Conceptual blockages and definitional dilemmas in the 'racial century': genocides of indigenous peoples and the Holocaust

Donald Bloxham,The Final Solution: A Genocide(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

“…For substantiation of this implicit hierarchization, I refer the reader to A. Dirk Moses' seminal article on the subject. 71 The hierarchy has traditionally been implied most clearly, though not exclusively, in the claim that the Holocaust is 'unique'-it is also implied, whether or not intentionally, in the language of centring/decentring. By 'unique' is meant not the mundane uniqueness of every historical event, but a special quality whereby the particular characteristics of the Holocaust are promoted, without philosophical justification, above its commonalities with other genocides, and whereby comparative studies is distorted as an intellectual pursuit.…”

From comparative to international genocide studies: The international production of genocide in 20th-century Europe

“…In any case, if the exclusive idea of the 'nation' is central to high-modern genocide -and on this there is a convergence between Levene, Mann and others -its origins are more plausibly linked to French Revolutionary nationalism and the assault on the Vendée in 1794 (Levene, 2005b: 103-161) than to Westphalia. Moreover, as Levene recognizes, an overall account of modern genocide must begin in the rather different contexts of colonial conquest and settlement, linked more obviously to 'empire' and 'race' (Moses, 2002) than to 'nation'. Thus Levene's reversion to actortype analysis tends to blunt more historically specific system-type questions: what have been the historical tendencies in the forms and incidence of genocide, how have international relations in general changed over time, and what are the relationships between these trends?…”

Scandinavian Anthropology, Eugenics, and the Post-Colonial Geneticization of Sami Culture

“…Dirk Moses [10] points out that the century between 1850 and 1950 marked a period of intense ethnification of populations that culminated in the Holocaust and other genocides in Europeand took on distinct national features in history. Furthermore, certain patterns of extinction among the indigenous populations reveal that cultural genocide is not isolated from biological genocide, as portrayed by neo-liberal theorists.…”