The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder Hardcover – January 13, 2015

excellent,profound. Understanding how "normal men" could commit atrocities and have no guilty conscience. Refutes hannah arndt banality of evil. . why men of the Hamburg battalion were not Odinary men but ordinary men who had grown up during world war 1 with 2 million German dead, hyperinflation and >22 years of virulent anti jewish propaganda which made jews completely other to them. a compartment where this violence was "ok" and convinced germans of that era they were the victims threatened by jews.. Also also very informative about the fate of turkish Armenians , tutsis and why they were slaughtered and on and on. Stalin's terror China terror etc. What a century! and not over it yet.Also note religious belief had Nothing to do with slaughter

Good overview but wanted more: more socio-economic-historical analyses that place these awful crimes against humanity in our sweep of history. Instead, we're left feeling that much goes on without our knowing, gets swept under the rug of "little" history - those stories of one tribe or another, or of one people or another, or of one region or another. And, that we all forget.

This is a huge subject spaning centuries so details of the histoical events are minimal. However I believe that the author successfully made his case about the methodology of tyrants and Progressives used in the last 150 years to effect mass murder

a a sociological take on killing groups obsessionally presented

very incisive interesting book!!

This books claims to dispense with easy answers and identify the real reasons for genocide. The author claims these roots lie in social and psychological factors such as indoctrination, working in teams, lack of guilt on the part of the kills, propaganda, isolation of the victims and the like. The author is correct in saying that you cannot explain genocide by saying the killers were obeying orders because that does not explain why the orders came to be given. Exactly. Unfortunately, the author does not explain it. Social and psychological explanations do not work if you do not explain how societies and psychologies got that way. The deepest explanation can only come from philosophy. I would like to contrast this book with one that does the job properly: The Cause of Hitler's Germany by Leonard Peikoff. Peikoff explains in stunning detail how Nazism was the result of generations of corrupt philosophy (stemming from Plato German philosophers such as Kant and Hegel), such as hatred of reason, the glorification of duty, collectivism, and the denial of objective reality and even of the individual. The Nazis had little serious opposition because Hitler's opponents ts shared all his fundamental ideas. Mr. de Swan does not go nearly deep enough. For those really interested in the issue of genocide, I recommend comparing these two books.