Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity [Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged] [MP3 CD]

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in a comparative study of twentieth-century genocides. Goldhagen includes some mass murders of which I previously knew nothing such as the Germans' treatment of the Herero in South-West Africa and the British suppression of the Kikuyu in Kenya. All future analyses of genocide's causes and characteristics will have to reference this book. (Note: it is not necessary to have read Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust prior to reading this book.) Now for the bad news: 1) The book is mind-numbingly repetitious at times. Goldhagen must make the point over and over that the perpetrators are willing and eager participants in the slaughters. 2) He invents terms (eliminationism for genocide; Political Islam for Islamo-fascism; genocide bomber for suicide bomber) that do not add much clarity to his arguments. 3) His utter contempt for the work of Milgram and Zimbardo reeks of unprofessional axe-grinding. 4) He condemns Harry Truman as a mass murderer (for the atomic bombs) but includes not a word about the Vietnam War. 5) The chapter on Political Islam assumes a unity among Sunni, Shia, Wahabbi, etc. that exists only in the minds of neo-cons. 6) The chapter on What We Can Do proposes actions that are either utterly unrealistic or utterly horrifying. See The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil for another angle on explaining perpetrators' behavior. See For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence for an exploration of the connection between child-rearing and cruelty.

This book goes way beyond talking about numbers. It looks deep down into the heart of darkness. There have been many genocides. Goldhagen explains that they all share common elements. I read this book and came to a deeper understanding of the planet and the people on it. Ultimately this book is about the human condition. What's in people's hearts. What's it like to mobilize others to kill, what's it like to be a killer, to be a victim, to be a bystander. The book is breathtaking in its scope. Panoramic. It opened my eyes.

This book makes the incomprehensible understandable -- that more people have died in genocides than in all military combat combined is breathtaking to think about, and is just the start. That huge, abstract number frames the book. To kill large numbers of people means large numbers of other people are mobilized to do the job. Goldhagen looks into the hands, the hearts and the minds of those who are pulling the triggers and holding the machetes. He examines the local and global conditions at the moment a man, a woman, or a child is felled. He makes it very real, very personal. At the very core of genocide is hate. The perpetrators hate their victims for reasons simple and complex, and the spark of killing is ignited time and again by a political decision, a political calculus, usually by a tyrant in one place or another to mobilize local hatreds for his own political purposes. The killing usually stops when all or substantially all of the victims are gone. The world watches. Time and again, it does nothing or not enough.

This is a hugely important book. Because by reading it, you realize, it's not the world that's watching anymore. It's us. It is each one of us looking, knowing, understanding that somewhere not just one child is being killed, but ultimately millions. Goldhagen points out that if a child were killed on a suburban street in the United States or in England or in France there would be outrage, and a call for action. Good people do not want killing like this to happen. Yet no action is taken when it is half a world away. Nearly ALL the children, the men and the women of the targeted group die.

This book is what happens in places far from our everyday lives. The sanctity of life. Of human suffering. Of the hate in people's hearts. Of the failure of good people and their institutions to protect the weak. After reading it, you can no longer say that you don't know, or don't understand. This book is a very important work that makes sense of the world. It looks evil in the eye and it makes you think.

Goldhagen narrates the atrocities that had been committed throughout recent history. In South Africa,Turkey,British Occupied Kenya, Indonesia,Burundi,Cambodia,Guatemala,Bosnia,Rwanda,Darfur,Germany and its occupied lands. Mass murder of innocent people has indeed been the scourge of humanity prior to the Holocaust,during and after the Holocaust.

It is shocking and disturbing that so many of the broader populace had been willing to collaborate with the perpetrators, to join rather than contest or protest. Most people became aware when mass murder was carried out by their countrymen on helpless victims who posed no physical or military threat to the perpetrators or to themselves, the bystanders. The apathy of so many within Germany, as well as all over the world, in effect enabled the perpetrators to continue the mass murder during WWII.

According to Goldhagen, (p.149) "during the Holocaust no German perpetrator was ever killed, sent to a concentration camp, imprisoned, or punished in any serious way for refusing to kill Jews. Many knew they did not have to kill, because their commanders explicitly told them so. Some men accepted their commander's offer and removed themselves from the task of killing. Nothing happened to them; they were given other duties." Apparently most mobilized Germans chose to take part in the murder of innocent men, woman and children. Their leaders' planted seeds of hatred sprouted in the minds and hearts of those who succumbed to their bestiality lurking inside.

I have often been asked: "Did German civilians know about the ongoing annihilation of the Jewish people?" My response to my life audiences or readers of my autobiography (From A Name to A Number) is in the affirmative: Every German family had somebody or knew somebody serving in the police, military, government etc. Furthermore, there were twenty thousand forced labor and concentration camps in Germany. More than 600 of them were located in Berlin, the capital. In four camps (out of five) that I had been incarcerated, local civilians saw our haggard bodies marching to work, and back. In one camp, I worked at the same factory where German employees worked. In Death Marches, as Goldhagen depicts so eloquently "created the broadest permanent imprint on a human landscape precisely because they cover much territory, with the dying, broken, and unwanted strewn in columns over main roads, past cities and towns, announcing to the countless bystanders unmistakably what their leaders and countrymen do in their name, and leaving indelible images in mind."

I survived the Holocaust with a stabbed soul and traumatic memories. Still, I do not deem the entire German people culpable for the Holocaust. There was one German woman who risked her life, thirty times, for me. She was definitely not the only compassionate German. I witnessed the best of humanity alongside its worst. Regrettably, I saw many devils, but very few angels. Nevertheless, the Bible tells us in Genesis 18.23, "Will you sweep away the righteous and the wicked, the innocent and the guilty?" If there is one righteous person in a village where everybody else is wicked, the entire village must not be destroyed.

WORSE THAN WAR is a very important book! It alerts the reader to realize how prejudice leads to the un-sanctification of life. Xenophobia encourages one people to hate and sometimes eliminate its unwanted people. The Germans under Hitler's fascistic regime became wanton and murderous conquerors. They stigmatized peoples that they deemed to be racially inferiors. They demeaned the Jews, and some other targeted groups, as subhumans of diminished intellectual capabilities. They called their subjects lazybones, cursed, cockroaches, rats, bacilli etc. In the occupied lands, the Germans' collaborators had a history of a long-standing deeply rooted anti-Semitism. The Germans dehumanized (deprived of basic human rights) and demonized (held to be evil) the European Jewry and subjugated it all the elements of Elimination, as defined by Goldhagen: Transformation, Repression, Expulsion, Extermination and the Prevention of Reproduction.

Anti-Semites might find in WORSE THAN WAR support for their contentious assertion "There were many calamities much worse than the Holocaust; it is just Jewish propaganda" They turn a blind eye on the fact that the Nazis were determined to eradicate the entire European Jewry and succeeded to annihilate one third of the Jewish people. Mass murder wherever it occurred is a tragic event in history. No peoples should let it happen: "Never Again"