Cruelty And Silence: Kana Makiya

Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya brought the attention of the world to the brutality of Saddam Hussein's regime in his powerful 1989 bestseller Republic of Fear.  Here, Makiya confronts the broad realities of tyranny in the Middle East and the moral failure of Arab and pro-Arab intellectuals to repudiate it. Makiya tells the stories of Khalil, Abu Haydar, Omar, Mustafa and Taimour - the Arab and Kurdish heroes of this book. Their testimony reveals the true extent of occupation, prejudice, revolution, and routinised violence and links these tales of survival to an examination of the Arab intelligentsia's response to Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War, comparing the flood of condemnation of the West with the trickle of protest over Saddam's mass murder campaign against the Kurds. In his exploration of these "landscapes of cruelty and silence," Makiya lays out the nationalist mythologies that underlie them.