Quotes About Genocide

The most controversial sentence I ever wrote was not about abortion, gay marriage, the wars in Vietnam or Iraq, elections, or anything to do with national or church politics. It was a statement about the founding of the United States. Here's the sentence: "The United States of America was established as a white society, founded upon the near genocide of another race and then the enslavement of yet another.

History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?' She shakes her head. 'All of that, and the world didn't learn anything. Look around. There's still ethnic cleansing. There's discrimination.

The bottom line, as Raul Hilberg put it, was that most people thought that, even if Jews shouldn't be killed, they weren't worth saving.

The Jews deserved to die. I have no regrets. If I had the chance I would do it again.

These two distinct crimes, with their different emphases on the individual and the group, grew side by side, yet over time genocide emerged in the eyes of many as the crime of crimes, a hierarchy that left a suggestion that the killing of large numbers of people as individuals was somehow less terrible.

Human nature was all about shifting blame...and responsibility. How else could you explain concentration camps and genocide and all the awful things people did to each other every day? They just carried on life and pretended like the evil didn't exist, as long as it was happening out of their direct view.

This was before the Nazis settled on a more efficient method—machine-gunning Jews into the Babi Yar canyon, thirty thousand in two days.

When a leader used his power over the ruled for the purpose of settling scores and inflating his self-esteem, for remaking society according to his own grand designs, class warfare and genocide ensued.

Though Israel is charged with engaging in genocide against Palestinians, in the last 20 years, the number of Palestinians has doubled; and since Israel's founding in 1948, the Palestinian population has grown five-fold. It must surely rank as the least effective genocide in world history.

If the question is 'How do we stop enormous evils in the world?' the answer is, unfortunately, quite frequently 'War.' Nazi and Japanese racist genocide were ended by soldiers shooting people, and by bombers bombing people, not by people who believed 'war is not the answer.

The world had seen the same thing happen many times before. After it happened in Nazi Germany, all the big, powerful countries swore, "Never again!" But here we were, six harmless females huddled in darkness, marked for execution because we were born Tutsi. How had history managed to repeat itself? How had this evil managed to surface once again? Why had the devil been allowed to walk among us unchallenged, poisoning hearts and minds until it was too late?

As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.

Nor can the one day of suffering Jesus supposedly endured compare with the Holocaust, the genocide of Native Americans or the pain of those who were tortured during the Inquisition. His supposed contribution to the world hardly compares with the hard work, sacrifice and discipline of intelligent individuals who have dedicated their lives to science and medicine. Just because Jesus was considered a Higher Power does not make his alleged suffering any higher than yours or mine.

With Saddam gone, any voting would install a Shiite majority. The Sunni wouldn't run Iraq again. That, at the bottom, caused the insurgency. Absent the genocide of Sunni Arabs, it would keep it going.

The implication—never questioned by anyone at RAND while I was there—was that adequate deterrence for the United States demanded a survivable, assured second-strike capability to kill more than the twenty million Soviet citizens who had died in World War II. That meant we were working to assure the survival under attack of a capability for retaliatory genocide, though none of us ever thought of it in those terms for a moment.

Dwight Eisenhower had secretly endorsed the blueprints of this multi-genocide machine. He had furthermore demanded, largely for budgetary reasons, that there be no other plan for fighting the Russians.

we were working to assure the survival under attack of a capability for retaliatory genocide

Words without deeds violates the moral and legal obligation we have under the genocide convention but, more importantly, violates our sense of right and wrong and the standards we have as human beings about looking to care for one another.

Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, their irredentism and their acceptance of violence as a means of generating change can turn them into future threats.

Free societies, which allow differences to speak and be heard, and live by intermarriage, commerce, and free migration, and democratic societies, which convert enemies into adversaries and reconcile differences without resort to violence, are societies in which the genocidal temptation is unlikely and even inconceivable.

The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.

The Germans have eaten the Gypsies of Poland for breakfast, child, and then they ate the Jews for lunch, but soon it will be supper." "What will they eat then?" "All the rest of the Poles.

Bloodlust is like a natural disaster; it has to run its course. I have seen their faces; they are faces out of nightmares—most ordinary—so ordinary that you can't believe the brains behind them capable of genocide.

The Germans have removed, murdered or burned alive tens of thousands of Jews. Out of the three million Polsih Jews, no more than 10 percent remain.