The Politics of Cruelty – An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment (Paper)

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 individuals monumental fear of the state through the rich literature of its expression—a mixture of literary text (Solzhenitsyns The Gulag Archipelago Mathabanes Kaffir Boy Bharadwajs 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.