I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.
Christopher HitchensTags: family anonymity angst misery genocide short-stories nabokov nazis survivors extinction germans rwanda born-again clean-slate rwandan-genocide signs-and-symbols
What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland. I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge.
Christopher HitchensTags: war revenge antisemitism world-war-ii genocide holocaust jews poland germans nazism stalinism eastern-european ernest-gellner ethnic-cleansing stalin
And in "Elbow Room" the cast sings the glories of westward expansion in the United States, which involved the murder of native peoples and the violent conquest of half of Mexico. Among the lines in the song is one that intones, "There were plenty of fights / To win land right / But the West was meant to be / It was our Manifest Destiny?" Let it suffice to say that happily belting out a tune in which one merrily praises genocide is always easier for those whose ancestors weren't on the receiving end of the deal.
Tim WiseTags: genocide racism myths kids
Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism... neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the worlds greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy.
Richard WeikartTags: war evolution world-war-ii genocide holocaust darwinism darwin racism hitler eugenics nazism macro-evolution macroevolution world-war-two world-war-2 ethnic-cleansing social-darwinism
She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.
Arundhati RoyTags: genocide famine ethnic-cleansing
What I learned in Rwanda was that God is not absent when great evil is unleashed. Whether that evil is man-made or helped along by darker forces, God is right there, saving those who respond to His urgings and trying to heal the rest.
James RiordanTags: evil god genocide epiphany rwanda epiphanic-moment
As a Nobel Peace laureate, I, like most people, agonize over the use of force. But when it comes to rescuing an innocent people from tyranny or genocide, I've never questioned the justification for resorting to force. That's why I supported Vietnam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia, which ended Pol Pot's regime, and Tanzania's invasion of Uganda in 1979, to oust Idi Amin. In both cases, those countries acted without U.N. or international approval—and in both cases they were right to do so.
José Ramos-HortaTags: peace war tyranny united-states genocide iraq pacifism iraq-war 2004 vietnam nobel-peace-prize united-nations international-law tanzania 1978 cambodia cambodian-vietnamese-war idi-amin khmer-rouge pol-pot uganda uganda-tanzania-war
Genocide is the responsibility of the entire world.
Ann ClwydTags: morality law genocide iraq iraq-war international-law saddam-hussein al-anfal-campaign moral-responsibility kurdish-genocide responsibility-to-protect
(On the beginning of the mid-1990s' genocidal war in Rwanda:)
Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-quarters of the Tutsi then remaining in Rwanda, or 11% of Rwanda's total population, had been killed.
Tags: war africa genocide rwanda tutsi
The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.
Jared DiamondTags: history war interaction genocide conquest epidemics peoples
« first previous
Page 2 of 6.
next last »
Data privacy
Imprint
Contact
Diese Website verwendet Cookies, um Ihnen die bestmögliche Funktionalität bieten zu können.