Chapter 11 Flashcards
Of all of the acts of collective political violence, what is the worst act?
> Genocide (the most lethal form as well)
With respect to genocide, what was the 20th century called? What was the reasoning for the name?
> been referred to as an “Age of Total War”
> estimates suggest that genocide killed almost four times as many people as all the wars, revolutions, and civil wars combined during that century.
How many refugees were there as a result of acts of genocide in 1995? How many people on earth did this figure represent?
> In 1995, for example, there were approximately 27 million refugees worldwide, which represented approximately 1 out of every 280 people on earth.
How has the term genocide been misused?
> the word has been applied to such widely disparate and inappropriate subjects such as integration, sterilization, bisexuality, dieting, suburbanization, hysterectomies, urban sprawl, and family planning
Genocide is such a powerful and symbolic word that people have come to rely on it when trying to do what?
> when trying to strongly condemn or call attention to some situation or policy.
What does the term genocide symbolize?
> It has come to symbolize the worst possible type of destructive violence and has become the go-to word when someone or some group wants to claim that some action, event, or policy is absolutely wrong or evil.
Aside from misuse, what is another definitional difficulty?
(what is it hard to diffrentiate from)
> it is sometimes hard to distinguish between genocide and related types of crimes, such as human rights violations and other war crimes.
> A great deal of overlap exists between these crimes as they are defined in international law.
Why are genocides hard to distinguish from war crimes?
> Genocide typically happens during the middle of an armed conflict, such as a civil war, and it is sometimes hard to distinguish between massacres that are considered war crimes
Aside from misuse or confusing genocide with another term, what is another definitional difficulty?
> politicians, social commentators, and even scholars use the term differently and apply the definition selectively, depending on the nature and politics of the situation.
Historically, U.S. political leaders have been reluctant to employ the term genocide when our allies were perpetrating it because of what concerns?
> because of concerns about pressures to intervene or because of Cold War politics.
What are two historical examples of countries being reluctant in employing the term genocide?
> the Chinese invasion of Tibet on October 7, 1950.
-China argued that it was simply reclaiming a past province and liberating Tibet (not true)
> when the Indonesian military invaded East Timor in 1975.
- East Timor gaining independence but the Indonesian government sent in the army to occupy and take over the former Portuguese colony.
- the population decreased by around 12% due to this genocide
-
Although the act of genocide is as old as human civilization, the term genocide is relatively new. Who coined the term?
> Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe
> He coined the word genocide from the Greek genos, which means race or tribe, and the Latin cide, which translates as killing.16 The term genocide therefore refers to the killing of a race or tribe.
How is genocide different than other forms of violence?
> Genocide, in short, is about destroying populations, and this is what separates it from many other types of large-scale violence.
Aside from coining the word genocide, what was the other main contribution of Lemkin?
> was also instrumental in helping to provide the impetus for the international community to outlaw this crime.
On what date did the UN approve the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide?
> December 9th 1948
How does article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide define genocide?
> Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
What are good things to note about the definition of genocide as provided by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide? What is something that is still problematic for this definition?
1) First, it makes it clear that genocide is about destroying populations.
2) genocide includes a number of different behaviors, not only mass murder.
> intent remains a potentially problematic aspect of the UN definition of genocide.
When can a crime still be considered genocide?
> Importantly, genocide can be considered to have taken place even if the goal was not to kill every single member of that group. Destroying part of a specific population can still be genocide
> but what defines a “part”
What kind of policy imposed residential schools? As a result, what kind of genocide was this?
> a policy of forced assimilation
> This particular type of genocide has sometimes been defined as cultural genocide or as ethnocide.
What kind of intent does genocide require as per the genocide convention:
> the Genocide Convention specified a level of intent that is referred to as specific intent, special intent (dolus specialis), or even genocidal intent.2
What group is excluded from the UN definition of genocide? What are two examples that demonstrate how this exclusion is problematic?
> Political parties, for example, are a type of group excluded from the official UN definition of genocide because it was suggested that they did not have the same permanence and stability as the listed groups.
> The mass murders in Indonesia in 1965 + Indonesian violence with the 1988 Iraqi government’s attacks against Iraq’s Kurdish population.
Historically perpetrators of genocide include:
B,A, I, G, R, M
> include the ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, Israelites, Greeks, Romans, and Mongols
What is Vahakn Dadrian’s definition of genocide?
> The successful attempt by a dominant group, vested with formal authority and/or with preponderant access to the overall resources of power, to reduce by coercion or lethal violence the number of a minority group whose ultimate extermination is held desirable and useful and whose respective vulnerability is a major factor contributing to the decision of genocide
What is Robert Melson’s definition of genocide?
> A public policy mainly carried out by the state, whose intent is the destruction in whole or in part of a social collectivity or category, usually a communal group, a class, or a political faction
What is Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn’s definition of genocide?
> A form of one-sided killing in which a state or authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator
What is Helen Fein’s definition of genocide?
> Sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collective directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim.
What is Israel Charny’s definition of violence?
> The mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military action against the military forces of an avowed enemy, under conditions of the essential defenselessness and helplessness of the victims
What is Irving Louis Horowitz’s definition of violence?
> A structural and systematic destruction of innocent people by a state bureaucratic apparatus
One of the best-known historical examples of genocide involves what groups?
Not the nazis - this genocide took place in medieval times.
> involves the destruction of the Cathars of southern France during the early 13th century.
> Cathars believed that the world was evil and that people should live a frugal and ascetic life to avoid being corrupted by the world.
> In 1204, Pope Innocent III initiated a crusade against them to suppress their threat to the dominance of the church.
> the Albigensian Crusade was led by nobles from the north of France who saw an opportunity for land and enrichment in addition to serving their faith and the church. No attempt was made to distinguish the Cathars from others, so this crusade, which was actually genocide, virtually obliterated the entire population of southern France.
The ancient world is full of similar kinds of genocidal practices and policies across the globe. The United States has also had experience with genocide. Perhaps the most obvious example concerns what group?
> the policies and practices against various American Indian tribes.
The first recognized genocide of the 20th century was that of what?
> was that of the Hereros and Nama in what was then known as German South-West Africa, present-day Namibia.
> In 1904, the Hereros and then the Nama rose in revolt against German rule because they were increasingly losing their lands, sinking into insurmountable debt, and suffering from the racist policies of the German administration.
> In January of that year, the Hereros attacked German farms, villages, and military outposts and forts. The Germans responded with heavy-handed efficiency and brought in more troops to wage a campaign of utter destruction. They killed all the men, women, and children they were able to find.
The next major genocide of the 20th century occurred in what country?
* After the Hereos in Germany *
> occurred in Turkey, when the Armenian population was targeted for destruction by the Turkish government.
> Minority groups, such as the Armenians, simply did not fit into their vision of a homogenous and modern Turkish state. These sentiments were brought to a head when Turkey entered World War I in 1914 on the side of Germany and Austria.
> As Turkey’s wartime situation deteriorated, the government, hateful and suspicious of the Armenian population in its midst, planned and then implemented a genocide
Do the turkish people take accountability for their cultural genocide? Did anyone speak up about it?
> To this day, the Turkish government continues to deny the Armenian genocide.
> in December 2005, the Turkish government put its country’s best-known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, on trial after he asserted that his country had killed 1 million Armenians in an interview with a Swedish newspaper.
> To recognize the Armenian genocide, in 2007, Adam Schiff, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, introduced HR 106 titled Affirmation of the United States Record on the Armenian Genocide Resolution.
Perhaps the best-known and deadliest of 20th-century genocides involved what groups?
> involved the Nazi attempt to eliminate the Jews of occupied Europe.
> Even though there have been more than 40 examples of genocide since 1945, it is the Holocaust that remains the preeminent example of genocide.
How did the holocaust occur?
> the Nazis and their supporters had long scapegoated the Jews for many of Germany’s problems.
> After taking power in 1933, the Nazis began a multiyear process of marginalizing the Jews legally, economically, politically, and socially in order to make them more vulnerable to further persecution.
> These legalistic maneuvers were punctuated by periodic outbursts of violence against Germany’s Jewish population, such as the infamous Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), on November 9, 1938.
What was the night of broken glass?
> Occured after a Jewish man shot and killed a Nazi diplomatic aide in Paris, the Nazis orchestrated a series of attacks over the next few days that resulted in an estimated 7,500 Jewish businesses being looted, over 1,000 synagogues destroyed, nearly 100 murders, and some 30,000 Jews subsequently sent to concentration camps.
When did Mass Killings occur in the holocaust?
> Mass killings did not occur until after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
> Special extermination squads known as Einsatzgruppen followed behind the German army and were tasked to conduct mass shootings - but was not effective.
> To increase the efficiency of the killing process and to spare their men, the Nazi government created a number of death camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor, which employed gas chambers to kill millions of Jews and others.
political scientist R. J. Rummel calculated that the Nazis killed approximately how many people and by what means? Of this figure, how many were killed by genocide alone?
> killed approximately 21 million people through genocide, killing hostages, reprisals, forced labor, euthanasia, starvation, exposure, experiments, and various other means in the concentration and death camps.
> Of these, over 16 million were victims of genocide alone
>
- 28 million were killed due to war also.
Another well-known example of genocide occurred during the 1970s- what was it?
Hint: wasn’t really direct, involved the US.
> occurred during the 1970s, when the U.S. war in Vietnam spilled over its borders and helped destabilize the government of Cambodia. (spillage of bombings which destroyed villiages in cambodia)
> This helped the Khmer Rouge or the Red Khmers, a Cambodian communist group, win popular support and brought them many new recruits.
In 1975, the Khmer Rouge was able to overthrow the Cambodian government and establish Democratic Kampuchea- was it really democratic? What does this genocide rank in terms of lethality?
> was anything but democratic.
> The Khmer Rouge had decided it wanted to create a utopian communist Khmer nation
> Over a four-year period, the Khmer Rouge systematically starved, beat, worked to death, tortured, and murdered between 1 and 2 million of its own citizens. (who were from the previous goverment or did not fit in.
> Since the total population of Cambodia was only around 8 million, this genocide ranks as one of the most lethal of the 20th century in terms of the proportion of the population killed
What genocide occurred in Rwanada?
> Rwanda is home to two major ethnic groups: the Tutsi and the Hutu.
> A minority, the Tutsi, have historically been seen as a privileged group compared with the more numerous Hutu.
> In the early 1990s, Rwanda was in the midst of a civil war between the Hutu-dominated government of President Juvenal Habyarimana and the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which had invaded from neighboring Uganda in 1990
> once the president was assassinated, military and police forces and militias began killing moderate Hutus as well as every Tutsi they found (Hutu extremists)
What other genocides occured in the 19th century?
> Stalin’s Great Terror, which wracked the Soviet Union in the 1930s and which resulted in the death of around 20 million people,
> the extermination of various Indigenous peoples in Central and South America,
> and Bosnia’s experience with ethnic cleansing after Yugoslavia fell apart at the end of the cold war.
