The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat

Abstract

This book is interesting, frightening, wise, and important. In another highly provocative collaborative effort, this time with sociologist Eric Markusen, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has succeeded in warning citizens of the world not to fall asleep on nuclear weapons issues. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has pushed back the minutehand on its doomsday clock, US-Soviet relations are starting to warm-up, and brakes are starting to be applied to the arms race, but in reading this book, it is clear that our confrontation with nuclear weapons has only just begun. Careful to delineate differences as well as similarities, the book reflects on the Nazi genocide to help us better understand how modern societies can create and maintain nuclear weapons systems and strategies capable of species genocide. Like the Nazi experience, the process whereby ordinary people become cogs in the wheels that drive a potentially genocidal system for amassing and deploying nuclear weapons is sustained by certain psychological mechanisms that protect the individuals involved from inwardly acknowledging the real or potential harmful effects that