God Gulliver and Genocide

We are obsessed with barbarians. They are the not us who don''t speak our language or any language whom we despise fear invade and kill; for whom we feel compassion or admiration and an intense sexual interest; whose innocence or vigor we aspire to and who have an extraordinary influence on the comportment and even modes of dress of our civilized metropolitan lives; whom we often outdo in the barbarism we impute to them; and whose suspected resemblance to us haunts our introspections and imaginings. This book looks afresh at how we have confronted the idea of barbarism in ourselves and others from the conquest of the Americas to the Nazi Holocaust through the voices of many writers including Montaigne Swift and Shaw.