Quotes About Genocide

Some argue that recognition of the genocide has become even more problematic now, when the world is at war with terrorism and the United States cannot afford to offend the sensibility of our Turkish ally.

The Holocaust is - there's nothing comparable to it.

We saved our lives, Ender.' 'No,' said Ender. 'That's what we thought we were doing, and that's what we should be judged for – but what we really did was slaughter a species that wanted desperately to make peace with us, to try to understand us – but they never understood what speech and language were. This is the first time they've had a chance to find a voice.

Many of the prophecy-riddles reflect Leonardo's love for animals. "Countless numbers will have their little children taken away and their throats shall be cut," is one prophecy, as if describing a brutal act of war and genocide. But then Leonardo, who had become a vegetarian, reveals that this prophecy refers to the sheep and cows that humans eat.

In brutally suppressing the Maji Maji War in Tanganyika and in attempting genocide against the Herero people in Namibia the German ruling classes were getting the experience which they later applied against the Jews and German workers and progressives.

On the 70th anniversary of Auschwitz, mourning dead Jews is easy. And, forgive me, cheap. Want to truly honor the dead? Show solidarity with the living—Israel and its six million Jews. Make "never again" more than an empty phrase. It took Nazi Germany seven years to kill six million Jews. It would take a nuclear Iran one day.

Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.

The finding that enduring religious belief systems make us more amenable to the commands of authority also is affirmed by the historical realities surrounding many cases of mass killing and genocide.

There is no gene for genocide. Ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and our desire for social dominance are tendencies, not triggers that lead to mechanical causation or reflex action.

Despite their continuing efforts of denial and revisionist interpretation, however, there is now widespread recognition that the Turkish destruction of the Armenians between 1915 and 1923 stands as the first "total genocide" of the twentieth century.

As anthropologist Michael Ghiglieri writes: "Xenophobia and ethnocentrism are not just essential ingredients to war. Because they instinctively tell men precisely whom to bond with versus whom to fight against, they are the most dangerously manipulable facets of war psychology that promote genocide. Indeed, genocide itself has become a potent force in human evolution.

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONEAND TELL EVERYONEHOW THEY SPONSOR...THE KILLING OF THE YAZIDI NATION

There are something like 300 anti-genocide chapters on college campuses around the country. It's bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. There are something like 500 high school chapters devoted to stopping the genocide in Darfur. Evangelicals have joined it. Jewish groups have joined it.

In all, dozens upon dozens of groups and organizations have prioritized stopping the killing in Darfur before there is no one left to be killed. It is high time that we, the U.S. Congress, join our name to that list.

With the return of Yanukovych, first as prime minister in 2007 and then as president in 2010, the Holodomor began to fall back again in terms of public remembrance. Because of this political shift and because this was a taboo topic in Soviet times, the Holodomor has not entered into the DNA or soul of Ukrainian politics, or worldview, as the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide have in Israel and Armenia.

The point is that it was something done by others against us. In Ukraine, as indeed in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge genocide of 1975–79, it was not something quite so clearly done by others.

Our intuitions fail us. We rightly associate the Holocaust with Nazi ideology, but forget that many of the killers were not Nazis or even Germans. We think first of German Jews, although almost all of the Jews killed in the Holocaust lived beyond Germany. We

Germans carried out what they called the "Great Action," deporting some 265,040 Jews to the death factory at Treblinka to be

The Germans murdered about as many non-Jews as Jews during the war, chiefly by starving Soviet prisoners of war (more than three million) and residents of besieged cities (more than a million) or by shooting civilians in "reprisals" (the better part of a million, chiefly Belarusians and Poles).

a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: "I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive." She was among the more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans.

The fourteen million were murdered over the course of only twelve years, between 1933 and 1945, while both Hitler and Stalin were in power.

Hitler wanted not only to eradicate the Jews; he wanted also to destroy Poland and the Soviet Union as states, exterminate their ruling classes, and kill tens of millions of Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles).

Hitler foresaw a "resolution of the Polish problem" by the murder of those who might be regarded as fully human.

The racist and colonial idea that the Holocaust began as an elemental explosion of primitive antisemitism arose as Nazi propaganda and apologetics.