A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation

Overview

"In his well-documented comparative account of five mass killings in the twentieth century, Eric Weitz has uniquely perceived the ideological connections and analogous revolutionary crises that resulted in 'a century of genocide.' Not only does his book demonstrate that human rights safeguards are indispensable for preventing human rights disasters, but it will help identify early warnings of future crimes against humanity."--David Weissbrodt, David Weissbrodt, coauthor of International Human Rights and Member, United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights

"This ambitious and broad-ranging study of genocide in the twentieth century is one of the most illuminating works of comparative history to appear in recent years. It shows in graphic and sometimes gut-wrenching detail how a vicious combination of racist ideology, power hungry leadership, and a popular willingness to participate in mass murder can result in the most appalling crimes against humanity. We can hope to prevent genocide only if we understand it, and this book is a major contribution to such an awareness."--George M. Fredrickson, author of Racism: A Short History

"This is a passionate, persuasive, and elegantly argued study of the genocidal policies and behavior of four twentieth-century regimes that are rarely systematically compared."--David Chandler, author of Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot

"Weitz brings a wealth of learning and understanding to the problem of genocide. His book is sensible and even-handed all the way through, breaking free of staid categories of analysis. Innovative and refreshing in tone, it traces its devastating story right down to the local level, where, after all, genocide happens."--Robert Gellately, author of Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany

"Eric Weitz's Century of Genocide is a model of comparative history. Brilliantly organized around the themes of race and nation, it keenly analyzes both the similarities and differences between the genocidal regimes of Hitler's Germany and Pol Pot's Cambodia and the genocidal actions of Stalin's Soviet Union and Milosevic's Greater Serbia."--Christopher Browning, author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland

Editorial Reviews

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.

Author Information

Bio of Eric D. Weitz

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Additional Info

Imprint

Princeton University Press

Filesize

3.62 MB

Number of Pages

368

eBook ISBN

9781400825509