Genocide from the Jews in the Holocaust to the Mayans in Guatemala

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Throughout world history, many manifestations occurred which led to horrific demeanors. In 1981, Todd Strasser wrote a fictionalized novel known as The Wave, based on a real life event about an experiment. This experiment, conducted in 1969 by Ron Jones in Palo Alto, California, proves how effortlessly fascism can corrupt people. This experiment begins with a student’s question about the Holocaust which Jones cannot answer. The Holocaust was a horrific event that occurred from 1933 to 1945. This atrocity was initiated by Adolf Hitler, who tortured and murdered over eleven million Jewish people in extermination camps.
Today, the Holocaust is considered “genocide,” a word that was first coined in 1944 by a lawyer by the name of Raphael Lemkin. Genocide is “the deliberate killing of people who belong to a particular racial, political, or cultural group” (“Genocide”). Genocide is brought out through the ideas of fascism and power hunger and is caused by pure hatred toward a specific group. After the millions of lives lost in the Holocaust, the world claimed that genocide would “never again” occur. However, the nations around the world did not keep those alleged “promises.” Within the past sixty five years there has been over a dozen known genocides. Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Africa are just a few examples of the atrocities that genocide brings; countless amounts of deaths and innocent lives lost and forgotten are horrific effects that become pointless to the overall picture of us being human. No one should have the authority to kills others because they believe they over power them and that is precisely what the top Schutzstaffel Soldiers did during the holocaust.
Individuals, in direct correlation with genocide,...

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Schirmer, Jennifer. “Efrain Rios Montt.” Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. Biography in Context. 2005. Web. 20 Feb. 2014.
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Worse Than War. Narr. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Prod. Jay Sanderson, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, and Stephen Segaller. WNET.org and JTN Productions. PBS. Apr. 2010.Film.

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