Cumulative radicalization

In historiography and genocide studies, cumulative radicalization is the notion that genocide and other mass crimes are not planned long in advance, but emerge from wartime crises and a process of radicalization. Originally coined by German historian Hans Mommsen with regard to the functionalist view of the Holocaust, in his 1976 essay "National Socialism: Cumulative Radicalization and the Regime’s Self-Destruction".[1][2][3][4][5] The concept has also been applied to the Armenian genocide.[6][7][8][9]

  1. ^ Zimmermann, Moshe (2014). "Stationen kumulativer Radikalisierung. Das Editionsprojekt ,,Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland"". Neue Politische Literatur. 2014 (1): 10–22. doi:10.3726/91500_10.
  2. ^ Vondung, Klaus (2010). "Debatten um den Holocaust und das Deutungskonzept der 'politischen Religion' der 'politischen Religion'". Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik (in German). 40 (1): 9–22. doi:10.1007/BF03379665. ISSN 2365-953X. S2CID 164613710.
  3. ^ "Hans Mommsen (1930–2015)". German History. 35 (2): 272–289. 1 June 2017. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghx046. Mommsen's concept of 'cumulative radicalization' was first proposed, I believe, in his 1976 entry for 'National Socialism' in the ninth edition of Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon—the final edition of this venerable publication. His six-page essay, under the title 'Der Nationalsozialismus. Kumulative Radikalisierung und Selbstzerstörung des Regimes' ('National Socialism: Cumulative Radicalization and the Regime's Self-Destruction'), is a condensation of ideas that he had been developing since he had begun to work on the history of Nazism in the early 1960s; to appropriate John Stuart Mill's phrase, it appears as a kind of 'intellectual pemmican', almost too dense to digest... Mommsen's Third Reich is an object lesson in how conservative elites chose compromise with regimes of totalitarian terror, why they failed to resist and how difficult it therefore was for domestic forces to dislodge this kind of terroristic regime— unless it could be toppled by its own excessive ambitions, in the parasitic dynamic indicated by the essay's title.
  4. ^ Browning, Christopher R. (2013). "Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization ed. by Alex J. Kay, Jeff Rutherford, and David Stahel". German Studies Review. 36 (3): 723–724. doi:10.1353/gsr.2013.0107. S2CID 159557941.
  5. ^ "Hans Mommsen (1930–2015)A History of Cumulative Radicalization | www.yadvashem.org". zimmermann.html. Retrieved 11 January 2021.
  6. ^ Melson, R. (2013). "Recent Developments in the Study of the Armenian Genocide". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 27 (2): 313–321. doi:10.1093/hgs/dct036.
  7. ^ Schrodt, Nikolaus (2014). Modern Turkey and the Armenian Genocide: An Argument About the Meaning of the Past. Springer. pp. 246–247. ISBN 978-3-319-04927-4.
  8. ^ Bloxham, Donald (2003). "The Armenian Genocide of 1915-1916: Cumulative Radicalization and the Development of a Destruction Policy". Past & Present (181): 141–191. doi:10.1093/past/181.1.141. ISSN 0031-2746. JSTOR 3600788.
  9. ^ Melson, Robert (2015). "Contending Interpretations Concerning the Armenian Genocide: Continuity and Conspiracy, Discontinuity and Cumulative Radicalization". Genocide Studies International. 9 (1): 10–21. doi:10.3138/gsi.9.1.02. S2CID 145397509.