Exterminations are Doing Great in the World. A Review of My Book on the Subject

Grim, but it is also a breath of fresh air.

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Honestly, I didn’t imagine that my 2024 book “Exterminations” would have been so prophetic, and I am not happy that it was. But, unfortunately, it seems that exterminations are becoming a feature of our world, especially in the extended form called “genocides.” Not just the result of the madness of our leaders, but approved, or at least condoned, by a public continuously dazed and bamboozled by a propaganda system that’s becoming more and more effective and more aggressive in suppressing every contrary opinion.

My book is doing reasonably well in terms of sales, even though we are still speaking of hundreds of copies, not of thousands, . Yet, I daresay that those people who make the effort of reading it are gaining insights on the reasons why the current disaster is occurring. Here is a review that I received on Amazon from a US reader.

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  “Exterminations” by Ugo Bardi

5.0 out of 5 stars unparallelled

• Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2025

  A disturbing, important read - one of the most important books I'll read this year, possibly ever. It's a sobering look at humanity's history with war and mass exterminations. A few copyediting mistakes don't take away from this compulsively readable and incredibly well-researched book.
  
  The author makes good points that the madness that takes hold of groups of people related to war is always about power: money, territory, or both. It can also be about controlling the population and keeping it in check. It can be very complicated, and the author lets us see glimpses of these wheels within wheels.
  
  What are the things that make people vulnerable to being exterminated - and how to navigate it if you ever find yourself in that situation? The author's main point, that people vulnerable to extermination meet three criteria, is deeply important. Basically - 1) a subgroup that can be identified easily, 2) assets that can be confiscated 3) the lack of effective military defense.
  
  What do exterminations look like - from war, holocaust, to famine? Why did the average citizen of the time so thoroughly want WWI to happen? Why did no contemporaries seem to think that witch hunts were worth speaking out against, or even a moral problem? Why did the Europeans in America hate the Native Americans so much and talk about them like they were bugs to be exterminated? What led to the Holocaust, and the civilian population's utter complicity? Has humanity truly "gotten better" in any meaningful way, or will looking at the past show us what the future might look like, when people have profit motivations and propagandized beliefs designed to dehumanize others?
  
  This book sounds (and is in many ways) incredibly grim, but it is also a breath of fresh air. It can be so hard to see the world clearly, to understand history or how things work, but seen from this broader perspective, things make more sense, and it reminds us that none of us are really immune to propaganda. Only by wisdom and grace do we have a chance to make the world better, and protect ourselves and those we love, when evil arises.
  
  It is better than I'm making it sound, though. It's an important book and well-written. I wish everyone could stand to look at it, to look at this facet of humanity's history and really think about how war and human sacrifice are not truly so far apart.
  
  Quote from the book:
  

• "It is perfectly clear. An empire can survive only as long as it can guarantee the survival of minority groups. A nation state, instead, is a natural-born killer of minorities. It has no mechanisms to protect them from the whims of the majority. Once you understand this point, you understand many things." Indeed.
  
  The author makes a good point about how we don't have mass crowd casualty events much anymore - things like lynchings - but social media makes it easy to mobilize crowds and inform the worst of our nature all the same. The clear-headed, grim approach of the author is sometimes shocking, sometimes a breath of fresh air. He makes a good point about how immoral those in power regularly are, and the way they make choices - nothing that most people would even think of in how to treat other humans. Some theories (about military choices) are not fully supported, and the author points out that it's unclear how true they are - and indeed, how we may never fully know the true motives for certain military choices. I think rather than finding things that you don't agree completely about, it's more important to see and discuss the trends clearly.
  
  "As is always the case in propaganda wars, it was an asymmetric struggle: on one side, there was reason, and on the other, emotion. And emotion always trumps reason."
  
  A head-in-the-clouds belief that humanity has simply "gotten better" or will improve in some magical way are not useful. This book, that looks at the issues and addresses them honestly, will certainly make you think, and may better prepare you if human nature or social structures haven't truly changed in the last few centuries. I truly believe we as a species can do better - but we have to be honest about what the human relationship with extermination truly is.