ABSTRACT
For concerned citizens as well as social scientists, the unresolved question is whether the increase is an accident of human nature or a result of fundamental changes in the social system or the moral order. The notion that science or modernity is somehow responsible for society's successes or failures derives from the long history of Utopias and dystopias. The Rousseauian pole, as expressed in the Social Contract and even more clearly in the Discourses on Inequality, offers a direct challenge to this Judeo-Christian tradition. This chapter explains the causes of genocide in the specific relations exposed by a stagnant moral climate and a rapidly changing technological order; it is not necessarily a defense of either the Hebrew or Christian faiths. The nationalisms that spawn genocide are not a pleasant subject to contemplate, but clearly they are central to the performance of genocide. The chapter explains how the social organization within the death camps served to unleash mayhem.
