"Horesh's perceptive and thoughtful views on fascism are in the great tradition of past works by Orwell, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt and Henry Thoreau." Andy Heintz, author of Dissidents of the International Left


The breakdown of the liberal international order over the course of the last decade unleashed a string of crimes against humanity, culminating in the election of rightwing nationalists and fascists the world over. It might be said to have begun with Putin’s land grab in Ukraine in 2014. However, it was half a year later that Isis’s terror-state in the heart of the Middle East, Israel’s annihilation of Gaza, and Assad’s ongoing mass murder in Syria would culminate in a summer of hate that would transform our very conception of the world.

The crimes against humanity were fought over on social media where countless people were exposed to endless unfiltered atrocities. In the process, hundreds of millions of people became passive onlookers to genocide, but many also justified it in comments, making them active participants in mass murder. Meanwhile, countless others came to identify with its victims. All of a sudden, a world order that Steven Pinker had dubbed the most peaceful in human history was crumbling before our eyes. In the process, national collective traumas were being globalized as the global imaginary darkened, and crimes against humanity proliferated in Yemen, Burma, China, India, and Brazil.

This book is a panoramic excursion through the murderous new milieu. It is a vivid dissection of violence and a probing exploration of its causes, an erudite inquiry into the legacy of collective trauma and a magisterial overview of the new brutality peering through the cracks of a disintegrating international order. Yet, most of all, it is an inquiry into the all pervasive nature of genocide denial and the dynamics of collective trauma which perpetuate it. Sweeping in scope and striking in its originality, it will open your eyes and awaken your moral intelligence to the subterranean depths of ethnonational animosity today.