| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Manus I. Midlarsky. The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xv, 463. Cloth $75.00, paper $28.99.

Using three genocides—the holocaust of the Armenians under the Turks, the Jews under the Nazis, and the Tutsis under the Hutus—Manus I. Midlarsky develops the fundamental conditions or rules of human behavior under which genocides have occurred in the twentieth century. He excludes the mass murders in Cambodia and the Darfur as politicides rather than genocides because those deaths did not result from the desire to destroy a whole people but rather from an effort to destroy a social or economic class for reasons of politics. In each of the chosen cases, regarding the attitude of the perpetrator versus the victims, Midlarsky finds some form of loss to the perpetrator—loss of territory, war, economic depression, or loss of security—and certain consequences of loss, such as the need to blame someone, as well as a strong need to regain what has been lost. He also finds present in the three genocides he has chosen the power to repair that loss, or what he calls "realpolitik," which is a government that has the power and the will to use that power, and altruistic punishment, a method of obtaining unity among the perpetrators by making it clear that the victims are criminals or traitors or subversives who deserve to be destroyed. Whether every genocide requires the presence of all these conditions the author does not indicate, but it would seem that genocide requires all three, and the author does an excellent job of showing the presence of loss, realpolitik, and altruistic punishment in the cases of the Armenians, Jews, and Tutsis.

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