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On Butchery. The Museum Publishes a Polish edition of Bernard Bruneteau’s "Le siècle des génocides"

Wiek ludobójstwa (The Age of Genocide), by the French expert Bernard Brunetau, is being made available to Polish readers for the first time. The book presents a wide range of views by philosophers, historians, and sociologists on the causes of genocide in the 20th century, which Brunetau terms, with considerable justification, “the age of genocide.”

Having begun with the slaughter of the Armenians in Turkey, the century just past concluded with the extermination of the Rwandan Tutsi and ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. Between these events, the world lived through the great Stalinist massacres and the tragedy of the Holocaust, as well as the butchery carried out by the Khmer Rouge.

Created by Rafał Lemkin in 1944, the word “genocide” denotes crimes on a mass scale aiming at the annihilation of groups of people in the name of national, ethnic, racial, or religious criteria. Brunetau discusses these issues and describes the 20th century’s worst acts of extermination.

Bernard Bruneteauis professor of history at Pierre Mendes-France University in Grenoble. He specializes in totalitarianism and has written numerous books including Les totalitarismes (Totalitarianisms) and “L’Europe nouvelle” de Hitler: Une illusion des intellectuels de la France de Vichy (Hitler’s “New Europe” : An Illusion of the Intellectuals of Vichy France).

Bernard Bruneteau, Wiek ludobójstwa
Translated from the French by Beata Spieralska
Warsaw, 2005. Oficyna Wydawnicza Mówią Wieki in cooperation with the Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Oświęcimiu
14.5 x 21 cm., bibliography, annexes, 224 pp.

Published by Oficyna Wydawnicza Mówią Wieki in cooperation with the Auschwitz Museum