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Final Solutions: Mass Killing and
Genocide in the 20th Century Benjamin A. Valentino |
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Benjamin A. Valentino finds that
ethnic hatreds or discrimination, undemocratic systems of government, and
dysfunctions in society play a much smaller role in mass killing and genocide
than is commonly assumed. He shows that the impetus for mass killing usually
originates from a relatively small group of powerful leaders and is often
carried out without the active support of broader society. Mass killing, in
his view, is a brutal political or military strategy designed to accomplish
leaders' most important objectives, counter threats to their power, and solve
their most difficult problems. In order to capture the full scope
of mass killing during the twentieth century, Valentino does not limit his
analysis to violence directed against ethnic groups, or to the attempt to
destroy victim groups as such, as do most previous studies of genocide. Rather,
he defines mass killing broadly as the intentional killing of a massive number
of noncombatants, using the criteria of 50,000 or more deaths within five
years as a quantitative standard. Final Solutions focuses on three types of mass
killing: communist mass killing like the ones carried out in the Soviet
Union, China and Cambodia; ethnic genocide as in Armenia, Nazi Germany, and
Rwanda; and "counter guerrilla" campaigns including the brutal
civil war in Guatemala and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Valentino closes the book by
arguing that attempts to prevent mass killing should focus on disarming and
removing from power the leaders and small groups responsible for instigating
and organizing the killing. Benjamin A. Valentino is Assistant Professor of
Government at |
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