Visions Of Annihilation

The fascist Ustasha regime and its militias carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed an estimated half million Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, and ended only with the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. Rory Yeomans analyzes the Ustasha movement's use of culture to appeal to radical nationalist sentiments and legitimize its genocidal policies. He shows how the movement attempted to mobilize poets, novelists, filmmakers, visual artists, and intellectuals as purveyors of propaganda and visionaries of a utopian society. Yeomans chronicles the foundations of the movement, its key actors and ideologies, and reveals the unique conditions present in interwar Croatia that led to the rise of fascism.

Reveals the secret teachings of the Khwajagan, the Masters of Wisdom of Turkish Sufism • Provides biographies for the entire lineage of teachers in the Naqshbandi order, such as Yusuf Hamdani, the first recognized Khwajagan, and Baha’ al-Din Naqshband, from whom the Naqshbandi order of Sufis took its name • Shows that this spiritual path focuses on expanding awareness of the heart to reach God-consciousness • An essential guide for understanding Itlak Yolu, the Sufi path of Absolute Liberation, and fana’, Annihilation in God Almost one thousand years ago a new and powerful nexus of spiritual transmission emerged in Central Asia and lasted for five centuries, reaching its culmination in the work of the Khwajagan, or “Masters of Wisdom.” Like the much earlier Rishi Pantha of India, these masters of Turkish Sufism were not renunciates but advocated maintaining an active connection with the world, including raising a family or running a business. They exerted a remarkable influence on the destiny of Central Asia, yet their chief significance lies in their almost unparalleled depth of spiritual perfection. Based on primary Persian and Turkish sources, the same texts used by the Sufi authority Idries Shah in his many books, Masters of Wisdom of Central Asia explores the entire lineage of teachers from this golden age of Islamic Sufism. Author Hasan Shushud provides brief biographies of each teacher, such as Yusuf Hamdani, the first recognized Khwajagan; Ahmad al-Yasavi, the father of Turkish Sufism; and Baha’ al-Din Naqshband, from whom the Naqshbandi order of Sufis took its name. He examines their spiritual journeys, their writings and teachings, and their most famous sayings, incorporating occasional parables to illustrate their wisdom. Shushud reveals how this spiritual path focuses on expanding awareness of the heart and how heart awareness is a prerequisite for divine contemplation and God-consciousness, for the heart is the manuscript within the body on which the infinite mysteries of the Godhead are recorded. An essential guide for understanding Itlak Yolu, the Sufi path of Absolute Liberation, and fana’ fi-llah, Annihilation in God, this book is an indispensable work for anyone interested in Sufism or the spiritual history of Central Asia.

For most of the population of Europe and East and Southeast Asia, the most persistent and significant aspect of their experience of the Second World War was that of occupation by one or more of the Axis powers. In this ambitious and wide-ranging study, Aviel Roshwald brings us the first single-authored, comparative treatment of European and Asian responses to German and Japanese occupation during the war. He illustrates how patriotic, ethno-national, and internationalist identities were manipulated, exploited, reconstructed and reinvented as a result of the wholesale dismantling of states and redrawing of borders. Using eleven case studies from across the two continents, he examines how behavioral choices around collaboration and resistance were conditioned by existing identities or loyalties as well as by short-term cost–benefit calculations, opportunism, or coercion.

During World War II, Croatia became a fascist state under the control of the Ustasha Movement - allied with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Here, Goran Miljan examines and analyzes for the first time the ideology, practices, and international connections of the Ustasha Youth organization. The Ustasha Youth was an all-embracing fascist youth organization, established in July 1941 by the `Independent State of Croatia' with the goal of reeducating young people in the model of an ideal `new' Croat. This youth organization attempted to set in motion an all-embracing, totalitarian national revolution which in reality consisted of specific interconnected, mutually dependent practices: prosecution, oppression, mass murder, and the Holocaust - all of which were officially legalized within a month of the regime's accession to power. To this end education, sport, manual work and camping took place in specially established Ustasha Youth Schools. In order to justify their radical policies of youth reeducation, the Ustasha Youth, besides emphasizing national character and the importance of cultural and national purity, also engaged in transnational activities and exchanges, especially with the Hlinkova mladez [Hlinka Youth] of the Slovak Republic. Both youth organizations were closely modelled after the youth organizations in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. This is a little studied part of the history of World War II and of Fascism, and will be essential reading for scholars of Central Europe and the Holocaust.

Winner of the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for 2018 Even before Tito's Communist Party established control over the war-ravaged territories which became socialist Yugoslavia, his partisan forces were using football as a revolutionary tool. In 1944 a team representing the incipient state was dispatched to play matches around the liberated Mediterranean. This consummated a deep relationship between football and communism that endured until this complex multi-ethnic polity tore itself apart in the 1990s. Starting with an exploration of the game in the short-lived interwar Kingdom, this book traces that liaison for the first time. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, it ventures across the former Yugoslavia to illustrate the myriad ways football was harnessed by an array of political forces. Communists purposefully re-engineered Yugoslavia's most popular sport in the tumult of the 1940s, using it to integrate diverse territories and populations. Subsequently, the game advanced Tito's distinct brand of communism, with its Cold War-era policy of non-alignment and experimentation with self-management. Yet, even under tight control, football was racked by corruption, match-fixing and violence. Alternative political and national visions were expressed in the stadiums of both Yugoslavias, and clubs, players and supporters ultimately became perpetrators and victims in the countries' violent demise. In Richard Mills' hands, the former Yugoslavia's stadiums become vehicles to explore the relationship between sport and the state, society, nationalism, state-building, inter-ethnic tensions and war. The book is the first in-depth study of the Yugoslav game and offers a revealing new way to approach the complex history of Yugoslavia.

These poems are a return to a past century in their approach, in that they tell of love affairs, encounters, or personal crises in simple language rather than being cryptic crossword puzzles or displays of ingenious imagery. They are also a return to a more recent past in content, since many of them were written around 1980 after a seven-year period spent “on the road.” They describe impressions of exotic countries (both their poverty and their beauty), the adventures of a life of wandering and drug-induced indolence on paradisiac beaches, and the love affairs of an era when young men and women related to each other rather more freely than they do today. These poems were rejected by publishers at the time, when the “hippie” lifestyle was not thought to be of interest and poems were supposed to be academic wordgames, not neo-romantic expressions of personal experience. There are signs both attitudes are changing, as the baby-boomers enter a period of nostalgia for their youth (including the counter-culture that inspired its music) and we near the end of the long drawn-out death of Modernism, which reduced all art-forms to idiocy or sterility. The book ends with some more recent poems, which reflect on life, death, justice, faith, science, other lives, and other worlds.

In Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938–1945, international scholars examine the theories of race that informed the legal, political, and social policies aimed against ethnic minorities in Nazi-dominated Europe. The essays explicate how racial science, preexisting racist sentiments, and pseudoscientific theories of race that were preeminent in interwar Europe ultimately facilitated Nazi racial designs for a “New Europe.” The volume examines racial theories in a number of European nation-states in order to understand racial thinking at large, the origins of the Holocaust, and the history of ethnic discrimination in each of those countries. The essays, by uncovering neglected layers of complexity, diversity, and nuance, demonstrate how local discourse on race paralleled Nazi racial theory but had unique nationalist intellectual traditions of racial thought. Written by rising scholars who are new to English-language audiences, this work examines the scientific foundations that central, eastern, northern, and southern European countries laid for ethnic discrimination, the attempted annihilation of Jews, and the elimination of other so-called inferior peoples.