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Violence Workers

Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities

Philip G Zimbardo author Mika Haritos-Fatouros author Prof Martha K Huggins author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:19th Nov '02

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Violence Workers cover

Of the twenty-three Brazilian policemen interviewed in depth for this landmark study, fourteen were direct perpetrators of torture and murder during the three decades that included the 1964-1985 military regime. These "violence workers" and the other group of "atrocity facilitators" who had not, or claimed they had not, participated directly in the violence, help answer questions that haunt today's world: Why and how are ordinary men transformed into state torturers and murderers? How do atrocity perpetrators explain and justify their violence? What is the impact of their murderous deeds--on them, on their victims, and on society? What memories of their atrocities do they admit and which become public history?

"A groundbreaking work.... Its conclusions allow us to understand how state-sponsored violence is a social illness, and how easily moral boundaries can be destroyed.... Our lesson is to grasp carefully how the technique of transforming individuals into evildoers is a highly rational exercise of constructed hatred, the isolation of individuals, and the blurring of the border between duty and cruelty."-Maria Pia Lara, editor of Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives "It's rare enough that people study torturers. It's very dangerous fieldwork, demoralizing material to ponder over, and intellectually hazardous to put it together coherently. These authors do better than this: they come back with a book well worth thinking about. Thinking about torture these days is something we do less and less; one can only hope this book will be an antidote to so much thoughtlessness."-Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Modern Iran

ISBN: 9780520234475

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 20mm

Weight: 454g

314 pages