The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century (review)

122 SHOFAR Spring 1997 Vol. 15, No.3 journalists at the London Times and by Segel himself demonstrated clearly that it was fabricated from three sources around the tum of the century: a French political satire attacking Napoleon III entitled Dia/ogue between Machiavelli andMontesquieu in Hell; a German pulp fiction novel entitled Biarritz; and the creative minds ofthe tsarist Russian secret service who sought to warn Tsar Nicholas II against a revolution being allegedly plotted by liberals, Freemasons, and Jews. Segel published his long and scholarly refutation of the Protocols under the title Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion, kritisch be/euchtet: Eine Er/edigung [The Protocols ofthe Wise Men ofZion, Critically Illuminated: A Lethal Refutation] in 1924. His shorter, more popular, 1926 book edited and published here is based on that lengthier work. Some may find Segel's prose, even as carefully reconstructed by Richard Levy for the American reader, to be awkward and hard to understand. For example, some ofthe phrases are heavily weighted with irony, and if they were pulled out of context they would make Segel appear to be an antisemite himself. The excellent explanatory notes (which, for greater clarity should have been placed as footnotes rather than grouped at the end of each section ofthe book) help us to make sense of the seventy-year-old polemics. For those who realize that vicious antisemitism was not (and is not) limited to the Germans of the early twentieth century, this book makes significant contribution. The vile legend unfortunately still has its advocates, and Segel's and Levy's strong voices deserve to be heard in their attempts to put it finally to rest. Gordon R. Mork Department ofHistory Purdue University The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century, by Eric Markusen and David Kopf. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. 354 pp. $34.95. This book is a revision ofEric Markusen's doctoral thesis in sociology expanded by historian David Kopfto look at the global context of violence in the twentieth century. One only needs to begin to read the forward by noted Holocaust scholar Israel Charny to realize how unusual and provocative this work is. While praising the authors in his first paragraph for their moral courage and determination to come to grips with the complicated relationship between war and genocide, Charny begins to disagree with their methodology and conclusions in his second. He is especially critical of their decision to use the Holocaust as a metaphorical tool and believes they have gone too far in their comparisons ofthat event with Allied strategic bombing in World War II. Despite the historical veneer, this book is primarily a study of the sociology ofmodem mass killing, and while Charny's BookReviews 123 criticisms ofit are accurate, it is still worth reading to contemplate its troubling conclusions and proposed reforms. The authors begin with a broad discussion of the historiography of total war and genocide: they generally regard any form of government mass killing to be genocidal, regardless of intent. This leads them to conclude that, in the twentieth century, war and genocide have sometimes merged to produce the most violent and murderous era in history. They describe the global context surrounding World War II, and then the evolution ofthe Holocaust and Allied strategic bombing campaigns. Their comparison of these two activities is based upon the results of each, as well as on the psychological, organizational, and scientific-technological factors that allowed otherwise ordinary people to engage in them. The authors concede that airmen were exposed to more risk and had a different objective in their attacks on civilians than their Nazi counterparts in the death camps, and that Getman and Japanese civilians were members of a defended enemy society, but argue that in both cases governments sanctioned the slaughter ofmasses ofinnocent civilians in recognized violations of international law. Ideological dehumanization, bureaucratic compartmentalization, organizational loyalty, scientific rationalization and technical distancing facilitated genocidal behavior in both the Holocaust and strategic bombing. The authors even deny the airmen's excuse that the bombing campaign was just a means toward the goal ofwinning the war while for the Nazis the killing ofthe Holocaust was an end...