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
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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