Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (Audiobook) (repost)

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 [and] 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.