In 390, the garrison commander at Thessalonica and several officials were killed by local citizens during a riot. Upon hearing of this, instead of an appropriate response to the riot, the Emperor Theodosius ordered a retaliation. The local hippodrome in Thessalonica became the scene of a bloodbath, as soldiers mercilessly massacred thousands of people. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, effectively excommunicated the Emperor, pending a public statement of repentance. The story of the massacre, known from several conflicting reports, leaves many questions unanswered, but its chief problem is the absurdity of such a measure against a civilian population. Puzzled by this ill-advised decision, some scholars have tried to find other explanations, such as errors in communication or the presence of troops who got out of control. The sources, such as they are, fail to support these hypotheses. They do, however, permit a simpler explanation: a grave and tragic failure of the soldiery on the spot in carrying out the Emperor’s orders. The massacre was an unwanted calamity, not only for the inhabitants of Thessalonica but also for the reputation of Theodosius and the balance of power between the state and the church.
Throughout the hostile political transformation that began in 2013 in Turkey, a number of massacres and mass murders remained untraceable. The Curfews period of December 2015- February 2016 in South-Eastern Turkey was a time of collective violence in multiple forms, among which Cizre Basement Massacres are the most known. Some social media material shared from the basements in the region, such as phone calls by representatives of the Kurdish party, caught international attention and provoked artistic as well as political responses. In this article, I will first provide an overview of the key events during the Curfews period, then analyze the artistic work of Songül Sönmez, with whom I have worked during the conceptualization of the sound work of her installation Forensic Body (2015-2020). Based on one-to-one discussion and participant observation, I will then discuss her witnessing and her creative process regarding these serial events of mass violence.
The article applies a comparative perspective to assess the onset of the two ‘successful’ eighteen-century revolutions – the American and the French. The Boston events of March 1770 are compared with those of Paris in July 1789: in both cases ‘the people’ faced the soldiers, riots and politically generated violence led to bloodshed, but the subsequent actions of the insurgents showed a marked difference in understanding the sense of justice and the ways of promoting revolutionary discourse. Boston patriots relied on the English-based system of common law, were ready to condemn their own radicals and did not wish plebeian justice to prevail. They hoped for a perestroika, not for a revolution. The French – finding no culprits to condemn, and having as of yet no legal institutions of their own to use – were willing to disregard the legal continuity of the state and to search for more radical solutions.
O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar as migrações forçadas a partir das dinâmicas de organiza-ção e práticas de violência do paramilitarismo na Colômbia exemplificando um estudo de caso: o massacre no povoado de Caño Jabón – Meta (1998) e o testemunho de uma sobrevivente, uma migrante que fugiu da situação de violência. Através de quem vivenciou e sobreviveu a um mas-sacre e de suas memórias, descreveremos o conflito armado colombiano. Em termos teórico-metodológicos, baseamo-nos na corrente da micro-história italiana, realizando um esforço por utilizar os objetos microhistóricos mais além da questão local, como um espaço de demonstração e lugar de experimentação para a reelaboração e reformulação de hipóteses de ordem claramente macrohistórico e global. Para tanto, partimos de um acontecimento particular, de um testemu-nho, para compreender a violência e os massacres que envolvem a história de um país e as mi-grações forçadas decorrentes dessa situação de calamidade. Em diálogo com a narrativa em pri-meira pessoa, encontram-se outras fontes que utilizamos para contar essa história: notícias de jornais sobre o massacre de Caño Jabón e os paramilitares responsáveis pelo crime, sentenças da Fiscalía General de la Nación, sentenças da Corte Interamericana de Direitos Humanos e os tes-temunhos dos próprios paramilitares frente à justiça colombiana. Entendemos, portanto, que as dinâmicas de acumulação capitalista na Colômbia atuam de maneira particular como produtoras de uma ordem de controle social baseada no uso irrestrito da violência, provocando o desloca-mento de milhares de pessoas.
EN
The objective of this work is to present forced migrations due to the dynamics of paramilitary organization and violent practices in Colombia, exemplifying a case study: the massacre in Ca-ñoJabón - Meta village (1998) and the testimony of a survivor, a migrant who fled the violent situation. We will describe the Colombian armed conflict from the perspective of those who sur-vived the massacre and through their memories. In theoretical-methodological terms, we base ourselves in the current of Italian micro-history, making an effort to use micro-historical objects beyond the local question, as a space of demonstration and place of experimentation for the re-elaboration and reformulation of hypotheses of a clearly macro-historical and global order. To do so, we start with a particular event, a testimony, to understand the violence and the massacres that surround the history of a country and the forced migrations resulting from this situation of calamity. In dialogue with first-person narrative, we find other sources that we use to tell this story: newspaper reports on the Caño Jabón massacre and the paramilitaries responsible for the crime, judgments of the Attorney General's Office, judgments of the Inter- Human Rights and the testimony of the paramilitaries themselves before the Colombian justice system. We under-stand, therefore, that the dynamics of capitalist accumulation in Colombia act in a particular way as producers of an order of social control based on the unrestricted use of violence, causing the displacement of thousands of people.
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