A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation
University of Minnesota history professor Weitz offers a sobering comparative study of four of the past century's genocidal regimes: Stalin's Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Cambodia under Pol Pot and Bosnia in the 1990s. (While acknowledging that the Holocaust was unprecedented, Weitz explicitly rejects the notion that it was "unique" and incomparable to other genocides.) Weitz begins with a tightly argued account of how Enlightenment thought, together with 19th-century romanticism's nostalgia for an imagined and innocent past, combined to provide the intellectual underpinning for the growth of nationalism and racism, which provided the 20th-century engine for state-organized genocide. Weitz then explores the historical precedents in each country, providing context for a comparison of how each government accomplished its horrific goals. There is much new in Weitz's analysis and his isolation of the common mechanisms of state-sponsored genocide is an invaluable contribution to the literature on the subject, such as his discussion of the prevalence of one-on-one brutality in the cases of Serbian, Nazi and Cambodian atrocities. The descriptions of the mechanisms for the purges, specifically how each government made large sections of their population complicit in the crimes, is chilling. Despite its analytical and reasoned approach, this work cannot be read without feeling outrage, despair and horror. Weitz's work raises profound questions about the human capacity for violence.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.