This review of recent books on Zaire examines how the changing salience of the issues of ethnicity, class, and the state exhibit shifts in academic perspectives and especially in perceptions of how best to account for and articulate the characteristics of political life in contemporary Zaire. The authors' views on the dynamics of class formation within a situation of increasing socioeconomic inequality and state decline raise questions about how or to what degree the Mobutu regime has managed to institutionalize a kind of “authority” and “political order” over the past twenty years. The case of Zaire challenges the meaning of “institutionalization” because the most clearly identifiable practices in Zaire have centered on finding efficient means for appropriating whatever political and economic resources are at hand.

The implementation of the Final Solution is discussed in terms of the divergent interpretations characteristic of the “functionalists” and the “intentionalists.” The routines of two sets of implementors are described: the mass liquidations perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen an the “barbaric-civil orderliness” of the bureaucrats carrying out the deportation of the German Jews. In the final section, Lifton's concept of the medicalization of the killings is introduced, with attention also to his thoughts on “doubling” and the extension of his concerns “beyond Auschwitz” to the sphere of nuclear catastrophe.