Monday, May 24, 2010
Other Potential Genocides
Hey Yall, I just wanted to go over some other times in history and what happened in them. If you were to try and make a relative scale some are worse in terms of casualties and others are not as bad. I'll start with the murder of the Kurdish people specifically in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Saddam used a variety of methods to stay in power. He had targeted assassination, torture, and he also did things call destruction of Wetlands. Destruction of Wetlands is essentially if one political group held the potato farms of Idaho and you burned those areas in order to starve them. While these are terrible the worst forms of killing he committed were the use of chemical weapons to decimate the Kurds in Iraq. Saddam believing he was of a more pure ethical and religious than the Kurds used chemical weapons to kill some 300,000 Kurds. Is this not genocide? In China they have faced their own types of problems over the years. In the years before world war II a very strong Japan invaded China and many other countries believing that they were the chosen people. However, they thought that there could only be one asian people. In a 6-week period in 1937 the Japanese army killed some 300,000 Chinese people in Shanghai and raped over 100,000 women. This is now known today as the rape of nanking. Is that not genocide. The targeting of a specific ethnicity that you believe is lower than you. I also found a difference in types of genocide. There is genocide and there is Politicide. Politicide is when you kill members of another political party in order to dominate a country. There have been hundreds of these instances throughout history. Is this not genocide. Isn't having a firm set of political beliefs much like a religion?
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You bring up some very interesting points Alex. I believe that politicide should be considered genocide because you are targeting a group of individuals as a whole. You are killing a mass number of people due to a characteristic they all share, which to me means genocide. Whether you are killing because of race, religion, or political party, i believe they should all be considered genocide. If a group of people all have the same trait, and they are killed by another group on a mass scale because of this shared trait, than I believe it should be considered a form of genocide. As for the other two scenarios you brought up, they seem like they should be classified as genocide, though they are not to the scale of the other genocides we looked at in class.
ReplyDeleteWhat we call things can change the way we view them. When I first heard of the Boston Massacre, I thought it was a huge event where hundreds or thousands of people died. In reality, only 5 people perished. While this is a catastrophic loss of human life, it pales in comparison to the "acts of genocide" that were perpetrated in Rwanda. However, we saw the United States assistant Secretary of State call them "acts of genocide" instead of genocide. This is because labels cause people to look at things in a different way. "Acts of Genocide" seem much more like sporadic killings than a "Genocide" does, because a "Genocide" connotes thorough and pre-meditated killings. Take for example these 2 sentences
ReplyDeleteIn the 90's "Acts of Genocide" were perpetrated across Rwanda, resulting in the deaths of Tutsi Minorities.
In the 90's "the slaughter of innocent men, women, and children" was perpetrated across Rwanda, resulting in the deaths of Tutsi Minorities.
The 2nd one has a whole different ring to it, doesn't it.