CENTURY OF SLAUGHTER "WORSE THAN WAR BY DANIEL JONAH GOLDHAGEN"
Michael Gove
MAIL ON SUNDAY
February 14, 2010 Sunday
London
No one could accuse Daniel Jonah Goldhagen of putting style before
substance. On page 524 of his 658-page work he argues that, ‘A new,
more accurate, more powerful anti-eliminationist and pro-human
discourse about mass murder and eliminations must develop . . . We
should avoid euphemisms and obfuscating locutions such as "ethnic
cleansing".’
Never has a plea for plain speaking been delivered in language so
jargon-ridden and opaquely cumbersome. Goldhagen is many things in
this work, but snappy he ain’t.
And yet despite its dense prose style, Worse Than War makes a
compelling and brave argument that our world must heed if we are
to see sanity restored. The past century stands out in history not
so much for the speed of technical innovation or the growth in life
expectancy, but for the prevalence of organised mass murder.
That mass murder has, again and again, been inspired by a perverted
dream of purity in which the enemy has to be ‘cleansed’ from a
particular territory. The most horrific of all these campaigns was
the Nazi onslaught against the Jewish people. Goldhagen has already
written a masterful book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, in which he
laid bare the widespread complicity of the German people in the Nazi
genocide. But while the Holocaust was the greatest atrocity of the
last century it was very far from being the only one.
The Holocaust had a grotesque dress rehearsal 100 years ago in the
German slaughter of the Herero people in South-West Africa. When Hitler
was still an adolescent, General Lothar von Trotha was butchering
an entire African people. Just a few years later, in the shadow
of the First World War, the German-trained officers of the Turkish
Army presided over another genocide: the slaughter of the Armenian
Christians within Muslim Turkish lands. Thousands died in what was
considered a ‘holy war’.
The impunity with which both those atrocities were committed made
a firm impression on those who were to plan future genocides. Von
Trotha boasted after his crimes, ‘Who now has even heard of the Herero
people?’ Hitler inaugurated his campaign of mass murder against the
Jews by rejoicing, ‘who after all, speaks today of the annihilation
of the Armenians?’
It is to Goldhagen’s immense credit that he painstakingly reminds us
not just of those slaughters but also of others such as the Khmer
Rouge’s genocidal campaign, the Soviet Union’s war against its own
peoples through famine and labour camps, China and North Korea’s
adoption of the same techniques, Saddam Hussein’s extermination of
Kurds, Serbian atrocities in Bosnia and Kosovo, Hutu genocide of the
Tutsis in Rwanda, the genocidal campaign against African Christians
waged by the Islamist regime in Khartoum, and that same regime’s
genocidal onslaught against the people of Darfur.
He illuminatingly explains what unites them all, showing how political
hate campaigns are used to poison minds. He demonstrates how men
are moved to kill when they believe their land can be redeemed by
wiping out an alien enemy. He challenges the view that the Holocaust
was a process carried out by those who feared the consequences of
disobedience; indeed, almost all the mass murder Goldhagen charts was
carried out at close quarters by men and women who were free agents,
who rejoiced in their crimes and won favour in their societies through
their blood-letting.
Goldhagen’s manner of linking these genocides is powerfully original.
But the most compelling part of his book is his central argument that
we have allowed mass murder to continue by failing to recognise that
genocidal campaigns have killed more than wars in the past century.
And we have the power to end genocides if we simply take steps to
remove the tyrannical regimes that use genocide as a political tool.
Goldhagen is magnificent in the way he upbraids us for our misplaced
values, pointing out the acres of space devoted to one infamous murder
in the American media in the same year that the murder of thousands
in Darfur went scarcely reported.
And he is inspiring when he spells out how important it is for
democracies to unite, and fight those behind the genocidal campaigns:
mass murderers such as the political Islamists in power in Sudan,
Hezbollah and Hamas; men who are as committed to the elimination of
the Jewish people as Hitler ever was.
There are those who will dismiss Goldhagen as preachy or naive. They
should be ignored. Because if we pay heed to them, we ignore something
far more significant: the ongoing slaughter of innocents across this
world which it is in our power to prevent.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
