Abstract
There has been such a proliferation of terms relating to the arbitrary termination of life — including the resurrection of old words such as regicide and the manufacture of new terms such as politicide and democide — that the growing public awareness of genocide threatens to be side-tracked in this cascade of academic nuances. My purpose here is first, to concentrate on the centrality of genocide in understanding the violence of the twentieth century; second, to explain how genocide is a function of political decision-making; and third, critically to review the idea that modernity in itself serves as the source of genocide.
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Notes
Irving Louis Horowitz, Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power, 3rd, augmented edn ( New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 1980 ).
R. J. Rummel, ‘Deadlier Than War’, Institute of Public Affairs Review 41, no. 2 (1985): 24–30; and idem., same author, Death by Government ( New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 1994 ).
While there has been a substantial body of writings on the Holocaust and genocide in general from the social science community, comparatively little has been written on how the structure of social scientific work changes as a result of such fundamental processes of genocidal systems in the technological structures of industrial societies. One such effort is Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Sociology after the Holocaust’, British Journal of Sociology 39, no. 4 (1988): 469–97.
Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986 ).
And for a more detailed and comprehensive effort, see Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany, 1900–1945 ( New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 ).
Edward F. Mickolus, Todd Saddler and Jean M. Murdock, International Terrorism in the 1980s: a Chronology of Events (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989 ) vol. 1: 1980–3.
Irving Louis Horowitz, ‘Texture of Terrorism: Socialization, Routinization and Integration’, in Roberta Sigal, ed., Political Learning in Adulthood: Sourcebook of Theory and Research ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989 ), pp. 286–314.
A political variant of the modernist hypothesis on the Holocaust is that ‘it was part and parcel of a syncretistic ideology combining key tenets of conservatism, reaction and fascism’. While such a view, most ably propounded by Arno Mayer in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The ‘Final Solution’ in History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), p. 449, has a prima facie attractiveness, it tends to wash out the specific role of the Jews in history long before there was a Final Solution; the uses of anti-Semitism and racism by communist no less than fascist regimes; and finally, the existence of fascist regimes that did not engage in the final solution. These themes are dealt with in Taking Lives.
Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews: 1933–1945 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975 ), pp. 150–66.
Iwona Irwin Zarecka, Neutralizing Memory: the Jew in Contemporary Poland (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction, 1988)
and Aaron Hass, The Aftermath: Living with the Holocaust ( New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 ).
Vahakn N. Dadrian, ‘The Role of Turkish Physicians in the World War I Genocide of Armenians’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1, no. 2 (1986): 169–92.
Dan Jacobs, The Brutality of Nations (New York: Knopf, 1987). For a recent update on the conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis, see ‘Sin and Confession in Rwanda’, The Economist (14 January 1995): 53.
Vahakn N. Dadrian, ‘The Naim—Andonian Documents on the World War I Destruction of Ottoman Armenians: the Anatomy of a Genocide’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 18, no. 3 (1986): 311–59.
Vera B. Saidpour, ‘Iraq Attacks to Destroy the Kurds’, The Institute for the Study of Genocide Newsletter 1, no. 2 (1988): 2–11.
René Lemarchand, Selective Genocide in Burundi (London: Minority Rights Group 1974).
For a more recent and no less poignant account see Alain Destexhe, ‘The Third Genocide’, Foreign Policy 97 (1994–5): 3–17.
Ted Robert Gurr, ‘Persisting Patterns of Repression and Rebellion: Foundations for a General Theory of Political Coercion’, in Margaret P. Karns, ed., Persistent Patterns and Emergent Structures in a Warring Century, ( New York: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1988 ), pp. 149–68.
Raul Hilberg, ‘German Railroads/Jewish Souls’, Society 14, no. 2 (1976): 60–74.
Jane Goodall, ‘A Plea for Chimps’, The New York Times Magazine(17 May 1987): 108–120. See also her The Chimpanzees of Gombe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986).
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust 2nd edn (London and New York: Cornell University Press, 1991), and for a summary of the argument in this book, see ‘Assimilation and Enlightenment’, Society 27, no. 6 (1990): 71–81.
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© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Horowitz, I.L. (1999). Science, Modernity and Authorized Terror: Reconsidering The Genocidal State. In: Chorbajian, L., Shirinian, G. (eds) Studies in Comparative Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27348-5_2
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