Quotes About Genocide

This unprecedented mass murder would have been impossible without a special kind of politics. —

In the winter of 1942–1943, the Germans began to separate the Jews not into two but into three groups: the men, the older women, and the young women. They sent the young women into the gas last, because they liked to look at their naked bodies in the cold. By then the corpses were burned rather than buried. The pyres were huge grills made from railway rails laid upon concrete pillars, some thirty meters across. By spring 1943, fires

I certainly think that another Holocaust can happen again. It did already occur; think of Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia.

One of the things that a president needs in the face of genocide is resolve.

When genocide is committed, it must be seen. People must look at it with open eyes, not minimize its impact.

I think that the memory of Armenia's genocide opened my eyes at an early age to the existence of political cynicism.

You have to wonder about these settlers of the Great Plains. These white people who in olden times killed the natives and laid claim to this dirt and stuck to it; who stranded their children and grandchildren with a birthright of dust. A collection of clapboard shacks with backyards full of unmown pigweed and junked cars and abandoned swing sets and withered, thirsty trees. Was the genocide worth it?

Yet, as should become obvious, genocidal events have been common enough to suggest that they cannot be explained as some kind of deviant behavior. On the contrary, given the right circumstances, normal human beings are all too ready to kill by category.

Conflict can become genocidal when powerful groups think that the most efficient means to get what they want is to eliminate those in the way. It can become equally or more murderous when the motive is revenge, and descend to the worst levels of slaughter when there is great fear that the survival of the enemy group might endanger the survival of one's own group.

The most intractable cause of genocidal killings emerges when competing groups—ethnic, religious, class, or ideological—feel that the very presence of the other, of the enemy, so sullies the environment that normal life is not possible as long as they exist.

There were some ten million Jews living in 1939 in the territories occupied by Hitler's forces. By any estimate it is certain that nearly half of them were exterminated by the Germans. This was the final consequence and the shattering cost of the aberration which came over the Nazi dictator in his youthful gutter days in Vienna and which he imparted to—or shared with—so many of his German followers.

But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?

But history does matter. There are lines connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Serbs and the Rwandans. They are obviously morbid. Really, how much genocide can one sentence handle? You get the point. Besides, my grandparents' story deserves to be told, regardless of their nationalities.

Those who participate in a genocide as well as those who merely look away rarely volunteer much in the way of anecdote or observation. Same with the heroic and the righteous. Usually it's only the survivors who speak-and often they don't want to talk much about it either. p. 75

They were people I knew, neighbors actually, acting like animals. They killed thousands of Tutsis. The machetes they used to cut people were the same as they used to cut crops and cows, they didn't care.

Sólo los políticos se arrogan el derecho a condonar o perdonar en nombre de todos, cosa inconcebible para un crimen de masas o un genocidio.

What has since happened in Tibet is hardly to be believed. More than 1.2 million Tibetans lost their lives and of about six thousand monasteries, temples, and shrines, 99 percent were either looted or totally destroyed. In

though he found himself reluctant to be the direct cause of any actual killing. This wasn't Tolkien—these weren't orcs and trolls and giant spiders and whatever else, evil creatures that you were free to commit genocide on without any complicated moral ramifications.

Only through encouraging decentralized communal agents will such a worldwide organization as an effectively reconstituted United Nations find the massive human backing needed for banishing all weapons of genocide and biocide, and ensuring justice and comity among its members. To assemble peace-making power in a world authority without such a revitalizing of autonomous smaller units capable of exercising local and regional initiatives, would be to rivet together the ultimate megamachine.

All cultures are different. Some commit genocide. Some are uniquely peaceful. Some frequent bathhouses in groups. Some don't show each other the soles of their shoes or like pictures taken of them. Some have enormous hunting festivals or annual stretches when nobody speaks. Some don't use electricity.

Genocide is not just a murderous madness; it is, more deeply, a politics that promises a utopia beyond politics - one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference. Since genocide is a form of political utopia, it remains an enduring temptation in any multiethnic and multicultural society in crisis.

The biggest road block to action on genocide and other human rights crimes is ignorance. Most people just don't know that such things are happening, and often, if they have a vague idea they are happening, there is a feeling that there is nothing that can be done to stop these crimes.

At the October 1933 proceedings of the League of Nations in Madrid, Lemkin mounted a valiant effort to persuade the gathered ambassadors to define and agree to punish the crime of what we now call genocide. He failed.

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.