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Genocide: Some Historical Reflections |
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Since I retired from FT,
PT and casual-employment in the years 1999 to 2005, after a 50 year student and paid employment life from 1949 to 1999, I have been
recreating myself as a writer and author, poet and publisher, editor and
researcher, reader and scholar, and online blogger and journalist. During the years,
1999 to 2014, I have taken an interest in the subject of genocide.
The following prose-poems, some 14 A-4 pages and 4000 words, are a reflection of this interest. Readers
who find the following far too long for their reading sensibilities are advised
to: (i) skim or scan, (ii) read until your eyes glaze over or you lose interest
or (iii) just stop reading now. I do any one of all three of these choices all
the time . If I tried to read everything on all subjects, I'd drown in words. The
following is for those with a special interest in the subject.I was not sure where to post this item at this history site. In the end I went for the Armenian genocide and I trust my post will provide a useful, a helpful, general perspective on the topic.
________________________________________________________
Counting Hell
Last
night I revisited Cambodia’s Killing Fields on the ABC's 4 Corners program “Where Are They Now?”1 I read some of the commentary on the
subject and the writing of Bruce Sharp2 interested me the most. In his essay Counting Hell, Sharp wrote that we are confronted with incomplete and inconclusive evidence, and it
is tempting, therefore, to say that we will never really see the full picture
of what happened in Cambodia’s Killing
Fields from April 1975 to January 1979. It is also tempting to say that after more
than thirty years have passed, it is time to move on. So much of the contemporary scene and of
history is so often “a time to move on.” History is, as Edward Gibbon once wrote, “little more than the register of
the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”
To the German-Swiss novelist and poet, Hermann Hesse, as he put it in his
The Glass Bead Game, the study of history means “submitting to chaos and
nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task.” Perhaps the most apt definition of history
insofar as The
Killing Fields is
concerned is the one from James Joyce in his Ulysses. “History,” Joyce wrote, “is a
nightmare from which I am trying to wake.”
Historians
are accustomed now to the idea of genocide. Cambodia was not the first
occurrence of genocide and it will not be the last. There have been a myriad
newer crimes since 1979. “Do we still need to worry about the old ones?” Sharp
asks rhetorically. Why should we bother with numbers? One and a half million,
two and a half million deaths in Cambodia: does it matter? There was once a
time when these were not merely numbers. These numbers had names, and that is
why it matters, he concludes.2-Ron Price with thanks to1
“Where Are They Now?” 4 Corners, ABC1 TV, 27/6/’11, 8:30 p.m., 2the link: http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/bsharp.htm,
and 3the internet site Cambodia,
1 April 2005. It was a big year ’79. Those killing
fields came to an end, the
revolution
in Iran took place and I settled
into a
life in Tasmania at the age of 35
Y.O.
I was in Ballarat at the CAE
during all
those years of 1 to 2 million
deaths in
Cambodia. I was busy reading so
many
books, helping the Baha’i
community &
surviving another 4 years of
marriage-
family and community responsibilities
until I was worn-out due to my
own wars,
my own hell with bipolar-disorder……and
Cambodia was at least a million
miles away
in another world, indeed, another
universe.
Ron Price
28/6/'11 to 9/10/'14.
Part 1: Levon Chorbajian
notes in the introduction to Studies in Comparative Genocide by Adam
Jones1 that "our current state of theorizing about genocide is the
product of a recent, incomplete and evolving process as well as a contested
one." Chorbajian points out that
the "systematic study of genocide is only 25 years old. The relative newness of this field of inquiry
lends the subject of comparative genocide studies much of its urgency and
vigour. It also accounts, as Chorbajian
suggests, for continuing debates over core definitions and applications.-Ron
Price with thanks to 1Adam
Jones, Studies
in Comparative Genocide, edited by Levon Chorbajian and George
Shirinian, Macmillan, 1999. This book has its
origins in a conference on genocide held in Yerevan, the capital of the
Republic of Armenia, in 1995. The conference brought together many of the most
prominent names in this young field, including Yehuda Bauer, Vahakn Dadrian,
Helen Fein, Henry Huttenbach, the Cambodia specialist Ben Kiernan, and Ervin
Staub, author of The Roots of Evil. The published papers from the
conference, though predictably uneven, represent an exceptional contribution to
the theorizing of genocide, and to the continuing search for markers and
"early warning" signs that might allow outside forces to intervene
more intelligently, and directly, in cases of genocide and other mass
atrocities. Part 2: Studies in Comparative Genocide was published the year I took a sea-change and
retired early after a 50 year student-working life: 1949-1999. I have taken an interest in the subject of
genocide due to my association with the Baha’i Faith for over 60 years. The
literature on genocide in relation to the Bahá'í community of Iran is now
extensive, and there is now an extensive documentation that can easily be
accessed in cyberspace. Baha’is, and the
precursor religion with which it is intimately associated, Babism, have been
officially persecuted since the 1840s. Some 200 Baha'is have been executed and
hundreds of thousands forced to convert or be subjected to the most horrendous
disabilities since the revolution in Iran in 1979. Systematic targeting of the leadership of the
Bahá'í community by killing or disappearance was focused on the Bahá'í National
Spiritual Assembly and Local Spiritual Assemblies across Iran in the last 35
years. Like most conservative
Muslims, Khomeini believed Bahá'ís to be apostates and issued a fatwa stating: It is not
acceptable for a non-Muslim to change his religion to another religion not
recognized by the followers of the previous religion. Jews who become Baha’is have
a choice to accept Islam or be executed. Part 3: Khomeini
emphasized that the Bahá'ís would not receive any religious rights, since he
believed that the Bahá'ís were a political rather than religious movement.
Allegations of Bahá'í involvement with other political powers have long been repeated
in many venues with resulting denunciations from the president. Conversion from Judaism and Zoroastrianism to
the Baha’i Faith is well documented since the 1850s; such a change of status removed
any legal and social protections. More recently,
documentation has been provided that shows governmental intent to destroy the
Bahá'í community. The government has intensified propaganda and hate speech
against Bahá'ís through the Iranian media; Bahá'ís are often attacked and
dehumanized on political, religious, and social grounds to separate Bahá'ís
from the rest of society. Of
all non-Muslim religious minorities the persecution of the Baha’is has been the
most widespread, systematic, and uninterrupted. In contrast to other non-Muslim
minorities, the Baha’is are spread throughout the country in villages, small
towns, and various cities, fuelling a social-paranoia throughout Iran. Since the 1979
revolution, the authorities have destroyed most or all of the Baha'i holy
places in Iran, including the House of the Bab in Shiraz, a house in Tehran
where Bahá'u'lláh was brought up, and other sites connected to aspects of Babi
and Baha'i history. These demolitions have sometimes been followed by other
crimes like the desecration of cemetaries in a deliberate act of triumphalism. In addition the Bahá'í Institute for Higher
Education(BIHE), "an elaborate act of communal self-preservation",
has been systematically raided. Between 1987 and 2005 the Iranian authorities
closed down the Institute several times as part of the pattern of suppressing
the Bahá'í community. Between September 30 and October 3 1998, and most
recently again in 2014, officials from the Ministry of Intelligence entered the
homes of academic staff of the BIHE, seizing books, computers and personal
effects as well as shutting down buildings used for the school.-Ron Price with
thanks to “Cultural Genocide,” Wikipedia, 19/9/’14. It is such a long
story going back to the 1840s
and in my lifetime to the
1950s, & me in a culture where
people do not give a
tuppence what are your religious
beliefs as long as you drink beer
or wine, & take an interest
in football, & don’t take
religion seriously.
Religion here is
like a custom; It’s something you
take on like a feeling you get
when you go into a church.
Catholic, Jew, & Protestant—a
complacent trinity, part of a small,
safe & familiar world they grew-up
in and so hang-on to like an
old-doll or dummy for
psycho-comfort….
Ah well, it’s
better than all that fanatical
anti-Baha’i stuff I’ve been reading about
in Iran all my Baha’i life. I
think I’ll take the big doses of
indifference that have been my lot since I was
in my teens, and my friends found
out I actually took my religion
seriously and it was not the same stuff
they all got in church and did not give a
tuppence-apeny for, anyway, most
of the time..time. Ron Price 19/11/’12 to
9/10/'14. _______________________________________________________ A QUESTION OF JUSTICE Part 1: The rule of the
Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge first came onto my radar in the late 1970s when I was
up-to-my-ears in my own life's battles. I had my own psychological killing
fields to worry-about as I bottomed-out yet again on my journey, my
life-narrative. Last night Pol Pot and
the Khmer Rouge were back on my agenda at about 3 a.m. when I got up from my 12
hours-in-bed-a-day for a cup-of-tea. "The Khmer
Rouge: A Question of Justice" on SBSONE1
was being televised in the middle of the night and the middle of an Australian
autumn season. The focus of this film was the faltering attempts at providing
Khmer Rouge victims with long overdue justice.
When the atrocities were ending and the Khmer Rouge were ousted from
rule in Cambodia in early January 1979, I was just settling-in to my second
period of years in far-off Tasmania where I had first come back in September
1973 to a job at what is now the University of Tasmania. With a wife and 3
children, and the rigors of bipolar disorder winging their wild-fires on my
emotions I was simply unable to take-in the horrors of April 1975 to January
1979 and, for that matter, the next 19 years of Khmer Rouge soldiers waging
guerilla warfare. Part 2: In 1999 I stopped
my 60 to 80 hour a week life of nose-to-the-grindstone stuff that had kept me
busy in a myriad of different ways from 1949 to 1999. I took an early
retirement at the age of 55 and began working out how to go on a disability
pension. This I achieved by the age of 60 in 2004. I was finally able to devote myself to a life
of writing and editing, research and study, poetizing and publishing. The court
set up in the late 1990s and, with Pol-Pot finally dead, it began its work in
2006. By then I had also retired from PT and casual employment and was engaged
in a 60 hour literary-work-week at the bottom-end of the world in my third
period of years in Tasmania. Watching this doco
on TV last night made me more aware of the incompetence and ineffectiveness of
the court, the corruption, the lengthy trial proceedings and the complicated
political issues involved in the years 2006 to 2014. Since I retired form FT
work in early 1999 neither Cambodia's local civil society organizations nor its
citizens have had much say in the functioning of the tribunal. They follow it
on TV for the most part and justice can not be arrived at due to the fact that
the court can not prosecute individuals who are currently part of the
government.2-Ron Price with thanks to 1SBSONE TV, 2:40 a.m. to 4:20 a.m., 8/10/'14 and 2Lak Chansok,
"Can Khmer Rouge Survivors Get Justice?" The Diplomat, 30/5/'14. 2 Lak Chansok is a lecturer
at Institute of Foreign Languages’s Department of International Studies, Royal
University of Phnom Penh, and has been a research fellow at the Cambodian
Institute for Cooperation and Peace. __________________________________________________ GENOCIDE AND
ME Ben Kiernan tells
us that “genocide” is a very new word, invented in 1944 by a Polish Jew named
Raphael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule
in Occupied Europe, and given legal definition by the United Nations in
1948 through The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. That
convention defines the crime of genocide as “an attempt at extermination
through acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, racial, ethnical, or religious group.”1 My life beginning,
as it did, in that same year 1944 has seen many an example of genocide which I
won’t list here or cite in any detail, but there is one group with whom I have
been personally associated and this simple prose-poem deals with that
group.–Ron Price with thanks to 1Blood and Soil: A World History
of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur by Ben Kiernan, Yale
University Press, 2008. I will say,
though, that the religion I
have now been associated
with for more than 60 years
has also
been associated with the
word genocide in the land
of its birth; it has been this
fierce opposition and hatred
that has been the chief
instrument for the spread
of its organization &
form to every corner of the
planet. I have seen this in
my lifetime since the beginning
of the second century
of the Baha’i Era while
I have lived and had my
being-& the story is far from
over in this century!!
Ron
Price 20/11/'11
to 9/10/'14. _____________________________________________________ STARS
IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE
Section
1:
In
1994, as I was heading into my last five years of employment as a teacher and
tutor, lecturer and adult educator, the ruling Hutu government in the then
small African nation of Rwanda, set out to eradicate its Tutsi minority. The Rwandan
Genocide, as this eradication
program came to be called, consisted of the mass murder of an estimated
800,000 people. The Hutu people alleged that the Tutsi minority held an unfair
monopoly of power in Rwanda.
The
majority Hutu people had come to power in the rebellion, the revolt, of 1959–62
which overthrew the Tutsi monarchy, and established a republic. I was just 15
years old in 1959, had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and played a lot of
baseball, hockey and football in a small town in southern Ontario. By 1962 I
was working on my matriculation studies and had begun to travel and pioneer for
the Canadian Baha’i community.
Section
2:
In
the colonialist period, under Belgian rule before 1959, the Tutsis and Hutus,
the two ethnic groups concerned, had come to hate each other through
systematized inequality and a struggle for power. It is a somewhat complex story that can be
easily read by those interested. I shall
say no more here. I certainly knew none
of this back around 1960, occupied as I was with my local agenda, with
growing-up, in the small town culture of Burlington Ontario.
In
August 1998 the largest war in modern African history began. Called the Second
Congo War, it began on the eve of my retirement after 50 years in classrooms:
1949 to 1999. It directly involved eight
African nations as well as about 25 armed groups. It took place in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo. By
2008, the war and its aftermath had killed 5.4 million people mostly from
disease and starvation. This war was the deadliest conflict worldwide since
World War II. Millions more were
displaced from their homes or sought asylum in neighbouring countries.
By
then, by 2008, I was fully ensconced in
retirement, had taken a sea-change, was on a pension, and was still as far
removed from all this slaughter in Africa as I had been 14 years before. I had,
though, begun the recreation of my life and its narrative from a teacher and
tutor to writer and author, student and researcher, online blogger and
journalist.-Ron Price with thanks to "All
Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace", SBSONE TV, 8:30-9:30 p.m. Parts 1-3, 18/10/’11 to
1/11/’11.
So
much of the world’s slaughter goes
on in some parallel universe as
one eats one’s evening meal & tries
to get through one’s own life unscathed
by the slings-&-arrows of
some outrageous fortune..And Ill-equipped
to interpret the social commotion
at play throughout the planet,
we listen to the pundits of error
& sink deeperinto the slough of
despond, troubled by forecasts of
doom and doing battle with our1 wrongly
informed imaginations as our
days pass swiftly like those tiny twinkling
stars that fill a night sky!!
1 Ridvan message 1999, The Universal House of Justice
Ron
Price 2/11/'11 to 9/10/14.
MEANDERING
In the Old Testament, in Genesis 11:31, Abraham is portrayed as leaving
the city of Ur, as commanded by God, to cross the desert wilderness to
Haran. Other manifestations of God in
the great religions are also required to move from place to place. But, as far as I know, the Bahá'í Faith is
the only religion on earth that has its beginnings in a refugee experience,
commanded not by God, but by man, to leave its place of origin, its homeland. The experience of community in a prison
colony, a type of concentration camp would come to provide a relevant
metaphorical base for its future struggle.
Its early history also experienced an
attempt at genocide, an attempt not yet entirely finished. That early history has affected and will
affect the Bahá'í community, perhaps, forever.
The years of being convicts, the prison years, were relatively short,
1867-1907. Certainly by the time of
‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Western tour in 1912 they were well and truly over. But they would affect the community for
centuries to come. -Ron Price, Pioneering
Over Four Epochs, May 30th 2006.
You can’t have birds flying dead, candles stuck in flesh and heads rolling around in a lounge-room, thousands dying over decades, prison cells, bodies smashed to smithereens without it affecting the way you live, move and are.
A telescopic-lens to look at one’s universe is born out of all this horror and violence, a lens to see it all as one single, divinely inspired current, vision, dogma, principle of such magnitude and emotional potency--a oneness, no unwitting over-simplification, nor mankind’s presumptuous construction?
The impulse to envisage, comprehend the whole of life is deep within us and the individual seems obliged, under pain of being stunted, enfeebled in his own development, if he disobeys to carry others along with him in his march to perfection, to be continually doing all he can to enlarge the volume of the human stream sweeping along and flowing down from mountain, meandering to the great ocean of life.
Ron Price 30/5/'06 to 9/10/14. __________________________________________________________ MANUFACTURING
On 1 June 1962, as I finished my high school exams in Canada, and about 12 weeks before my Baha’i travelling-pioneering life began near the end of August, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi boss responsible for transporting 100s of thousands of Jews to death camps, was executed. Research Professor of history and specialist in Jewish history, David Cesarani, argues that Eichmann had a corporate mentality and that he made a conscious career decision to do what he did within the immense bureaucratic wheel of the German totalitarian state.
He was not an embodiment of evil, not a brutal, depraved, an ideologically-driven psychopath. These popular views are a myth, Cesarani argues. He learned to be an anti-semite; he learned to hate and chose to be part of the genocide process. He was part of a “paperwork-based collapse of morality.” He was in many ways a detached, passionless administrator, as the sociologist Max Weber describes such men so well; he was an ordinary, common, far from atypical man, a graduate in mechanical engineering. He could have been, so argues Cesarani, you or I.-Ron Price with thanks to David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Times, Vintage, 2004.
You
can get a man’s life so wrong,
even if you study him for
years; and you can get your own
life quite wrong even though you
live it decade in and decade out, for
man, it is said, is God’s mystery.
You
certainly found, as the decades rolled
insensibly and sensibly by, some
bad, false wretched fame, notoriety,
a failed celebrity, mortifying
failure, a career move in
the wrong direction, a socio-historical, ideological
apparatus and a psycho-social profile
that manufactured you as
they manufacture us with
enough autonomy thrown-in so
that we can call ourselves free even
if we are everywhere in chains in
the Most Great Prison that is our life, in
which we cannot walk away but in
which there is always a degree of voluntarism,
there are always half-truths and
we must manage our lives within a
new structure of freedom for our age.
Ron
Price 23/12/'05
to 9/10/'14. _________________________________________________________ NADIR
OF CIVILIZATION?
In the months both before and after I was born in 1944, Jewish prisoners
were exterminated in a planned program of genocide in Nazi concentration
camps. Auschwitz had the biggest killing
machine of all the camps. It was
situated in Poland southwest of Krakow and between 1 and 1.5 million Jews were
gassed from 1942 to 1944. In September
1944 the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz ended, and in November 1944 the
gassing operations ceased. The camp of
Auschwitz was liberated on January 27th 1945. That was nearly 70 years ago, as I revise
this original prose-poem.
It seems to have taken me at
least 50 years of living before the power of understanding, and the
reinforcements of the electronic media, have enabled me to see the holocaust in
any kind of perspective, of conceptual integration. What I was born into back in July of 1944, that
'final solution' as it was sometimes called, I had no idea even existed until
at least my mid-to-late teens in the late 1950s and early 1960s, more than half
a century ago. The light, the darkness,
dawned on me insensibly over six decades.
-Ron Price with thanks to “Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution,”
ABC TV, 9:25-10:15 p.m., 13/10/'05-3/11/'05,
and 9/10/'14.
The gassing stopped before I was four months old, little did I know then in those early months of life in the lunch-pail city of Hamilton Ontario Canada a million miles away with a 40 year old mother, a 55 year old father, a 70 year old grandfather helping me into my world on the edge of a Canadian Lake.
Surely that was the nadir, then, of civilization’s journey, surely? But the dark heart had yet to come, the darkest hours of a slough of despond when, in a brief span of time, so charged with potential and hope for all of humankind I would inscribe my mark and assist in the operation of forces that would lead us out of the valley of that misery and shame which bestrewed my years and my father’s--- to the loftiest summits of majesty and glory.1 1The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 1996.
Ron Price 28/10/'05 to 9/10/'14. ____________________________________________________ THE INTERNET: ADDITIONAL INFORMATION The internet now has a great deal of material on the
subject of genocide in addition to an online game entitled Genocide. One such
example is: The Second Regional Forum on the Prevention of Genocide took place in Arusha, Tanzania on
March 3–5, 2010. The
Regional Fora on the Prevention of Genocide are co-organized by the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the United Republic of
Tanzania, the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs
(FDFA) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Commerce and Religion
of the Nation of Argentina.
The First
Regional Forum took place in December 2008 in Argentina, and the next forum is scheduled to be
held in Asia in 2011. Two additional examples are: (i) the Fourth
Regional Forum on the Prevention of Genocide Co-organized by the Governments of
Argentina, Cambodia, Switzerland and Tanzania, 28 February – 1 March 2013; and
(ii) The New York Review of Books has an article on the problems the definition of genocide is causing, a
case of where the popular definition of the word clashes with a legal one.
Edited by RonPrice - 10 Oct 2014 at 21:02 |
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pinguin ![]() WorldHistoria Master ![]() ![]() Joined: 29 Sep 2006 Status: Offline Points: 15234 |
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Interesting. Are you interested in the genocide of American Indians as well, or only in Cambodia's Pol Pot genocide?
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The issue is complicated because the American Indians suffered gravely from introduced diseases.
Of course, that's not a form a genocide. Especially considering microbes were discovered until the mid 1800s. |
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pinguin ![]() WorldHistoria Master ![]() ![]() Joined: 29 Sep 2006 Status: Offline Points: 15234 |
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Sure. But it is historically true that most Indians didn't die of common cold at all. It was the greed and criminality of the Europeans what destroyed most natives. The genocides are well known and documented, actually. And no matter there were some important infectious diseases, we shouldn't use that as a smoke curtain to hide the crimes of the European colonizers and exploiters.
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Pinguin:
As far as Amerindians are concerned, I don't know a great deal, but I'm not aware of any deliberate genocide as such being carried out in either North America or South America. From what I've read over the years, I believe that there were many atrocities, including mass murder, carried out on Indian people, but, where whole tribes have been obliterated, it's my understanding, particularly in South America, it was due to the introduction of, in many cases, minor diseases to which the Indians had no natural defence. Assuming what I've written is true, this couldn't be called genocide. Do you have any historical evidence of genocide in your region? |
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Not to feed the fire but I have seen the cases in some old western movies that some individuals distribute infected blankets among American Indians in North America to get rid of the tribe and seize their land by speculators or pioneers. If it was done systematically in large scale, it can be called genocide. Since it is deliberately wiping them up.
Edited by Alburz - 03 Nov 2014 at 01:05 |
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I wouldn't bee to keen to use Hollywood movies as reference material when discussing history. I'd just like to see some historically accurate evidence of Ameroindian genocide-if it exists. |
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pinguin ![]() WorldHistoria Master ![]() ![]() Joined: 29 Sep 2006 Status: Offline Points: 15234 |
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There are documented cases in North America where it really happened. Now, most Indians didn't die of contagious diseases but shot. In North America was common to kill Indians to rob theirs land, and sometimes the invaders just killed the game to starve Indians to death. And they made no difference between males, females or children. In Latin America genocide was addresses to males, and that's why most people of the region present a genetic imbalance, where most Y-Chromosomes are European but most mtDNA is Amerindian. In this region in particular Indians were forced to work in inhuman conditions to dead, in search of gold, silver or working on plantations. It is not surprising Indians overworked, badly fed and tortured daily, ended sick and die. What is undeniable is that in the Americas, the Pacific and Australia there was a massive genocide, product of the invasion and colonization. There were millions, perhaps ten or 20 million victims, product of the European invasion and ambition. It was the largest genocide up to the civilian victims of World War II. The worst is that people in many English speaking countries, act as if this never happened, and blame bacterias only for this crime. Edited by pinguin - 03 Nov 2014 at 10:47 |
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pinguin ![]() WorldHistoria Master ![]() ![]() Joined: 29 Sep 2006 Status: Offline Points: 15234 |
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Actually, In Latin America we have a clear picture of what happened during the conquest and colonial times. Spaniards may be criminals, but also they were excellent accountants and lawyers. They registered everything, including theirs own crimes. With a degree of detail that's really shocking. Spaniards wiped out large number of tribes, and killed a lot of people. Mainly in wars of conquest, but also for making people work to death. Tortures where unbelievable cruel, including impaling, cutting hands or blind the natives that opposed them. Matters became better with time when the crown intervene and dictate laws to protect Indians. In the Caribbean that marked the beginning of African slavery, whom lacked any protection at all and became the focus of the Spanish exploitation. By the end of Colonial times, the Spanish territories in the Americas had changed so much that now it was the place where natives were treated better. For instance, the Spanish crowd started to vaccinated natives in the 18th century! That's why many natives migrated from Brazil and from British (or American) territories to Spanish ruled lands. Today, most natives in the Americas survived in Spanish territories... Even after the initial genocide that Spanish committed in the New World, particularly in the Caribbean (Read Father Las Casas: A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies) |
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Pinguin:
Can you supply some references please? Alburz: I know about the Long March, but I wouldn't call that genocide. True, many people died but of neglect or misadventure rather than as a result of a deliberate actions intended to cause death. |
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pinguin ![]() WorldHistoria Master ![]() ![]() Joined: 29 Sep 2006 Status: Offline Points: 15234 |
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Read the chronicles of the conquest, starting from Father Las Casas' book on the destruction of the Indies.
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The inadvertent spread of disease to which the invaders had a certain tolerance does not mean that it is genocide.
Genocide is when a country (or its forces) intentionally set out to eliminate the population of another country, or ethnic groups within its own borders. Biased writings of South Americans about the invading Spanish still don't amount to genocide. |
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franciscosan ![]() WorldHistoria Master ![]() Joined: 09 Feb 2015 Location: Littleton CO Status: Offline Points: 10968 |
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It seems to me that an analysis of what happened over a 400 year period in the Americas is not going to help in an analysis of a genocide today. It is important to realize what is happening as close to time T=0 as possible for a genocide starting up. In general there is a window where the genocide is happening, if your Jewish in Germany in 1930 or 1948, you might get some anti-semitism, but you will (fortunately) miss the big show. How do we shorten, defuse or postpone a genocide and miss that window? Defining 400 years of Indian "mistreatment," as "genocide" kind of makes the overall concept more fuzzy, and in my opinion, less useful in preventing genocides in the future.
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wolfhnd ![]() General ![]() ![]() Joined: 18 Feb 2015 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 812 |
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It's all about the means isn't it? If you buy into the global warming hysteria (which I don't) then we know the means but not the out come only that the cost will be born primarily by the less sophisticated. That of course ignores the idea that criminality predisposes both intent and the competence to know you are committing a crime. To a large extent both of those elements are missing in most genocides. Genocides usually start out as small scale reactions to the perception that a group of people are undesirable which escalates into taking action to remove that group either by killing them or deporting them or both. The difficult part is in accessing if the people committing genocide think they are committing a crime or are morally incompetent enough to simply think they are doing what is in the best interest of civilization.
So let's say for the sake of argument that hunter gather societies stand in the way of technological progress. I would argue that technological progress is in the interest of all people but some would not agree so we will just assume that it is an established fact. Accepting the above premises we could then conclude that the "genocide" of Native Americans was partially justified but considering the technical competence of many Jews (for example Einstein) that the Nazi genocide was a crime against humanity. So now we are down to if the means justify the ends and that produces and argument that is not so easy to access by any means. Instead of typing out pages of argument I will simply say that the measure of a civilization may very well be how human rights are extended to even those who do not represent the interest of the majority. The human rights of minorities are protected by law so as to insure that even a democracy does not become a mob. While difficult for many people to understand the extension of rights without regard to innocence or guilt insures that none of us will have our rights violated by creating an environment in which order can be maintained under even the most difficult of social stresses. The above argument insures that Genocide can never be justified under the principle of the protection of the law and isn't dependent on circumstances. Many anarchist consider themselves extremely sophisticated thinkers but often that pseudo sophistication can become a trap. Justice is blind precisely because complexity renders even the most advanced logic inadequate. We judge people not because we can realistically consider all the facts but because we must sit in judgement for practical reasons always assuming there are factors both beyond our control and that there are inadequacies in our logic. Humility and moderation are not virtues only for the weak minded and they are virtues for societies as well as individuals.
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