God, Gulliver, and genocide

About this book

"When we say certain people 'ought to be shot', or exterminated from 'the face of the earth', we usually do so in the knowledge that we will not be thought to mean it literally. It is a figure of speech, partially sanitized by the conventions of social usage. We also create myths, stories, histories of which the same might be said. The victims in these stories may be whole peoples or groups of people, or even the whole of humanity, as when God said He would 'destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth'. The phrasing reverberates throughout scripture and human history. It has been applied to the people to Israel and to their enemies, to conquered savages, the Irish, the poor, and the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe. Its usage has ranged from the deadliest genocidal intentions, to satirical threats, fictional fantasies and colloquial expressions of undeadly irritation. We 'mean' it, don't mean it, and don't not mean it, and the demarcations are often unclear." "God, Gulliver, and Genocide explores the range of aggressions which inhabit the space between such figures of speech and their implementation, from the book of Genesis to the present day, but more especially in the period between the conquest to the Americas and the end of World War II. It examines a wide variety of authors and voices, chiefly Montaigne and Swift, but also Bartolome de las Casas and Jean de Lery, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, and travel-writers and ethnographers from Columbus and Vespucci to Bougainville and Cook. Behind all these stand those mass-catastrophes in Genesis, the Deluge and the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, with their grim and quizzical relation to the mass-slaughters of human history, culminating in the Second World War."--Jacket.