Genocide at Its Finest

Ethnic cleansing and genocide, two very powerful words. They have existed and do exist to this day. They happen in much smaller amounts, not as massive as the ones in Hatred and watched in Hotel Rwanda’s. Over time, there have been many different times that genocide has taken place. Many people remember genocide from the Holocaust, but there are many other times that it has occurred.

Why? Why is there genocide? What could possibly be going on in their heads to make them do such things? I believe that the main reason that have done such hateful acts is because, to put it simply, they believe that they are better than everyone else. In the text, they are trying to remove Armenians in Turkey and move them to Seria. They only wanted to have one group so that felt that their removal was necessary. Those that were not Muslim and remained would be punished, but if they converted to Islam, they would not be. They were going for assimilation and attempting to make everyone the same. They didn’t believe that what they were doing was wrong. They believed that what they were doing was simply punishment, and nothing more.

Chapter 2 dealt with the removal of Jews. According to the text, Germans ideology was, “Jewish men gravitated spreading syphilis and other sexually communicated diseases wherever they went. Jewish women were no better. (59) They saw the Jews as gross human beings whom carried diseases. There would do a number of things to attempt to destroy them. Even having sex with their women to kill off their gene pools. The extermination of the Jews was done in many different ways. They first began with attempting to just remove them without killing them. Many of the Jews were not able to leave because they simply had nowhere else to go. Then they would move them into what was known as the “ghetto” and would come and kill them in these towns. When the towns got too crowded, they started moving them into camps. They would put them into gas chambers, but they (the Jews) believed that they were showers, and it killed them.

In Hotel Rwanda genocide, According to United Human Rights Council, “the weeks after April 6, 1994, 800,000 men, women, and children perished in the Rwandan genocide, perhaps as many as three quarters of the Tutsi population”. This is the number of tootsies that lost their lives during the genocide. In the movie we got to see a number of people being killed without any type of mercy being shown.

I can conclude that these groups truly believe that what they are doing is right. They do not see their actions as genocide, but they see it as bettering the world. Without these people, the world would be a better place. They also do this because they are very power hungry. Getting this group of people out of the world would raise that power. People are very power hungry and do not think much of their actions no matter who it hurts.

 

http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/genocide/genocide_in_rwanda.htm

http://history1900s.about.com/od/holocaust/tp/holocaust.htm