21st Century and Genocide

Genocide in the 20th and 21st Centuries Prompt: Sadly, genocide did not end with the Holocaust. In fact, a lot more people have died from genocide since World War II than were victims of it in the war itself. How and why has this happened? What have been the steps taken to prevent, stop, and punish in regards to genocide since 1945? Have these efforts been successful or not? Explain why. In these more recent genocides, compare and contrast them.

What big similarities and big differences have there been? Do we see anything similar in most of them? If so, what and why? Based on what we learned about genocide in your lifetime (since the 1990s), are we on track to finally eradicate these horrors or are we a long way off from that? Explain. Response: The Second World War claimed the lives of tens of millions of civilians including six million Jews and other "undesirables" in the attendant Nazi-led Holocaust.

Although it seemed at the time that the enormity of this event should be sufficient for humankind to take the steps that were needed to prevent its recurrence, genocide has remained a constant companion of the human race throughout the remainder of the 20th century and into the 21st century. For example, conservative estimates indicate that approximately two million Cambodians were slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge in 1975, another 800,000 Rwandans were killed in 1990 and another 100,000 people were killed in Bosnia beginning in 1991 (Past genocides and mass atrocities 2-3).

In addition, in 2003, 200,000 more civilians were murdered in Darfur in the Sudan (Past genocides and mass atrocities 3). Although the precise causes of these more recent genocidal events varied, they all shared a common theme of involving people who were regarded as being undesirable and dispensable by virtue of their race, ethnicity, religion or other marginalized status. The problem has been further exacerbated by the arbitrary geopolitical lines that were drawn after both world wars that thrust peoples with longstanding grievances against each other into closer geographic proximity.

For instance, Rubinstein emphasizes that," To the average person, 'genocide' is likely to mean the deliberate and intentional killing of all or most of a specified group of people simply because they are members of that group and for no other reason" (37). Although killing all members of another group because they differ somehow may appear baseless, humans fear what is different and other people are no exception. In this context, the Holocaust and more recent examples of genocide share this overarching but spurious and misguided rationale.

The more recent examples of genocide differ both quantitatively and qualitatively from the Holocaust, however, simply by virtue of being far more widely publicized. Notwithstanding this greater transparency, though, the international community has been largely sluggish, reluctant or disinterested in coming to the assistance of the victims of ethnic-based genocide in recent years suggesting that the human race has a long way to go before genocide can be added to the list of other problems that have historically plagued humankind that have been eradicated from the face of the earth.

In order to finally eradicate genocide from the list of other horrors confronting humankind, it must be regarded as "the most serious of all international crimes" and the definition expanded to include other types of genocide, including so-called "ethnic cleansing".