The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective

ISBN-13: 9780521527507 / Angielski / Miękka / 2003 / 408 str.

Robert Gellately

Opis

Focusing on the twentieth century, this collection of essays by leading international experts offers an up-to-date, comprehensive history and analysis of multiple cases of genocide and genocidal acts. The book contains studies of the Armenian genocide; the victims of Stalinist terror; the Holocaust; and Imperial Japan. Contributors explore colonialism and address the fate of the indigenous peoples in Africa, North America, and Australia. In addition, extensive coverage of the post-1945 period includes the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia, Bali, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, East Timor, and Guatemala. Robert Gellately is Professor and Strassler Family Chair for the Study of Holocaust History at Clark University, where he teaches a variety of courses in modern German history, modern European history and the history of the Holocaust with a concentration on the study of Nazi Germany and the Gestapo. In Backing Hitler (Oxford, 2001), Gellately uses new evidence to demolish long-held beliefs about what ordinary Germans knew of the concentration camps. His internationally acclaimed book, The Gestapo and German Society (Oxford, 1990) challenges conventional concepts of the Gestapo and daily life in Nazi Germany. He has won numerous fellowships, and awards, most recently from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. Ben Kiernan is A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University and Convenor of the Yale East Timor Project. Kiernan is the author of The Pol Pot Regime (Yale, 1996), How Pol Pot Came to Power (Verso Books, 1985) and three other works and over a hundred scholarly articles on Southeast Asia and the history of genocide. Choice called him "the most knowledgeable observer of Cambodia anywhere in the Western world." Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge "indicted" and then "sentenced" him as an "arch war criminal." Kiernan is a member of the Editorial Boards of Human Rights Review, the Journal of Human Rights, and the Journal of Genocide Research. He is currently writing a global history of genocide since 1500.

Recenzje

'… useful comments on general aspects of genocide and near genocide: an obsession with purity and pollution on the part of the persecutors, the holding of power by military groups who are unrestrained by civilian politicians or public opinion, revolutionary governments transforming society, and peasantism, the idealization of the rooted cultivator of the soil.' Morality

Spis treści

1. Introduction Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan; Part I. Genocide and Modernity: 2. Twentieth century genocides: underlying ideological themes from Armenia to East Timor Ben Kiernan; 3. The modernity of genocides: war, race, and revolution in the twentieth century Eric D. Weitz; 4. Seeking the roots of modern genocide: on the macro- and micro-history of mass murder Omer Bartov; 5. Genocide and the body politic in the time of modernity Marie Fleming; Part II: Indigenous Peoples and Colonial Issues: 6. Indigenous peoples genocide: rhetoric of human rights Elazar Barkan; 7. Military culture and the production of 'final solutions' in the colonies: the example of Wilhelminian Germany Isabel V. Hull; 8. East Timor: counter-insurgency and genocide John G. Taylor; Part III. The Era of the Two World Wars: 9. Under cover of war: the Armenian genocide in the context of total war Jay Winter; 10. The mechanism of a mass crime: the 'great terror' in the Soviet Union, 1937–1938 Nicolas Werth; 11. The third reich, the Holocaust and visions of serial genocide Robert Gellately; 12. Reflections on modern Japanese history in the context of the concept of 'genocide' Gavan McCormack; Part IV. Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1945: 13. 'When the world turned to chaos': 1965 and its aftermath in Bali, Indonesia Leslie Dwyer and Degung Santikarma; 14. Genocide in Cambodia and Ethiopia Edward Kissi; 15. Modern genocide in Rwanda: ideology, revolution, war, and mass murder in an African state Robert Melson; 16. History, motive, law, intent: combining historical and legal methods in understanding Guatemala's 1981–1983 genocide Greg Grandin; 17. Analysis of a mass crime: ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, 1991–1999 Jacques Semelin; Part V. Conclusions: 18. The specter of genocide Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan.