s united Germany. Having been a freelance journalist and traveling lecturer – and the only person in the world to hold diplomas from both Harvard and the Karl Marx University – Grossman is able to offer insightful, often ironic, reflections and reminiscences, comparing the good and bad sides of life in all three of the societies he has known. His account focuses especially on the socialism he saw and lived – the GDR’s goals and achievements, its repressive measures and stupidities – which, he argues, offers lessons now in our search for solutions to the grave problems facing our world. This is a fascinating and unique historical narrative; political analysis told with jokes, personal anecdotes, and without bombast.
The Iron Men
Author: Leonard B. Scott
Publisher:
Published: 1993
Total Pages: 486
ISBN-13: 9780345377531
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Leonard Scott's extraordinary first novel, Charlie Mike, was hailed by The Washington Post as "one of the finest novels yet written about the war in Vietnam." With several more highly praised novels to his credit, Leonard Scott now moves beyond Vietnam with a daring story of war and revenge that carries us from the second World War to the present. Centered on Berlin, The Iron Men tells of men who wear the Iron Cross and uphold the tradition of duty and honor." "It is the end of WWII and Germany is falling. Axel Mader and Jorn Furman are young paratroop officers and recipients of the Knight's Cross, Germany's highest class of Iron Cross. Axel and Jorn's unit is falling back to defend Berlin before the advance of the Russian army. But a unit of the SS has been ordered to shoot any German soldiers who retreat and SS Captain Horst Volker gives the order to open fire. Axel and Jorn escape but vow to avenge the comrades they loved, now dead." "As Germany enters its tumultuous post-war era, we follow Horst Volker as he becomes the most powerful and ruthless leader within Stasi, the infamous East German secret police. We also follow the lives of Axel and Jorn, one in West Germany and one caught in the East." "But their fates will be entangled with a soldier of the new generation. Jake Tallon, a washed-up American lieutenant colonel, is assigned to Berlin with the hope that he can save his career. When he falls in love with Kris, Axel Mader's daughter, he finds that he has something else in common with her father. Jake too, is an iron man, for he wears the Distinguished Service Cross he earned for valor as a platoon leader in Vietnam." "It will now be three iron men who join together in Berlin just before the fall of the Wall, to confront Horst Volker and the legacy of the past...." "Filled with the superbly described action and understanding of the fighting man that have won Leonard Scott both wide critical acclaim and a huge readership, The Iron Men is an exciting breakthrough, a stirring novel about men and honor."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Europe Central
Author: William T. Vollmann
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2005-11-14
Total Pages: 834
ISBN-13: 0143036599
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA daring literary masterpiece and winner of the National Book Award In this magnificent work of fiction, acclaimed author William T. Vollmann turns his trenchant eye on the authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century to render a mesmerizing perspective on human experience during wartime. Through interwoven narratives that paint a composite portrait of these two battling leviathans and the monstrous age they defined, Europe Central captures a chorus of voices both real and fictional— a young German who joins the SS to fight its crimes, two generals who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons, the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the Stalinist assaults upon his work and life.
Rogue State
Author: William Blum
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2006-02-13
Total Pages: 404
ISBN-13: 9781842778272
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRogue State and its author came to sudden international attention when Osama Bin Laden quoted the book publicly in January 2006, propelling the book to the top of the bestseller charts in a matter of hours. This book is a revised and updated version of the edition Bin Laden referred to in his address.
