“They
were a racial tuberculosis that had to be isolated and removed” (Naimark, 59). This
particular quote truly caught my attention and lays out the ideology of Naimark’s
Fires of Hatred. Before the twentieth
century, genocide/ethnic cleansing took a toll on the world and completely
corrupted minds to eliminate and deport individuals who they believed no longer
needed to be in existence. Through chapter 1-3 Naimark establishes how ethnic
cleansing came to existence and how it impacted this cycle for years to come.
In
the first three chapters of Fires of
Hatred, Naimark discusses the ethnic cleansing of Armenians, Greeks, Jews,
Chechens-Ingush, and Crimean Tatars. What all have in common is this ideology
of dehumanization. This is a topic we went over in class and how ethnic
cleansing was a form of taking the label of “human” away from those like Jews
and acknowledging them as vermin and diseases. Just as in the movie Hotel
Rwanda, the Tutsis were referred to as “cockroaches.” How the Tutsis were
identified, is clear representation of this idea of dehumanization. Reading and
seeing how these individuals were identified was just astonishing on how we are
a world where we pick and choose who belongs.
In
Fires of Hatred, Naimark mentions, “…the
Soviet state sought to mobilize its citizens and, at the same time, to control
them” (Naimark, 85). From chapters 1-3 that was also a centralizing theme which
was maintaining these groups of individuals and ultimately do what they saw as
a punishment for their ways of being. Throughout our class readings in
Gallagher’s Rethinking the Color Line, we addressed a lot on how race is socially constructed and how we
define what race is from history, the media, etc. This piggy backs Fires of
Hatred because the many countries that participated in this ethnic
cleansing defined how the Armenians, Jews, etc. would be mobilizing these
individuals and how they would take control.
Despite the need to wipe out these groups of people, deportation played
a huge role during these ethnic cleansings as they do today. Chapters 1-3 in Fires
of Hatred establishes how they deported these groups to other countries to
further quicken the pace of taking them away from the countries they were
originally at. The things that have happened through genocide/ethnic cleansing
have impacted our world today in a sense that here in the United States, there
is initiative to send people like Mexicans back to the countries they are
originally from. In comparison to Naimark’s book, they are pretty much
uprooting these individuals, their cultures, ways of living, etc. out of the
United States and restoring it to the way it should be.
Through Naimark’s book and what we acknowledge in our classroom opens
my mind to a whole new world I wasn't much aware of. We are aware of what went
on in the past and have the resources that acknowledge it all, but we still
repeat it somewhere around the world. Whether or not we go about differently,
these genocides/ethnic cleansings have affected the ways of how the world works
today. We establish this ideology of who should stay and who should go and do
what we can to make it happen, close to a mindset of “any means necessary.” We
continue to build upon situations of the past and just watch what goes by just
as the world witnessed these wipe-outs.
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