In many ways, (the Armenian genocide) shows that the old idea that war is politics by other means is outdated in the 20th century. War is hatred by other means. And in this case, hatred means extermination. The First World War was the biggest war ever to date. The Second World War was bigger still. It’s not an accident in my mind that both of them were marked by genocide. This is the logic of the brutalization of total war.
So states the eminent historian Jay Winter in the 1997 PBS special, “The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century,” which he co-created and served as chief historian. Winter uses his knowledge of 20th century European history to examine the psychological impact of that history on people and on nations. He is interested in studying how a nation remembers its wars and its repercussions, and how it chooses to memorialize it. Holocaust Memorial Lecture
