Genocide is commonly understood to be a terrible aberration in human behaviour, performed by evil, murderous regimes such as the Nazis and dictators like Suharto and Pinochet. John Docker argues that the roots of genocide go far deeper into human nature than most people realise.
Genocide features widely in the Bible, the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and debates about the Enlightenment. These texts are studied in depth to trace the origins of violence through time and across civilisations. Developing the groundbreaking work of Raphaël Lemkin, who invented the term ‘genocide’, Docker guides us from the dawn of agricultural society, through classical civilisation to the present, showing that violence between groups has been integral to all periods of history.
This revealing book will be of great interest to those wishing to understand the roots of genocide and why it persists in the modern age.
Table of Content
Dedication: this book is dedicated to Ned Curthoys
Preface, Acknowledgements, and Contents Page
Introduction
1. Genocide as Ancient Practice: Chimpanzees, Humans, Agricultural Society
2. Genocide, and Questioning of Genocide, in Classical Greece: Herodotus and Thucydides
3. Genocide, Trauma, and World Upside Down in Ancient Greek Tragedy: Aeschylus and Euripides
4. Utopia and Dystopia: Plato and Cicero’s Republics
5. Victimology and Genocide: The Bible’s Exodus, Virgil’s Aeneid
6. Roman Settler Imperialism in Britain: Narrative and Counter Narrative in Tacitus’ Agricola and Germania
7. The Honourable Coloniser
8. Was the Enlightenment the origin of the Holocaust?
Conclusion: Can there be an end to violence?
References
Index
About the author
John Docker is Honorary Professor in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Origins of Violence (Pluto, 2008), 1492: The Poetics of Diaspora (2001), Postmodernism and Popular Culture (1994) and (with Ann Curthoys) Is History Fiction? (2005).
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