Book Review of All you Need to Know about the Genocides of the XX Century by Daniel Muchnik

 Book Title: All you Need to Know about the Genocides of the XX Century

Author: Daniel Muchnik  ( Historian /Journalist)

My Personal Expectation with de Book ( Basically why I Picked it up): So in my studies in international relations I've gravitated towards the dark and more messed up stuff in international relations, in order to try to understand why these thing happen so I can put my little grain of sand so these thing never happen again, by clearing up any misconception people may have on the subject. So after writing my review on Matthew White's book on the History of Atrocities, that touches on the subject of Genocide I came across this book, so I was pumped thinking  that this book would dive deeper into the subject, so let's see what I could learn from this book.

Central Thymes and Concepts, that interested me as the reader:

·         Author explains that the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term Genocide, for a crime that up to that moment (World War II) wasn't a typified crime, a "Crime Without a Name", no way to effectively try the Nazi war criminals.

·         Lemkim term Genocide etymologically means to kill a people(as in a particular group)  or a race. By definition it's a crime without frontiers and it can happen during times of war or peace, that has the intention to destroy partially or totally a particular nationality, ethnicity, race or religious group. Genocide isn't the same as the concept crimes against humanity even though both concepts over lap (book actually mentions this but doesn't explain the difference, sloppy writing).

·         Daniel explains the concept of Holocaust which is a Greek term, that alludes to a sacrifice, like the ones that the Jewish  people offered to god in antiquity, where animals were sacrificed animals in fire.

·         Shoa is a Jewish term to describe calamity, destruction or ruin, which is used to describe what happened to the Jewish people during the second world war.

·         Not sure if on purpose but the author makes an interesting point that Colonialism, Nationalism  and Industrialization had a strong effect in the construction of the other dehumanizing them, opening the door to these crimes.

The Good stuff about the Book:

·         The book is a easy read author never bogs you down, he's pretty straight to the point.

·         The book is written in a interesting way each page has interesting items with interesting facts about the subject of the chapter, and quotes of specific historical figures.

·         At the end of each chapter the author sums up the whole section in one or two sentences.

·         To my shock I discovered in this book that the US took more than 40 years to sign the Genocide Treaty.

·         Another shock  that I discovered in this book is that only 22 (time when it was edited) countries recognize the Armenian Genocide, today it's about 29, with Uruguay being the first country to recognize that it happened and the United States isn't on the list even though 44 of its 50 States have. Unofficially Iran has recognized the Genocide.

·         Turkey in 1948 signs the treaty on Genocide, without recognizing its own crimes.

The Bad:

·         Only the first couple chapters explicitly cover the subject genocide, and the rest of the book is pretty much a normal history book about that centers around the atrocities of the XX Century, Matthew White does a much better job writing about the historical aspect of this subject than Muchnik. 

·         Book actually does a bad job differentiating the difference between the concepts of War Crimes, Crimes Against humanity and Genocide.

·         Book tries to define good and evil for some reason citing political authors but this part of the book goes nowhere.

·         Takes 50 pages to get to the first historical Genocide of the XX century, the Turkish crake down on Arminians.

·         Book insist to call Istanbul, Constantinople 

The book dedicates a lot of time to the Jewish genocide, understandably because of  its historical relevance  but he doesn't add anything new or a new perspective of what happened and in the cases of the other Genocides depicted in the book he just sheds a little light on them but he dedicates just one chapter to each one of  them, while in the case of the Shoa the book dedicates eight chapters.   

Genocides that are not mentioned in the book:  Bengali that lost 1.500.000 at the hands of the Pakistani, in 1971. Book doesn's mantion 500.000 gypsies killed by the Nazi's, Tibetans at the hand of the Chines in1950 about  350.000, Asirians by the Turks during the first world War apox. 275.000, Greeks that lived in Turkey after the first world war about 100.000 to 350.000, The Kurds during a 30 year periods lost about 200.000, East Timor around 102.800... so the book overlooked all of these cases that's a blunder by the author.

The Debatable:

Author  explaining the root of European anti-Semitism, is  the bedrock to the second world war  genocide of the Jewish people, but pretty much over simplifies a pretty complex religious, cultural and political problem , just by affirming  root of the problem is that Christian believes that the Jewish people killed Jesus there for the underlying animosity towards these people, now from my point of view the author, without going overboard, historically Christianity and Judaism have a very complex past, with some real bad moments, but the Jewish population has always been viewed as the other, not willing to be assimilated and at the same time they were not allowed to integrate themselves, so as a political tool by the powers that be they became the perfect scapegoat, accusing them to have killed Christ is just a excuse, sadly  they were persecuted because they were there and they were different and there was a cultural paranoia in the case of the Jewish people that they were power hungry.

In the books conclusion the it makes the mistake  of  opening up a can of worms, asking ¿Is the Israeli actions towards the Palestinians a genocide? and he establishes that it isn't ( which I also concur), but starts to analyze the conflict being totally pro Israel, with zero objectivity and using a very superficial analysis on probably the most complex  international issue out.     

Overall: This book is a lets down, it's pretty redundant compared to other history books on the subject, 3 out of 10.