Century of Genocide

Eric D. Weitz is Dean of Humanities and Arts and Distinguished Professor of History at the City College of New York. He is the author of Creating German Communism, 1890-1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State and Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (both Princeton).

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2003 "There is much new in Weitz's analysis and his isolation of the common mechanisms of state-sponsored genocide is an invaluable contribution to the literature on the subject... Despite its analytical and reasoned approach, this work cannot be read without feeling outrage, despair and horror. Weitz's work raises profound questions about the human capacity for violence."--Publishers Weekly "A Century of Genocide has much to offer. It will serve as an excellent first introduction to Lenin and Stalin's crimes, the Holocaust, the Cambodian massacres of the 1970s and the ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia."--Brendon Simms, Times Higher Education Supplement "[A] book that must be read and that must be argued over. Without an understanding of the issues [it] tackle[s] with passion and in depth, the desire to intervene--to prevent ethnic cleansing or genocide--is meaningless."--Rima Berns-McGown, International Journal "Weitz has produced something exceedingly rare: a scholarly book one cannot put down. This is a meritorious, thoughtful book."--Choice "An important, thought-provoking book on an inordinately complex subject."--Gavriel Rosenfeld, The New Leader "Weitz makes a persuasive case that these genocides were not simply anarchic eruptions of age-old hatreds, but rather were engineered by crisis-ridden regimes promoting utopian visions requiring a radical refashioning of the population."--Martin Farrell, Perspectives on Politics "This important, highly thoughtful book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on genocide in the twentieth century. It deserves a wide audience among scholars, undergraduates, and policy makers. Broad ranging, genuinely comparative, rigorous, and learned, A Century of Genocide is engagingly written, while prudent and balanced in its judgments."--Frank Chalk, Slavic Review

• Abbreviations vii Preface to the New Paperback Edition ix An Armenian Prelude 1 Introduction: Genocides in the Twentieth Century 8 Chapter 1 Race and Nation: An Intellectual History 16 Chapter 2 Nation, Race, and State Socialism: The Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin 53 Chapter 3 The Primacy of Race: Nazi Germany 102 Chapter 4 Racial Communism: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge 144 Chapter 5 National Communism: Serbia and the Bosnian War 190 Conclusion 236 Notes 255 Bibliography 311 Acknowledgments 339 Index 343