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Genocide

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The duty of the survivor is to bear testimony to what happened . . . You have to warn people that these things can happen, that evil can be unleashed. Race hatred, violence, idolatries—they still flourish.
~ Elie Wiesel

Genocide is the systematic destruction of all or a significant part of a linguistic, ethnic, religious or national group. Well-known examples of genocide include the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the Bosnian genocide, and the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Quotes

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  • Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak[istan] dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy,(...) But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected.
  • It is a failure not only for the United Nations; it is a failure for the international community. And all of us are responsible for this failure ... it is a genocide which has been committed. More than 200,000 people have been killed and the international community is still discussing what ought to be done.
  • Ah, but this time it was not so easy. This time it was not all one way. The Russian Armies and all the peoples of the Russian Republic have rallied to the defence of their hearths and homes. For the first time Nazi blood has flowed in a fearful flood. Certainly a million and a half, perhaps two millions of Nazi cannon-fodder, have bitten the dust of the endless plains of Russia. The tremendous battle rages along nearly two thousand miles of front. The Russians fight with magnificent devotion. Not only that, our generals who have visited the Russian front line report with admiration the efficiency of their military organization and the excellence of their equipment. The aggressor is surprised, startled, staggered. For the first time in his experience mass murder has become unprofitable. He retaliates by the most frightful cruelties. As his armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands, literally scores of thousands of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the sixteenth century there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale or approaching such a scale. And this is but the beginning. Famine and pestilence have yet to follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler's tanks. We are in the presence of a crime without a name.
  • How could so many reputable and responsible churchmen have lent their support, even if only passively, to the perpetration of such crimes as genocide? What fever seized so many millions of German Christians, both Evangelical [Lutheran] and Catholic, in those few short years of Nazi tyranny? ... The Church was unprepared and totally unsuited to cope with the situation.
    • J. S. Conway, Canadian historian, raised this question in his book The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933-1945.
  • How could I deny the power of evil when I see what is occurring and what has occurred since I was born: The second world war, with over 40 million victims; Auschwitz and the death camps; the genocide in Cambodia; the bloody tyranny of the Ceauşescu regime; torture as a system of government in many places throughout the world. The list of horrors is endless. . . . So I believe that we are justified in calling such acts ‘diabolic,’ not that they are inspired by a Devil with horns and cloven feet but by a Devil that is the symbol of the spirit and power of evil operating in the world.
    • Jean Delumeau, historian, replied when asked if he believed in the Devil, cited in The Watchtower magazine, 2002, 10/15.
  • In 1973, CIA-psychological operatives in Chile scrawled graffiti on the sides of buildings that read "Jakarta se acerca" – "Jakarta is coming." This was a reference to the massive CIA orchestrated 1965 bloodletting in Indonesia which overthrew Sukarno and made the country safe for US corporations like Freeport Sulphur. The American and Indonesian governments have never acknowledged the truth of those events. But we must confront these sorts of dark truths if we are to move forward as a civilization.
    • Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State. Skyhorse Publishing. (2022) p. 290. ISBN 978-1510769137
  • Genocide lies at the core of Western imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. It is not unique to the Nazis. It is the building block of Western domination. The humanitarian interventionists who insist we should bomb and occupy other nations because we embody goodness — although they promote military intervention only when it is perceived to be in our national interest — are useful idiots of the war machine and global imperialists. They live in an Alice-in-Wonderland fairytale where the rivers of blood we spawn make the world a happier and better place. They are the smiley faces of genocide. You can watch them on your screens. You can listen to them spout their pseudo-morality in the White House and in Congress. They are always wrong. And they never go away.
  • We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination, as the immediate task of the coming revolutionary action.
    • Vladimir Lenin, “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising,” Proletary, No. 2, August 29, 1906. Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1965, Moscow, Vol. 11, pp. 171-178 [1]
  • Overt debates about genocide have been relatively slow in developing, in part because of the creation of a TRC, mandated with collecting the ‘truth’ about the IRS system while similarly engaging in ‘reconciliation’ (a contested term) with settler Canadians. While Canada's history wars may seem slow in getting off the ground, the TRC's more ‘balanced’ approach and wide-ranging engagement with non-Aboriginal societal actors may have a greater effect in stimulating national awareness than in the United States and Australia.
  • India’s 1971 armed intervention in East Pakistan—undertaken for a mixture of reasons—is widely and fairly regarded as one of the world’s most successful cases of humanitarian intervention against genocide. Indeed, India in effect applied what we would now call the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) principle, and applied it well.
    • Pratap Bhanu Mehta, quoted from Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide. Epilogue
  • It is called a genocide. That's what it was... No other way to describe it and that's the way it needs to be described in the history books. And so I'm here to say the following: I'm sorry on behalf of the state of California... It's humbling for me, having believed I was educated, to have been so ignorant of our past, to have been so unaware of how ashamed I should be, as a Californian, 5th generation... I'm sorry that we've had generations of your kids and grandkids, your ancestors, that have had to suffer through indignities, lack of capacity, empathy and understanding...
  • In the European century that began in the 1840s from Engels's article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found.
    • George Watson, The Lost Literature of Socialism, Cambridge: England, The Lutterworth Press (1998) p. 80
    • Note: Watson's views have been criticised as being based on mistranslation and distortion reflecting his ideological bias
  • Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In a utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite. Most of us agree that it is ethically permissible to divert a runaway trolley that threatens to kill five people onto a side track where it would kill only one. But suppose it were a hundred million lives one could save by diverting the trolley, or a billion, or - projecting into the indefinite future - infinitely many. How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good? A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain. Not only that, but consider the people who learn about the promise of a perfect world yet nonetheless oppose it. They are the only things standing in the way of a plan that could lead to infinite goodness. How evil are they? You do the math.

See also

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