Eric D. Weitz, a Century of Genocide:

Eric D. Weitz, A CENTURY OF GENOCIDE: UTOPIAS OF RACE AND NATION. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003,

Eric D. Weitz's text A CENTURY OF GENOCIDE: UTOPIAS OF RACE AND NATION puts forth the challenging question as to why the 20th century has seen a hideous explosion in the phenomenon of genocide, cross culturally, all over the globe, without any particular grounding in any one continent or nation. To answer this query, Weitz compares a historically and geographically diverse section of four of the past century's genocidal regimes: Stalin's Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Cambodia under Pol Pot and Bosnia at the close of the century. He uses this comparative approach to demonstrate that although the Holocaust was a horrible event, it was not a unique event. Rather, it was the product of the same sort of historical forces as these other manifestations of genocide. Weitz identifies genocide as a phenomenon that stretches back to the beginning of time, produced by conditions that have grown more ideologically pronounced over the course of the last two hundred years, and thus subsequently growing more common.

Weitz's thesis is philosophically grounded, rather than stressing individualistic aspects of each of these four tragedies. Weitz states that the roots of Enlightenment thought, combined with a 19th-century Romantic longing for a mythological past, created the necessary ferment to create an intense need for nationalism that eventually spanned across the globe. Within this shift to a stress upon nationalism came a subsequent stress upon racial as well as ethnic identity. Thus, rather than providing liberation from old ideals, the Enlightenment actually proved hurtful to groups construed as marginal across Europe, including but not exclusively Jews.

Nationalism's stress upon finding one's identity through the nation often meant the destruction of other nations, in the quest to forge this crucial, secure national identity. Genocide one of the 'symptoms' of nationalism -- genocide is the destruction of a nation, as opposed to the forging of a nation. "The [Geneva] Convention defines as genocide the intent to destroy 'in whole or in part' a population defined by race, nationality, religion, or ethnicity. The Convention specifically does not include groups defined by their political orientation or class background." Nationalism was fused with a corresponding stress on racism, which provided the 20th-century engine for state-organized genocide, according to Weitz' first chapter in his text, even though politics and class often motivated certain groups to be selected as targets for genocide in Germany, Russia, and Cambodia.

This is not to say that Weitz denies that there were unique features to all of the regimes that perpetuated genocidal crimes. For instance, Nazi Germany, according to Weitz was a specifically racist, genocidal driven regime. So was Cambodia, where the powers that came to rule that nation defined themselves and the existence of their regime against groups they defined as "others." Thus, they rendered the survival of their regime as contingent upon the destruction of other peoples of different political backgrounds, classes, and ideologies. (Weitz questions the Geneva Convention's rather stringent definition of genocide.) Yet even though Stalinist Russia and the Serbian republic may not have quantified their existence in such terms, the roots of the genocide and the material effects of these regimes were still fueled by the same hatred and paranoia that created the Germanic and Cambodian reigns of terror.