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The origins of genocide have been sought by scholars in many areas of human experience: politics, religion, culture, economics, demography, ideology. All these of course are valid explanations, and go a long way to getting to grips with the objective conditions surrounding genocide. But, as Berel Lang put it some time ago, there remains an inexplicable gap between the idea and the act of mass murder. This article aims to be a step towards bridging that gap by adding a human dimension to the existing explanations. Building on Roger Caillois's anthropological analysis of 'war as festival', Georges Bataille's concept of society's 'excess energy', and Emile Durkheim's idea of 'collective effervescence', and connecting these terms to those used explicitly in relation to the Holocaust by Dominick LaCapra ('scapegoating' and the 'carnivalesque') and Saul Friedl‰nder ('Rausch' or 'ecstasy'), I argue that prior to and during any act of genocide there occurs a heightening of community feeling, to the point at which this ecstatic sense of belonging permits, indeed demands, a normally forbidden act of transgression in order to 'safeguard' the community by killing the designated 'threatening' group. This article is a theoretical starting point aimed at stimulating discussion, in which I refer to the Nanjing and My Lai massacres and the genocides in Nazi Germany and Rwanda to show where empirical research is needed to illustrate this concept of 'genocide as transgression'.

The dominant historiographical view of eugenics in Britain is that it was a middle-class protest movement that found in early genetic science a justification for its objections to paying taxes to aid the poor. Often, this position is contrasted with a 'harder', blood-and-soil, continental type of eugenics, one that ended in genocide. In this article Stone does not dispute the class-based nature of British eugenics, but shows that, among all kinds of eugenicists, this class issue was inseparable from a racially motivated world view. 'Race', in this reading, was more than simply a synonym for 'nation', for already by the Edwardian period there was a widely accepted racial hierarchy. If this was not always referred to, it was because it was taken for granted. Hence the view of British eugenics that sees it as mildly threatening but basically embarrassing needs to be adjusted so that its full, sinister implications can be seen.

A much neglected figure in the history of the reception of Nietzsche in Britain, Oscar Levy not only headed the Nietzsche movement, but went on to produce a challenging Nietzschean Zivilisationskritik of his own. Focusing especially on the role of the Jews in western civilization, Levy took on the majority of political ideologies of his day, including popular Nietzscheanism, and called into question the ability of Christianity, liberalism, communism or fascism to deal with the ills of contemporary society. Levy's consistent Nietzscheanism makes him stand alone in the history of Nietzschean thought, and illustrates the complexity of the history of ideas of the first half of the twentieth century. Yet his apparently bizarre views on the Jews are actually closer to Nietzsche's own than are the views of many better known Nietzschean thinkers, especially nazi philosophers. And his writings, incompatible with today's mainstream beliefs as they are, nevertheless demonstrate why Nietzsche was himself no fascist.