Goldhagen, Hirsi Ali and Fenton Bring New Works to L.A.

November is a splendid month for Angelenos who like to keep up with new books and meet the people who write them.

With Kristallnacht on Nov. 9 as a grim reminder, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen will evaluate the continuing horrors of genocide, while Ayaan Hirsi Ali will analyze the global threats posed by Islamic extremists.

In line with Veterans Day, Jason Fenton will discuss his book documenting the role of American and other foreign volunteers in Israel’s War of Independence.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

In his international best-seller, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” (Vintage, 1997), former Harvard political scientist Goldhagen proposed that the Holocaust was not merely the work of Hitler and a small cadre of Nazi fanatics, but was willingly carried out by ordinary Germans, indoctrinated by a long history of anti-Semitism.

Now, in “Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity” (PublicAffairs), Goldhagen broadens the historical landscape of the last century to record the “eliminationist” mass murders of Armenians, Cambodians, Bosnian Muslims, Tutsis, Darfurians — and the list goes on.

Looking at the sheer numbers, the “Worse Than War” title appears justified. According to the author’s calculations, between 127 million to 175 million people were killed in 20th century genocides, not counting the starvations under Stalin and Mao’s depredations in China.

Perhaps to make certain that his readers are wide awake, Goldhagen’s first sentence in the book reads, “Harry Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, was a mass murderer. He twice ordered nuclear bombs to be dropped on Japanese cities.”

As I read this jaw-dropping sentence, I was reminded of a learned British historian who, around 1938, wrote a book proving conclusively that Hitler did not represent a threat to Europe and, internally, only wanted to limit Jewish influence in Germany.

If the scholar had left his Oxford study and spent one day on the ground in Nazi Germany, he would have come to different conclusions, one reviewer observed.

The latter observation illustrates one of the problems later historians face in looking at earlier historical events. They may be privy to all subsequent documents and may be the keenest of analysts — as Goldhagen is — but they simply cannot relive or recreate the mood, the emotions, the gut feelings of the earlier time.

Goldhagen argues that Japan was, in effect, beaten and would have surrendered without dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This may or may not be valid, but the almost unanimous popular conviction at the time was that Japan could only be beaten by an invasion of the homeland, which might cost up to a million American casualties.

Had that occurred, and it came out that Truman could have prevented such deaths by dropping atomic bombs, he would not only have been impeached, but also probably lynched.

If I may be allowed a personal note, I was an infantryman at the time and, after seeing action in France and Germany, was being shipped back to the States to prepare for the anticipated invasion of Japan. Had I been killed in the invasion, as seemed not unlikely, I would have never forgiven Truman.

It is patently unfair to judge a book by its first sentence. In more than 600 pages, Goldhagen does yeoman’s work in analyzing the types and causes of genocides, including the demonization of clearly identifiable groups, which supposedly must be eliminated in self-defense to assure the survival of the perpetrators.

The author argues that such “eliminationism” is not inherent in human nature and can be prevented by political means. Perhaps if not by the feeble United Nations, than by an alliance of democracies ready to intervene forcefully at the first threat.

What seems to be missing in the equation, as critic Adam Kirsch of Tablet Magazine points out, is the “mystery of [human] evil.” As history has shown endlessly, any given people, under the “right” circumstances and leadership, are capable of slaughtering any perceived internal or external enemy.

Goldhagen will speak and field questions at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance on Nov. 9, starting at 7 p.m. Also to be featured are excerpts from the upcoming PBS documentary by Jay Sanderson of the Jewish Television Network, who accompanied Goldhagen on some of his travels and interviews.

Admission is free, but advance reservations are required. For reservations, call (310) 772-2527.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali