The Unacknowledged Genocide
Dana Beverly
For this class we read Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in
Twentieth-Century Europe by Norman Naimark. In this book Naimark examines the
brutal, bloody and horrific ethnic cleansing of the twentieth century. Naimark
makes a point to the reader that ethnic cleansing and genocide are different. He says genocide
is the intentional killing off of part or all of an ethnic, religious or
national group. The intention of ethnic cleansing is to remove a group of people and
often all traces of them from a concrete territory. Ethnic cleansing usually relates
to deportations and forcible removal of a group of people, usually carried out
in a brutal manner. In chapter one of the book we learn about the removal of Armenians’
from Turkey to Syria. The Turks were very brutal in the treatment of
Armenians and simply wanted one ethnic group. In chapter two Naimark discussed
the Nazi Germany attack on the Jews in the mid-1900s. Jews were seen as vermin
to the Nazis, so they had to be exterminated because many Germans wanted to
keep the race pure. Originally one could consider the Germans to be doing some
ethnic cleansing because they began with deportation of the Jews to Palestine.
Once they saw that that wasn't working, they moved on to putting Jews in
ghettos. Once the ghettos started getting over crowded, Nazis decided to
move
the Jews to concentration camps equipped with gas chambers and began gassing
and killing men, women and children. The genocide of the Jews was very terrible
and abysmal, but when it comes to someone like Hitler (leader of the Nazis),
the power he had and his ideas of nationalism almost made him unstoppable. Chapter
three was about Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union and his deportation
of other ethnic groups that did not wish to follow him. Stalin used Nationalism
in his favor to maintain power. I hadn’t heard much of ethnic cleansing prior
to reading this book, but the idea of genocide brought me back to last semester
in my Environmental History class where we spent quite a lot of time discussing
why there is a big debate on whether European Americans colonists committed
genocide on Native American peoples. If you ask many white people in America
today, and even people of color whether or not Americans have committed
genocide of any sort, the answer will often come out as no. What I learned in
my Environmental History class was that many people don’t acknowledge the mass
killing of Native Americans that occurred in our very own country. What
European settlers did to Native Americans is in fact genocide, even though it
did take longer than Hitler or Stalin, it was genocide none the less. In 1492
Christopher Columbus sailed to America, and Native groups have not been the
same since, even after he left. Population in America went from from an
estimated 12 million in 1500 to scarcely 237,000 in 1900. This is a clear
representation of a vast genocide. The ways that Natives were being
exterminated include, but were not limited to; the spread of disease (which
Natives were not immune to, such as smallpox), mass killings (Indian Massacres),
marches (The Trail of Tears), and many government policies. I relate the
genocide of Native Americans to the other ethnic cleansing and genocides found
in Fires of Hatred because the same type of prejudice occurred just in
different ways. It is very important to know our own history as well as the
history of others, even those that often go unacknowledged.
http://www.danielnpaul.com/scan_image/TrailOfTears.jpg (PICTURE)
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