ABSTRACT
Unquestionably, the epicenter of Robert Jay Lifton's influential and highly significant scholarly oeuvre is a preoccupation with genocide, and particularly with what he identifies as "the genocidal mentality." Whether it is the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the nuclear threat, the Vietnam War, or even the Armenian ordeal in Turkey, Lifton's psychohistorical inquiries have exposed the main dimensions of the genocidal phenomenon, explaining how both its architects and perpetrators go about their bloody business and how a complicit population removes itself from real knowledge, and hence from any realization of their own interventionary responsibility. Lifton's most provocative and threatening, yet also most valuable, finding is the dual reality that those who commit genocide are not far removed from the rest of us and that all of us, by societal circumstance or by drawing down a numbing curtain over our feelings, are actual or potential culprits. In essence, Lifton's work imparts the disquieting news that there is a fearsome normalcy about genocide that makes efforts to portray its occurrence as abnormal deviance profoundly misleading, and worse, that encourages complacency.
