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The word genocide is not new, the concept is ancient.
On the historical heels of the physical and cultural genocide of North American indigenous peoples during the nineteenth century, the twentieth century writhed from the near- complete annihilation of the Herero’s by the Germans in Southwest Africa in 1904; to the brutal assault on the Armenian population by the Turks between 1915 and 1932; to the implementation of Soviet manmade famine against the Ukrainian Kulaks in 1932–1933 that left several million peasants starving to death; to the extermination of two-thirds of Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust of 1939–1945; to the massacre of approximately half a million people in Indonesia in 1965–1966; to genocide or mass killings in Bangladesh (1971), Burundi (1972), Cambodia (1975–1979), East Timor (1975–1979), Argentina (1976–1983), Guatemala (1980s–1990s), Sri Lanka (1983–2009), Iraq (1987–1988), the former Yugoslavia (1992–1995), and Rwanda (1994).
Genocidal death rates worldwide— 7,700 per 100,000—were an eight-fold increase over the previous 69 centuries. Close to 170 million civilians were done to death by their own governments in the twentieth century.
It is clear that genocide cannot be confined to one culture, place, or time in modern history. Even the most restrictive of definitions estimates that at least 60 million men, women, and children were victims of genocide and mass killing in the past century alone.
The reality—for genocide IS THAT it is a human problem and, as such, has a human solution.
It is not a problem that came to us from another world or was ingrained in our behavioural genetic repertoire. At its root, genocide happens because we choose to see a people rather than individual people and then we choose to kill those people in large numbers and over an extended period of time.
It is often assumed that genocide must be caused by extraordinary psychological processes – processes that are outside of or defy the logic of normal human functioning and that cannot be easily understood.
Dehumanization is central to every genocide.
We know from the Holocaust, Cambodian Genocide, Rwandan genocide and many other cases that victim groups were labelled as vermin, cockroaches, rats or snakes.
The decision to exterminate a group of people is the extreme end of a continuum that lies beyond proclamations that they cannot live, worship, or love as they see fit and beyond decisions to ghettoize them or force them out of your country.
However, while it is certainly beyond our imagination what it means to experience, witness, or perpetrate genocide, the psychological processes that lead up to that point and enable people to engage in “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group” (as genocide is defined in Article II 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide) are not.
Genocide is not a qualitatively distinct category of human behaviour – it follows ordinary principles of human cognition, affect, and behaviour that certain societal and political conditions (such as political upheaval, prior genocide, autocratic rule, and low trade openness) allow to escalate into more and more severe violence.
However, dehumanization does not only occur during genocide, or what we officially recognize as genocide. This blatant dehumanization predicts several violent outcomes such as support for torture and bombing of civilians, drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or detention and solitary confinement of undocumented immigrants.
Exclusionary ideologies are one of the main predictors of genocide
Deep inequalities that are a source of oppression and violence. People become desensitized to violence they are exposed to; and participating in violence makes us more likely to engage in future violence
We should therefore never give in to the illusion and optimistic bias—which also helps explain some behaviours of victim groups in times of genocide that reduce their survival, as well as the likelihood of resistance—that we are immune to the risk of genocide.
Genocide can take rightful claim as the most pressing human rights problem of the twenty-first century.
We can make another choice; We can find constructive, rather than destructive, ways to live with our diverse social identities.
For decades, Israel, aided and abetted by the American empire, has sought to politically erase Palestine from the map. Over the past few days, Palestinians have proved, once again, that they won’t easily give up their indigenous claim to and sovereignty over the land stolen from them.
From the deep, non-utilitarian connection between a people and their ancestral land – a connection that renders meaningless all other political impositions.
This is exactly what the Israeli state has long been seeking to erase.
Palestinians have, for decades, tried to put under a global spotlight the violence Israel has been inflicting on them on a daily basis.
Even if they are wiped off the have of the earth they have recorded all the killings, the torture and the abuse, so people from across the world will continue to see their struggles reflected in the Palestinian struggle, ensuring that Palestine as a political story, a political vision, and as a revelation of the current political conditions and systems of power, will never be erased from the hearts and minds of people the world over.
What are we in the free world doing about it.
As Israel intensified its efforts to erase Palestine and Palestinian people from Arab and global consciousness, we have international Verbal diarrhoea voiced support, repeatedly and loudly, for Israel abiding and abetting Israel’s colonial oppression and basically encouraged it to intensify its efforts to expel Palestinians from their remaining lands and erase Palestine from history and global politics.
No state or actor in this current system can gain enough authority and power to ensure its safety and dictate its will on the global community by merely speaking of higher ideals.
In fact, higher ideals are proclaimed in this wretched world order only to conceal the brutal violence required to gain and maintain any authority whatsoever.
they are going to be made worse by the ongoing actions of the Israeli state, which is determined, regardless of how Palestinians resist, to erase Palestine and officially create what they already achieved in practice: exclusive Israeli-Jewish sovereignty over the entire land of Palestine.
The reality is that Palestinians have been dehumanised to such an extent, that even when they hold up their murdered children in front of cameras and display them to the world, there are those who will still say they are responsible for their own children’s deaths. But make no mistake, what we are seeing in Gaza is an unfolding genocide and Palestinians are showing the world what it looks like in real time.
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