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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14312 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 672 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781586487690
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Goldhagen expands the controversial argument of his bestselling Hitler's Willing Executioners to indict the world in this relentless j'accuse. His comparative study surveys a panorama of modern atrocities, encompassing the Holocaust, the Soviet gulag, Cambodia, the Rwandan and Darfur genocides, and even Harry Truman, a mass murderer who should be put in the dock no less than Stalin [and] Pol Pot for the atomic bombing of Japan. Goldhagen's elaborate concept of eliminationism, complete with a two-dimensional matrix of Types of Excess Cruelty (is the action ordered or not? individually or collectively performed?) is similarly broad, comprising massacres along with nonlethal expulsions and repressions; in his hectoring, incantatory prose (Think of hearing your victim's screams as you hack at or 'cut' her and then cut her again, and again and again), it's less a theory than a nomenclature for cataloguing human devilry. As in Executioners, Goldhagen convincingly disparages bureaucratic banality of evil explanations of genocide and spotlights the ideologies of leaders who exploit ordinary citizens' hate-filled beliefs to instigate mass murder. It's not easy reading, but Goldhagen's vehemence and the sheer weight of horrors that he recounts move one's conscience. Photos. (Oct.)
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Goes Deep Into The Human Condition
This book goes way beyond talking about numbers. It looks deep down into the heart of darkness. There have been many genocides. Goldhagen explains that they all share common elements. I read this book and came to a deeper understanding of the planet and the people on it. Ultimately this book is about the human condition. What's in people's hearts. What's it like to mobilize others to kill, what's it like to be a killer, to be a victim, to be a bystander. The book is breathtaking in its scope. Panoramic. It opened my eyes.

This book makes the incomprehensible understandable -- that more people have died in genocides than in all military combat combined is breathtaking to think about, and is just the start. That huge, abstract number frames the book. To kill large numbers of people means large numbers of other people are mobilized to do the job. Goldhagen looks into the hands, the hearts and the minds of those who are pulling the triggers and holding the machetes. He examines the local and global conditions at the moment a man, a woman, or a child is felled. He makes it very real, very personal. At the very core of genocide is hate. The perpetrators hate their victims for reasons simple and complex, and the spark of killing is ignited time and again by a political decision, a political calculus, usually by a tyrant in one place or another to mobilize local hatreds for his own political purposes. The killing usually stops when all or substantially all of the victims are gone. The world watches. Time and again, it does nothing or not enough.

This is a hugely important book. Because by reading it, you realize, it's not the world that's watching anymore. It's us. It is each one of us looking, knowing, understanding that somewhere not just one child is being killed, but ultimately millions. Goldhagen points out that if a child were killed on a suburban street in the United States or in England or in France there would be outrage, and a call for action. Good people do not want killing like this to happen. Yet no action is taken when it is half a world away. Nearly ALL the children, the men and the women of the targeted group die.

This book is what happens in places far from our everyday lives. The sanctity of life. Of human suffering. Of the hate in people's hearts. Of the failure of good people and their institutions to protect the weak. After reading it, you can no longer say that you don't know, or don't understand. This book is a very important work that makes sense of the world. It looks evil in the eye and it makes you think.

Essential, but irksome
This book is essential reading for anyone interested in a comparative study of twentieth-century genocides. Goldhagen includes some mass murders of which I previously knew nothing such as the Germans' treatment of the Herero in South-West Africa and the British suppression of the Kikuyu in Kenya. All future analyses of genocide's causes and characteristics will have to reference this book. (Note: it is not necessary to have read Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust prior to reading this book.) Now for the bad news: 1) The book is mind-numbingly repetitious at times. Goldhagen must make the point over and over that the perpetrators are willing and eager participants in the slaughters. 2) He invents terms (eliminationism for genocide; Political Islam for Islamo-fascism; genocide bomber for suicide bomber) that do not add much clarity to his arguments. 3) His utter contempt for the work of Milgram and Zimbardo reeks of unprofessional axe-grinding. 4) He condemns Harry Truman as a mass murderer (for the atomic bombs) but includes not a word about the Vietnam War. 5) The chapter on Political Islam assumes a unity among Sunni, Shia, Wahabbi, etc. that exists only in the minds of neo-cons. 6) The chapter on What We Can Do proposes actions that are either utterly unrealistic or utterly horrifying. See The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil for another angle on explaining perpetrators' behavior. See For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence for an exploration of the connection between child-rearing and cruelty.

Connects All The Dots
I heard this book covers a lot of ground when it comes to genocide. It does, for sure. I was surprised though, but I shouldn't have been, that thematically, it's bigger than that. It goes deep into the human psyche and the way nations behave towards its citizens and each other.

I've read a bit on the subject, and am something of an activist. I've come across many fine books about genocide. In general, they are very specific in the attention they give. Be it Bosnia, Cambodia, Armenia, or any of the other places or peoples that genocide has affected. It's quite remarkable that in this one volume, Goldhagen has connected all the dots. He looks at genocide as a phenomenon. Played out in one venue or another, they share common characteristics. Most important of all for all of us to remember is that genocide as a human enterprise can be understood, and can be explained. It is a hate crime. The UN calls it a crime against humanity. That it is. But when it comes to the killing, it's personal. It is brought about because one group of people hates another group of people so much -- that mass murder seems to the perpetrators logical and just, and the killing is done under the auspices of a government, usually a dictator. Unfortunately we read and write books about it, and we have not done a good job of saving people's lives.

I'd love for all good people to read this book. Goldhagen does a brilliant job. He's arranged it thematically. You don't plod from one country to the next. You visit the big picture issues. Each chapter has a theme: "Why They Begin", "How They are Implemented", "Why The Perpetrators Act", "Why They End", "Prologue For The Future". By the end of it you understand a lot about genocide, a lot about human nature and a lot about world affairs.

He leaves no stone unturned. It's genocide from A to Z. Even though I have read many books on the subject, this book helped me fill in the blanks, and make sense of it all. Because it's organized thematically, I didn't even have to read it in order. I read it one theme at a time, and the ones I wanted to cogitate on I re-read. This is a really great book.