Genocide

Louis Goldsmith

Mark Hertz

English 2

29 May 2013

Genocide

Wouldn’t it be scary if someone suddenly decided that you should disappear because they think you do not have the right to live because of your race or religion? Scary? Yes, but definitely possible. Genocide is defined as the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group. The word genocide, which is also known as ethnic cleansing, is certainly not uncommon to anyone living in this not so perfect world, full of violence, hatred and discrimination. Throughout the decades, genocide has taken place in more than one occasion, causing wars, slaughters and mass destruction of cities and towns.

The Holocaust was one of the greatest acts of genocide that left a mark of horror on this world. The Holocaust began at January 30th, 1933 when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. The Holocaust ended at May 8th, 1945, when the war in Europe ended. Millions of Jews died during the Holocaust, some were killed by machine guns, gas chambers, while others died due to starvation, abuse and diseases.  The Germans were the ones doing the killings, but the rest of the world stood by and watched, allowing millions of Jews to be killed.

The Jews did not believe that they could get harmed because they were far enough away from the front of the war. When they were put into ghettos in their own towns they started to think that maybe they should have heeded the warnings that were given by people that had come back and seen what they started to do to the Jews. Jews were not the only ones that were targeted in the Holocaust. Gypsies, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, socialists, disabled people, Slavic, Polish, Russians and others were as well.

Although the Holocaust is the most famous, there are many more. So why do we call it “the holocaust” if there were so many more like: Rwanda, Cambodia, Sudan, and Yugoslavia?           

The Rwandan genocide began on April 6, 1994; Hutus began slaughtering the Tutsis in the African country of Rwanda. As the brutal killings continued, the world stood idly by and just watched the slaughter. Lasting 100 days. Over 1,000,000 where dead at the end of 2,400 hell ridden hours. They were hacked to pieces left to die in the streets.

In Cambodia, during the regime Pol Pot in the 1970 and 80’s, over 25% of the population was destroyed in order to change the farming methods. There were The Kurds in Northern Iraq who were assassinated by Saddam Hussein in 1988.  The Croats, Muslims, and the Albanians of Kosovo were killed by the Serbs During the 1990s.  The list goes on and on and still happens today.

Humans seem as violent as animals.  Let’s take the case of our closest relative in the animal world, the chimpanzee.  Looking at the social structure of that species.  Chimps can be violent, killing the members of their own family groups. These killings happen for a variety of reasons; struggles for food, struggles for leadership, to mate with the most desirable female.  Chimps would never kill for something so abstract as difference in religion or beliefs, or color of their skin.  Yet, humans claim to be so much more socially responsible and refined than wild animals.  We have many examples where humans perform mass murder on other humans.  You never see this in the wild. In this way, perhaps we are no better than wild animals.

I would hope that we, as humans, have learned from these awful happenings.  It is time to stand up and stop these mindless killings.  Each one of us has a responsibility to the people around us and across the oceans.  When we hear of something happening to someone, we need to do whatever we can to stop it.