Worse Than War

September 14, 2009
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 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.