ABSTRACT
The history of criminology is marked by a series of intellectual revelations that people too often take for granted, for example, persons of high socioeconomic status commit crimes; a small number of young chronic offenders commit a disproportionate amount of crime. Irving Louis Horowitz suggests that conceiving of genocide as a crime in the province of victimology or criminology will necessarily reduce its meaning. Genocide, it has been said, is a political rather than criminal act most often employed to enhance the solidarity and unification of nation-states. Survivors, victims, and refugees resist the conscious and unconscious denial of genocide. Increasingly, all are more aware of the risks of admission; the dangers of “Americanizing” and “cleansing” the horrors of genocide so that the Diary of Anne Frank plays well on Broadway and Hollywood can sell wide-screen images of individual altruism during the Holocaust.
