I can get behind murder. I feel like this, to some extend, is a genuine part of human behaviour. Even the horrific aftermath of such. But genocide truly feels inhuman to me. So I can never fundamentally understand how in history, civilizations went from point A to point B to Point Genocide. Any thoughts on this?
I can get behind murder.
LMAO I was not ready for that. Anyway, genocide is usually the result of a group of people being blamed for another’s problems. Once the blaming starts, it’s easy to dehumanize them to the point where it makes sense to get rid of them.
Granted, I could’ve phrased that little better 😅.
No it’s perfect. Your profile picture and username only serves to make it better.
You create an outgroup, portray them as subhuman, whip people into a frenzy with propaganda, and you’re there.
People are also emotional, you tap into that. Anger and hate are easy emotions.
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Which is one of the most absurd things about that whole debacle, too…
I’m very leftist, and god damn if these American conservatives have made me hateful, too. They’ve made me feel that if your whole fucking existence is dedicating to taking away rights from others, marginalizing them, and subjecting them to Social Murder, then these conservatives are the very people who deserve to have their voting rights stripped and subjected to the very things they want others to suffer.
Frankly, if they’re going to bitch about it and endlessly play the victim anyway. Fuck it, let’s make em fucking victims like they want if they want to be the victim so god damned badly. Let’s pull the Boomer “I’ll give you something to cry about” with these assholes.
See, their conservative bullshit has made me so done with their shit that I’m willing to ostracize these fuckers from society entirely.
…huh?
The paradox of tolerance.
If people are tolerant of intolerance, tolerance dies. So, ironically, people who are otherwise highly tolerant people (especially when they have thought about this deeply) realise they must reject intolerance loudly and intensely, lest their way of life is destroyed.
Abuse of trans people (and others) by conservatives makes me want to kick conservatives out of fucking society the same way conservatives want to with everyone else.
I’d be fucking tap dancing on graves in happiness if more of these fuckers gave into “death’s of despair” and shot themselves instead of innocent people. I don’t give a damn anymore. Fuck all of 'em, I hope they all suffer worse than the people they’ve abused.
Yeah, you’re not going to be winning over any people to your side of the argument with this tactic.
That wasn’t designed to be persuasive.
I’m more with than against.
It’s a matter of degrees.
Technically the situation with trans people is already a genocide in the US - but such things do exist by degrees. You can’t call the two comparable in severity.
A genocide counts when victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly and involve :
- killing members of the group
- causing them serious bodily or mental harm
- imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group
- preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.
Right now that particular snowball is small but you already have families with trans kids fleeing states because Child protective services can target affirming parents as child abuse removing vulnerable children into the foster system. People unable to go out in public for more than a couple hours at a time because they can’t use bathrooms without hassle or because they fear assault and trans adults are getting stranded in pain between surgical procedures or facing hormonal imbalances as their HRT and health care is forcibly stopped.
Too often we treat words as automatically hyperbolic… But the reality is fuzzier. Genocides exist on a sliding scale. Gaza is a very hardcore textbook extermination the sort which dominates our understanding of the word genocide. The trans genocide is a much smaller largely beaurcratic one … People are dying due to it yes, but the actual cost is still well obscured.
Interestingly, trans persecution is closer to literal genocide (death based on genetic characteristics) than a lot of official genocides in recent history (which are often death based on culture or religion).
With Israel/Palestine of course, you get genetics, culture, tribalism AND religion all at the same time, and the extreme fringes in both groups desiring total genocide of the other group.
But any time you see populist politics, rest assured that the end game is a continual separation of “them” groups to blame for anything that prevents everyone from behaving like “us”. I still find the French Revolution to be all the warning I need in this area, but many people miss the myriad of lessons history provides us, and so we are doomed to repeat them.
When you put it like in-group out-group, it does feel like a very human thing. We seem to be quite naturally very cliquey.
A prerequisite is ceasing to see others as individuals but rather groups. Then the (possibly fictional) crimes of one become the crimes of all. Thusly it is justifiable to punish all.
The important lesson here is to treat others as individuals, not as representatives of a group.
Usually one of the first steps is dehumanization - make your targets “less than human” in the eyes of the population. Nazis famously did it by comparing Jews to rats. You’ll notice in a lot of recent Israeli press releases and media Palestinians are referred to as “inhuman animals” or some variation of that. By creating that disconnect between your targets and “normal, healthy” humans you reduce empathy and make harsher treatment seem acceptable.
Another step is to make your audience disgusted or angry. Studies show there’s a link between those two emotions and harsher judgments (although degree/method is still very much an area of research). To invoke disgust you may use words like “filthy, wretched, diseased, mindless” etc. Using the Nazi example again, they made cartoons that showed Jews as dirty, greasy and generally disgusting. To make people angry convince them your targets are “immoral, violent, bloodthirsty” and so on. Nazis leaned heavily into blaming Jews for society’s ills and calling them thieves. Both effects can be made greater if your audience is conditioned to be sensitive to anger/disgust, i.e. being raised to believe in strict definitions of purity and so on. For Nazis it was the idea that Aryans were racially superior. For Zionism it often involves teaching people they are “God’s chosen” with other races not having the same rights (like rights to dwell in territory claimed by Israel) because of religion.
So if you can make your victims seem less than human and enrage or disgust your audience you convince people to do horrible things. They won’t feel like they are doing it to valuable humans and often think it’s a form of justice or necessary cleansing. Using the above psychological “levers” can shift perceptions so large populations view some other group as different to relatable, valid people.
Kill a person, it’s a tragedy. Kill a million and it’s a statistic.
Human brains aren’t capable of actually imagining a million people.
1k 1m 1b, all are drastically greater than the number of fingers and toes available to reference. The factor between 1 and 1,000 is 1,000. Seems tangible. The factor between 1,000 and 1,000,000 is 1,000. Basically the same
You begin by classifying anyone you don’t know as “the others”… They’re not like you. They don’t share your values. Their ways are weird.
If you use that language with your citizens long enough, it slowly seeps in that those people aren’t really people at all. Eventually, killing them isn’t killing humans, it’s just getting rid of vermin; poisoning rats or bug-bombing your home.
You see politicians doing it every day. They’re not humans…they’re “illegals”, is probably the most modern example. But it’s insidious, and pervasive. Slowly and deliberately inuring a populous to greater and larger acts of inhumanity.
The short answer is that it doesn’t just happen. It’s a culmination of a process that ends with one group of people completely rejected the very humanity of another group. After that, who cares if they die.
You ever drown or wipe out an ant colony? Take down a wasps nest? Swat away the hoards of mosquitos annoying you?
That’s genocide but they aren’t what you would consider equals as a human. I’m aware some super vegan froo froos, do. But anyways. Your ability to genocide an entire village of beings you don’t consider equal is where most of these feelings come from.
It’s also why the playbook, heavily updated by Hitler in the past, and Israel today, say that’s an important step. Dehumanize your enemy. Then wiping them off the face of the earth is a casual comment much like calling an exterminator to genocide those pesky wasps under your front porch. And I’m not being snarky when I say Israeli playbook. They have published and public books on exactly how to do this, how to wage a propaganda war, etc. It is not a secret. The US, and other 5 eye countries also follows the same aided by their intelligence agencies because it’s so powerful on the majority of low intellect people. Remember half the people are below average intelligence… Many that are above average aren’t interested. So you always have a minority that can critically think for themselves. The rest want it spoonfed.
Edit: Also if you want a laugh, Eddie Izzard somewhat explains it in his Dressed To Kill tour.
Any pointers on where in the 2hr show you’re referencing? I’ve seen the “do you have a flag” and the “mass murder” parts
@FatTony I agree with you. It’s not part of human nature. When we look at the fossil records for the earliest humans they are fairly egalitarian.
Genocides are always the product of intense periods of political manipulation of the genocidaire group by its elites, and almost invariably designed for resource gain.
We have way more genocides in the modern era because the tools to get people on board with it are more advanced eg communication media. Radio in the case of Rwanda, Facebook in Myanmar.
But even if you look back at earlier genocides eg the Rhineland Massacres you see this intense communication of propaganda (in that case religious rhetoric that also spurred on the Crusades).
I hear what you’re saying, but there’s a counterpoint to this.
In prehistoric times, population densities were low. In mesolithic times (hunter gatherers) there were simply no concentration of people large enough to wipe out or to do the killing. Nothing could be called genocide at this time.
In neolithic times (the first farmers) violence was definitely a part of life. Some early towns do show signs that they were destroyed. But again, population densities are low enough that the scale of violence would not be enough to call ‘genocide’. It’s a town burnt down with everyone murdered, not a ‘people’ - whatever that might mean at this time. This is not about egalitarianism - it’s population density.
However as we move to the bronze age, there are definitely signs that large scale events occur that might fit into the modern concept of genocide but archeological evidence is severely lacking. The main line I would argue is that the male lines of the neolithic farmers in Europe are hammered and almost completely replaced with the Yamnaya Y chromosomes across a huge expanse - from the east european plains to the Iberian peninsula. Genetic continuity with the neolithic farmers is maintained though indicating that male newcomers were having children with local women, and very few male locals had children. During this event the culture changed hugely - burial patterns, material goods, etc.
I don’t know if we can call this genocide - at least the full modern concept - because these changes took centuries to roll out across the expanse of Europe, but they speak to local conquests and, at the very least, the newcomers prevented local males from having their own families. At worst you can imagine a constant expansion of this new culture taking control of new areas, killing the men, taking local women as concubines and eradicating their gods, customs and ways of living. Quite a lot of genocidal checklist items ticked off there.
By the mid to later bronze age, genicide is definitely a widespread thing, recorded in many texts.
@modeler thanks, interesting info, esp the Yamnaya Y thing!
I realise I might sound a bit no true Scotsman but I don’t really see anything that doesn’t already arise before farming and granaries as being inherent in human nature.
Anything we adopted that late in the game can be un-adopted.
As I was discussing this with my partner we summarised this as:
Humans have always had the capacity for violence and murder; as populations grew, acts of violence could be larger, both in terms of number of combatants and also length of time of continuous fighting. This is a progression of:
- Small bands of people skirmishing with neighbours to
- Towns sending small raiding bands to
- Cities fielding an army for a summer campaign to
- Empires furnishing professional armies and sending them on multi-year campaigns, to
- Nation states using advanced logistics to maintain millions of soldiers in the field for years at a time.
Somewhere between city-states and full modern nation states, there have been full on campaigns of genocide. But genocide can be thought here definitionally as only possible with some significant number of people.
Unfortunately there is a deep dark part of the human psyche that has always been with us.
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Hey, Fat Tony! You of all people should know Geno had it comin’.
He was a made guy!
Imagine that you know someone who intends to kill you. You can run and hide, or you can can kill them instead. Genocide is that on a large scale.
Or at least that’s the version of genocide thar is easiest to understand. There is also the Nazi version where you kill an entire people just because you hate them, not because they threaten you or have a resource that you desperately need for survival.
There is also the type of genocide that was committed against the indigenous people of the Americas. That happened over a long period of time and over two continents. It involved every type of genocide noted above at different times and places, plus the initial accidental genocide by disease (probably influenza) that killed off about 90% of the population prior to the colonizing that came later.
And just because you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t do it in the right circumstances. There is nothing more human than genocide. The only other animal that does it is chimps, if I remember correctly.
Sorry, that is a depressing note to end this comment on. Humans are scary.
Kraut I believe provides a good step by step of it using the Armenian Genocide as the case study. It’s in part 1 of his series on the history of Turkey.
This YouTube video from Sprouts explains it very well.
Let’s expand from murder of one person to more. People live with a family. There is another family nearby. Both families have some resources, but not enough. If one family kills the other family, the surviving family can have more resources to distribute within their family.
Ethnic groups are effectively very extended family.
Primarily greed, but secondarily the fear of becoming an out group themselves, this carrot and whip makes for a very plaint population which authoritarian, dictatorial, and/or oligarchical regimes find quite handy. Dispossessing entire groups of people unites the other groups both out of the desire to share in the stolen wealth of the “undesirables” and prevent their own groups from being targeted next.
