The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment

By Kate Millett

Book Overview

It is, in the words of the noted Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, a passionate, heroic effort to fathom the nature of a phenomenon that all too often drains us emotionally and incapacitates us intellectually.

Millett analyzes the individual's monumental fear of the state through the rich literature of its expression--a mixture of literary text (Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Mathabane's Kaffir Boy, Bharadwaj's film Closet Land), the reports of witnesses, legal theory, and historical account. The literary version of their experience is the most arresting; it prevails and persuades with the greatest effect: the reality of the victim, the social and psychological climate of life under dictatorship, the moment of capture when one is disappeared, that pivotal electronic second after which nothing is ever the same.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393313123
• ISBN13: 9780393313123
• Release Date: June 1995
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

"To speak of the unspeakable is the beginning of action."

Linking various accounts of torture and imprisonment from around the world with analyses of world culture, Kate Millett explores where cultural permission begins that allows these sorts of atrocities to occur. From Nazi Germany to South Africa, from South and Central America to Ireland, she shows how similar the experiences of those captured and tortured are throughout the world, and since this has all happened during the last century, it is all the more chilling, especially in the light of recent world events. With her compelling mixture of the personal with the political, Millett holds up a mirror to our American complicity in these crimes and challenges us to do something about it, if nothing else but to not be silent. Published almost a decade ago, "The Politics of Cruelty" is still timely and important because these sorts of occurrences have never ceased. They just are better hidden. Millett's ninety-year-old mother is quoted at the end in the acknowledgments as saying, "I am not sure I wanted to know this much before I died... but then, imagine what they knew." Such a truth ought to not be overlooked.