Genocide

Our ancestors - the primitive man and the creatures that preceded him, fought and killed the neighboring tribe in order to take control of living resources. The murderers survived and the pursuers of peace were eliminated, therefore it is no wonder that this bad trait spread in the population

Aryeh Seter

Three Armenian artists depict the holocaust of their people in a painting. The link leads to the artist's website
In World War II, the Germans committed genocide by killing approximately twenty million people, six million of whom were our people. It was not the greatest genocide in history. In the Soviet Union, from 1917 to the end of the fifties, about 66 million people - Russians and other peoples of the Soviet Union - were murdered by the authorities, the vast majority during Stalin's reign. Many of them were Jews, and this number does not include the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were brutally murdered in Ukraine at the end of World War I and shortly after. Besides the elimination of various opponents of the regime, Stalin ordered in the midst of World War II, when Russia was under the German boot, the destruction or exile of six peoples, among them the Chechens and the Tatars. Not Hitler, then, was the greatest murderer in human history, but Stalin. There were dozens and hundreds of other cases of genocide in history and many of them right in our century. These cases of genocide and the many wars throughout human history raise the question - is it the nature of the human race to kill its own kind and what are the chances that wars and acts of killing will stop.

The aborigines in Australia arrived there 50,000 years ago. The white settlers arrived in Australia more than two hundred years ago, and then there were about 300,000 natives called aborigines and referred to by Australians as "blacks". At the beginning of the 60,000th century, the aboriginal population numbered XNUMX souls, and this was as a result of systematic killing operations, some of them through the "native police" established there.

The perfect genocide was also committed by the Australians in Tasmania. The Tasmanians were cut off together with their island from the Australian continent about ten thousand years ago and since then have remained in isolation because their sailing technology did not allow long-distance sailing. When the first Europeans arrived in Tasmania in 1642, there were about three thousand Tasmanians. By 1830 there were only 75 left and the last one died in 1869, long before the last Tasmanian wolf died in its zoo cage in the XNUMXs. Tasmanian wolf is a species of striped marsupial similar in shape to a dog or a wolf - one of many species of animals that man has succeeded in exterminating. The last Tasmanian wolf wandering in its cage is often seen in nature programs on television; But does anyone remember the Tasmanians?

In fact, the Americans also managed to eliminate certain Indian tribes until the last one of them. General Philip Sheridan said - a good Indian is a dead Indian. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Presidents in the United States, including Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Monroe and Theodore Roosevelt made statements about the Indians such as - settlements must be destroyed and their crops destroyed; The Supreme Providence wants the destruction of these savages to make room for the builders of the land; They are barbarians worthy of extermination; They have no right to such a large area just to hunt; They are inferior and will therefore disappear.

By the way Indians - does anyone know that Brazil and Argentina committed genocide against Indian tribes - not in the last century, but in the seventies of the twentieth century. And if we talk about Argentina, then they killed not only Indians, but also tens of thousands of their people who were kidnapped and disappeared by the army and this happened in the eighties.

A genocide almost as famous as our holocaust was committed by the Turks on the Armenians in the First World War. The number of victims is measured in seven figures. The Jewish and Armenian holocausts are in the world's consciousness, because the murdered are members of the white race, the murderers were enemies of the Western world and also because of our and the Armenians' global lobby which works to not forget.

The murders in Yugoslavia also received global exposure, partly thanks to the media and foreign forces were sent there to try to restore order. There is nothing new in Yugoslavia. The Croats murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs back in World War II. And the UN, although it passed a resolution in 1948 that genocide is a crime, has not done much about it since then.

Many other acts of genocide were not exposed, who knows what, because they happened in distant places, physically or culturally from us.

In Africa, the Germans committed genocide in the Bantu tribes at the beginning of the century. Idi Amin killed hundreds of thousands in Uganda. North Sudanese killed hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese in the sixties. The Tutsi tribe committed genocide in the Hutu tribe and vice versa (several years apart).

And in Asia - hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims were killed in mutual genocide in India and Pakistan in 1947.

Millions of Bengalis were murdered in Bangla-Dash by the Pakistani army in 1971.

Millions of Cambodians were murdered in the seventies, by their own people who belonged to the Khmer Rouge.

The Indonesians murdered hundreds of thousands of communists and Chinese as well as tens of thousands of the people of the island of Timor and that too was only in the seventies.

A few years ago we read about fanatical Muslims killing and massacring entire villages in Algeria. At the end of World War II, riots broke out in the town of Algiers, in which the Algerians killed a hundred Frenchmen. The French army responded with planes, ships and raiding units and killed tens of thousands of Algerians.

It may be disturbing to read such a long list, but we must do so in order to draw conclusions and think how we can (if we can) prevent more such cases in our world and above all do everything possible so that we do not become victims ourselves again.

Cases of genocide happen when there are differences between groups in race, nationality, religion or politics. The excuses for genocide are self-defense, religious imperative, control of progress, and belief that the murdered are subhuman. Our opinion is that genocide, which he actually killed in the other tribe, is ingrained in our genes. Our ancestors - the primitive man and the creatures that preceded him, fought and killed the neighboring tribe in order to take control of living resources. The murderers survived and the pursuers of peace were eliminated, therefore it is no wonder that this bad trait spread in the population. Even today it is possible to see in many species of animals, acts of murder within the same species. If we refer to our relatives the great apes - the gorillas kill the rival male and his offspring; The chimpanzees who live in groups, fight and destroy rival groups. They are less successful than us because they are not as smart as us and do not have technology like ours, but you can tell that they are planning the killings.

Here is the place to emphasize that, as in the animal kingdom, so also in humans, the killers are males. Maybe if the world is run by women we will have world peace.

Nowadays, killing technologies have become more sophisticated and the means of killing can be less direct. It began with the atomic bombs that the Americans dropped on Japan and it continues today with ballistic and guided missiles equipped with unconventional means of killing, which today threaten various populations in the world. It's as if it's easier to press a button... On the other hand, one can hope that the media will curb such cases in the future; Not only because it will present and bring the events to everyone's attention, but also because it contributes to turning us all into one global village and perceiving others as similar to us. But even then we will have to be careful of those who continue to hate foreigners - because their media is controlled by the authorities who inflame the hatred and thereby also cause the proliferation of acts of terrorism that we have recently witnessed.

Hopefully human culture and morality will finally win out and then we can all live safely.