Customer Reviews

Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust

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Vessels of Evil requires the reader to fully develop and rationalize the concepts of obligation and duty as they relate to societal interaction. The book transcends the traditional struggle between right and wrong in society to focus attention on the real debate - what is expected of an individual vs. what would be considered merely "a nice thing for one to do." The result is a resource for formulating concise, detailed, and analytical justifications for one's views.

Vessels of Evil examines how ordinary people come to do evil. The book uses two enormous and well-documented cases in point-- American slavery and the Holocaust. (A few clueless individuals have objected to "comparisons" between the two cases. Had they actually read the book, they would appreciate the author's clear and extensive disclaimer that these are two outstanding cases in which many ordinary people came to do evil, and that no other similarity between the two cases is expressed or implied. One can only role one's eyes and shrug upon reading such misguided reviews.)
Prof. Thomas's writing is lucid and graceful, and I found his reasoning and conclusions generally compelling. It is a short book, but (as my son remarked on his first experience with a serious work of philosophy) "you have to read every word." It does not reward skimming.

One simple bit of data disproves this book. No one has ever claimed that the population of Africa decreased due to the depredations of the slave trade, but the population of Ireland was 8,000,000 in 1848, and is now just over 4,000,000. That is genocide. The slave trade was a brutal, callous, inhuman commercial transaction, that eventually created a vital new population in a New World.

Thomas is dealing with two completely different topics. He professes to be interested in bringing out the structural differences between Am, Slavery and the Holocaust and the differences of these events in shaping the victims of both. But a comparison of these two institutions is absurd. How can one compare an institution of many hundreds of years to another that lasted 7? The aims were so different, their places in time - not to mention the obviousness of location - that a comparison is ludicrious. He makes no compelling argument on why they should be viewed together and admittedly has no new insights on these subjects. His historical sources are also lacking, noting virtually no first hand accounts. A truly awful book.