Regime Treatments Research Articles

'"Un livre pour enfants'": Mickey au Camp de Gurs as Picture Book

'"Un livre pour enfants'":Mickey au Camp de Gurs as Picture Book Philip Smith (bio) The Gurs camp was the largest internment center in occupied France. Despite hunger, thirst, separation from loved ones, scarcity of even the most basic resources, an uncertain future, and widespread sickness, its occupants actively sought to maintain signs of culture within the camp, including hosting lectures, staging plays, performing music, and creating visual art. One work to have emerged from Gurs is Horst Rosenthal's Mickey au Camp de Gurs, which uses Disney's Mickey Mouse as a representative camp prisoner. Rosenthal's use of irony, gallows humor, and satirical wit is all the more remarkable for the fact that he produced the work while under such terrible conditions. Mickey au Camp de Gurs, this essay argues, uses a visual vocabulary borrowed from the picture book and the comic book to offer a double-voiced criticism of Vichy racial politics, highlighting not only the violence of the regime, but the ways in which it sought to legitimize that violence through bureaucracy and nationalist rhetoric. In criticism to date, Mickey au Camp de Gurs has often been associated with Art Spiegelman's Maus and, as such, has received significant attention from comics scholars. This essay instead reads Rosenthal's work as one that shares certain generic conventions with the picture book. It draws out Mickey au Camp de Gurs from the shadow of Maus to explore it using analytical tools from children's literature. It shows, first, that approaching Mickey au Camp de Gurs as a picture book yields readings beyond the codes found in comics, and, second, that Mickey au Camp de Gurs's primary target is not German anti-Semitism as in Maus, but rather the officiousness, xenophobia, violence, and hypocrisy of the Vichy regime. Mickey au Camp de Gurs, this essay argues, uses a form of double address to ridicule the Vichy regime's treatment of foreigners, and Jews in particular, as a danger to French ideals. In order to appreciate the import and context of Rosenthal's work, we must begin with his biography. Horst Rosenthal was born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1915. Faced with rising anti-Semitism and an uncertain future, he fled to France in 1933—the year Hitler [End Page 104] came into power. At first, he lived in Paris, on rue de Clignancourt and then rue Richomme. After war broke out, he was arrested in a round-up of French Jews and Jewish refugees from Germany. He was held first in Buffalo Stadium in Paris, then Marolles in Loir-et-Cher, Damigny, Dreux, Tence, and finally the camp in St. Cyprien. As he was moved between these camps, in 1940, northern France fell under German control. Most of France was occupied by the German military, and the remaining regions were administered by the Vichy regime in accordance with the terms laid out by Germany. The Vichy regime was, as Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton contend, "authoritarian, traditionalist, pious, and neutral in the war between Hitler and the Allies" (xvi). They were also nationalistic and deeply anti-Semitic, blaming immigration and foreign influence for, as they saw it, the degradation of French society. The persecution of Jews, Marrus and Paxton argue, was not purely a case of the Vichy government aligning their policies with those of the German occupiers, but also a project of recovering (in their eyes) French values by purging France of those considered a threat to national unity—the most demonized among these groups being communists and Jews. Their policy was not of extermination but of forced relocation or (in a minority of cases) assimilation with the goal of building a "homogeneous French nation" (xvii). A series of laws came into place, denaturalizing French Jews, closing Jewish businesses, barring Jews from certain occupations, and allowing for the internment of foreign Jews. The anti-Semitism that Rosenthal had sought to flee had found him in France. After the St. Cyprien camp was destroyed in a flood, Rosenthal was transferred to Gurs in late 1940 (Rosenberg 274). Gurs was the largest camp in occupied France. It had originally been intended to house refugees from the...

Healthcare Assistants: distributional losses as a consequence of NHS modernisation?

This paper examines the labour process of Healthcare Assistants (HCAs) at a National Health Service (NHS) hospital trust (TUH) in the context of the NHS modernisation agenda. It determines whether application of the modernisation agenda is formalised at TUH and considers how HCAs are affected. The paper is based upon 60 interviews with HCAs, structured questionnaires completed by all interview respondents, observation of HCAs and interviews with non‐clinical managers. The findings show that elements of the modernisation agenda are informally implemented at TUH to the detriment of HCAs. HCAs experience distributional losses in the form of intensification as nurses deflect duties to HCAs and insulate themselves from adverse effects. HCAs resist, using selective absence when pressures mount. They ameliorate losses by re‐internalising their work as a job with caring elements not a genuine caring role. They rationalise their altered behaviour towards patients by blaming the regime's treatment of them as a subordinated group.

Joining Our Grand Circus

The unusual play and production of Our Grand Circus by Iakovos Kambanellis placed history and myth squarely on the Greek stage of 1973. As a mix of dramatized history and historicized drama, the play offered up a critical mirror-image or answer-in-kind to the proliferating military parades, victory festivals, and historical reenactments sponsored by the regime of 1967–1974. The production won over mass audiences that warmly welcomed Kambanellis's presentation of alternative ways of telling and displaying Greek history. The playwright effectively created a leftist ideological genealogy out of historical vignettes of continuing hardship and persistent lack of freedom which became palpable on stage. Kambanellis and his lead actors used an abundance of comic, popular, and folk ingredients to signal, under the restrictions of censorship, that they understood and dared to show Greek history in a new, critical light from below. Especially after November of 1973, the past of their play often erupted into the present in its opposition to the military regime and the regime's treatment of history.

When the Subaltern Speak: Memory of Genocide in Colonial Libya 1929 to 1933

This essay challenges Eurocentric views of the 'benign' nature of Italian Fascism by exploring the genocide in Libya between 1929 and 1933. It looks at the ways in which this experience has generally been elided from historical accounts of Fascism that look only at Europe. In addition to detailing the brutality of the regime's treatment of the Libyan population, it also draws on oral history and folk poetry as a means of establishing the ongoing legacy of Italy's presence in Libya.

Does Trade Openness Promote Security Rights in Developing Countries? Examining the Liberal Perspective

As the global economy expands, there is an increasing opportunity for trade between diverse regime types. Simultaneously, human rights have become an increasingly important issue as regimes are faced with greater pressure to adopt democratic policies. As a result, it is common for contemporary western political rhetoric to advocate the use of trade policies in an attempt to deter human rights violations. Within the political science literature, the liberal position asserts that increased trade will lead to improved human rights practices. Critics of this view, on the other hand, argue that trade policies do not alter a regime's treatment of its citizens. The extent to which the level of trade in a country affects human rights remains a point of contention. This paper sets out to empirically test the liberal perspective regarding the effect of trade on human rights practices. A pooled cross-sectional time series analysis is utilized to investigate the effects of trade on human rights. We examine developing countries from 1976 to 1996. We find support for the liberal position, specifically that trade is negatively related to human rights violations.

The Vestey Cattle Enterprise and the Regime of Juan Vicente Gómez, 1908–1935

This article seeks to expand our understanding of the dynamics of the Gómez regime and of its treatment of foreign investment by examining its relationship with a large British enterprise engaged in ranching and frozen meat exports. The company and the regime established mutually beneficial relationships during the First World War, but when the tighter market conditions of the post-war period obliged the company to restrict its purchases of cattle from Gómez, he forced the company to end its exports. The regime's treatment of the Vestey enterprise thus offers a vivid contrast to its treatment of foreign oil companies.