Best 215 quotes in «genocide quotes» category

Who’s going to keep them from wiping us out species by species? Not me. We aren’t prepared for a new demographic of magic-using humans who are sadistic, power hungry, don’t like Inderlanders, and see genocide as an acceptable form of communication.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

After years of working with missionaries, I am tempted to conclude that their endeavors merely prolong a dying race's agonies for ten or twenty years. The merciful plowman shoots a trusty horse grown too old for service. As philanthropists, might it not be our duty to likewise ameliorate the savages' sufferings by hastening their extinction? Think of your Red Indians, Adam, think on the treaties you Americans abrogate & renege on, time & time & time again. More humane, surely & more honest, just to knock the savages on the head & get it over with?

Yet, history has shown that if material force can defeat some ideologies it can no longer obliterate a civilization without destabilizing the whole planet.

All white nations now have sub-replacement fertility and almost all are receiving large numbers of non-white immigrants. Many say this should not be a cause for concern. Charles A. Price, Australia’s senior demographer, described in 2000 the change his country was going through: “Some people think that a steady replacement of Anglo-Celts by other ethnic groups is highly desirable. . . . Personally, [replacement] does not worry me . . . .” Jozef Ritzen, Dutch Minister of Education, Culture, and Science, explained that “this is the trend worldwide. The white race will in the long term become extinct. . . . Apparently we are happy with this development.” Tim Wise is a white person who has lectured on the evils of racism on more than 600 college campuses, and the Utne Reader named him one of “25 visionaries who are changing your world.” In an open letter to white American conservatives, he looked forward to the day when whites will be outnumbered by other races: 'We just have to be patient. And wait for your hearts to stop beating. And stop they will. And for some of you, real damned soon truth be told. Do you hear it? The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently? Because I do, and the sound of your demise is beautiful.

All bombing is terrorism.

All our ancestors were murdered, murderers, complicit to murder, or combating murder.

America. Where property damage is a greater offense than genocide.

Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.

An older woman begs me to tell her if all the men are kept alive as labourers. She knows that she is going to her death. Still, she will be happy if her son, who came with her, remains alive. I calm her with my answer and she thanks me.

As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma and elsewhere-the truer shout is not "Never again" but "Again and again.

Another crucial thing to question is why deniers even bother to quibble about the number of deaths. If one day it were proven only five million or 5.5 million Jews were exterminated, would it be any less an atrocity? What number would deniers suggest is low enough to say that genocide didn't occur and that it’s not important that humanity remembers the Holocaust and the lessons learnt?

A refusal on the part of psychiatrists and therapists to validate the horrors of their patients' tortured past implies a refusal to take seriously the unconscious psychological mechanisms that individuals need to use to protect themselves from the unspeakable. Such a denial is, however, no longer ethical, for it is in the human capacity to dissociate that lies part of the secret of both childhood abuse and the horrors of the Nazi genocide, both forms of human violence so often carried out by 'respectable' men and women.

Are there, as science fiction and Gnostic speculation imply, different species of time in the same world, 'good time' and enveloping folds of inhuman time, in which men fall into the slow hands of the living damnation?

At the end of this journey, it seems to me that reconciling the long shadows cast by the uneasy past may ultimately depend on elements so basic that they bring to mind a simple Slav proverb I once came across and never forgot: Eat bread and salt and speak the truth. They are the recovery of fact, public accountability and the instituting of fair trials of one sort or another, to help mark ends and beginnings and to return the moral compass as close to the centre as possible.

Behold, the Spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love! Every seed is awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land. Yet, hear me, people, we have now to deal with another race – small and feeble when our fathers first met them but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that away from us. My brothers, shall we submit or shall we say to them: 'First kill me before you take possession of my land

But even the Nazis realized that if there was something that gave more power than merely destroying the word, it was owning and controlling it.

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

...But this number, like all the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one. This does not mean some generic image of a Jew passing through some abstract notion of death 5.7 million times. It means countless individuals who nevertheless have to be counted, in the middle of life...

Consider the species known as man. We lie, we cheat, we want what others have and take it; we make war upon each other and the earth; we harvest lives in multitudes. We have mortgaged the planet and spent the cash on trifles. We may have loved, but never well enough. We never truly knew ourselves. We forgot the world; now it has forgotten us.

Children are being killed, because some "adults" think life is a game. Something is amiss. When children shoot up other children in school, it's a national tragedy, and a week of mourning. When grown men are killing unarmed young, yes unarmed young, it bespeaks the leagues of fear residing in these men's hearts; that they've created a world in which they themselves have become useless. Then it makes front page, and it becomes business as usual. Something is amiss here. If adults don't truly grow up, then their young may never get the chance.

Civil Wars happen when the victimized are armed. Genocide happens when they are not.

Discrimination leads to genocide

Do not avert your eyes. It is important that you see this. It is important that you feel this.

Do not tell me that it is not God-like to get angry or go into a fit of rage. God himself when enraged will grasp a star and hurl it through the heavens. And at night, you can see bits of the star flashing through the sky, fallen apart merely by the shear force of which it was thrown. Know when He is angry and stay out of His way… And the same holds true for my grandson.” Yervant Yacoubian.

..each bloodletting hastens the next, and as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable.

Even if we, as northerners, choose to ignore this history, the victims’ descendants will not

Genocide" is an invidious word that officials apply readily to cases of victimization in enemy states, but rarely if ever to similar or worse cases of victimization by the United States itself or allied regimes.

FLIES IN DISGUISE Tell me, Have you Really seen Flies in a child's eyes Or heard their hungry cries In the middle Of the night? Don't lie. You can protest all you want About peace And genocide, But unless you are willing To take beatings for your fights, Your display of trendy showmanship Simply ain't right. Go on, Carry your useless signs About an issue the world Already abhors, But it's TRUE Heartfelt actions That will prevent Suits and Senators From creating Any more wars.

For many people, that war [WWII] is called the “good war” because it was fought against a regime guilty of unspeakable atrocities. But the Allies did not enter the war to save Jews from extermination. The United States entered the war after it was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor and, as a nation, we certainly did not do as much as we should have to save the Jewish population of Europe. The basic question is still with us: Is it right, justifiable, to intervene in a nation’s internal activities when those activities include genocide, ethnic cleansing, or some other demonstrable harm to a subset of its people?

You will be judged in years to come by how you responded to genocide on your watch.

Extend the sphere," Madison wrote, and, "you take in a greater variety of parties and interests," and you make it difficult for either a mob majority or a tyrannical minority to unite "to invade the rights of other citizens." Whatever one's take on any of the debates of the day (especially the debate over slavery), and whatever one's philosophical understanding of the relationship of republicanism to land, commerce, finance, and labor, most agreed on practicalities. Also wanted to remove Spain from the Mississippi; also wanted the capacities to pacify hostile native Americans and put down rebellions of poor people; and all wanted Great Britain to get out of the way of their commerce. All wanted "room enough," as Thomas Jefferson would put it in his 1800 inaugural address, to be protected from Europe's "exterminating havoc." Expansion became the answer to every question, the solution to all problems, especially those two caused by expansion.

Genocide is the responsibility of the entire world.

Hvis du tar til orde for at Europa en gang skal bli fritt for muslimer, tar du samtidig til orde, i beste fall, for en tvangsdeportering av mer enn femti millioner mennesker vekk fra det europeiske kontinentet. I verste fall tar du til orde for voldshandlinger mot en religiøs gruppering som allerede er sterkt utsatt for fordommer og hets. Hvis målet ditt er at islam skal utryddes fra Europa, kan du ikke samtidig påstå at du er fredelig sjel som aldri har hatt som formål å skade noen. Du må skjønne at politikken du forfekter faktisk handler om mennesker. Og du må tåle å bli møtt med motargumenter. At noen motsier argumentene dine betyr ikke at du knebles. Det betyr at du deltar i debatten.

Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right.   Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people!

History is a delicate matter in a diverse country. Shortly after the fall of the Alamo—likewise in 1836—Mexican troops defeated the Texans at the Battle of Coleto Creek near Goliad, Texas. The Texans surrendered, believing they would be treated as prisoners of war. Instead, the Mexicans marched the 300 or so survivors to Goliad and shot them in what became known as the Goliad Massacre. Mexicans resent the term “massacre.” With the city of Goliad now half Hispanic, they insist on “execution.” Many Anglos, said Benny Martinez of the Goliad chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), “still hate Mexicans and using ‘massacre’ is a subtle way for them to express it.” Watertown, Massachusetts, had a different disagreement about history. In 2007, the town’s more than 8,000 Armenian-Americans were so angry at the Anti-Defamation League’s refusal to recognize the World War I Turkish massacres of Armenians as genocide that they persuaded the city council to cut ties with the ADL’s “No Place For Hate” program designed to fight discrimination. Other towns with a strong Armenian presence—Newton, Belmont, Somerville, and Arlington—were considering breaking with the ADL. Filmmaker Ken Burns has learned that diversity complicates history. When he made a documentary on the Second World War, Latino groups complained it did not include enough Hispanics—even though none had seen it. Mr. Burns bristled at the idea of changing his film, but Hispanics put enough pressure on the Public Broadcasting Service to force him to. Even prehistory is divisive. In 1996, two men walking along the Columbia River in Washington State discovered a skeleton that was found to be 9,200 years old. “Kennewick Man,” as the bones came to be called, was one of the oldest nearly complete human skeletons ever uncovered in North America and was of great interest to scientists because his features were more Caucasian than American Indian. Local Indians claimed he was an ancestor and insisted on reburying him. It took more than eight years of legal battles before scientists got full access to the remains.

Human beings don't live in the long run they live and suffer in the here and now

I am afraid, my friends, that the ugly chapters of genocides and the deep-rooted history of persecution in the Middle East will last longer if we ignore the facts. If we keep silent, we will probably witness another genocide at a future date, and the price we may pay for neglecting our duty to act may prove to be too high.

I am sometimes asked, "How do you know there won't be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism) that will refute your whole thesis?" The question misses the point of this book. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them. Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up.

I become almost wild and shout at them: - To whom are you reciting Kaddish? Do you still believe? And what do you believe, whom are you thinking? Are you thanking the Lord for his mercy and taking away our brothers and sisters, our fathers and mothers? No, no! It is not true; there is no God. If there were a God, he would not allow such misfortune, such transgression, where innocent small children, only just born, or killed, by people who want only to to honest work and make themselves useful to the world are killed! and you, living witnesses of the great misfortune, remain thankful. Whom are you thanking?

I bend over more deeply and ask him again what happens here. — Don't you see? Here they take the lives of our nearest and dearest. Don't you see that these are the close of the poor wretches who come here?

I have argued elsewhere (Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence [2005]) that we need to treat ethics in biblical texts just as we treat ethics in any other works of ancient literature. It is a vacuous exercise to pick and choose which atrocities were really ordained by any gods and which were not. We should have a zero-tolerance view of any text or collection of texts that at any time endorses genocide, misogyny, and other atrocities. We always judge ancient texts by modern ethical standards, and the Bible should not be treated differently.

I have come to the conclusion that imperialism and exploitation are forms of cannibalism and, in fact, are precisely those forms of cannibalism which are most diabolical or evil.

In 2000, interior minister [of France] Jean-Pierre Chevenement said Europe should become a place of race-mixing (métissage) and that governments should make efforts to persuade Europeans to accept this. In 2007, both candidates in the French presidential election took the same view. Socialist Ségolène Royale, said that “miscegenation is an opportunity for France,” adding that she would encourage immigration and would be “president of a France that is mixed-race and proud of it.” Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative candidate who won the election, said he was proud of “a France that understands that creation comes from mixing, from openness, and from coming together—I’m not afraid of the word—from miscegenation.” It is common to project contemporary views upon the past. George Washington University professor Amitai Etzioni has written that people who marry across racial lines are “accepting the core American value of openness and living up to its tenets.” Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republic has written that “miscegenation has always been the ultimate solution to America’s racial divisions.” These two got it wrong. For most of American history, miscegenation was the ultimate nightmare for whites. That whites should now see it as the ultimate solution to racial conflict is a sign not only of how radically our thinking has changed but also of how stubborn racial conflict turned out to be. Civil rights laws were supposed to usher in a new era of racial harmony. To propose now that the only solution to racial enmity is to eliminate race itself through intermarriage is to admit that different races cannot live together in peace. Of course, widespread miscegenation would not eliminate race; it would eliminate whites. Whites are no more than 17 percent of the world’s population and are having perhaps seven percent of the world’s children. No one is proposing large-scale intermarriage for Africa or Asia. Nor would mixing eliminate discrimination. Blacks, South Americans, and Asians discriminate among themselves on the basis of skin tone even when they are the same race. Thomas Jefferson looked forward to the day when whites would people the Americas from north to south. Today such a view would be universally scorned because it would mean the displacement of other populations, but the revolution in thinking among today’s whites leaves no grounds to argue against their own displacement through immigration or disappearance through intermarriage. Whites may have a sentimental attachment to the notion of a white America, but if races are interchangeable that attachment is irrational. If the only legitimate group sentiment for whites is guilt, perhaps it is only right that they should retreat gracefully before the advances of peoples they have wronged. There could hardly be more striking proof not only of how the thinking of whites has changed but how different it is from that of every other racial group. All non-whites celebrate their growing numbers and influence—just as whites once did. Whites—not only in America but around the world—cheerfully contemplate their disappearance as a distinct people.

....in Bosnia, mass rape was a policy of the war, systematically carried out, implicating neighbors, paramilitaries, soldiers.

İspanyollar Yahudileri sınırdışına sürer, Almanlar Slavlarla birbirlerini diri diri yakarlarken Kutsal Kitap'ta ne kadar millet varsa biz Türkler hepsine kapılarımızı açtık, onları barındırdık. Ama olmadı, bu imparatorluğun içinde yaşayan ne kadar azınlık varsa hepsi de kendilerini Türk'ün zulmüne uğramış fedai birer millet diye hayal ediyor.

Israel's demonstration of its military prowess in 1967 confirmed its status as a 'strategic asset,' as did its moves to prevent Syrian intervention in Jordan in 1970 in support of the PLO. Under the Nixon doctrine, Israel and Iran were to be 'the guardians of the Gulf,' and after the fall of the Shah, Israel's perceived role was enhanced. Meanwhile, Israel has provided subsidiary services elsewhere, including Latin America, where direct US support for the most murderous regimes has been impeded by Congress. While there has been internal debate and some fluctuation in US policy, much exaggerated in discussion here, it has been generally true that US support for Israel's militarization and expansion reflected the estimate of its power in the region. The effect has been to turn Israel into a militarized state completely dependent on US aid, willing to undertake tasks that few can endure, such as participation in Guatemalan genocide. For Israel, this is a moral disaster and will eventually become a physical disaster as well. For the Palestinians and many others, it has been a catastrophe, as it may sooner or later be for the entire world, with the growing danger of superpower confrontation.

It always amazes me how people in Europe and the United States can be so indifferent to the speeches of their chancellor or president, for these worlds from the top can be a wind sock for what might happen next.

It is incredible that this must be said, but the obvious seems to escape politicized academics, so we must state the obvious: Genocide is deliberate; it is premeditated. There is no genocide without premeditation. The murders are not unfortunate coincidences. This is why it is called "mass MURDER" and not "mass MANSLAUGHTER.

It is not what you can do for your country, but what you can do for all of mankind.