Genocide

Genocide in the Twentieth Century

Even though the word "Genocide" was not coined until 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, it had been occurring for centuries. This paper will touch on three of the most heinous cases of genocide from across the world; Armenians, Nanking, and Darfur. There have been many other atrocities in the past century that included genocide such as Stalin's famine of the Ukraine, the Nazi Holocaust, Mao Zedong's rule in China and Idi Amin's attack on Uganda, but to keep it short I will stick to the three cases previously noted. Genocide is the conscious and systematic extermination of a racial, political or cultural group. It is one of the most evil acts of humankind that could ever be thought of because it encompasses so much more than what is stated in any definition. Genocide's details include rape, torture, famine and slavery, but there is more to it than just that, only if a person is lucky will they receive death. Corrupt leaders utilized misleading propaganda and lies to guide people into acting against people that were once their neighbors and friends. They also instilled fear so deeply, that people would harm their own family memebers to escape torture and death.

The Armenian Holocaust, Great Calamity or Armenian Massacre is sometimes noted as the first true genocide. In 1914, the Armenian homeland was considered by the Turks to be one of the key issues holding them back from creating a great Turkish empire called Turan. Turan was to be an empire with unified religion and language. Since the world was focused on World War I at the time, there would be little or no attention paid to an ethnic cleansing that the leaders of Turkey, called the Young Turks, would be executing. The Turks would use the Armenians Christian religion and the fact that they were well educated against them in the propaganda that was spewed to the rest of the Turkish population. The Young Turks would say that because of their religion, the Armenians had a weakness to sympathize with the Christian Russians. They also appealed to the peasants, which was the majority population in Turkey, to say that the peasant way of life was superior to the educational teachings of the Armenians.

Once the Young Turks had filled the Turkish population's minds with the nonsense thoughts that the Armenians were separate and not a part of Turkey, they were able to move forward their plan of genocide. They used many different tactics to complete their goal. The first step was to take 300 well known Armenian leaders, have them publicly arrested and then killed via hanging or shot. They were also taken from their homes. Men were "arrested" and lead to the outskirts of town where they would be killed. Women, children and elderly had a much worse experience; they were lead out of their homes to be relocated to "safer" areas when the truth was that they were going on a death march never to return. These death marches often had no end destination, people were lead all over the country, and the point was to stop when all the Armenians had died or been killed. In the cases where groups of Armenians were able to join together in a caravan and leave on their own, they were often "protected" by Turkish guards. The guards would often let a group called the "Special Organization," a group of criminals supported by the government, attack and kill the Armenians at will. During these attacks, girls were raped and beaten and sometimes taken into a life long sentence of slavery by this group. It is estimated that over a million Armenians were massacred from 1915-1917.

The Raping of Nanking was the absolute worst action against humanity. The levels of humiliation and acts of evil are almost unspeakable. The Japanese Imperial Army was ruthless. In 1937, the Japanese Army marched into Nanking, still furious about the difficult battle previously fought at Shanghai, and they were looking for revenge. The soldiers in Nanking outnumbered the Japanese, but since the Japanese Army was well organized and was well stocked with ammunition, they were forced to withdraw into the city. Any soldiers that surrendered were taken outside of Nanking and utilized for torture practice and mercy resistance. If they were fortunate, they died quickly. People were doused in gasoline and burned alive or they would trap a group in a building and then set the building on fire. The soldiers would go through town stealing anything and killing anyone that got in their way.

When the Japanese turned on the females of Nanking, it was the most horrific hunt in the world's history. Women were raped and beaten as their families were made to watch. In some instances the families were forced to commit the raping. Japanese law outlawed rape; therefore everyone was killed so there would be no witnesses. If a woman was pregnant, that did not save her, they would rape her and then cut out the fetus, and both would be killed. The acts against women were so atrocious, which may be due to the Asian cultural view that existed at that time, that women were inferior. It was easy for the soldiers to act as though the women were mere animals. Death was not always enough for the Japanese soldiers; they would often mutilate the body by cutting off the breasts or stuffing various orifices. Women would be taken captive and used as sex slaves, often being tied down to something like a bed and brutalized over and over again. Once they were deemed undesirable, they were "disposed" of and a new victim would take her place.

For six weeks there was an intense focus on killing and any Chinese person was