Quotes About Genocide

No small part in the new awareness of the horrors of genocide was a willingness of Holocaust survivors to tell their stories. Chalk and Jonassohn note that these memoirs are historically unusual.146 Survivors of earlier genocides had treated them as humiliating defeats and felt that talking about them would only rub in history's harsh verdict. With the new humanitarian sensibilities, genocides became crimes against humanity, and survivors were witnesses for the prosecution.

The authors of recent histories of mass killing are adamant that the idea of an unprecedented "century of genocide" (the 20th) is a myth. On their first page Chalk and Jonassohn write, "Genocide has been practiced in all regions of the world and during all periods in history," and add that their eleven case studies of pre-20th-century genocides "are not intended to be either exhaustive or representative.

the Blank Slate had, and has, a dark side. The vacuum that it posited in human nature was eagerly filled by totalitarian regimes, and it did nothing to prevent their genocides. It perverts education, childrearing, and the arts into forms of social engineering. It torments mothers who work outside the home and parents whose children did not turn out as they would have liked. It threatens to outlaw biomedical research that could alleviate human suffering.

In the case of Iraq, notwithstanding the violence there at the moment, the very fact that a hideous regime - responsible for genocide, for the use of chemical and biological weapons, aggression against two neighbors - has been removed in itself is a positive development.

During the colonial years of our nation, racism was perpetrated in the form of two unspeakably horrible and devastatingly evil activities-the genocide of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of African peoples.

It's necessary to exterminate these Jews like rats, once and for all. In Germany, thank God, we've already taken care of that. I hope that the world will follow this example.

I learned later that the surgeon who put Dole back together after he was so badly injured in World War II was an Armenian whose family had deep memories of the genocidal campaign the Turks had waged against them.

There is never a time when a president can act to stop a tragedy from occurring without being held politically accountable one way or the other. If he does it and fails, he's wrong. If he does it and succeeds, he was never right because it didn't happen. If we go in and stop an act of genocide, we can't prove what we stopped.

Clinton chose his language very carefully. About Rwanda, he said that, at the time, he "did not fully appreciate" the extent of the genocide. Not that he did not know. Because he did know. The Washington Post reported piles of bodies six feet high, and the evening news showed rivers choked with corpses. Regret, not action, had been his policy decision. Regret, he hoped, would not cost him anything.

If it was up to the U.N., Saddam Hussein would still be killing his own people.

I'm half-Armenian. Even though my grandparents did not discuss the genocide, and my father - like many sons and daughters of immigrants - wanted to be as 'American' as possible, I was always aware of it. How could I not be?

The whole Indian thing, I always say it's really the American holocaust. It's something we need to look at.

Of the 9,600,000 Jews who lived in Nazi-dominated Europe, 60 percent are authoritatively estimated to have perished. Five million seven hundred thousand Jews are missing from the countries in which they formerly lived, and over 4,500,000 cannot be accounted for by the normal death rate nor by immigration; nor are they included among displaced persons.

Otto Rasch, whose Einsatz unit massacred exactly 33,771 Jews over a two-day period outside Kiev, Russia.

It's not surprising to me that in a country born of racial genocide, the issue of race is still an open wound on the American soul. We haven't dealt with it.

Rwanda can be a paradise again, but it will take the love of the entire world to heal my homeland. And that's as it should be, for what happened in Rwanda happened to us all - humanity was wounded by the genocide.

The legacy of the Armenian Genocide is woven into the fabric of America.

A journey through the Mediterranean is not only inspiring and stimulating, it is also humbling. The men and women who created antique treasures for us to marvel at had to deal with plague, genocide, a world without writing, iron tools, or penicillin - and yet they made something extraordinary of their life and times.

there is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.

In the eyes of the Jews, thinking exclusively in terms of their own history, the catastrophe that had befallen them under Hitler, in which a third of the people perished, appeared not as the most recent of crimes, the unprecedented crime of genocide, but, on the contrary, as the oldest crime they knew and remembered.

What for Hitler , the sole, lonely plotter of the Final Solution (never had a conspiracy, if such it was, needed fewer conspirators and more executors), was among the war's main objectives, with its implementation given top priority, regardless of economic and military considerations, and what for Eichmann was a job, with its daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews quite literally the end of the world.

Despite the increase in world attention toward Sudan in the past months, the genocide in Darfur has continued without any serious attempt by the Sudanese government to do what governments primarily exist to do, protect their citizens.

To label family planning and legal abortion programs "genocide" is male rhetoric, for male ears.

I still believe that change is possible. With enough hard work and organization, there's no reason activists can't stop genocide, achieve nuclear disarmament, eradicate poverty, or end all human wars. But when it comes to the stuff that really matters, the stuff that really counts? There's nothing you can do.