Invasion and
Extermination

Invasion and extermination are some of the dangers people encounter when they cannot manage to develop a "well-ordered" society ... And so this was the fate not just of the Aztecs, but of the native populations of Australia and North America, whose rates of attrition after contact [with Europeans] were 80 and 95 percent respectively.

As Mann points out, 12 years of Nazi rule in Europe resulted in the death of 70 per cent of the Jewish population; in the first 12 years of California's statehood, the Native American population fell by 80 per cent. Anyone who imagines that a post-genocidal literature must be unreadeable should try Little House on the Prairie, or perhaps Joan Didion's Where I Was From.

--- Malcolm Bull in the LRB,
9 February 2006
Reviewing Michael Mann's
The Dark Side of Democracy:
Explaining Ethnic Cleansing
(Cambridge University Press)