A Century of Genocide

[Monroe, Dave]

Weitz, Eric D.  A Century of Genocide:
   Utopias of Race and Nation.
   Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2005.

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.

http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7491.html
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