The True Meaning Of Humanity
The destruction of an entire race, though it seems impossible it has happened before, such an act is known as Genocide. Throughout our civilization’s history we have fought wars and killed to protect our country, but some have killed in the name of something else, something much less commendable. The act of genocide is a recurring blemish in our history’s timeline that has claimed the lives of millions. This atrocity has been committed for many different reasons including greed, power lust, control of resources and an inability to tolerate difference. The definition of genocide is a mass murder of a certain type of people. Therefore, it is important for our future generations to study genocide around the world because of the inhumane actions towards man and why no one had the courage to speak up and put an end to these horrible tragedies.
Our generation has the power to make the changes that we want see. Genocide is an atrocity that has gotten worse in the twentieth century. In order for us to figure out ways to stop such crimes, we must study them to comprehend the entire problem so we can eventually figure out the best way to solve it. Ignoring what is going on and how it has progressed has obviously not, and will not, solve the problem. Although it is easy for people to push the responsibility of preventing future genocide on anyone but themselves, the fact of the matter remains that someone, somewhere, needs to take on this massive task of spearheading the effort. (Grant)
No one country or political party should be expected to be the moral compass of the world. Rather, efforts must be made to force the entire world to pay attention to this crisis. That is why the Genocide Convention was such a tremendous step in the effort. ("Prevent Genocide International") The Convention was not enough, however, and today's students need to be educated about the tragedies that, for various reasons, have been allowed to happen in the past. If no one pays attention to the past instances of genocide, then similar tragedies can and will happen again. There will always be hate in the world, and there will always be people who live their lives to oppress and ruin the lives of others. As has been demonstrated by recent genocides like that in Rwanda, genocide is still very much possible. The monsters that would inflict such suffering on other people have not gone extinct. The only way to make any difference in this issue is to be constantly vigilant, and make sure that history is not allowed to repeat itself like the Holocaust, Cambodia and Armenian genocide, and the Spanish Inquistion.
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. "Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." (Bernhaut, 5) The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior or Aryan race" (Bernhaut, 9) and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community. In 1933, the Jewish population of Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during World War II. By 1945, the Germans and their collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the "Final Solution," the Nazi policy to murder the Jews of Europe. (Rosenberg)
The Khmer Rouge period saw the deaths of approximately two million Cambodians through the combined result of political executions, starvation, and forced labor. Due to the large numbers, the deaths during the rule of the Khmer Rouge are often considered genocide, and commonly known as the Cambodian Holocaust or Cambodian Genocide. Modern research has located thousands of mass graves from the Khmer Rouge era all over Cambodia, containing an estimated 1.39 million bodies. Various studies have estimated the