Why did the twentieth century witness unprecedented organized genocide?
Can we learn why genocide is perpetrated by comparing different cases of
genocide? Is the Holocaust unique, or does it share causes and features
with other cases of state-sponsored mass murder? Can genocide be
prevented?
Blending gripping narrative with trenchant analysis, Eric Weitz
investigates four of the twentieth century's major eruptions of
genocide: the Soviet Union under Stalin, Nazi Germany, Cambodia under
the Khmer Rouge, and the former Yugoslavia. Drawing on historical
sources as well as trial records, memoirs, novels, and poems, Weitz
explains the prevalence of genocide in the twentieth century--and shows
how and why it became so systematic and deadly.
Weitz depicts the searing brutality of each genocide and traces its
origins back to those most powerful categories of the modern world: race
and nation. He demonstrates how, in each of the cases, a strong state
pursuing utopia promoted a particular mix of extreme national and racial
ideologies. In moments of intense crisis, these states targeted certain
national and racial groups, believing that only the annihilation of
these "enemies" would enable the dominant group to flourish. And in each
instance, large segments of the population were enticed to join in the
often ritualistic actions that destroyed their neighbors.
This book offers some of the most absorbing accounts ever written of the
population purges forever associated with the names Stalin, Hitler, Pol
Pot, and Milosevic. A controversial and richly textured comparison of
these four modern cases, it identifies the social and political forces
that produce genocide.
