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State-Sponsored Mass Murder

This research compares and contrasts two cases of state-sponsored mass murder in the 20th century: the Holocaust, which refers to the state-sponsored murder in Europe of some 12 million people, 6 million of whom were Jews, during the Nazi regime; and the Stalinist purge of some 20 million people undertaken in the USSR state during the regime headed by Josef Stalin. In the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, in which an apparently stateless military attack accomplished a spectacle of mass murder and raised questions about how such an event could have happened, it may be instructive to consider that in the 20th century there were numerous examples of state-sponsored mass murder. The two most notorious--certainly the two that appear to have achieved the highest body count in the 20th century--can be found in Germany's Third Reich (1932-1945) and in the Stalinist period (1924-1953) of the Soviet state.

Murders that occurred at the behest of Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Russia were on a continuum of positive programs of state-mandated suppression. What Bullock (969) describes as the 40-50 million premature deaths attributable to either one regime or the other that occurred in Europe between 1930 and 1953 occurred in a continental Europe that for the first half of the 20th century was marked by political instability and fierce ideological competition. One object in view, according to Bullock (966) was to "redraw the map of Europe in the twentieth century." Ideology had claims of its own, and Bullock suggests that Nazism under Hitler was the extreme form of ideological fascism, just as Stalinism was the extreme form of ideological Bolshevism. That evaluation does not account for the tradition of nondemocratic rule in both Germany and Russia, between-the-wars Weimar Germany notwithstanding. It may be claiming too much cause-and-effect to suggest that the decisive revolutionary break from the monarchic tradition in both countri...

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State-Sponsored Mass Murder. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:08, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1683027.html