"Harry Truman, the thirty-third president of the United States, was a mass murderer." With these scorching words, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen begins his global tour of eliminationism, genocide, and other forms of mass slaughter. By exploring the nature and mechanism of these brutal acts, Worse than War exposes them as intended political acts, not merely rare aberrations. No stranger to controversy, the man who wrote Hitler's Willing Executioners approaches his subject with heartening seriousness, turning what could be a mere historical survey into a work of original analysis.
James Traub
…[a] magisterial and profoundly disturbing "natural history" of mass murder…As he did in his celebrated and controversial Hitler's Willing Executioners, Goldhagen insists that even the worst atrocities originate with, and are then propelled by, a series of quite conscious calculations by followers as much as by leaders. "We must stop detaching mass elimination and its mass-murder variant from our understanding of politics," Goldhagen writes. "Eliminationist politics, like the politics of war, is a politics of purposive acts to achieve political outcomes, often of ultimate ends and often of desired power redistribution." Worse Than War is, in effect, "Everyone's Willing Executioners."
—The New York Times
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.)
Kirkus Reviews
Grisly specifics share space with an insightful, often startling analysis of why mass murder occurs and how to stop it. Historian and journalist Goldhagen (Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, 1996) considers genocide the end point of eliminationism, a set of tactics that a dominant group uses against a detested minority. Eliminationism begins with repression (ghettos, apartheid, segregation) and moves on to transformation (obliterating culture, forbidding a minority's language, forcible religious conversion) and expulsion (deportation, "resettlement," ethnic cleansing). The author maintains that eliminationism never turns to genocide through mass hysteria, blind obedience or war. It is always a political decision requiring considerable planning, he writes, and "there is no mass murder of elimination that I know that could not have been avoided had one person or a few people decided to do otherwise, which they easily could have done." Most disturbing, once the political decision occurs, the slaughter proceeds with almost universal approval. Ordinary police, soldiers and civilians kill their victims face to face-this includes the Holocaust, despite the gruesome Nazi ovens-often preceded by humiliation, torture and mutilation. Goldhagen assembles interviews with perpetrators from Rwanda to Serbia to Argentina to Cambodia. All express regret, but the author points out that while they were killing all believed they were performing a necessary patriotic duty. The author makes a convincing case that preventing genocide requires only a modest effort by leaders of democratic nations and the United Nations, both of which are criminally negligent. The UN facilitatesgenocide by trumpeting its rule of noninterference in other nations' affairs. Our leaders are well informed of ongoing genocides but refuse to act unless pushed by public opinion-sadly, the media generally avoids the subject-or convinced that national interest is threatened. A significant achievement-rarely encouraging, but intensely researched and wholly original. Agent: Esther Newberg/ICM
From the Publisher
"[A] magisterial and profoundly disturbing 'natural history' of mass murder." ---The New York Times
