“It's déjà vu all over again,” said the great linguist (and Yankee catcher) Yogi Berra. This was my initial reaction upon perusing this book: Ideas put forward by others, including myself, are revisited in somewhat revised form. This is especially true of portions of the book that seek to explain genocide and certain dynamics of mass murder within an international context. But upon a more careful reading, I saw that this treatment does diverge from others in significant ways. First, new concepts are introduced to explain massacre and genocide: those of “delusional rationality” and the imaginaire (the French word is used throughout), or imaginary fear. Second, in the study of mass murder, the massacre is suggested to be the principal unit of analysis, replacing genocide; hence the subtitle of the book.

With these conceptual additions, Jacques Semelin, a French political scientist, seeks to reorient the study of mass murder that has historically centered on genocide. These proposed innovations are sufficiently interesting to command attention. Much of the following review centers on their meaning and implications, both analytical and moral. Though perhaps applicable in part to an understanding of the etiology of massacre, the concepts of delusional rationality and the imaginaire do not capture the sources of genocide itself and can have pernicious consequences, if taken seriously.

Semelin begins by delimiting his cases, which, though unevenly examined, are the Jews in Holocaust-era Europe, the Muslims in Bosnia, the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Armenians in Anatolia. He then introduces the concept of the imaginaire. Various forms of mass murder are said to be driven by an imaginary fear that leads to a delusional rationality. Delusions about the iniquities of people denoted as the “other” are assumed to provide a basis for their systematic elimination. The “rational” component is suggested by the expectation that when these dangerous aliens are removed, matters will improve considerably.

Now, although these concepts of delusional rationality and imaginary fear may have a partial applicability to the Holocaust, they certainly do not generalize to the Bosnian, Rwandan, and Armenian instances of genocide. Indeed, in the former Yugoslavia, Serbs were eager to negotiate with the Muslims of Bosnia in order to retain them in a united Yugoslavia still under Serb leadership, despite the defection of the Slovenes and Croats. One cannot imagine Hitler negotiating with Jews for their participation in the Third Reich. Only when the Muslims demurred did they become targets of the Serbs. The murders of Muslims in Bosnia (excepting Srebrenica, which has been deemed genocide by the United Nations) clearly are not in the same category as the depredations of the Holocaust. It was the reality of a Serbia weakened in its dominance of Yugoslavia by these defecting nationalities, and seeking to compensate for these losses by adding territory free of Muslims or Croats, that prompted the mass killing, not some imaginary fear or delusional rationality. It was also the reality of an invasion by the predominantly Tutsi Rwandese Patriotic Front and its success at defeating the Rwandan army that set the stage for the genocide of Tutsis, whose votes would have counted against the Hutu extremists in a peaceful democratic Rwanda.

And the Armenians, who receive much less attention by Semelin, present the strongest case for the inapplicability of these concepts. Armenian revolutionary groups—the Dashnaks and Hunchakists—had for decades been agitating, sometimes violently, for Armenian independence, or at least autonomy, within their homeland of eastern Anatolia. The creation of “another Bulgaria” in eastern Anatolia was greatly feared by the Ottoman sultans and later by the Young Turks who committed the genocide. It was the reality of the conflict that was central; what is needed is an explanation of the inordinate and perverse genocidal response, not the invention of inapplicable concepts.

Understanding the sources of genocide requires recognition of the importance of the reality of critical political events and the political responses to them. Even the etiology of the Holocaust departs considerably from intimations of delusional rationality and imaginary fear. One cannot even begin to understand the formation of a Nazi Party and its eventual popularity without recognizing the traumatic consequences of the German defeat in World War I, the Spartacist Revolution of 1919 in Berlin, and the Bavarian Communist Revolution led by three Russian Jews. The last two events are not mentioned by Semelin, despite the enormous impact on Bavaria and its transformation into the German base of the Nazi Party. Of course, the Russian Revolution and the prominence of Jews among its leaders fed into the anti-Semitism engendered by these events. It was the reality of these occurrences that was to be so consequential for the Holocaust, for the fear was genuine and palpable, albeit perverse and unwarranted. And the genocide itself began only after the German invasion of Russia.

Contrary to Semelin's proposed emphasis on massacre as the principal unit of analysis, policies of the state are required to understand the decision to commit genocide, or even mass murder on a large scale. The massacres of Jews in Russian pogroms of the late nineteenth century were quite different from those of World War II. Qualitatively, the pogroms did not arise from tsarist policy despite early indications that this might be the case, and quantitatively of course, the number of Jews murdered was several orders of magnitude smaller, numbering in the hundreds, not millions. In other words, seeking to explain both massacre and genocide within the same framework is a major research blunder. Explaining the magnitude of the genocidal killing would be largely overlooked, as it has been in this book. When Semelin declares at the outset: “I am not a German Jew, or a Tutsi from Rwanda, or a Bosnian Muslim” (p. 1), he signals that the remaining 95% of the Jewish victims who were not German Jews (most were East European) would not be sufficiently recognized. Even Vichy France and its leaders, Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, complicit in the murder of 72,000 Jews, merit only one sentence in the entire book (p. 220) and zero entries in its index.

Worse, introduction of the concept of perpetrator delusion raises the possibility of exculpation. Only those of sound mind can be deemed to be responsible for their actions. If they were delusional, then the possibility of impunity is open for those who deliberately killed innocent human beings. Semelin's section entitled “The Ambiguity of Evil” does not help matters. Homicidal behavior can have ambiguous antecedents. Evil itself, understood here as the premeditated mass murder of innocent human beings, is never ambiguous.

These considerations suggest that the book was hastily written and produced, a conjecture that is reinforced by the fact that names mentioned in the text do not appear in the index, citations are sometimes not given for authors named in the text, names are misspelled (e.g., Arno Mayer becomes Arnold Mayer, and Peter Longrich is cited as Peter Longerish), and the heading of the concluding chapter is misspelled throughout. Semelin is obviously well read, especially in the French literature, and demonstrates a capacity for analytic thought. It is a pity that this book was not more precisely conceived and executed. Vraiment, c'est dommage.