Sadistic Pleasures

""Sadistic Pleasures... offers devastating insights into the dynamics of violence defined by a national hatred handed down over many generations, by distrust of one's neighbor, driven by the need for revenge. Reading this book highlights the chasms of violence to which nationalism leads and invites us to empathize with the victims. It also demonstrates the helplessness of human rights organizations in the face of perpetrators who are determined to dehumanize those at their mercy, to cause them lasting physical and psychological harm. This book prompts us to make an emphatic commitment to humanity and sincere adherence to the principles of international humanitarian law. Sadistic Pleasures is an indispensable source, valuable documentation from which to draw a sense of the inexplicable."" -Dr. Mihran Dabag, The Institute for Diaspora and Genocide Studies ""Arakelyan portrays the victims who were targeted because of their identity and not because of their personality: targeted because they were Armenians. These individual stories tell the reader about hatred of the Armenian ethnicity, that the victims were victimized not because of their goodness or malice but because they belonged to a certain group of people. They tell of the physical and psychological damage the victims suffered during their captivity. This publication is not only an important documentation of individual fates but also a source of evidence of international crimes committed before, during, and after the Forty-Four Day War in Artsakh in 2020."" -Dr. Gurgen Petrossian, LLM (Heidelberg), Senior Researcher, Head of International Criminal Law Research Group at Friedrich-Alexander Erlangen-Nuremberg University, Chairman of German-Armenian Lawyers' Association