> You mean like what the Romans did to Carthage and the
> Hebrews to Jericho?
Total slaughter has been around since competing tribes of hominids fought over the right to gnaw on the local mastodon carcass. But there's a qualitative leap from killing small settlements of people -- population numbers for most of prehistory were tiny -- to the early modern destruction of entire continents for the sake of exchange-value.
I find it fascinating and symptomatic that Judt wails loudly about violence, but can't be bothered to mention the inconvenient truth that the US spends $800 billion every year on the industrialized variant of hominid head-bashing. That's half the military spending of Planet Earth.
-- DRR