Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity

by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Overview

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's books are events. They stir passionate public debate among political and civic leaders, scholars, and the general public because they compel people to rethink the most powerful conventional wisdoms and stubborn moral problems of the day. Worse Than War gets to the heart of the phenomenon, genocide, that has caused more deaths in the modern world than military conflict. In doing so, it challenges fundamental things we thought we knew about human beings, society, and politics.

Drawing on extensive field work and research from around the world, Goldhagen explores the anatomy of genocide — explaining why genocides begin, are sustained, and end; why societies support them, why they happen so frequently and how the international community should and can successfully stop them.

As a great book should, Worse than War seeks to change the way we think and to offer new possibilities for a better world. It tells us how we might at last begin to eradicate this greatest scourge of humankind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781586489007
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	10/05/2010
Pages:	672
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a former professor at Harvard University, is the author of the #1 international bestseller Hitler's Willing Executioners, A Moral Reckoning, and Worse than War. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, New Republic, and newspapers around the world.

Table of Contents

Preface: The Choice xi

Introduction: Clarifying the Issues

Chapter 1 Eliminationism, Not Genocide 3

Human Beings and Mass Slaughter 8

Eliminationism 14

The Modern State, Transformative Power 21

The Problems Defined 25

Chapter 2 Worse than War: Our Age of Suffering 33

Our Age's Slaughters 36

Varieties of Eliminationist Assaults 43

The Scope of Eliminationist Assaults 50

Part I Explaining Eliminationist Assaults

Chapter 3 Why They Begin 59

Four Questions and Three Perspectives 63

A New Perspective 68

The Centrality of Political Leaders 74

Chapter 4 How They Are Implemented 85

The Perpetrators 91

Eliminationist Institutions 102

Means and Methods 120

The Sympathies of Others and the Problem of Resistance 130

Transformative Politics, Transformative Results 137

Chapter 5 Why the Perpetrators Act 145

Why Do the Killers Kill? 148

The Perpetrators' Other Actions 168

The Perpetrators' Beliefs and How They Come to Hold Them 194

From Beliefs to Action 216

Chapter 6 Why They End 233

The Genocide Convention 235

The International Political Environment's Crucial Context 241

How Eliminationist Assaults End 252

Part II Modern Eliminationist Politics

Chapter 7 Sources and Patterns 265

Modernity and Eliminationist Politics 274

Four Kinds of Eliminationist Assaults 289

Noneliminationist Outcomes 293

The Crucial Character of Perpetrators' Beliefs 297

Chapter 8 Thinking and Acting 309

Discourse and the Dissemination of Eliminationist Beliefs 311

Dehumanization and Demonization 319

Dealing with Demons 330

From Discourse to Action 342

Chapter 9 Actual Minds, Actual Worlds 361

Eliminationist Worlds 364

CommunalWorlds 381

Camp Worlds 401

Personal Worlds 429

Actual Worlds 478

Part III Changing the Future

Chapter 10 Prologue to the Future 485

The New Threats 490

Chapter 11 What We Can Do 515

The Need for a Powerful Anti-Eliminationist Discourse 517

The International Community's Promise and Pathologies 532

Stopping Eliminationist Politics 558

Notes 599

Credits 629

Thoughts and Thanks 631

Index 637

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"[A] magisterial and profoundly disturbing 'natural history' of mass murder." —-The New York Times

Editorial Reviews

"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.

…[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

James Traub

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.)

Publishers Weekly

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

Kirkus Reviews

"[A] magisterial and profoundly disturbing 'natural history' of mass murder." ---The New York Times

From the Publisher