In spite of the passage of landmark international legislation criminalizing mass genocide, torture, military aggression and apartheid and the enactment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations, the modern period of world history has resulted some of the most heinous crimes against humanity yet seen. Sociologist Helen Fein traces the abysmal record in her book, Human Rights and Wrongs: Slavery, Terror and Genocide and seeks to explain why the international community has not been effective in putting a halt to them.

One clear answer, that Fein could be more explicit about, centers on the failure of the United States to provide moral leadership and its complicity and participation in some of the worst abuses. This is in spite of America’s role in drafting many of the pioneering pieces of legislation during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. To her credit, Fein draws on the work of scholars like Michael McClintock and Marguerite Feitlowitz in tracing America’s role in supporting military dictatorships in the Southern Cone during the 1970s, which institutionalized torture and frequently “disappeared” political opponents. She notes American training of repressive military and policing agents at the notorious School of the Americas, and the CIA’s support for international terrorist operations like Operation Condor, in which the security forces of military backed regimes led by Chile’s Augusto Pinochet collaborated to murder left-wing political activists, including a former Cabinet level official in Salvador Allende’s government, Orlando Letelier, who had his car blown up in Washington D.C.

Fein could have extended her discussion to include the gruesome atrocities perpetrated by Reagan backed forces in Central America, including the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, which resulted in the death of 900 civilians, and the defacto genocide of the native Indian population in Guatemala (which neocons and some American scholars evidently still support). In the attempt to demonstrate how Western complicity contributes to human rights atrocities, Fein could have additionally pointed to America’s support for notorious dictators such as Joseph Mobutu in Congo, General Mohammed Suharto in Indonesia (responsible for perpetrating two genocides, when he came to power in 1965 and during his Kissinger-backed invasion of East Timor in 1975) and successive military juntas in South Vietnam, which killed countless civilians under the rubric of counter-insurgency.

In rectifying a shortcoming of the subfield of “genocide studies,” (as well as “human rights” studies) Fein, furthermore, might have included discussion of the humanitarian ramifications of the type of “total warfare” characteristic of the 20th and 21st century. While not overtly genocidal, the use of new technologies of death coupled with racial dehumanization has resulted in massive civilian casualties (or “collateral damage” according to the latest parlance) and the suffering of millions of people in every major conflict waged since the First World War. U.S. forces in Indochina, for example, likely killed upwards of one million civilians, while crippling, maiming and displacing countless more. The numbers for the “forgotten” Korean War (in which U.S. General Curtis LeMay bragged about burning down every town in North Korea, as Bruce Cumings recounts in his authoritative history) were likely similar, while the totals for Iraq are less known, though a recent estimate places the figure at over 500,000.

To be sure, American foreign policy is hardly responsible for all of the major atrocities of the 20th century. Fein is at her best in synthesizing much of the scholarly literature on genocide and pointing out how ethnic hatred, religious extremism, heightened nationalism and power struggles have factored into the disregard for human life shown by all too many political groups, and how ordinary people can be easily manipulated to commit heinous deeds on their behalf. Fein’s discussion of the demonization of the black Christian population of Sudan by the Muslim majority and its resort to terror and slavery is particularly instructive and disturbing. So too is her ability to demonstrate how the popular rewriting of history by the Hutu majority in Rwanda allowed for the exclusion of the Tutsi population and later calls for its extermination after they had pressed for political rights.

In another engaging chapter, Fein highlights how the limited class based vision of society by Communist regimes and the vilification of the propertied classes resulted in major abuses and their ultimate demise. She provided added insights into the Machiavellian world in which Saddam Hussein rose to power in Iraq based on Iraqi exile Kanan Makyia’s book Republic of Fear, and Saddam’s institutionalization of torture and state repression to solidify his power base and curb his personal insecurities. In this respect, there were striking resemblances to Stalinist Russia. Sadly, Hussein’s American backed successors are now adopting similar methods in trying to overcome the stigma of being considered colonial collaborators by many Iraqis – a point Fein, as an American scholar, ought to have made mention of.

In sum, Fein has written an important book on a disturbing topic that sheds great insights into the motives and rationale for why mass genocide and terror has remained a dominant feature of modern history. The major shortcoming is an incomplete discussion of how American and Western complicity in major crimes against humanity has contributed to the betrayal of the vision of Franklin Roosevelt and the architects of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and of the promise engendered by their role in helping to defeat Fascist Germany and Japan. One can only hope that when the Bush-Cheney era ends, this vision and promise can once again be restored, and that the West can again play a role in working towards its fulfillment.