Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth CenturyThis fascinating and profound book is about the psychology that made possible Hiroshima, the Nazi genocide, the Gulag, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and many other atrocities. The author reveals common patterns - how the distance and fragmented responsibility of technological warfare gave rise to Hiroshima; how the tribalism resulted in mutual fear and hatred in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia; how the systems of belief made atrocities possible in Stalin's Russia, in Mao's China and in Cambodia; and how the powerful combination of tribalism and belief enabled people to do otherwise unimaginable things in Nazi Germany. The common patterns suggest weak points in our psychology. The resulting picture is used as a guide for the ethics we should create if we hope to overcome them. |
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accept American arms race army atomic bomb atrocities attack Auschwitz belief system Berlin Bethmann Hollweg blockade Britain British Bukharin camps Chapter civilians cold joke Command Communist crisis Croatia cruelty Cuba culture death Eichmann emotional enemy ethics evil fear genocide German hard Heidegger Heidegger's Hitler Hobbesian hope human responses humiliation Ibid Jean Améry Jewish Jews Jung Chang Kennedy Khmer Rouge Khrushchev killed later leaders lives London Mandelstam Mao's Martin Heidegger military missiles moral identity moral resources murder Nadezhda Mandelstam Nazi Nazi Germany Nazism Nietzsche nuclear numbers obey partly peace philosophy Pol Pot political pressure Primo Levi prisoners propaganda psychology quoted Revolution Robert Rudolf Höss Russia sense of moral Serbian Serbs side Social Darwinism soldiers Solzhenitsyn Sometimes Soviet Union Stalin sympathy things thought told torture trans trap tribal Trocmé truth victims village wrote