Şiddet ve Tecavüz Tarihine Epigenetik Yaklaşım: Dün-Bugün
Good Fit
- Readers of harsh, polemical essays discussing the psychological and social roots of violence
- Anyone looking for a non-academic, author-positioned historical-psychological study with an abundance of archive and textbook references
Not a Fit
- Anyone who cannot at present carry descriptions of sexual violence, child abuse and genocide
- Those after an academic work using epigenetics in the scientific sense or a historically rigorous method
- Readers bothered by sweeping criticism of religious and ethnic groups
In the introduction Dreisbusch sets up his method like this: history «has always been written by the one-dimensional fascist dynamics of the powerful», so for the period of Muhammad the author says he relies on the earliest sources such as Ibn Ishaq's «Sira» rather than modern biographies. Citing Hegel's «the truth is the whole», he names the result of this «whole» genocide. The core thesis of the first section: violence and denialism are a systematic cycle already present in the subconscious, and speech is only its visible form in consciousness.
The section «The Epigenetic Beginning of Denialism in Human Psychology» opens with images of 1936–1937 newspaper reports (crime news) and states the author's aim: to convey the explanation both to readers inclined to scientific language and to people «shaped by fairy tales and lies». In these sentences the author doubts the reader's «capacity to understand» and opposes «whitewashing» the past: he writes that the sympathy of those who say «my grandmother was Armenian» should not be used to launder a problematic past.
The author takes the paedophilia debate around the German Green Party as an example (Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Alice Schwarzer) and asserts that sexuality is a «problematic mechanism» in society and that «social degeneration» is only at the level of discourse: a society that should be sensitive about children while its own weapons target thousands of children in other countries is inconsistent. In this part the text moves with free digressions from the thesis and jumps from one topic to another.
Then the author moves on to explaining «epigenetics»: psychological continuity over genetic codes and a list of hormones such as dopamine, adrenaline, testosterone, serotonin, oxytocin, oestrogen, vasopressin, pheromone and neurotrophin. This part cites German textbooks (Montag, Lohaus/Vierhaus) and is the most systematic place in the text; yet it tries to present hormones not as making violence «natural» but as its biological ground. At the end of the section the question «the egg or the chicken» and the DNA/RNA structure of the cell and the shaping of the «human epigenome» in the external environment are briefly explained.
- The book combines different topics (psychology, sociology, history, law, religion); each section reads like a separate essay
- The footnotes are many (including German-language sources), but the text is sometimes lost under the mass of references
- Epigenetics is used not in the scientific sense but as a broad metaphor for the continuation of behaviour from generation to generation
- Jumps from topic to topic and long lists of hormones slow the reading flow
A well-known study of the international reaction to genocides
A classic study of the social meaning of rape in history
A broad scientific view of the historical decline of violence
At the end of the part read, the author writes that life is built from the elements C, N, H, O, S, P, that a human arises from the union of egg and sperm, that DNA, RNA and the epigenome in the cell are shaped under the influence of the external environment, and connects this explanation with verse 6 of surah 86, «Tariq», of the Qur'an. The following chapters are outside the scope of this review.
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