Genocide studies yield generalizable lessons for preventing other destructive organizations

Evidence

Staub sets himself the task of describing the cultural conditions that lead to genocide. Specifically, he has analyzed the Nazi Holocaust, the killings of the Armenians in Turkey from 1915 to 1916, the Cambodian massacre of their own countrymen during the 1970s, and the mass killings of “leftists” under the Argentinean dictators during the 1970s. His analysis deserves our attention for two reasons. First, genocidal movements are certainly evil ones, and therefore of direct interest. Second, as I have come to see, we can extract some generalizations from his conclusions, which can be applied to explain the origins of other destructive social organizations, in the interest of understanding these origins and the hope of preventing them. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3971

Categorization

• XREF: Staub’s cultural-societal approach parallels Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil thesis and ongoing genocide-prevention scholarship.