Mass Murder and Nationalism

            When people think of genocide today, usually the holocaust is what pops to mind before anything else, and it may be the only thing that pops into their mind at all. What people forget is the acts against the Greeks, Armenians, Chechens-Ingush and the Crimean Tatars. These subjects aren't typically taught in schools, and I had actually never heard about anything that had happened outside of the Holocaust until I had read "The Fires of Hatred" by Naimark.
           Typically the subject of Genocide and ethnic cleansing is attached to the Holocaust and World War II. We also aren't usually taught what caused the mass murder of millions of people. Usually the explanation is a simple "Hitler was nuts and blamed the Jewish people for causing the loss of World War I." Really, the answer is simply hate. We see movies like Hotel Rwanda and everyone looks like each other. What possesses them to hate the other person so much when they're both exactly the same on the inside and outside? Why does hate go so far as to cause people to murder massive amounts of people that are just like them?
          As can be seen from Chapters 1-3 of the Naimark book, nationalism can be a dangerous thing. Nationalism is what worked against the Armenians, the Jewish, and the Chechens. We aren't taught about what nationalism really is in high school. Nationalism is an ideology that the people of a nation attach to and identify with, usually to further a cause. It gives the people a single target of people to hate and blame for their country's misfortunes and shortcomings  Nationalism

can fuel an entire movement to change the world and bring great injustices upon people that have no reason to be treated the way they are. The Armenians were slaughtered in several massacres throughout the beginning of the 1900's. The Jewish people were completely decimated from the Holocaust, fueled by the Nazi nationalism. The Chechen and Ingush were suffering because Hitler had rubbed off on Stalin, as much as they would probably deny it. Stalin declared them enemies of the state, and had rid his lands of them because of his nationalist agenda.
        In school, we aren't usually taught about what nationalism is, or what it does to people. When people get behind one idea, things can become dangerous for the rest of the world. People stop becoming free thinkers and become part of a massive swarm, which could potentially be considered a type of hive-mind, and do things that they would not normally do, which could be seen from Hotel Rwanda when people are turning on their neighbors and murdering people in the streets. What happened in the movie, happened to the Jewish people, the Armenians, and others throughout history. People got behind one idea, and followed it like a train on a rail. Why aren't we taught in schools how dangerous this line of thinking is, and how to think critically about what nationalism really is and how to work as a society to avoid something like this every happening again, and how to make a difference? That is exactly what we need when the world seems so fragile as it is with acts of civil war going on in Africa every day and maybe moving in to the rest of the world.


http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/history/nationalism-history.html
http://carolynyeager.net/newsletter/nationalism-and-holocaust-reply-johnson