A convincing essay about what makes genocide possible and how one genocide can easily lead to another. As a person of Jewish descent, I’m not often comfortable hearing or reading that other genocides may have similarities to The Holocaust, not because those similarities don’t exist (because, of course, they do) but rather that I am always wary of the possibility that any rationale (no matter how well presented) might diminish the severity of that particular genocide. Nevertheless, I found Lindqvist’s essay fair and persuasive. While showing the historical trail that led to The Holocaust, a trail that killed people in other parts of the world as brutally and psychopathically as the Jews in Europe, Lindqvist does seem to eventually suggest something of a distinction between The Holocaust and many other genocides: the probability of a Jew being left alive to act as a slave was less than someone of another ethnicity at that time. Jews were meant to merely die. Therefore, this fact places The Holocaust in the same category as the killing of the Armenians by the Turkish government, the killing of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda, and any other mass murder where many members of a particular ethnic group are meant merely to die (such as Bosnian Moslems in Serbian controlled Bosnia). Having said that, it certainly does not diminish one’s nausea upon reading of the earlier genocidal conditions in the Congo and the Americas. Being a slave under those evil conditions is beyond intolerable. The “take home” message of the book (for me) is “what difference does it make in the end?” what the similarities and the differences between genocides are — genocide arises from the very depths of human weakness. We already know this fact -- now we must act to stop it wherever and whenever the disgusting rhetoric which feeds it is voiced and to make heard the voices of those who, because of genocide, cannot speak. This book makes that goal clear and imperative.
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