The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective [Paperback]

Robert Gellately (Editor), Ben Kiernan (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 7, 2003 | ISBN-10: 0521527503 | ISBN-13: 978-0521527507

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While this is definitely a collection of distinguished scholars writing for other scholars, the editors, historians at Clark and Yale respectively, bring together a cogent group of perspectives on the history and causes of mass murder. The University of Minnesota's Eric Weitz makes a persuasive case that the peculiar 20th-century combination of mass society, technology and racist ideologies has made genocide so much easier than in previous centuries that it has become both more pervasive and more destructive, looking to those who engage in it as an easy way out. "Genocides of Indigenous People," by Claremont Graduate University's Elazar Barkan contains many insights on the question of inherited collective guilt, as well as good historical summaries. Of the less theoretical historical narratives, some cover well-trodden ground but with clarity and vigor, including studies of the Holocaust and Yugoslavia. Others present examples of genocide not commonly known, such as the Indonesian slaughter of the population of East Timor and the U.S.-backed government of Guatemala's war against its Mayan population. Particular distinction belongs to the summary of Rwanda, extraordinarily informative for its brevity. In both introduction and afterword, the editors emphasize the necessity of broad but informed definitions of genocide as essential in raising barriers against it.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"This book is a starting point for those who wish to learn more about the complexities of the genocide debate." -Military Review

"...extraordinarily informative...Recommended as a companion to classic titles like Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem." -Publishers Weekly

"Kiernan and Gellately have assembled a stellar group of academics to produce a first-rate book usefully balanced between theory and case studies and focusing on the 55 years since the UN genocide convention was adopted.... Highly recommended." -Choice

"This volume will be invaluable for scholars of all disciplines who seek to gain a greater comprehension of what, on the surface, seems incomprehensible." ,i>An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies Glenn Sharfman, Hiram College

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (July 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521527503
• ISBN-13: 978-0521527507
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #691,885 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strong collection of useful essays, October 24, 2007

By 

C. R. Went (Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Paperback)

This collection of essays has a wide focus and all are useful and clear in their discussions. The comparative essay on Cambodia and Egypt is an interesting approach. The essays are focussed not only on 20th century genocides but also colonial history and its resulting mass killings.

14 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good book about genocide, bad book about individual genocides, January 13, 2006

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J. Harding (Houston, Texas United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Paperback)

If you are interested in the study of genocide and theories of how a genocidal regime may rationalize its policies, then this book is a good choice for you. It's chock full of scholarly articles on theories concerning these matters, as well as how genocide should be defined, and other such intellectual material. If you're more interested in learning the details of individual genocides: how they were carried out, in-depth histories and case studies, then this is book will provide nothing for you to sink your teeth into. The articles within it frequently reference statistics from actual genocides and compare various aspects of different genocidal regimes, but never make any attempt to go beneath the surface. You'll learn nothing new from this book about any genocide that you couldn't have learned from just doing a Google search. Even the articles that are about specific events, like the killings in Guatemala, are mostly just full of heady social theory with statistics and facts concerning Guatemala as a backdrop. They never go into the specifics of how the killings were carried out, or specific incidents, or anything that might breathe just a little bit of life and humanity into the stuffy academic monologue. You may want to read this book if you're preparing to write a research paper on genocide, but it's definitely not something most people would read for pleasure.

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but incomplete, February 10, 2008

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Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Paperback)

This is a very fine collection of essays that examine genocide from the Holocaust to Stalin's Russia to East Timor. It tries to also examine how indigenous people have been subject to genocide, such as the Herrero in Southern Africa and how cultures that turned genocide had a history of such exclusion in their past, for instance in Japan.

THis is interesting and the essays show many statistics. But in this one has to wonder how exactly the authors are judging what a genocide is. For instance the casualties in East Timor were high over the years but not in any one year and in Yugoslavia the number of victims in Albania was very small and the number of victims in the conflict was equal on both sides.

This is always the problem books on genocide have: they don't know what to include. Why does this book call what has happaned in Ethiopia a genocide and compare it to Cambodia. In Cambodia, which was a genocide, there was not merely a genocide of minorities such as the Chinese, Vietnamese and Chams, but the majority of victims were actually Cambodian. Thus it is a very problematic subject and this doesn't provide a solution.

Seth J. Frantzman