Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World

by Christian Gerlach

Violence is a fact of human life. This book trace the social roots of the extraordinary processes of human destruction involved in mass violence throughout the twentieth century. Christian Gerlach shows that terms such as ‘genocide' and ‘ethnic cleansing' are too narrow to explain the diverse motives and interests that cause violence to spread in varying forms and intensities from killings and expulsions to enforced hunger, collective rape, strategic bombing, forced labour and imprisonment. He explores what happened before, during, and after periods of wide-spread bloodshed in Armenia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Greece and anti-guerilla wars in order to highlight the crucial role of socio-economic pressures in the generation of group conflicts. By focussing on why so many different people participated in or supported mass violence, and why different groups were victimized, the author offers us a new way of understanding one of the most disturbing phenomena of our times.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Sociology

502 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 2006

Reviews

[G.B. Gordon]

Detailed, erudite, and well-researched, but also unnecessarily dense and convoluted. What little analysis and pointing out of dependencies there is, is drowning in a simple listing of numbers, names, and uncommented historical data. At least give me a theory to be proven at the beginning of each chapter, so I don't have to blindly barrel through the data, and then reread the whole thing after I figure out what you're gunning for.
Yes, the reasons for mass violence are complicated, but it's the job of an analysis to pull the bare facts together and point out the interdependencies. The last 10 pages are sort of what I'd hoped most of the book would have been like. Not a wasted read, but an unnecessarily challenging one.

[Thomas Ray]

HM886 G46 2010 Memorial Library

[Abbas Zaidi · Rating 1 out of 5]

A white man writing about the violence committed by the 'savages' out there. LOL