ABSTRACT
The Age of Totalitarianism was hallmarked by genocides and demo-cides on an unprecedented scale. While totalitarian regimes, especially the revolutionary governments of Asian Communism, con-
tinued to slaughter by the millions, most of the well-known examples of
what many would term ‘genocide’ in the post-1945 period were of an
entirely different kind, typified not by ideologically motivated massacres
but by what is termed ‘ethnic cleansing’ and by mass killings of their own
peoples, for reasons largely unrelated to ideology, by Third World dicta-
tors and others. This chapter explores some of the best-known examples
of the post-war period. Some, like the ‘ethnic cleansing’ carried out by
the Serbian government in parts of the former Yugoslavia, are well-
known and continuously reported in the world’s media, while others
remain less well-known.
