War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society

Rating:
Summary: An explanation of Genocide that makes sense
Review: After a genocide occurs, people always ask, "How could this happen?" Martin Shaw provides an answer that is simple, insightful and chilling.

Martin Shaw's premise is that war has devolved from "total war" where the entire state (both soldiers and civilians) are at war against an enemy to "degenerative war" where both soldiers and innocent civilians of the enemy state are treated as compatants to "genocide" where innocent civilians are perceived as the enemy and treated as combatants. It is no coincidence that genocide and war go hand-in-hand. The Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge killing fields, East Timor, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur... all of these atrocities occured in the midst of war. Even in Stalin's purges and Mao's "Cultural Revolution" and "Great Leap Forward" the pretext for mass-killing was a kind of civil war against perceived enemies of the state.

Shaw (rightly) dismisses psychological and sociological explanations about why one group commits genocide over another. (i.e., there was something deep in the German psyche that caused the Holocaust) Instead he treats genocide as a natural by-product of autocratic states that produce and mobilize machines for mass killing, then turn those machines against a group of unarmed civilians.

The book can be a bit repetitive at times in stating the case, but all-in-all an excellent introduction to the subject of genocide.