Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe
What strands link the last century's bloody spasms of ethnic cleansing--from the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust to Bosnia and Kosovo? Stanford University historian Naimark argues ethnic cleansing is a profoundly twentieth-century phenomenon, not a product of "ancient hatreds." Its essential elements are a pseudoscientific racialist nationalism, the intrusive, homogenizing power of the modern state, and political and other elites that manipulate nationalist ideas and state machinery for their own purposes. Naimark supplies a comparative history of European ethnic cleansing: the 1915 Armenian genocide and the expulsion of the Greeks from Anatolia in the '20s; the early Nazi campaign against the Jews (1939-41); Stalin's forced deportation of the Chechens-Ingush and Crimean Tatars; the expulsion of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia in the mid-'40s; and Bosnia and Kosovo. The ugliness of ethnic cleansing--its violence and brutality, its misogyny and totality, its effort to eradicate every trace of "the other"--poses unique challenges to an international community reluctant to intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation state.Mary CarrollCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.