Regimes of Terror and Memory

The author claims that the thesis of the Uniqueness of the Holocaust has become a convenient excuse for not recognizing other regimes of terror in recent history. He therefore compares the memory of Nazi Germany’s macro criminal record with the remembrances of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, the Japanese Empire, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Indonesia 1965, the totally eclipsed transatlantic slave trade and US slavery. He discusses the cultural reasons for these memory distortions in the West and in the societies that experiences these macro crimes of genocidal violence. He has embedded his search in an autobiographical context that begins with his birth, upbringing and education in Germany from 1938 to 1969, continues after his move to Hawaii in 1970 in the American political culture and becomes through extensive travelling in Europe, Asia and S. Africa cosmopolitan.