Sticking with last week’s theme of the Holocaust, here’s the other article I wrote for that project:
We’ve all heard about the Holocaust, a systematic mass slaughter conducted by the Nazis in Germany before and during the second World War that left approximately 17 million supposedly inferior humans dead. This atrocity was so lacking in some way to aptly describe its magnitude, it warranted the creation of its own word, “genocide,” which refers to the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.
The Holocaust was not actually the first genocide, but it was the first to fall so significantly into the public eye and likely the largest. Similar horrors have been happening for centuries, with examples as far back as the Greeks and Romans, and in Biblical reference to the relentless and unjust persecution of the Jewish people. More recent examples include the contemporary Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides during and after World War I carried out by the Ottoman government in an attempt to remove those ethnic groups from their population. They had approximately 1.5 million, 150,000 to 300,000, and between 450,000 and 750,000 casualties, respectively, most of them civilians and rightfully Ottoman citizens. Still, none of these even neared the atrocious death count of the Holocaust that brought such an issue to the world stage.
Since the discovery of this massacre, several similar genocides have occurred in various places across the world. There was the Cambodian genocide of 1975, which lasted over 3 and a half years and killed between 1.671 and 1.871 million, which was 21-24% of Cambodia’s population at the time. Another example is the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, which left between half a million to a million dead, a devastating death toll even before considering that it occured over only a hundred days, or just little over three months.
You’d think that, after such a horrendous act as the Holocaust, humanity would have learned its lesson. So why hasn’t it?
Unfortunately, it likely has. The lesson is just not what we would have hoped. Instead of discouraging such a thing from ever happening again, the Holocaust set a precedent, showing that it was and is humanly possible to systematically dispose of people you oppose or consider inferior. It also suggests that the international community is not likely to interfere so long as the details of the situation are kept out of the public spotlight, or worse, that the international community simply won’t care, a combination of which seem to have been the case during the Holocaust.
The other incidents reinforce this message. In each of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides, which I’m overarchingly going to refer to as the Ottoman genocides for simplicity, and in the Rwandan genocide, while the rest of the world was at least somewhat aware of what was happening, they made no impactful move to stop it. In the Cambodian genocide, at least, they had some excuse, since they didn’t really have much intel on what was happening, but that too sends a dangerous message.
While this may seem downcasting and pessimistic, it is important to note that just because humanity has learned the wrong lesson does not mean that it cannot learn the right one. Perhaps, if those whose hatred, anger and fear may lead them to commit these atrocities have not been discouraged from such actions by examples like those I’ve shared with you today, but instead empowered, then it now falls on the rest of us to learn our lesson from history. To learn that we cannot be complicit in these actions, even if only by inaction, and that it is our obligation to learn and see all that we can, and where we see these wrongs, resist them. If the rest of the world hadn’t sat back and let these horrible things happen then they may not have, and it is my hope that in the future they won’t, because we will learn from our prior mistakes and not repeat them, but instead stand and fight these injustices.
To quote the Bataillon de Chasseurs Ardennais motto: “Résiste et Mords!” (“Resist and Bite!”)
