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Title: States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering
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Manufacturer: Polity
List Price: $29.95
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| States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering by Polity States of Denial - setting the record straight | This review is in response to the offensive one posted on this website. Clearly the reviewer who rated this excellent book with one star and made what I regard as slanderous comments about the professionalism of one of the most illuminating thinkers of our time, is driven by ideological objection to Cohen's analysis.
We can only speculate, because the text has been removed, which act of genocide he would deny or argue had been portrayed as something less than the one the evidence of corpses or the disappeared shows reveals to all those who want to see.
The other reviewer on this site has captured the essence of States of Denial. While Professor Cohen will be best remembered by most people for his influential book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, States of Denial is his seminal work that shows the process of collective justification of atrocities. In doing so he exposes the futility of searching for evil people to explain such atrocities. An essential read for anyone concerned with human rights, justice and understanding humanity.
| | States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering by Polity Reader from London--Should Read London Papers | | States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering by Stanley Cohen was awarded the 2002 British Academy Book Prize. Stanley Cohen is Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The book was reviewed in British newspapers. It was also reviewed in several magazines. The reviews were positive and gave it more than three stars. Amazon.com does not automatically insert reviews for all books. | | States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering by Polity I didn't know I knew what I didn't know | | This is one of those "it should be required reading" books. Although his emphasis is on the larger mass atrocities and sufferings, Cohen examines denial from the personal to the political, from harmless "I'm not eating as many cookies as I really am," to the most horrendous "It's not torture; it's just heavy pressure" to the apathetic, "Gee, 5000 Ruwandans killed this week; I wonder how the Giants did last night." He concisely reviews the explanations of denial--Freudian, cognitive, etc--and neatly identifies the different types, styles, motives and cultural and personal collusions. Cohen's writing is clean, engaging, to the point, neither tediously over-intellectual nor patronzing, obviously well-researched and professional. He assumes his reader is familiar with basic social and political sciences and history and doesn't belabor points others have made. Most importantly, the book is compassionate, not in a gooey, all-is- forgiven and understood sense, but in its acknowledgement of denial as a universal of human behavior. Cohen handles an uncomfortable subject, not knowing what we know, a behavior of which we are all guilty, in a straight-forward, non-accusatory fashion. One has the sense that Cohen has not only being willing to see what goes on in a way that few have the courage to do, but that he has also refused to see, as we all do, and come to terms with his own denials, that his fastination with denial is not only as an observer but as a participant as well. | | States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering by Polity Incompletely researched accusations of the most serious kind | | I wrote a review of what I take as a significant distortion and failing of this book. I note that this review has not been posted on the site. I am wondering why? | | States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering by Polity Book Description | | Blocking out, turning a blind eye, shutting off, not wanting to know, wearing blinkers, seeing what we want to see ... these are all expressions of 'denial'. Alcoholics who refuse to recognize their condition, people who brush aside suspicions of their partner's infidelity, the wife who doesn't notice that her husband is abusing their daughter - are supposedly 'in denial'. Governments deny their responsibility for atrocities, and plan them to achieve 'maximum deniability'. Truth Commissions try to overcome the suppression and denial of past horrors. Bystander nations deny their responsibility to intervene. Do these phenomena have anything in common? When we deny, are we aware of what we are doing or is this an unconscious defence mechanism to protect us from unwelcome truths? Can there be cultures of denial? How do organizations like Amnesty and Oxfam try to overcome the public's apparent indifference to distant suffering and cruelty? Is denial always so bad - or do we need positive illusions to retain our sanity? States of Denial is the first comprehensive study of both the personal and political ways in which uncomfortable realities are avoided and evaded. It ranges from clinical studies of depression, to media images of suffering, to explanations of the 'passive bystander' and 'compassion fatigue'. The book shows how organized atrocities - the Holocaust and other genocides, torture, and political massacres - are denied by perpetrators and by bystanders, those who stand by and do nothing. |
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