Genocide

• see also:
  • the 20th century - 2nd quarter
  • the 20th century - 3rd quarter
  • the 20th century - 4th quarter

Introduction:

• genocide is the intention to exterminate an ethnic, national or religious group of people who are targeted as such, whether by:
  • killing members of the group
  • causing serious bodily or mental harm of the group
  • deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
  • imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
  • forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
• Stanton's 8 stages of genocide:
  1. classification - the creation of groups of people
  2. symbolisation - creation of symbols or names for the group of people
  3. dehumanisation - one group denies the humanity of another group, equating it with animals, vermin, etc which serves to overcome the normal human revulsion against murder.
  4. organisation - genocide is always organised, whether by the state or by terrorist groups. Special army units or militias are often trained & armed. Plans are made for genocidal killings.
  5. polarisation - extremists drive the groups apart, hate groups broadcast polarising propaganda, laws may forbid intermarriage or social interaction. Extremist terrorism targets moderates, intimidating & silencing the center.
  6. preparation - victims are identified & separated out. Death lists are drawn up. Members f victim groups may be forced to wear identifying symbols. They are often segregated into ghettos, forced into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved.
  7. extermination - it is extermination to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human. Sometimes the genocide results in revenge killings by groups against each other, creating a vicious cycle of bilateral genocide.
  8. denial - always follows  genocide & is one of the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres.
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History of genocide or genocide-like events:

• 1994: Rwandan Hutu extremists massacre some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in civil war
• 1992-5: Yugoslav genocide of 8,000 Bosnian muslims by the Serbs, led by Slobodan Milosevic
• 1988: Iraq's Anfal campaign against the Kurds
• 1982: Guatemala govt backed by the US, brutal campaign against the Mayan Indians
• 1975 onwards: Laos: Communist Laos govt has killed 300,000 people of Laos since 1975 and it continues.
• 1975-9: Cambodian genocide by Pol Pots regime kills 1.7 million - 20% of the population.
• 1971: Hindu Bengali massacre by West Pakistani military regime aimed to kill millions of Bengali men and upper classes in Bangladesh.
• 1966: Rumania: Ceausescu's persection of the minority Hungarians in Transylvania
• 1940's the Burmese railway:
  • Japanese allow 90,000 indentured Asian labourers (mainly Malaysian Tamils and  Burmese) to die as well as many thousands of POW's whilst building the  Burmese railway
• 1940's the Holocaust:
  • Hitler's Nazi's killed millions of Jews, Gypsies (1.5m or 70-80% of Romani population killed), Serbians,  and the incapacitated.
  • the returning Rumanian army's extermination of 100,000 of the minority Hungarians in Northern Transylvania in 1944
  • see also:
    • chronology of the Holocaust
    • a brief chronology of the Romani (Gypsy) Holocaust
• 1940: Germany: The first mass genocidal action of the Holocaust takes place in January of this year, when 250 Romani children are used as guinea pigs to test the cyanide gas crystal, at the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Employment of any kind is forbidden to Gypsies in this same year.
• 1939: Germany: Nazi party decree states that "the aim of the measures taken by the state must be the racial separation once and for all of the Gypsy race from the German nation, then the prevention of racial mixing." The Office of Racial Hygiene issues a statement saying "All Gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is elimination. The aim should therefore be the elimination without hesitation of this defective element in the population."
• 1934: Germany: Gypsies are selected for sterilization by injection and castration, and sent to camps at Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Sachsenhausen and elsewhere. Two laws issued in this year forbid Germans from marrying "Jews, Gypsies and Negroes."
• 1933/3:
  • Ukraine: Stalin's starvation of the Ukraine peasants killed millions.
  • Germany: Nazis introduce a law to legalize eugenic sterilization. This is specifically named as written to control "Gypsies and most of the Germans of black color," these latter the descendants of the unions between African soldiers and Europeans from the period of the 1914-1918 War.
• 1927: In Bavaria, special camps are built to incarcerate Gypsies. Eight thousand Gypsies are processed in this way.
• 1922: All Gypsies in German territories are to be photographed and fingerprinted.
• 1920: Germans, Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, introduce the notion of "lives unworthy of life," suggesting that Gypsies should be sterilized and eliminated as a people. This notion, with the same name, is incorporated into Nazi race theory in 1933.
• 1915: Armenian or Hellenic/Pontian genocide:
  • Turkish government under extremist "Young Turks" Enver, Jemal & Talat  under cover of WWI decided to solve the Christian Armenian/Assyrian problem. Hundreds of Armenian leaders in Instabul were executed then they arranged for the remaining Armenian people to be "relocated" in a death march to the Syrian Desert where the survivors of the march were in the main killed on arrival. 1.5 million were killed between 1915 and 1922.
• 1909: A German policy conference on "The Gypsy Question" is held, and the recommendation made that all Gypsies be branded with easy identification.
• 1904: Namibia: German army exterminates the Herero, killing 65,000 of the 80,000 by driving them into the desert and poisoning the few waterholes available.
• 1890's: Armenian genocide:
  • Ottoman Empire under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, orders pogroms which killed hundreds of thousands of Armenians.
• 1890: Conference organized in Germany on the Zigeunergeschmeiss ("Gypsy scum"). Military empowered to regulate movements of Gypsies.
• early 19thC: British invaders of Australia persecute the Australian Aborigines, which combined with introduced disease & competition for food, almost wipes out the indigenous peoples.
• American massacre of indigenous Indians using forced removal, forced assimilation, military slaughter, bounties, biological warfare such as offering blankets intentionally contaminated with smallpox, killing over 100,000, and later forced sterilisation The indigenous population of over 12 million prior to Columbus, was reduced by 95% to 237,000 400yrs later.
• 1493:    Columbus commences the enslavement and mass extermination of the Taino population of the Carribean resulting in 5 million dead within 3 years. The Spanish colonists used various methods including hangings en masse, roasting them on spits, hacking children to pieces and feeding them to dogs.
• biblical:
  • In their own recorded history - the Pentatuch (or first five books of the Bible) - the Jews admit to the first recorded genocide perpetrated upon the Girgamesses, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites,  Hivites, and Jebusites by themselves in fulfillment of the covenant they hold with their God.
  • Deuteronomy 7:1-2: "... the seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them."
  • Joshua 6:21: "And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword."
  • Joshua 10:40-41: "So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded. And Joshua smote them from Kadesh-barnea even unto Gaza, and all the country of Goshen, even unto Gibeon."
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