There are some writers who clearly think that by changing a word they can change the world.

After all, didn't Karl Marx tell us, at his most ambitious, that he didn't want to just analyze history, but transform it?

A noble venture, to be sure, and akin to what Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is trying to do with Worse Than War: Genoicide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity.

By changing the meaning of a word — genocide — he is trying to change our understanding of these murderous, historical crimes.

"Perhaps we fail to prevent genocides, not because they can't be stopped, and not just because we lack the will to stop them, but because we have misunderstood their nature," Goldhagen writes, in an article adapted from his book and published in The New Republic.

Daniel Goldhagen (courtesy JTN PRoductions)

Instead of genocide, he says, we should try to comprehend the mass killings of people, perhaps a hundred million in the last century, by another name — "eliminationism."

Reframing

An historian turned writer, filmmaker and global town crier, Goldhagen believes that if he can change our understanding of this concept, the blinkers will fall from our eyes.

"Genocides are so horrifying," he writes, "that we don't think clearly about them. We need to start over and rethink their every aspect."

Would that the world be changed by rethinking it is the hope of every intellectual, even if he or she knows better. The American psychologist and linguist George Lakoff, has even given this practice a name, which has come into our political parlance.

Lakeoff calls it reframing, the theory being that if you can reframe a debate, you can then use a different language, argument and narrative to change people's minds.

But how do you reframe something like genocide? How do you reframe a hundred million bodies and mass carnage?

Hitler's executioners

Goldhagen came to prominence in 1996 with the publication of his book Hitler's Willing Executioners.

It argued that many Germans — a half million, in his estimate, many more than most historians believed — willingly participated in the Holocaust.

These people were not cogs, or dupes, or ignorant, afraid to recognize the truth before their eyes. Many were enthusiastic killers who took souvenir photographs of dead bodies, as if they were on holiday with friends. Now, in Worse Than War, Goldhagen tells us that "people tend to think of our era's mass slaughters — of Armenians, Jews, Bosnians, Tutsis, Kosovars and Darfuris (among other less known mass murders) as discrete unusual events."

This is the wrong way to look them, he says. "Large-scale mass murder is a systemic feature of modern states and the international system."

Viciously attacked

In Goldhagen's view, Genocide is just one feature of elminationism. The others include forced repression, expulsion and the prevention of reproduction.

A Bosnian Muslim couple, Suhra Malic and Hasan Malic look at a memorial to victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Potocari in October 2009. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters)

What's more, he says, at its core, it is a political decision by its practitioners to further cherish goals — but "only if they believe the benefits to themselves will outweigh the costs."

In other words, says Goldhagen, political leaders instinctivey draw up a cost-benefit analysis. If the result is not worth it, they will curtail their elminationist policies.

Goldhagen's thesis has been attacked, of course. David Rieff, a journalist who covered the Bosnian war, wrote a blistering rebuttal recently.

Reiff says Goldhagen is not only unoriginal but blinded by self-importance. "The man really gives self-love a bad name," writes Rieff.

Rieff's review is long and carefully argued. But it's also downright vicious. Reading it, you'd think Goldhagen is a member of some death squad slaughtering innocents.

It is true that Goldhagen takes himself very seriously. His father survived the Holocaust and there is a desperate almost beseeching quality to his remarks.

He was in Toronto recently and you can see his speech at the Holocaust Remembrance Day in Los Angeles on YouTube.

League of good guys

Maybe coming up with a new semantic distinction between eliminationism and genocide isn't worth the bother.

It is easy to argue mass murder transcends rational, political calculations. After all, Hitler refused to stop the murder during the last days of the Second World War when the Third Reich's resources could have been better spent waging war rather than killing unarmed Jews and other targeted prisoners.

But what especially angers critics such as Rieff are Goldhagen's proposed solutions. Rieff calls them a new form of imperialism.

Goldhagen thinks the UN is useless and so he wants democracies to usher in a state of almost permanent interventionism over the entire planet.

Some of these ideas were floated during the last presidential election, from the Republican camp. A League of Democracies, it was called. America would lead the way, of course.

If homicidal political leaders made plans to physically eliminate their enemies, "the world's democracies would bomb their military forces and bases," Goldhagen suggests.

Hmmm. Who in their wildest dreams today can imagine a broke America, or a militarily exhausted Canada, leaping into every godforsaken conflict in remote Africa or Asia? Even if such a plan is correct by some moral calculus, it's still inconceivable.

Still, this idea of stopping eliminationism, or whatever you want to call it, has its appeal to many moral, fair-minded people.

The trouble, of course, is that the argument can get morally and politically messy, depending on your choice of victim.

I have heard anti-abortionists use the same language and argument in defence of the unborn.

So, what are we left with after reading and hearing Goldhagen? Merely more argument, pain and wishful thinking?

Here's a writer who tries to change the world with the only thing he has at his command: language. His words may not be supremely original or convincing.

But they are not causing anyone physical pain. So we might want to direct the vicious attacks at the would-be eliminators.