Physical Genocide

SIGNIFICANCE: The act of genocide, which is based on hatred, bigotry, and prejudice, is opposed to the concepts of human rights, civil rights, and basic freedoms.

Physical genocide is the deliberate and systematic attempt to annihilate an entire human population. Perpetrators of this practice direct their actions against groups that differ from their own in religious belief, race, ethnic affiliation, nationality, or sexual orientation. Often, the extermination of a human group is prompted when the entire group is attributed with some presumed guilt that is associated with a small segment of that group or their ancestors.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), also called the Genocide Convention, is an international treaty initially signed in 1951 to criminalize genocide across the globe. Over 150 countries participated in the convention.

Hitler and the Jews

Brutal massacres of entire Jewish populations were ordered by Adolf Hitler as his “final solution” to the “Jewish question” in Germany and throughout Europe. Hitler argued that many of Germany’s problems stemmed from the fact that Jews formed a separate, degenerate race. To Hitler, each race inherited certain qualities through its blood and genes; the Aryans were thus a naturally superior race, while Jews were sinister and devious. Hitler accused the Jews of secretly forming an “international Jewish conspiracy” aimed at dominating the globe economically and politically by cheating everyone else. He argued that because Jews were a lower and undesirable form of life, the only real solution to the “Jewish question” was total extermination. As a result, he ordered the extermination of more than six million Jews. Hitler’s Nazi Party used the Holocaust to cover up its theft of Jewish families’ valuable art treasures, life savings, and property. The Nazi Party used the term Judenrein, meaning to clean an area of Jews, as a euphemism for genocide. Hitler applied the same flawed reasoning to Gypsies, the mentally disabled, and homosexuals. All were to be exterminated because they were considered inherently inferior and unworthy of life.

Other Historical Examples

History provides numerous examples of genocide. When the Australian government wanted land on the island of Tasmania, the native population refused to sell it or give it away. Ultimately, the Tasmanians’ water supply was poisoned. Every Native Tasmanian perished, and settlers from Australia subsequently claimed the land.

Turkey offers another example of this crime against humanity. Sultan Abdul Hamid II encouraged Kurdish depredations against Armenian villages. By 1894, these actions had grown into full-scale war, and the Turkish army assisted in the massacre of Armenians. Initially, an estimated 200,000 Armenians were killed. During World War I, the Turks sided with Germany, but the Armenians sided with Russia and Britain. As a result, the Turks viewed them as subversives. To secure its border with Russia, Turkey forcibly removed millions of Armenians and forced them to march south without adequate food or shelter. Armenians claim that the result was a holocaust and that more than one million Armenians died in Turkey in 1915. The Turks took more than 90 percent of the Armenians’ land. The Turkish government has never admitted guilt for these events and has claimed that Armenians killed an equal number of Turks during World War I. In another modern example of genocide, the government of Myanmar began persecuting and killing the Rohingya people beginning in late 2015.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist William Shockley (1910-1989) proposed a theory of “dysgenics” that states that African Americans are biologically inferior to White individuals. Shockley proposed making America more competitive globally by the forced sterilization of all African Americans living in the United States. Within one generation, there would be no race problem because the Black race would die out. Shockley was barred from speaking in Britain by authorities who considered his theory outrageous. World history is replete with examples of human willingness to violate moral and ethical codes, yet genocide constitutes the gravest violation of ethical principles on record.

Many social scientists study the causes, processes, and results of genocide. Sociologist Martin Shaw’s works War and Genocide (2003) and What is Genocide? (2007) explore war and genocide in the context of global politics. Bradley Campbell’s Geometry of Genocide (2015) attempts to explain the forces that drive genocide.

Bibliography

Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Cornell University Press, 1989.

Chalk, Frank, and Kurt Jonassohn. The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies. Yale University Press, 1990.

Cherny, Israel W. How Can We Commit the Unthinkable? Genocide, the Human Cancer. Hearst, 1982.

Kuper, Leo. The Prevention of Genocide. Yale University Press, 1985.

Porter, Jack Nusan, editor. Genocide and Human Rights. University Press of America, 1982.

"What is Genocide?" United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/learn-about-genocide-and-other-mass-atrocities/what-is-genocide. Accessed 2 Nov. 2024.