Cleansing After 1945 Michael Mann I have shown that modernity generated two different conceptions of democracy. First, North-Western European and white settler régimes had a pronounced sense of class conflict, and sought to institutionalize it. Thus they developed and deepened forms of liberal, not organic, democracy among themselves. But the white settlers developed an organic conception of their whole community as opposed to alien indigenous ‘others’. They practised severe forms of ethnic cleansing upon them, including the commission of genocide. Second, the different circumstances of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, meant that not class but ethnic stratification became the central political issue. Unlike classes, most ethnic or religious communities are not necessarily interdependent. They can live in their own cleansed communities, with their own organic state. They were increasingly doing so. In two distinct ways, th...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51