Okay folks, this is the first week we are reading a whole book. 173 pages. You can do it. Please do it.
The book is written by Swedish Sven Lindquist, who writes non-fiction, but is known to mix genres, as he also does in this book that is part travel-memoir, part historical analysis. Firstly: I have added some general advice on how to read a whole book for this course under "how to read" right here on the website. It might be helpful to look over those before you start chewing through Lindquist. The main point Lindquist is making in this book is that the Holocaust is not a unique event, but something that came directly out of European colonialism. As Lindquist writes in the preface: "two events need not be identical for one of them to facilitate the other." This is a big claim, and also an uncomfortable one, because it means that everyone with European decent (not just the Germans) carries these atrocities in their historical luggage. But as Lindquist ends his book: "You already know that. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions". What do you suppose he means by that? What conclusions do you think he wants us to draw? Also, as you read, think about how the book is written. How has the work been conducted? How is it told? What does it add that the author is traveling, bringing us readers along for both his trip through Sahara and his research? Main questions raised/topics to notice in each part of the book: Part 1: What happens when humans get to do whatever they want with nobody overlooking them? What happens when humans "slip into violence"? Notice how the example of the author's father is juxtaposed with violence in the colonies. Part 2: Notice how the distance between the killer and the killed in war has increased over time. Contemporary drone warfare is a testament to this. Nowadays, the killer is sitting in an office in Nevada, killing someone in Pakistan. Lindquist here makes the point - a really good one I think - that it is a big logical mistake to think that because you have superior or more sophisticated technology and weapons, you yourself are more civilized or more worthy of life. Part 3: This chapter describes the history of the sciences of extinction and evolution, and how these at the time new ideas got hijacked by the wrong people with the wrong ideas, and were used to justify the colonial genocides. This is central to our class topic: How is the death of someone else justified in the eyes of the perpetrator? To what extent do we think these ways of viewing certain people still inform warfare today? Part 4: Covers how the ideas of evolution were misunderstood, twisted, and then used to underline first racism and then the Holocaust. This chapter describes how the Germans were behind other European nations in conquering colonies, and how Hitler saw his war against Russia and jews as colonial. Notice that Hitler treated Russians and Jews similar to how people of color had been treated in the colonies, which was different from how Hitler's "white" prisoner's of war were treated. Over to you: What do you think? How did reading the book affect you? Do you agree with Lindquist? Why? Why not? And to ask the question I began with once again: What conclusions do you think he wants his readers to draw from reading his book? I look forward to your reactions!
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Thank you for your introductions and reactions to our introductory reading. Overall, you were all very on point and thorough, that is great. As you can now see on Laulima, I tend to write an answer to everyone's reactions, but when many of you raise the same questions or points, I answer to them only in the first response I get to. Therefore, a lot of the learning in this class takes place when you read each others reactions and responses and also my responses. Please also don't take it personally if someone else gets a long response and you a short one, it just means I saw the other one first. Or, if everything you said is fine and you're not raising any questions, I might not have a lot to say. That doesn't mean its a bad reaction you have posted.
A lot of you already responded to each others posts from the first week, and you were a bit early doing so. This Friday, the 19th, you have to post a reaction to Lindquist's Exterminate All the Brutes, and then post a response to someone else's reaction from last week (the reactions to the textbook reading). So if you've already done that, thats good, no need to do it again. Hi Everyone,
Welcome! Thank you for taking this class. I hope we will have an enjoyable and interesting summer together online. The class begins Monday June 8. Before Friday June 12th, please make sure to do the following: 1) Please respond to the email I sent out to the class, and confirm that you have found this website and do in fact intend to attend this class. 2) please read the syllabus in its entirety. You can either read it directly on this website or print it out fromt this website. All earlier versions of the syllabus are void. We go by what is on this website. 3) Post your reaction to the reading for week 1 in the "Class discussions" part under "Discussions and Private Messages" on the class Laulima site. Make sure that the title of each of your reactions states what week the reaction is for. I have chosen to have our forum on Laulima rather than via this website in order to ensure that the whole wide web doesn't have access to our discussions. Please post each of your reactions as a "new topic". 4) Post an introduction of yourself also in the "class discussions" part of Laulima. How far you are in your degree, your major, why you're taking this class, what you hope to get out of it, where you're from, what you like to do, stuff like that. It's nice to have a little idea of the participants of our virtual classroom. Please write your introduction as a response to the one I have posted. 5. Buy or lend any books you would like to read not on a screen. All readings are available through this website. Most are in pdf version. You can read them on a computer or e-reader or whatever. Even with the fanciest of e-readers however, reading pdfs is tiresome. I therefore encourage you to look over the different books on the syllabus and buy or lend the ones you find the most intriguing. Some are available for cheap used on for example Amazon, but be aware that it can take a while for used books to get shipped to you. If at any time you have any questions or comments, don't hesitate to email me at gitte[ø]hawaii.edu. Or post a comment right here on the blog. A bit about the subject matter of the class and the reading for week 1: The course is called Global Politics/International Relations. Global politics pertains to political and economical forces and movements across the globe, and is closely tied to the concept of "globalization". International Relations is about the relationships between different countries, and is often, but not always, about conflict and war. The two fields of course overlap, and as we shall see in the reading for week 1, they are difficult, if not impossible, to define. The reading for week 1 is the introduction and two chapters from a well-renowned International Relations textbook. Hopefully it will give you a little overview of the field and some of its main concepts and problems. In the introduction, the authors explain what is meant by a "state-centric" view of IR, namely the tendency to think that everything in IR is a question of what states want and do. This however overlooks corporations, NGO's, and institutions such as IMF and the World Bank - actors that the study of globalization has on the forefront. In the two chapters I have assigned about power and security, the authors often refer to the realist paradigm of IR (often to juxtapose alternative theories with the realist one, that has tended to be very dominant in the field of IR). The realist paradigm rests on three main assumptions: 1) States are rational unitary actors, and what happens inside each state (the domestic politics) are not very important to IR 2) States operate in an environment of anarchy - no one state has the overarching authority. 3) The fundamental resource that is pursued is power. There are of course problems with this theory, I am just outlining it here so you know what the authors are referring to. This class places itself in the murky, overlapping, grey area that covers both IR and globalization, and also lends it subject matter from a third field, namely that of postcolonial theory or postcolonial studies, which is the study of how colonial relationships of the past still form many realities today. As the IR textbook states, International Relations is often about explaining the causes of war. This class focuses on one of the many factors that play into why states go to war, namely how enemies are viewed. The class is structured around the premise that part of how war is legitimized in the minds of those who go to war, is through viewing the enemy in a certain way. As we shall see, a lot of the kinds of views that underlined colonialism also underline wars (and neocolonial relationships) today. Basically, colonialism, as well as war, often or partly, hinges on viewing (the lives of) other people as somehow not as important. We dive into this from week 2 and onwards. |
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August 2015
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