Purify and Destroy

Purify and Destroy

The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide

  • Auteur: Semelin, Jacques; Hoffman, Stanley
  • Éditeur: Columbia University Press
  • ISBN: 9780231142823
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780231512374
  • Lieu de publication:  New York , United States
  • Année de publication électronique: 2007
  • Mois : Août
  • Langue: Anglais
How can we comprehend the sociopolitical processes that give rise to extreme violence, ethnic cleansing, or genocide? A major breakthrough in comparative analysis, Purify and Destroy demonstrates that it is indeed possible to compare the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina while respecting the specificities of each appalling phenomenon. Jacques Semelin achieves this, in part, by leading his readers through the three examples simultaneously, the unraveling of which sometimes converges but most often diverges.

Semelin's method is multidisciplinary, relying not only on contemporary history but also on social psychology and political science. Based on the seminal distinction between massacre and genocide, Purify and Destroy identifies the main steps of a general process of destruction, both rational and irrational, born of what Semelin terms "delusional rationality." He describes a dynamic structural model with, at its core, the matrix of a social imaginaire that, responding to fears, resentments, and utopias, carves and recarves the social body by eliminating "the enemy." Semelin identifies the main stages that can lead to a genocidal process and explains how ordinary people can become perpetrators. He develops an intellectual framework to analyze the entire spectrum of mass violence, including terrorism, in the twentieth century and before. Strongly critical of today's political instrumentalization of the "genocide" notion, Semelin urges genocide research to stand back from legal and normative definitions and come of age as a discipline in its own right in the social sciences.
  • Contents
  • Foreword by Stanley Hoffmann
  • Acknowledgements
  • Introduction: Understand?
  • I. The Imaginary Constructs of Social Destructiveness
    • Unpromising avenues
    • The power of imaginary constructs
      • Destructive fantasies
      • Between imaginary and real: the role of ideology
    • From the identity narrative to the figure of Traitor
      • The stigmatisation of ‘minor’ differences
      • Figures of the enemy within
    • From the quest for purity to the figure of the Other in excess
      • Identitarian purity and political purity
    • From the security dilemma to the destruction of the enemy
      • Conspiracy and paranoia
      • Delusional rationality
      • Destroy ‘Them’ to save ‘Us’
  • II. From Inflammatory Discourse to Sacrificial Violence
    • The intellectual springboard
      • The creation of scientific myths
      • Warmongering intellectuals?
    • Reaching political legitimacy
      • Hitler’s rise to power
      • Milosevic and the dream of a ‘Greater Serbia’
      • Kayibanda and the formation of a Rwandan state
      • Prophets of chaos
      • Feeding fear and resentment: the role of the media
      • The pernicious tree of propaganda
    • From the religious to the sacrificial
      • Germany: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s solitary crusade
      • The Orthodox Church and the ‘Serbian martyr’
      • The Rwandan Catholic Church: between support for the regime and internal contradictions
      • The sacrificial regeneration of ‘We’
    • Societies torn between adhesion, consent and resistance
      • ‘The spiral of silence’
      • The breakdown of social relations
      • The role of the third party
  • III. International Context, War and the Media
    • A structure of political opportunities
      • Modern states and massacres
      • A legacy of ethnic violence
      • Massacres and population flows
      • State collapse and outbursts of extreme violence
      • Rwanda-Burundi: false ethnic twins
      • Serbia/Croatia: a fratricidal duo
      • Nazi Germany / the Soviet Union: two totalitarianisms clash
      • The passivity of the ‘international community’
    • Spilling into war
      • The politicisation of war
      • Conquering ‘living space’
      • War against civilians
      • Towards the destruction of the Inyenzi
      • Refusing the spiral of mass murder
      • The new universe of war
    • Telling the world: a last resort?
      • The extermination of the Jews: discovering the horror… and then doing nothing about it
      • Bosnia: knowing… and pretending
      • Rwanda: knowing… and leaving
      • The so-called ‘CNN effect’ and state indifference
  • IV. The Dynamics of Mass Murder
    • The decision-making process and the decision-makers
      • Nazi Germany: the pre-eminence of Hitler
      • Rwanda, a public call to genocide
      • Yugoslavia: the dismemberment of the federal system
      • Pinpointing THE decision?
    • The organisation of mass murder and the actors involved
      • Nazi Germany: ideological warriors
      • Rwanda: ‘Going to work’
      • Serbia: alternative armed forces
      • Organised practices and local initiatives
      • The symbol of Srebrenica
    • From collective indifference to popular participation in massacres
      • The fate of the Jews: between hostility and indifference
      • Rwanda: towards mass involvement in mass murder
      • The autism of the Serbian population
      • Territorial defence
      • Ordinary rescuers
      • Resistance: the energy of despair
    • Morphologies of extreme violence
      • When the threatened state becomes the threatening state
      • From partial to total destruction
      • Mass murder technologies
  • V. The Vertigo of Impunity
    • Crossing the threshold into violence
      • Massacre, pillage, business
      • Socialising into violence
      • Becoming a killer on the battlefield
      • What do killers think about during the massacre?
      • Cognitive dissonance and rationalisations
      • Divine legitimation
    • The tipping mechanism
      • The crime of obedience
      • Group conformity
    • The dual learning process of massacre
      • The murdering self
      • Task specialisation and the professionalisation of slaughter
    • The killers’ profiles: revisiting ‘the banality of evil’
      • Ordinary executioners
      • The involvement of women and children
      • The ambiguity of evil
      • The banality of evil revisited
    • Sexual violence and other atrocities
      • A variety of indefinite interpretations
      • Rational choice?
      • Towards orgiastic violence
      • Delighting in cruelty
      • The abyss of the ‘grey zone’
  • VI. The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide
    • Instrumentalisations of a word that is impossible to define?
      • ‘Genocide’: a legacy of international law
      • Pioneer studies in the social sciences
    • Distancing genocide studies from the frame of law
      • ‘Massacre’ as unit of reference
      • Analysing destruction processes
    • Destroying to subjugate
      • From warfare to ruling over the population
      • Communist regimes: Reshaping the social body
      • The paradigm of ‘Democratic Kampuchea’
    • Destroying to eradicate
      • Surgical practices in politics
      • The Holocaust paradigm
      • Politicidal regimes?
      • From ‘ethnic cleansing’ to ‘genocide’
    • Destroying to revolt
      • The rhetoric of terrorism
      • The 11 September 2001 paradigm
      • ‘Ordinary’ candidates for sacrifice?
  • Conclusion: The ‘Never Again’ refrain
    • Crisis prevention: arguments and illusions
    • An ethics of responsibility
    • ‘The revenge of passions’
  • Appendixes
    • A. Investigating a massacre
    • B. Comparing massacres
  • Bibliography
  • Notes
  • Name Index
  • Subject Index

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