The Total Enemy

The Total Enemy explores the most radicalized forms of enmity, trying to unravel some of its historical and contemporary expressions. Starting from the premise that one of modernity's constitutive values is non-violence, the book explores how non-violence, or rather the making of a world free of violence, becomes a cause of violence, in some instances even extreme violence and totalitarian terror. The book consists of six case studies each exploring and discussing historically specific expressions of depicting an enemy as one the actors believe they can only deal with violently. It begins by looking at two important sites in the development of the total enemy, the French Revolution and the emergence of terrorist thinking in the middle of the nineteenth century. The book then turns to the twentieth century, beginning with the pre-WWII conceptualizations of the "total" in European political thought as an answer to a liberal state deemed unfit to manage and control mass society. Secondly, it considers the totalitarian enemy in Nazi Germany, especially Soviet Russia. Finally the book turns to two forms of contemporary total enmity: Islamism and in right-wing extremism. These concluding chapters look specifically at what happens to the total enemy concept once it goes from the state concept of the twentieth century to the private practice of the twenty-first.

This book was originally published in 1957. During the First World War, German use of unrestricted submarine warfare, supported by extensive mining and surface raids, very nearly forced Britain out of the war in 1917. The island’s heavy dependence on seaborne supplies was gravely threatened again in 1939, supplemented this time by air attacks on shipping. After the war, Commanders Waters and Barley wrote a Naval Staff History which has long been recognised as an authoritative study of the impact of the German campaign and its ultimate defeat by Britain and her allies. It remains an indispensable basis for any serious study of the Battle of the Atlantic and has here been updated and revised by Dr Grove, who also contributes a perceptive introduction outlining its significance.

As Russia wages a twenty-first-century war against the very existence of a Ukrainian state and nation, reanimating Soviet-era propaganda that portrayed Ukrainians as Nazi collaborators and fascists, the experiences of the Ukrainian nationalist underground before, during, and after the Second World War gain new significance. While engaged in a decades-long struggle against the Ukrainian nationalist movement and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and lasting into the mid-1950s, Soviet counterinsurgency forces accumulated a comprehensive and extensive archive of documents captured from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the UPA. Volodymyr Viatrovych and Lubomyr Luciuk have curated and carefully annotated a selection of these documents in Enemy Archives, providing primary sources the Soviet authorities collected and deemed useful for better understanding their opponents and so securing their destruction, a campaign that ultimately failed. The documents seized from the insurgents and Soviet analyses of them shed light on a wide range of experiences in the underground: how the movement struggled to maintain discipline and morale, how it dealt with suspected informers, and how it resisted the ruthless Soviet state, laying the foundations for the continuing Ukrainian struggle against foreign domination.

With the vision of a historian and the voice of a novelist, prize?winning author John Demos explores the social, cultural, and psychological roots of the scourge that is witch-hunting, both in the remote past and today. The Enemy Within chronicles the most prominent witch-hunts of the Western world?women and men who were targeted by suspicious neighbors and accused of committing horrific crimes by supernatural means?and shows how the fear of witchcraft has fueled recurrent cycles of accusation, persecution, and purging. A unique and fascinating book, it illumines the dark side of communities driven to rid themselves of perceived evil, no matter what the human cost.