| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Ward Churchill. A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present. San Francisco, Calif.: City Lights. 1997. Pp. xix, 531. Cloth $37.50, paper $19.95.

This book is written in a deliberately polemical and provocative style that reflects Ward Churchill's strength of feeling and his "commitment, not just to opposing genocide but to ending it" (p. 12). The reader should not be too distracted by errors and interpretations that seem to weaken the overall argument, an argument that is far too important to be dismissed on such grounds. 1

Churchill provides very extensive footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies, and an index that together account for about a third of the book. While this burden of documentation can serve as a useful resource for the interested reader, it is far too voluminous to be checked and discussed in this brief review. It does seem worth noting, however, that the author seems quite prepared to ignore his own definition when it suits him. Thus, he does not explain how "Israel's ongoing genocide against the Palestinian population" (p. 74) fits into his definition of genocide. 2

The first two chapters deal with Holocaust denial to set the stage for a discussion of the importance of facing up to historical truth. In that context, the so-called "uniqueness" school is singled out for its many errors in trying to reserve a special place in history for the victimization of the Jews during the Nazi regime. Churchill's greatest charge against that position is that it is another form of denial: the denial of the genocides of other victim peoples. . . .

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