I can get behind murder. I feel like this, to some extend, is a genuine part of human behaviour. Even the horrific aftermath of such. But genocide truly feels inhuman to me. So I can never fundamentally understand how in history, civilizations went from point A to point B to Point Genocide. Any thoughts on this?
Hey, Fat Tony! You of all people should know Geno had it comin’.
He was a made guy!
Kraut I believe provides a good step by step of it using the Armenian Genocide as the case study. It’s in part 1 of his series on the history of Turkey.
Indeed, ask the fascist, communists, racists and the religious nutters.
Genocide is just murder on an industrial scale intended to solve some social problem (at least that’s a modern way of looking at it). The justification for a single murder is extended to a whole group and those people become history.
Kill a person, it’s a tragedy. Kill a million and it’s a statistic.
Human brains aren’t capable of actually imagining a million people.
1k 1m 1b, all are drastically greater than the number of fingers and toes available to reference. The factor between 1 and 1,000 is 1,000. Seems tangible. The factor between 1,000 and 1,000,000 is 1,000. Basically the same
Imagine that you know someone who intends to kill you. You can run and hide, or you can can kill them instead. Genocide is that on a large scale.
Or at least that’s the version of genocide thar is easiest to understand. There is also the Nazi version where you kill an entire people just because you hate them, not because they threaten you or have a resource that you desperately need for survival.
There is also the type of genocide that was committed against the indigenous people of the Americas. That happened over a long period of time and over two continents. It involved every type of genocide noted above at different times and places, plus the initial accidental genocide by disease (probably influenza) that killed off about 90% of the population prior to the colonizing that came later.
And just because you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t do it in the right circumstances. There is nothing more human than genocide. The only other animal that does it is chimps, if I remember correctly.
Sorry, that is a depressing note to end this comment on. Humans are scary.
It’s very human, that’s why it happens everywhere in history and also in at least like 4 or 5 different places right now.
We’d like to think we’re nice and rational and empathetic, but we’re just not as a species.
Let’s expand from murder of one person to more. People live with a family. There is another family nearby. Both families have some resources, but not enough. If one family kills the other family, the surviving family can have more resources to distribute within their family.
Ethnic groups are effectively very extended family.
Usually one of the first steps is dehumanization - make your targets “less than human” in the eyes of the population. Nazis famously did it by comparing Jews to rats. You’ll notice in a lot of recent Israeli press releases and media Palestinians are referred to as “inhuman animals” or some variation of that. By creating that disconnect between your targets and “normal, healthy” humans you reduce empathy and make harsher treatment seem just or ethical.
Another step is to make your audience disgusted or angry. Research shows there’s a link between those two emotions and harsher judgments (although degree/method is still very much an area of research). To invoke disgust you may use words like “filthy, wretched, diseased, mindless” etc. Using the Nazi example again, they made cartoons that showed Jews as dirty and disgusting. To make people angry convince them your targets are “immoral, violent, bloodthirsty” and so on. Nazis leaned heavily into blaming Jews for society’s ills and calling them thieves. Both effects can be made greater if your audience is conditioned to be sensitive to anger/disgust, i.e. being raised to believe in strict definitions of purity and so on. For Nazis it was the idea that Aryans were racially superior. For Zionism it often involves teaching people they are “God’s chosen” with other races not having the same rights (like rights to dwell in territory claimed by Israel) because of religion.
So if you can make your victims seem less than human and enrage or disgust your audience you convince people to do horrible things. They won’t feel like they are doing it to valuable humans and often think it’s a form of justice or necessary cleansing. It’s often heavily reliant on using the above psychological “levers” to shift perceptions so large populations view some other group as different to valuable, valid humans.
Imagine the stone age. Your tribe is running out of food, but there’s a nearby tribe with plenty of it. You group up, visit them during the night, murder them all and steal their food. This is pretty much a genocide. And it’s part of our nature. Always was, always will be.
But that’s the thing, I guess. When is the point reached, when I want food turns into I want to destroy a whole or maybe at least a part of a people?
Killing others is always at the back of our minds, it’s just that different people have different triggers to do so. The amount of people killed doesn’t really matter.
You ever drown or wipe out an ant colony? Take down a wasps nest? Swat away the hoards of mosquitos annoying you?
That’s genocide but they aren’t what you would consider equals as a human. I’m aware some super vegan froo froos, do. But anyways. Your ability to genocide an entire village of beings you don’t consider equal is where most of these feelings come from.
It’s also why the playbook, heavily updated by Hitler in the past, and Israel today, say that’s an important step. Dehumanize your enemy. Then wiping them off the face of the earth is a casual comment much like calling an exterminator to genocide those pesky wasps under your front porch. And I’m not being snarky when I say Israeli playbook. They have published and public books on exactly how to do this, how to wage a propaganda war, etc. It is not a secret. The US, and other 5 eye countries also follows the same aided by their intelligence agencies because it’s so powerful on the majority of low intellect people. Remember half the people are below average intelligence… Many that are above average aren’t interested. So you always have a minority that can critically think for themselves. The rest want it spoonfed.
Edit: Also if you want a laugh, Eddie Izzard somewhat explains it in his Dressed To Kill tour.
Any pointers on where in the 2hr show you’re referencing? I’ve seen the “do you have a flag” and the “mass murder” parts
You create an outgroup, portray them as subhuman, whip people into a frenzy with propaganda, and you’re there.
People are also emotional, you tap into that. Anger and hate are easy emotions.
Sounds like the American conservatives and trans people. They’re obsessed with hating them to the point it’s becoming a real genocidal concern.
Technically the situation with trans people is already a genocide in the US - but such things do exist by degrees. You can’t call the two comparable in severity.
A genocide counts when victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly and involve :
- killing members of the group
- causing them serious bodily or mental harm
- imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group
- preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.
Right now that particular snowball is small but you already have families with trans kids fleeing states because Child protective services can target affirming parents as child abuse removing vulnerable children into the foster system. People unable to go out in public for more than a couple hours at a time because they can’t use bathrooms without hassle or because they fear assault and trans adults are getting stranded in pain between surgical procedures or facing hormonal imbalances as their HRT and health care is forcibly stopped.
Too often we treat words as automatically hyperbolic… But the reality is fuzzier. Genocides exist on a sliding scale. Gaza is a very hardcore textbook extermination the sort which dominates our understanding of the word genocide. The trans genocide is a much smaller largely beaurcratic one … People are dying due to it yes, but the actual cost is still well obscured.
Interestingly, trans persecution is closer to literal genocide (death based on genetic characteristics) than a lot of official genocides in recent history (which are often death based on culture or religion).
With Israel/Palestine of course, you get genetics, culture, tribalism AND religion all at the same time, and the extreme fringes in both groups desiring total genocide of the other group.
But any time you see populist politics, rest assured that the end game is a continual separation of “them” groups to blame for anything that prevents everyone from behaving like “us”. I still find the French Revolution to be all the warning I need in this area, but many people miss the myriad of lessons history provides us, and so we are doomed to repeat them.
Which is one of the most absurd things about that whole debacle, too…
I’m very leftist, and god damn if these American conservatives have made me hateful, too. They’ve made me feel that if your whole fucking existence is dedicating to taking away rights from others, marginalizing them, and subjecting them to Social Murder, then these conservatives are the very people who deserve to have their voting rights stripped and subjected to the very things they want others to suffer.
Frankly, if they’re going to bitch about it and endlessly play the victim anyway. Fuck it, let’s make em fucking victims like they want if they want to be the victim so god damned badly. Let’s pull the Boomer “I’ll give you something to cry about” with these assholes.
See, their conservative bullshit has made me so done with their shit that I’m willing to ostracize these fuckers from society entirely.
…huh?
The paradox of tolerance.
If people are tolerant of intolerance, tolerance dies. So, ironically, people who are otherwise highly tolerant people (especially when they have thought about this deeply) realise they must reject intolerance loudly and intensely, lest their way of life is destroyed.
Abuse of trans people (and others) by conservatives makes me want to kick conservatives out of fucking society the same way conservatives want to with everyone else.
I’d be fucking tap dancing on graves in happiness if more of these fuckers gave into “death’s of despair” and shot themselves instead of innocent people. I don’t give a damn anymore. Fuck all of 'em, I hope they all suffer worse than the people they’ve abused.
Yeah, you’re not going to be winning over any people to your side of the argument with this tactic.
I’m more with than against.
It’s a matter of degrees.
That wasn’t designed to be persuasive.
When you put it like in-group out-group, it does feel like a very human thing. We seem to be quite naturally very cliquey.
Fascism
Genocides predate this political ideology by millennia.
Forms of proto-fascism predate formal Fascism by millennia, and elements of it can be found in many ancient cultures.
Besides, I’m not saying that Fascism is the only way it happens, just a way it happens.
This YouTube video from Sprouts explains it very well.
But you’re watching a genocide happen right now. You can look at the news articles now. You can read in real time people laying the case for it, including in their original language using Google translate.
