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

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 6, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
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Review

Kirkus Reviews
“Grisly specifics share space with an insightful, often startling analysis of why mass murder occurs and how to stop it. A significant achievement…intensely researched and wholly original.”

New York Times Book Review
“[A] magisterial and profoundly disturbing ‘natural history’ of mass murder…We place the Holocaust outside of history; Goldhagen embeds it in the larger, recurring pattern of genocidal killing…Worse Than War is, in effect, Everyone’s Willing Executioners.…Belief matters; choices matter. This is Goldhagen’s wake-up call…So far, the United Nations has done virtually nothing to put [some] fine principles into action. Until it does, those few states that are committed to preventing mass murder may have to act without international approval. Worse Than War reminds us of the imperative to act, and of the terrible cost of our failure to prevent the mass murders of the past century.”

Worse than War is essential reading whether one is a human rights activist, a policy wonk, or a member of the general public... a monumental work of originality that offers interesting insights and prescriptions on nearly every page. --Thane Rosenbaum in Huffington Post

"Goldhagen is a trenchant writer and it is not his way to beat about the bush.  What no one can deny him is the range and depth of his knowledge or the courage involved in many of his judgments... his book is masterful." --Daily Telegraph (UK)

"Worse Than War makes a compelling and brave argument that our world must heed if we are to see sanity restored.... Powerfully original.... Goldhagen is magnificent... and... inspiring..."-Mail on Sunday (UK)

--Kirkus Best Books of the Year

Kirkus Reviews
“Grisly specifics share space with an insightful, often startling analysis of why mass murder occurs and how to stop it. A significant achievement…intensely researched and wholly original.”

New York Times Book Review
“[A] magisterial and profoundly disturbing ‘natural history’ of mass murder…We place the Holocaust outside of history; Goldhagen embeds it in the larger, recurring pattern of genocidal killing…Worse Than War is, in effect, Everyone’s Willing Executioners.…Belief matters; choices matter. This is Goldhagen’s wake-up call…So far, the United Nations has done virtually nothing to put [some] fine principles into action. Until it does, those few states that are committed to preventing mass murder may have to act without international approval. Worse Than War reminds us of the imperative to act, and of the terrible cost of our failure to prevent the mass murders of the past century.”

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 672 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs; 1 edition (October 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586487698
• ISBN-13: 978-1586487690
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #475,947 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

When in 1996 I published Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, I was transformed unexpectedly, and almost instantly, into the author of a #1 international bestseller of a book published in 15 languages, and the unwitting progenitor of an impassioned international "Goldhagen Debate," which has since become a fixed part of the western, and especially the German, cultural landscape. The book, about the perpetrators of the Holocaust and ordinary Germans' role in it, told buried truths about the tens upon tens of thousands who carried out Hitler's plan to exterminate the Jews: these perpetrators were willing executioners, willing because they were antisemites who believed that exterminating Jews was right and necessary. Survivors of the Holocaust -- the people who learned of the perpetrators' beliefs firsthand from the perpetrators themselves -- heartily applauded the book, as did younger Germans and people elsewhere who hankered for these tabooed subjects to be finally discussed openly, even as some others clung to various untenable positions with the effect of denying the humanity of the killers and of exonerating them. Immediately, upon its publication, its contributions were recognized. The New York Times wrote: "Masterly...One of those rare new works that merit the appellation landmark." The Philadelphia Inquirer judged it: "The most important book ever published about the Holocaust...Eloquently written, meticulously documented, impassioned...A model of moral and scholarly integrity." It was honored as a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and Time named it one of the two best non-fiction books of the year. In country after country, similar views and admiration greeted Hitler's Willing Executioners -- as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany conveyed with its summation of the effect of the publication of Hitler's Willing Executioners, which it endorsed as "The most spectacular nonfiction success of this year." With time, as a flood of scholarly studies have come out which have substantiated Hitler's Willing Executioners' conclusions, more and more who have read the book's vast amount of new research and evidence and its challenging perspectives have come to appreciate and accept what the Holocaust's survivors had known all along. And so, a front page article in the New York Times on 15 October 2010 announced that the revolution in understanding that Hitler's Willing Executioners produced about the Holocaust has unequivocally become, just fifteen years after the book's publication, the consensus view in Germany. The establishment German Historical Museum in Berlin has opened a major exhibition that confirms and builds upon the conclusions of Hitler's Willing Executioners: "This exhibition is about Hitler and the Germans -- meaning the social and political and individual processes by which much of the German people became enablers, colluders, co-criminals in the Holocaust," said the authoritative Constanze Stelzenmüller, until recently the director of the German Marshall Fund Berlin Office. "That this was so is now a mainstream view, rejected only by a small minority of very elderly and deluded people, or the German extreme right-wing fringe. But it took us a while to get there."

Thus I became a public intellectual, the startling winner of Germany's prestigious Democracy Prize (there have been only six since it was established) awarded only when someone earns it (the previous winner, seven years earlier, was the East Germany democracy movement), with a debate forever a suffix to my name. I have always been determined to write and speak forthrightly about important topics-topics about which many want to hear, even if many others desperately do not want the truth to be heard. Whether it is about Nazism and the Holocaust, powerful institutions' moral duties, or the dangers of Political Islam, I have never held my tongue out of fear of what people, including powerful people, might say.

My most recent project, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity, has issued both in a book (which is being published already in eight languages) and a feature length documentary (the first ever to focus on the phenomenon of genocide itself) that had its national broadcast premiere on PBS on April 14. Worse Than War tells people what I have learned about genocides and genocide in my three decades of studying them, explaining not just how to understand their many complex facets, but also how to stop the killing. As Hitler's Willing Executioners did for the Holocaust, Worse Than War poses a powerful challenge to deeply entrenched myths about why genocides happen. It fundamentally reconfigures our understanding of genocide as a global phenomenon and reconceptualizes it as one aspect of a more fundamental form of politics that can be called "eliminationism." I am gratified that Worse Than War, more than a decade in the writing, has already garnered enormous praise, with words such as "magisterial," "pathbreaking," "masterful," "monumental," and "wholly convincing" gracing the reviews.

I hope that you choose to have a look at it. Whether or not you end up agreeing with every conclusion and proposal in Worse Than War, the book and the film offer a plethora of new information and perspectives not just on genocide or eliminationism but on critical aspects of humanity and modernity, society and politics. I hope to rouse your intellect and conscience, even if I at the same time challenge your views about the most foundational matters of politics, society, and human nature.

For more information, please visit http://goldhagen.com/.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Essential, but irksome, November 30, 2009

By 

R. Schwenk "progressive" (Rockville, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (Hardcover)

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in a comparative study of twentieth-century genocides. Goldhagen includes some mass murders of which I previously knew nothing such as the Germans' treatment of the Herero in South-West Africa and the British suppression of the Kikuyu in Kenya. All future analyses of genocide's causes and characteristics will have to reference this book. (Note: it is not necessary to have read Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust prior to reading this book.) Now for the bad news: 1) The book is mind-numbingly repetitious at times. Goldhagen must make the point over and over that the perpetrators are willing and eager participants in the slaughters. 2) He invents terms (eliminationism for genocide; Political Islam for Islamo-fascism; genocide bomber for suicide bomber) that do not add much clarity to his arguments. 3) His utter contempt for the work of Milgram and Zimbardo reeks of unprofessional axe-grinding. 4) He condemns Harry Truman as a mass murderer (for the atomic bombs) but includes not a word about the Vietnam War. 5) The chapter on Political Islam assumes a unity among Sunni, Shia, Wahabbi, etc. that exists only in the minds of neo-cons. 6) The chapter on What We Can Do proposes actions that are either utterly unrealistic or utterly horrifying. See The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil for another angle on explaining perpetrators' behavior. See For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence for an exploration of the connection between child-rearing and cruelty.

40 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Goes Deep Into The Human Condition, October 14, 2009

By 

David Campbell - See all my reviews

This review is from: Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (Hardcover)

This book goes way beyond talking about numbers. It looks deep down into the heart of darkness. There have been many genocides. Goldhagen explains that they all share common elements. I read this book and came to a deeper understanding of the planet and the people on it. Ultimately this book is about the human condition. What's in people's hearts. What's it like to mobilize others to kill, what's it like to be a killer, to be a victim, to be a bystander. The book is breathtaking in its scope. Panoramic. It opened my eyes.

This book makes the incomprehensible understandable -- that more people have died in genocides than in all military combat combined is breathtaking to think about, and is just the start. That huge, abstract number frames the book. To kill large numbers of people means large numbers of other people are mobilized to do the job. Goldhagen looks into the hands, the hearts and the minds of those who are pulling the triggers and holding the machetes. He examines the local and global conditions at the moment a man, a woman, or a child is felled. He makes it very real, very personal. At the very core of genocide is hate. The perpetrators hate their victims for reasons simple and complex, and the spark of killing is ignited time and again by a political decision, a political calculus, usually by a tyrant in one place or another to mobilize local hatreds for his own political purposes. The killing usually stops when all or substantially all of the victims are gone. The world watches. Time and again, it does nothing or not enough.

This is a hugely important book. Because by reading it, you realize, it's not the world that's watching anymore. It's us. It is each one of us looking, knowing, understanding that somewhere not just one child is being killed, but ultimately millions. Goldhagen points out that if a child were killed on a suburban street in the United States or in England or in France there would be outrage, and a call for action. Good people do not want killing like this to happen. Yet no action is taken when it is half a world away. Nearly ALL the children, the men and the women of the targeted group die.

This book is what happens in places far from our everyday lives. The sanctity of life. Of human suffering. Of the hate in people's hearts. Of the failure of good people and their institutions to protect the weak. After reading it, you can no longer say that you don't know, or don't understand. This book is a very important work that makes sense of the world. It looks evil in the eye and it makes you think.

17 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Attributing putative noxious qualities to any ethnic group leads to WORSE THAN WAR, December 21, 2009

By 

Alter Wiener (Hillsboro OR U.S.A.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (Hardcover)

Goldhagen narrates the atrocities that had been committed throughout recent history. In South Africa,Turkey,British Occupied Kenya, Indonesia,Burundi,Cambodia,Guatemala,Bosnia,Rwanda,Darfur,Germany and its occupied lands. Mass murder of innocent people has indeed been the scourge of humanity prior to the Holocaust,during and after the Holocaust.

It is shocking and disturbing that so many of the broader populace had been willing to collaborate with the perpetrators, to join rather than contest or protest. Most people became aware when mass murder was carried out by their countrymen on helpless victims who posed no physical or military threat to the perpetrators or to themselves, the bystanders. The apathy of so many within Germany, as well as all over the world, in effect enabled the perpetrators to continue the mass murder during WWII.

According to Goldhagen, (p.149) "during the Holocaust no German perpetrator was ever killed, sent to a concentration camp, imprisoned, or punished in any serious way for refusing to kill Jews. Many knew they did not have to kill, because their commanders explicitly told them so. Some men accepted their commander's offer and removed themselves from the task of killing. Nothing happened to them; they were given other duties." Apparently most mobilized Germans chose to take part in the murder of innocent men, woman and children. Their leaders' planted seeds of hatred sprouted in the minds and hearts of those who succumbed to their bestiality lurking inside.

I have often been asked: "Did German civilians know about the ongoing annihilation of the Jewish people?" My response to my life audiences or readers of my autobiography (From A Name to A Number) is in the affirmative: Every German family had somebody or knew somebody serving in the police, military, government etc. Furthermore, there were twenty thousand forced labor and concentration camps in Germany. More than 600 of them were located in Berlin, the capital. In four camps (out of five) that I had been incarcerated, local civilians saw our haggard bodies marching to work, and back. In one camp, I worked at the same factory where German employees worked. In Death Marches, as Goldhagen depicts so eloquently "created the broadest permanent imprint on a human landscape precisely because they cover much territory, with the dying, broken, and unwanted strewn in columns over main roads, past cities and towns, announcing to the countless bystanders unmistakably what their leaders and countrymen do in their name, and leaving indelible images in mind."

I survived the Holocaust with a stabbed soul and traumatic memories. Still, I do not deem the entire German people culpable for the Holocaust. There was one German woman who risked her life, thirty times, for me. She was definitely not the only compassionate German. I witnessed the best of humanity alongside its worst. Regrettably, I saw many devils, but very few angels. Nevertheless, the Bible tells us in Genesis 18.23, "Will you sweep away the righteous and the wicked, the innocent and the guilty?" If there is one righteous person in a village where everybody else is wicked, the entire village must not be destroyed.

WORSE THAN WAR is a very important book! It alerts the reader to realize how prejudice leads to the un-sanctification of life. Xenophobia encourages one people to hate and sometimes eliminate its unwanted people. The Germans under Hitler's fascistic regime became wanton and murderous conquerors. They stigmatized peoples that they deemed to be racially inferiors. They demeaned the Jews, and some other targeted groups, as subhumans of diminished intellectual capabilities. They called their subjects lazybones, cursed, cockroaches, rats, bacilli etc. In the occupied lands, the Germans' collaborators had a history of a long-standing deeply rooted anti-Semitism. The Germans dehumanized (deprived of basic human rights) and demonized (held to be evil) the European Jewry and subjugated it all the elements of Elimination, as defined by Goldhagen: Transformation, Repression, Expulsion, Extermination and the Prevention of Reproduction.

Anti-Semites might find in WORSE THAN WAR support for their contentious assertion "There were many calamities much worse than the Holocaust; it is just Jewish propaganda" They turn a blind eye on the fact that the Nazis were determined to eradicate the entire European Jewry and succeeded to annihilate one third of the Jewish people. Mass murder wherever it occurred is a tragic event in history. No peoples should let it happen: "Never Again"