Genocides are events where one group tried to mass-murder or even entirely obliterate another group. The terms is actually a relatively new one, having been coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish Pole, in 1944 in his work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, through which he sought to draw greater attention to the Holocaust of Europe’s Jews being perpetrated at that time by the Nazis. The term is a portmanteau of an ancient Greek word and a Latin word. Genos in Greek means race, people or group, while caedo means the act of killing in Latin. The word is also incorporated at the end of terms like homicide and deicide. Thus, genocide means to kill a race or group of people. Genocide is usually engaged in when one group develops a hatred for another group based on their religion, culture or owing to longstanding political tensions between two groups. The most well-known genocides in history have occurred in modern times, notably the Jewish Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide and the Cambodian genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge. However, genocide has been practiced in one form or another since ancient times. Typically, it leads to mass migration as people try to flee from their persecutors or in the aftermath of the genocide as a group’s connections to where the genocide was committed are broken and they feel the desire to leave.[1]
Genocides chronology of events
It is quite possible that genocides of some kind or another occurred four or five millennia ago, but our earliest substantial evidence for genocide comes from ancient Greece and Rome. For instance, in his account of the Peloponnesian War (431 BCE – 404 BCE) the Athenian historian Thucydides relates several events which could be construed as genocidal, notably following the siege of Melos in 416 BCE when the Athenians mass murdered all of the male Melians and enslaved the women and children there.[2] Similarly, the Romans developed a rabid antipathy towards the Carthaginians with whom they had vied for mastery of the Western Mediterranean throughout the third century BCE. Although the Romans had emerged victorious from that rivalry, they launched a needless war against Carthage in 149 BCE and three years later capture the city of Carthage in what is now Tunisia. They killed the vast majority of its citizens, enslaved the remaining 50,000, levelled the city and even sowed salt into the earth to signify their complete destruction of Carthage. This was ancient genocide.[3]
There are no shortage of examples of genocides and quasi-genocidal behavior in medieval and early modern times. For instance, the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors were known to destroy entire cities and annihilate the citizens of them during their vast conquests across Asia, though this was undertaken more as a form of psychological warfare to warn other cities that they should surrender to the Mongols without a fight, rather than an ideological form of genocide.[4]
Other types of mass-murder of one group by another for political, social or cultural reasons during these eras might best be defined as quasi-genocide. For example, in Ireland, during the conquest of the island in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at the time of the Tudor conquest of the island, English observers like the poet Edmund Spenser in his A View of the Present State of Ireland were willing to advocate the mass-murder of the Irish owing to their supposed barbarism, Roman Catholicism and resistance to English rule. They often did so through scorched earth policies, whereby crops were burned and livestock rounded up in order induce famine conditions and starve the Irish populace. However, the English did make a distinction between the ruling political classes within Gaelic society, who they wanted to annihilate, and the common people, who they wanted to survive so that they could effectively become a servile under-class.[5]
This form of genocide, whereby some people were killed within a group and others left alive as they were useful to the perpetrators of the genocide, began to give way to the most brutal form of genocide of all in the modern era. Fueled by nationalism, xenophobia and growing views on the alleged hierarchy of races and civilizations, some groups began to determine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that it was either acceptable or desirable to wipe out other groups entirely. Some of this was for economic reasons, notably in California where the influx of settlers from the late 1840s following the 1848 gold rush there saw the newcomers gradually kill over 80% of the natives in the region.
Others were much more ideologically motivated, the most extreme being the Armenian genocide[6] in Turkey and the Caucasus, perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War and leading to the deaths of upwards of 1.5 million Armenians, and the Jewish Holocaust[7] of at least six million European Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War. Others began for ideological motives, but later became cycles of mindless violence, such as occurred in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge[8] in the second half of the 1970s. Estimates of the number of people who died during the twentieth century from genocidal activity range from 60 to 150 million people.[9]
Extent of migration owing to genocides
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For as long as there have been genocides there has been mass migration that accompanied them. Records for this in the pre-modern world are few and far between, but we can imagine that those few Carthaginians who were able to escape the wrath of the Romans in 146 BCE fled from Carthage to escape being killed or enslaved. When it comes to the modern era the date is clearer. Genocides lead to mass migration, either before they occur, during them or afterwards. Such was the case with the Holocaust. Europe’s Jews were already facing very serious persecution in Germany and Austria before the outbreak of the Second World War and hundreds of thousands had left for countries like Britain, the United States and Australia by the autumn of 1939.[10] Those who could, fled during the war, while after the war many of those who had survived left Europe for the nascent state of Israel or other regions such as North America. Other examples of mass migration owing to genocide include the flight of nearly two million people from Rwanda during and after the genocide there in 1994, while in recent years 960,000 Rohingya have fled from the genocidal polices of the Myanmar government and military into neighboring Bangladesh.[11]
Demographic impact of genocides
The demographic impact of mass migrations as a result of genocides has been very considerable. For instance, while a Jewish state in the Levant was in development for decades from the late nineteenth century onwards, the Holocaust and the migration to the region in the aftermath of the Second World War was a major impetus towards the emergence of the state of Israel in 1948, which has continued to draw Jewish migrants ever since.[12] The Armenian genocide also led to mass movement of Armenians further north into the Caucasus, to Russia and to the United States in the late 1910s and 1920s. As a result of the Isaaq genocide in Somaliland in the late 1980s, one of modern history’s largely forgotten genocides, at least 300,000 fled to neighboring Ethiopia.[13]
Elsewhere the demographic impact has been internal to a county. For instance, while the Cambodian genocide led to hundreds of thousands of people fleeing to Vietnam and Thailand, an even more substantial impact from a demographic perspective of the Khmer Rouge tyranny was the movement of over a million Cambodians from the cities to the countryside as Pol Pot and his deranged adherents tried to implement a form of agrarian Leninism. Whatever the nature of it, though, genocides and attempted genocides have led to the mass movement of tens of millions of people in the modern era.[14]
Explore more about Genocides
- Jewish Holocaust Memorials and Jewish Residents of Germany 1939-1945 record collection on MyHeritage
- Documenting Families or Communities Lost in the Holocaust at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- A Family Torn Apart in the Wake of the Holocaust Reunites Through MyHeritage at the MyHeritage blog
- Holocaust Survivor, 92, Finally Learns Brother’s Fate Thanks to MyHeritage at the MyHeritage blog
- I Found Descendants of the Man Who Saved My Father from the Nazis at the MyHeritage blog
References
- ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/holocaust/what-is-genocide
- ↑ https://www.jstor.org/stable/4436483
- ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/485/genocide-in-the-ancient-world/
- ↑ https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.CHAP3.HTM
- ↑ David Edwards, ‘Tudor Ireland: Anglicisation, mass killing and security’, in Cathie Carmichael and Richard C. Maguire (eds.), The Routledge History of Genocide (Abingdon, 2015), pp. 23–37.
- ↑ https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/what-was-the-holocaust/what-was-genocide/the-armenian-genocide/
- ↑ https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introduction-to-the-holocaust
- ↑ https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/what-was-the-holocaust/what-was-genocide/the-cambodian-genocide/
- ↑ https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2004-09-01/final-solutions-mass-killing-and-genocide-20th-century
- ↑ https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/german-jewish-refugees-1933-1939
- ↑ https://www.unrefugees.org/news/rohingya-refugee-crisis-explained/
- ↑ https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/creation-israel
- ↑ https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/valley-death-somalilands-forgotten-genocide
- ↑ https://kellogg.nd.edu/news/long-run-impact-forced-migration-evidence-killing-fields-cambodia