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Once North America and Australia were 95 percent cleansed, impeccably liberal nation-states could bloom above the massed graves of the natives. The ex-settler colonies can flaunt multiculturalism because immigrants, as in Europe, are not politically threatening.

Over half a million machetes were imported from China in late 1993, one for every third adult Hutu male. This was neither a traditional Rwandan tool nor a useful weapon of war against a well-equipped invading army. It was definitely sinister apparent, preparation for killing unarmed enemies –Melvern (2000: chap. 6) flatly says “for genocide.”

With the collapse of world commodity prices after 1985, coffee prices dropped 50 percent in 1989–90, while tin and tea prices fell more gradually. The economy in tatters, Habyarimana had to accept a rigid Structural Adjustment Program from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in 1990 in order to qualify for loans.

Population transfers were justified as the lesser of two evils: rather policed deportations and exchanges than the mayhem of ethnonationalist democracy. Schechtman (1962: 369ff.) suggested that more negotiated transfers of minority populations was the best way to avoid ethnic wars.

Had Cambodia been totalitarian (or even as centralized as Barnett suggests) under Pol Pot’s control, it might have seen fewer deaths.

The Khmer Rouge said the Americans were imperialist devils, and the bombing did seem capriciously malevolent, devilish – what had Cambodian peasants ever done to harm the Americans? The Khmer Rouge said the Lon Nol regime were the lackies of those devils, and this too was half-correct. The Khmer Rouge provided peasants with the most plausible explanation of their own predicament.

"judeobolshevism" is often explained as a ruse by rulers to channel social discontent unto scapegoats. But in WW2 the leadership of Axis and slavic states genuinely seemed to believe jews were a security hazard.

Belarussian nationalists [during the nazi occupation] had few followers. Most of the city population was Russian, Polish, or Jewish. Ninety percent of Belarussians were peasants, few of whom glamorized an ethnicity that guaranteed them low status.

In Nazi eyes, Norwegians were fellow Nordics and Greeks had founded European civilization, yet both should be treated brutally. In 1944 the Wehrmacht in Greece even turned most brutally against their former Axis allies after Italy left the war. On Cefalonia, almost 5,000 Italian soldiers were killed by firing squads after they had surrendered.

There had been no pogroms in Germany since the 1880s, and pre–World War I German anti-Semitism had peaked at the end of the 19th century. Even the Nazis downplayed anti-Semitism at election time, since a group that constitutes 0.7 percent of the population is not easy to blame for the major problems of the country.

German nationalists aimed to unite all ethnically defined Germans into one state. This was now tantalizingly close, for many German states had been consolidated into two great ones –Prussian Germany and Habsburg Austria. But to include almost all Germans in any single state would require imperial expansion in regions dominated by other ethnic groups.