Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide?

Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide? Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide? mark levene University of Warwick t has become almost a platitude, a statistical one at that: 187 million I is the figure, the now more or less accepted wisdom for the number of human beings killed as a result of political violence—Zbigniew Brzezinski uses the unlovely term megadeaths—in this, our bloody century. More killing than at any other time in history. And yet at the end of the twentieth century its relentlessness, as it passes across the television screens of those of us seemingly blessed with immunity from its catastrophic reality and consequences, continues to daze and bewil- der. For the historian, him or herself inured to centuries if not millen- nia of mass atrocity, this picture of a special era of death and destruc- tion invites, indeed demands further probing and analysis. Is “the Twentieth Century Book of the Dead” really so very different in scope or scale from previous ones? It has been argued that the effects of the Taiping and other rebellions in China reduced its population from 410 million in 1850 to 350 million in 1873. In southern Africa a couple of decades earlier, the emergence http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of World History University of Hawai'I Press

Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide?

Levene, Mark, --
Journal of World History , Volume 11 (2) – Oct 1, 2001
Download PDF
32 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-hawai-i-press/why-is-the-twentieth-century-the-century-of-genocide-TvKMoDDHXy
Publisher
University of Hawai'I Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 University of Hawai'i Press.
ISSN
1527-8050

Abstract

Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide? mark levene University of Warwick t has become almost a platitude, a statistical one at that: 187 million I is the figure, the now more or less accepted wisdom for the number of human beings killed as a result of political violence—Zbigniew Brzezinski uses the unlovely term megadeaths—in this, our bloody century. More killing than at any other time in history. And yet at the end of the twentieth century its relentlessness, as it passes across the television screens of those of us seemingly blessed with immunity from its catastrophic reality and consequences, continues to daze and bewil- der. For the historian, him or herself inured to centuries if not millen- nia of mass atrocity, this picture of a special era of death and destruc- tion invites, indeed demands further probing and analysis. Is “the Twentieth Century Book of the Dead” really so very different in scope or scale from previous ones? It has been argued that the effects of the Taiping and other rebellions in China reduced its population from 410 million in 1850 to 350 million in 1873. In southern Africa a couple of decades earlier, the emergence

Journal

Journal of World History – University of Hawai'I Press

Published: Oct 1, 2001

There are no references for this article.