<i>Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity</i> (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity Scott Nicholas Romaniuk Daniel Jonah Goldhagen , Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity. New York: Public Affairs, 2009. Pp. 672, paper. $29.95 US. For many decades, scholars and practitioners have been preoccupied with whether or not genocide and systematic human destruction can be contained and subsequently eliminated from the future narrative of humanity. With indelible imagery and exploration, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has compiled an impassioned study of mass murder and the systematic slaughter of human beings in his 2009 book, Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity. Goldhagen establishes a clear argument that human destruction is not beyond our control, and he maintains that the perpetrators of atrocities are not natural killers. While exploring why some people choose to become cold-blooded killers while others do not, Goldhagen presciently shifts the focus of the ongoing debate about genocide and mass slaughter to "understand[ing] its causes, its nature and complexity, and its scope and systematic quality" (xi-xii). Goldhagen applies his theory that perpetrators of recent massacres are not just "normal" individuals but rather people who are all too eager and willing to perform the heinous task of killing their own. The premise of Goldhagen's theory is applied to the 1994 Rwandan massacre by Hutu of Tutsi, the Serbian-sanctioned genocide of Muslims and Croats in the aftermath of the state dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, the Indonesian slaughter of Communists during the 1960s, the murderous campaign undertaken by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the extermination of some 200,000 indigenous Maya and leftists in Guatemala between 1978 and 1984, the massacre of Marsh Arabs and Kurds during the 1980s in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and to a corpus of "eliminationist" and genocidal campaigns across the African continent to the present day. Divided into eleven chapters, and dealing with the multifaceted phenomenon of new perspectives on arcane preconceptions and debates about eliminationist politics, actions, and discourse, Goldhagen's study centrally explores the notion that the expression of hatred toward the symbol of one's putative enemies leads to a struggle to establish not only physical mastery, but also emotional and moral mastery that breeds a cycle of fury and, ultimately, destructive rage. His examples demonstrate how individuals and groups establish and subsequently surpass previously established baselines for brutality and murderousness. As part of his case studies, Goldhagen conducts interviews with Madeleine Albright, former US Secretary of State; Francis Deng, UN Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide, and Clint Williamson, US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues. His consultations reveal the political, social, and cultural impasses associated with the task of preventing genocide at the same time that he attempts to apply the difficult lessons learned from past atrocities around the world. [End Page 107] In Africa, Goldhagen interacts with perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide to discuss their willful participation in acts of extreme violence that left thousands brutally killed and thousands more emotionally brutalized. Minister of Justice Tharcisse Karugarama discusses not only perpetrator motivation and willingness, but also the international community's inability and unwillingness to prevent other governments around the world from undertaking genocide as a domestic policy that seeks to quell civil discontent and political rivalry. One highly significant question thus posed is "how can we prevent other countries from suffering the same or a similar fate?" In another country, thousands of miles from Rwanda, Goldhagen explores the concept of "overkill" with one of Guatemala's leading forensic pathologists. Those interviewed demonstrate that many cases of excessive violence are readily discoverable among the remains of the country's genocide victims. Their examinations expose the harsh reality of how hatred is channeled to inflict offensive and often lethal wounds against even the most helpless of victims, including children and pregnant women. Commenting on Guatemala's genocidal history is former President José Efrain Ríos Montt, who held power during the barbarous events that took place during the 1980s. While in Bosnia and attending the annual commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide (which took place in 1995 and resulted in the slaughter of more than 8...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".