The twentieth century witnessed many genocides and mass slaughters carried out by European states against their own peoples, or by Asian communists who adopted an extreme form of Marxism. Historians and sociologists have advanced a number of general theories in an attempt to explain why these massacres occurred. Possibly the best-known is that of the Jewish Polish-born British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (born in 1925) who, in Modernity and the Holocaust (1991) viewed the Nazi Holocaust, and, by extension, other recent genocides, as a product of “modernity”, a by-product of the orderliness and categorisation of modern secular ideologies, combined with the…