In the pantheon of extremist behavior, genocide is emblematic. It would be difficult to imagine a more brutal example of extremism, and one that defies the traditional moral precepts of almost any code of human conduct, sacred or secular. The three most extensive genocides of the twentieth century, those that as a matter of state policy aimed at the annihilation of a particular group, were the Armenians (1915–16), the Holocaust (1941–45), and the Tutsi in Rwanda (1994). These are the principal cases examined in The Killing Trap, but now are to be investigated from the perspective of the elaborated framework offered here. (The massacre of the Herero in 1904 did have a genocidal consequence, but was not German state policy.)

The Armenians

If the theory of the ephemeral gain is valid it should be applicable to these cases, and here, in the instance of the Armenian genocide, at first glance it would seem to be inapplicable. By the turn of the twentieth century, the history of the Ottoman Empire would appear to have been one of inexorable decline. After the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji signaled the first loss of Ottoman territory to the non-Muslim world, in this case Russia, no instance of victory or reversal of this pattern appears at a cursory inspection of the historical record. The identification of loss as a progenitor of genocide appeared in The Killing Trap, but no indication of a preceding victory was noted.