Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe

TitleFires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe
Publication TypeBook
Year of Publication2001
AuthorsNaimark, Norman M.
Number of Pages248
PublisherHarvard University Press
CityCambridge, MA
Abstract

Of all the horrors of the last century--perhaps the bloodiest century of the past millennium--ethnic cleansing ranks among the worst. The term burst forth in public discourse in the spring of 1992 as a way to describe Serbian attacks on the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but as this book attests, ethnic cleansing is neither new nor likely to cease in our time. The author provides a history of ethnic cleansing and its relationship to genocide and population transfer. Focusing on five specific cases, he exposes the myths about ethnic cleansing, in particular the commonly held belief that the practice stems from ancient hatreds. The author shows that this face of genocide had its roots in the European nationalism of the late nineteenth century but found its most virulent expression in the twentieth century as modern states and societies began to organize themselves by ethnic criteria. The most obvious example, and one of the cases described in this volume, is the Nazi attack on the Jews that culminated in the Holocaust. The author also discusses the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the expulsion of Greeks from Anatolia during the Greco-Turkish War of 1921-22; the Soviet forced deportation of the Chechens-Ingush and the Crimean Tatars in 1944; the Polish and Czechoslovak expulsion of the Germans in 1944-47; and Bosnia and Kosovo. In this history, the author reveals how over and over, as racism and religious hatreds picked up an ethnic name tag, war provided a cover for violence and mayhem, an evil tapestry behind which nations acted with impunity.

URLhttps://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674009943&content=toc
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