Pete Kakel

Having read my share of accounts of the Final Solution, and the course of empire in North America, I approached this monograph with a good bit of interest. Sadly, this interest seems to have been misplaced. The main concern of the author would appear to be to sell the reader on the value of "genocide studies," as a source of insight, and then to offer an "one-hand-than-the-other" account of the dispossession of the First Nations, as compared with the development of a new German drive to the east (in the wake of the failure to carve out an empire in Africa and the Far East). While there do appear to be tidbits of information on the influence of the American experience on the Germans (what I was mostly looking for), Kakel's writing style is sufficiently prolix that I didn't feel like working that hard to tease those insights out. This is particularly since his final conclusions, that settler colonialism tends to go hand in hand with ethnic cleansing, or even out-and-out genocide, did not impress me as being especially novel. At best this is interlibrary-loan fodder that one reads because your professor made you.… (mehr)