Most scholars of genocide focus on mass murder. Lawrence Davidson, by contrast, explores the murder of culture. He suggests that when people have limited knowledge of the culture outside of their own group, they are unable to accurately assess the alleged threat of others around them. Throughout history, dominant populations have often dealt with these fears through mass murder. However, the shock of the Holocaust now deters today’s great powers from the practice of physical genocide. Majority populations, cognizant of outside pressure and knowing that they should not resort to mass murder, have turned instead to cultural genocide as a “second best” politically determined substitute for physical genocide.

In Cultural Genocide, this theory is applied to events in four settings, two events that preceded the Holocaust and two events that followed it: the destruction of American Indians by uninformed settlers who viewed these natives as inferior and were more intent on removing them from the frontier than annihilating them; the attack on the culture of Eastern European Jews living within Russian-controlled areas before the Holocaust; the Israeli attack on Palestinian culture; and the absorption of Tibet by the People’s Republic of China.

In conclusion, Davidson examines the mechanisms that may be used to combat today’s cultural genocide as well as the contemporary social and political forces at work that must be overcome in the process.

大多数研究种族灭绝的学者都专注于大规模谋杀。相比之下，劳伦斯-戴维森探讨的是文化的谋杀。他认为，当人们对自己群体以外的文化了解有限时，他们就无法准确评估周围其他人的所谓威胁。纵观历史，占主导地位的人群往往通过大规模的谋杀来处理这些恐惧。然而，大屠杀的震撼现在使今天的大国不敢再进行肉体上的种族灭绝行为。多数人口认识到外部压力，并知道他们不应该诉诸大规模屠杀，转而将文化灭绝作为政治上决定的替代肉体灭绝的 "次佳 "做法。

在《文化灭绝》中，这一理论被应用于四种情况下的事件，其中两个事件发生在大屠杀之前，两个事件发生在大屠杀之后：不知情的定居者对美国印第安人的毁灭，他们认为这些土著人是低等的，更想把他们赶出边境，而不是消灭他们；大屠杀之前，生活在俄罗斯控制区的东欧犹太人的文化受到攻击；以色列对巴勒斯坦文化的攻击；以及中华人民共和国对西藏的吸收。

最后，戴维森研究了可用于打击当今文化种族灭绝的机制，以及在此过程中必须克服的当代社会和政治力量的作用。