Blood and soil
This book, the first global history of genocide and extermination from ancient times, examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin's mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. Connections, patterns, and features are identified that in nearly every case gave early warning of the catastrophe to come. Racism or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, and cults of antiquity and agrarianism are ideologies that have motivated perpetrators of mass killings in the past, and persist even in our new century. The author urges that we heed the rich historical evidence with its telltale signs for predicting and preventing future genocides.
Stats for nerds
0recommend
2mentions
2people
2021–2023years
100% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- "By 1875, the French conquest was complete. The war had killed approximately 825,000 indigenous Algerians since 1830. A long shadow of genocidal hatred persisted, provoking a French author to protest in 1882 that in Algeria, 'we hear it repeated every day that we must expel the native and, if necessary, destroy him.' As a French statistical journal urged five years late, 'the system of extermination must give way to a policy of penetration.'"
- Ben Kiernan, "Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur" (2007)
This is just one short pithy quote; having done archival research concentrating on this period, I can personally testify that the amount of dry, bureaucratic references to "extermination" by French colonial administrators and professionals is nauseatingly large. If the colonizers saw what they were doing as the whole-scale extermination of a people (and those murderous ideologies coincided with the actual extermination of living human beings by the thousands), you're going to have a really tough time convincing me or anyone else that what occurred was not genocidal violence.
