Abro

    The crucial question is not why some people become killers, but why, under certain conditions, killing becomes ordinary. — Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men (1992)     The Familiar Face of Violence Imagine, for a moment, a village. It does not matter which village — in the Punjab of 1947 or the fields of East Pakistan in 1971, the contours are remarkably similar. There is a well at the center, shared by all. There are fields that flood together and drought together. There are marriages across lanes, loans repaid over seasons, and feuds resolved over shared plates of food. The village is, in anthropological terms, what Victor Turner called a communitas — a structure of mutual obligation, identity, and reciprocity that gives human life its texture and meaning. Now imagine that within seventy-two hours, that same village is on fire. The same hands that drew water from the shared well are now drawing blood. The same men who at...

    Host: Hello, everyone! We in South Asia are intimately familiar with the brutal story of European colonialism—the trading companies, the extraction, the long-term imposition of political and racial control. But today, we turn our gaze eastward to examine a different, arguably more ferocious, model of imperialism that emerged in Asia itself: the Japanese expansion. Joining us is Dr. Sharma (a fictional character), a distinguished historian of 20th-century warfare. Dr. Sharma, thank you for being here. Dr. Sharma: Thank you. It is crucial for us to understand this history because it illuminates the full spectrum of colonial violence.   Host: Let’s dive straight into the heart of darkness: The Nanking Massacre. For those unfamiliar, what happened in Nanking (or Nanjing) in December 1937? Dr. Sharma: The Nanking Massacre, often referred to as the Rape of Nanking, is the darkest embodiment of this contrasting imperial model. In late 1937, after capturing the ...