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The Age of Genocide?
The twentieth century is considered as an epoch of moral atrocity as the sheer enormity of mass violence and genocidal acts targeting defenceless men, women and children have developed into central themes that define this period of history. The following essay will highlight the brutality of the twentieth century and investigate the inevitable connection between modernity and society’s capability of committing genocidal acts. The Holocaust serves as a historical benchmark for modern genocides as it expresses the negative consequences ultimately associated with modernity and the development of the modern nation-state. The essay will also focus on the catalytic qualities associated with World War one and investigate
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This is clearly evident towards the victims of the Holocaust, whereby the ultra-nationalist mentality of the Nazi Party established a culture of immense violence against the targeted population. A major characteristic of modernisation was ethnic targeting and an underlying racial dimension which motivated perpetrators to commit wholesale massacres. A number of violent policies stemming from the notion of ethnic cleansing became conducive to repression, murder and ultimately genocide. The scope of twentieth century violence can be explained by modernity’s defining features such as the combined force of new technologies of warfare and administrative techniques that “categorised people along strict lines of nation and race”. Genocides stem from long-term obsession on the part of the perpetrators with the emphasis on religious or cultural differences of the victim group. Nationalism provided society with an opportunity to systematically categorise society based on ethnicity and race. This was certainly a modern phenomenon and was conducive in spreading violence and ultimately genocide. A defining feature of the twentieth century, and more specifically the Holocaust is the perpetrators ability to totally disregard the identity of its victims. Fear and “ubiquity of perpetrators and victims” are considered at the core of modern genocide that “encompasses society in a vicious cycle of devastation and murder”. The premeditated plan of the Nazi Regime is outlined in its ability to merely transform society’s perception of the victims into repulsive figures that threaten the prosperity of the nation. This became an effective technique that rendered mass support among the citizens of Nazi Germany. Hitler’s vision of the Final Solution was to create a Judenfrei Europe as Judaism was considered “a mortal, universal
The intentional murder of an enormous group of people is near unthinkable in today’s society. In the first half of the twentieth century, however, numerous authoritarian regimes committed genocide to undesirables or others considered to be a threat. Two distinct and memorably horrific genocides were the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany and the Holodomor by the Soviet Union. In the Holocaust, The Nazis attempted to eradicate all European Jews after Adolf Hitler blamed them for Germany’s hardship in recent years. During the Holodomor, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union attempted to destroy any sense of Ukrainian nationalism by intentionally starving and murdering Ukrainian people. The two atrocities can be thoroughly compared and contrasted through the eight stages of genocide. The Holocaust and Holodomor shared many minor and distinct similarities under each stage of genocide, but were mainly similar to the methods of organization, preparation, and extermination, and mainly differed
Throughout the Holocaust, the Jews were continuously dehumanized by the Nazis. However, these actions may not have only impacted the Jews, but they may have had the unintended effect of dehumanizing the Nazis as well. What does this say about humanity? Elie Wiesel and Art Spiegelman both acknowledge this commentary in their books, Night and Maus. The authors demonstrate that true dehumanization reveals that the nature of humanity is not quite as structured as one might think.
For any organized genocide to take place, there must exist an organized attempt at mass dehumanization. This has been proven repeatedly, in murders, in massacres, and through actions. Through the actions of the Rwandan Army, which committed hundreds of thousands of murders in a matter of months, killing over two thirds of the Tutsi people. Through the disparaging, imperialistic beliefs held for hundreds of years under the mantra of ¨The White Man's Burden¨. Through the Nazi soldiers who, although ultimately failing in their state-sponsored pogrom against the Jewish people, are responsible for the extermination of over six million men, women, and children. Dehumanization, agreed upon by historians and sociologists alike as a vital component of war and genocide, consists of destroying a person's perception of two features: Identity and Community. This process, so mercilessly and stringently carried out by the SS, and so tragically experienced by the Jewish people left such an impact on Elie Wiesel that he could not bear to recount his struggle without distancing himself from his memories through a transformation into Eliezer.
To this day it remains incomprehensible to justify a sensible account for the uprising of the Nazi Movement. It goes without saying that the unexpectedness of a mass genocide carried out for that long must have advanced through brilliant tactics implemented by a strategic leader, with a promising policy. Adolf Hitler, a soldier in the First World War himself represents the intolerant dictator of the Nazi movement, and gains his triumph by arousing Germany from its devastated state following the negative ramifications of the war. Germany, “foolishly gambled away” by communists and Jews according to Hitler in his chronicle Mein Kampf, praises the Nazi Party due to its pact to provide order, racial purity, education, economic stability, and further benefits for the state (Hitler, 2.6). Albert Speer, who worked closely under Hitler reveals in his memoir Inside the Third Reich that the Führer “was tempestuously hailed by his numerous followers,” highlighting the appreciation from the German population in response to his project of rejuvenating their state (Speer, 15). The effectiveness of Hitler’s propaganda clearly served its purpose in distracting the public from suspecting the genuine intentions behind his plan, supported by Albert Camus’ insight in The Plague that the “townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences”(Camus, 37). In this sense “humanists” represent those who perceive all people with virtue and pureness, but the anti-humanist expression in the metaphor shows the blind-sidedness of such German citizens in identifying cruel things in the world, or Hitler. When the corruption within Nazism does receive notice, Hitler at that point given h...
The Nazi slaughter of European Jews during World War II, commonly referred to as the Holocaust, occupies a special place in our history. The genocide of innocent people by one of the world's most advanced nations is opposite of what we think about the human race, the human reason, and progress. It raises doubts about our ability to live together on the same planet with people of other cultures and persuasions.
The history of the Jewish people is one fraught with discrimination and persecution. No atrocity the Nazis did to the Jews in the Holocaust was original. In England in 1189, a bloody massacre of the Jews occurred for seemingly no reason. Later, the Fourth Lateran Council under Pope Innocent III required Jews to wear a badge so that all would know their race, and then had them put into walled, locked ghettos, where the Jewish community primarily remained until the middle of the eighteenth century. When the Black Death ravaged Europe in the medieval ages, many Europeans blamed the Jews (Taft 7). Yet, the one thing that could be more appalling than such brutal persecution could only be others’ failure and flat-out refusal to intervene. Such is the case with the non-Axis coutries of World War II; these nations failed miserably in their responsibility to grant basic human rights – even the right of life – to Jewish immigrants prior to World War II.
The crime of genocide is one of the most devastating human tragedies throughout the history. And the word genocide refers to an organised destruction to a specific group of people who belongs to the same culture, ethnic, racial, religious, or national group often in a war situation. Similar to mass killing, where anyone who is related to the particular group regardless their age, gender and ethnic background becomes the killing targets, genocide involves in more depth towards destroying people’s identity and it usually consists a fine thorough plan prearranged in order to demolish the unwanted group due to political reasons mostly. While the term genocide had only been created recently in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, from the ancient Greek word “genos” meaning race and the Latin word “cide” meaning killing , there are many examples of genocide like events that occurred before the twentieth century. And this new term brings up the question as whether genocide is a contemporary description defined through current perspectives towards the crime act or is it just a part of the inevitable human evolutionary progress caused by modernity.
In AD Moses’ Modernity and the Holocaust, he analyzes the book Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation written by the historian Omar Bartov. In addition, he also briefly explains Zygmunt Bauman’s book Modernity and the Holocaust. Bauman was a major influence on Bartov’s understanding of the Holocaust, so Moses does a good job of bringing him into the analyzation process. Finally, Moses discusses an opposing position through the book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust written by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. This paper will discuss the themes and reasons behind the Holocaust brought up by Bartov, Bauman, and Goldhagen as well as other themes and reason from sources outside of this
When approaching the topic of the Holocaust, historians often become concerned with uncovering the motivations of the perpetrators. Two particular historians, Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen, hold views that are fundamentally opposite. Goldhagen directly challenges Browning’s postulation that the murderers of the Jews were not all fanatical and murderous Nazi’s, by arguing that Germany had a very strong cultural history of anti-Semitism that ultimately moved many German people to murder Jews. The two historians appear to disagree in two major significant areas of the historical interpretation of the Holocaust – the first being their assessments of the role of anti-Semitism in German history and the second being their assessments of the motivations of the German men who ultimately carried out the murders during the Holocaust.
The twentieth century was a time of change. With two world wars occurring within roughly three decades, it was no surprise that society became forever changed. These two world wars, however, resulted in perhaps one of the most significant and catastrophic events in history - the Holocaust. The Holocaust saw about six million Jews killed by command of German dictator Adolf Hitler. Despite resulting from World War II, however, Hitler’s massive genocide of European Jews was planned before the Second World War, and therefore was intentionalism, because of the blame from post-World War I Germany, the twentieth century movement of eugenics as a “racial hygiene”, and the actions to exterminate Jews before the outbreak of World War II.
Personally, when I first heard the term genocide, the first picture that came up to my mind was the picture of the German dictator Hitler. Hitler hated Jews and saw them as the reason behind every disaster in the world. In his biography on Hitler, Schramm wrote that there is a theory explaining the reasons behind Hitler’s hatred towards Jews, he said t...
Created this issue that, frankly caused historians from the 1960s till the 1990s to empathize and focus primarily on the persecution of the Jews under the Nazi regime. Therefore, as a result of this historians, like Kershaw (1991) and Niemeyer (1978) fell into constructing a very narrow and apocalyptic (or “relativist”) analyse
Clearly, the holocaust was a time of great destruction and sadness. The treatment of others during this time is still something we often discuss today. The focus of my paper is to talk to you about some of the reasons we often treat each other so horribly.
Worried that with the absence of a tellable Holocaust story society could become malicious deniers or exceedingly ignorant, Jewish survivors maintain that to fail to recall the Holocaust undoubtedly escapes justice as well as culpability on the part of the German perpetrators. As it is necessary to face the scope of their own collective moral failure, Jewish survivors are adamant that German perpetrators have a duty to remember so as to see the Holocaust as a lesson of never again rather than as an incident that they can get away with. Within this essay, there will be a strong focus toward thoroughly analyzing whether or not the Holocaust should be consigned to history or if there is a need to preserve the truth. As well, by exploring the perspectives of both German perpetrators as well as Jewish survivors, this paper endeavors
The atrocities of the Belgian Congo and the Holocaust are two of the main events in history that have been responsible for the mass murdering of millions of people. Although these events significantly changed the course of humanity, and the story behind each one is very different, there are significant factors that make them alike as well as different. Many would agree that comparing two atrocities that affected the lives of so many people and gave a 180-degree turn to each of their countries would be something very difficult to achieve. However, by comparing the behavior of both the perpetrators and the victims of both cases we might be able to further understand the lack of morality and the inspiration that led to these awful events. The perpetrators in both atrocities tended to have a similar pattern of behavior when it came to the way they saw their victims. But, they also acted in ways where you can draw the conclusion that one set of events was not inspired by the other. These two sets of atrocities were reported to have a very similar number of victims. However, the Holocaust is one of the most reminded events in history as a period of shame, tragedy and sadness, while many still ignore the atrocities in the Belgian Congo.