Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror Paperback - 1996 - 1st Edition

Mass Hate explores why the brutality of humankind has erupted and flowed more expansively in the twentieth century than ever before. More importantly, this monumental work offers specific recommendations on how to stem this bloody global tide of slaughter, terror, and genocide - so that the twenty-first century does not bring more of the same, or worse. Neil Kressel - a respected authority on the psychology of international affairs, genocide, and terrorism - meticulously investigates why in the past eight decades mass hatred has reached genocidal proportions throughout the world. In his investigation, he focuses on the horrifying butchery in Rwanda, the terrifying tactics of rape and torture of women in Bosnia, and the systematic murder of millions of Jews and others in the Holocaust. Genocide has occurred so often and blood has gushed so freely that one might consider the urge to kill one's neighbor an inborn characteristic of our species. Furthermore, the power to wreak bloody havoc on innocent civilians has become not only the sport of "soldiers", but of terrorists as well. In light of this, Kressel examines the motives for terrorist acts, specifically those of ultraextremist Muslims. Our only hope lies in understanding the human impulse to hate and the forces that transform that impulse into brutish action. In his quest for a thorough understanding of what ignites mass slaughter, Kressel probes beyond the facile, stock answers that traditionally explain such horrors. He plumbs the depths of history, psychology, and political science to derive his own theories of what propels an average citizen to raise a machete to groups of innocent women and children and slash them to death, or topull the lever to release pernicious gases upon defenseless people, and to do it again and again.