Best 215 quotes in «genocide quotes» category

{President] Kayibanda's government [in Rwanda] continued the persecution against the Tutsis and began to make use of the media it controlled to launch a propaganda campaign against us. In a country where more than half the people cannot read or write and very few have televisions, radio is the dominant media. The fact that some newspapers were still printing the truth didn't matter much to the part of the population that couldn't read. Most of the literate people were already politically aware. While an educated person might question what they read or hear from the media, the uneducated tend to accept it. The uneducated are more easily affected by threats and the emotional trauma that propaganda like this can create.

Religion makes people kill each other. Science supplies them with weapons.

Religion, by its very nature as an untestable belief in undetectable beings and an unknowable afterlife, disables our reality checks. It ends the conversation. It cuts off inquiry: not only factual inquiry, but moral inquiry. Because God's law trumps human law, people who think they're obeying God can easily get cut off from their own moral instincts. And these moral contortions don't always lie in the realm of theological game-playing. They can have real-world consequences: from genocide to infanticide, from honor killings to abandoned gay children, from burned witches to battered wives to blown-up buildings.

Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust. With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.

Rumors are the children of truth.

Socialism, communism, and fascism are the political manifestations of unachievable ideals, carried to genocidal extremes.

So, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, as it did keep on doing through the Clinton years, I had no excuse for not knowing the following things: I knew that its one-party, one-leader state machine was modeled on the precedents of both National Socialism and Stalinism, to say nothing of Al Capone. I knew that its police force was searching for psychopathic killers and sadistic serial murderers, not in order to arrest them but to employ them. I knew that its vast patrimony of oil wealth, far from being 'nationalized,' had been privatized for the use of one family, and was being squandered on hideous ostentation at home and militarism abroad. (Post-Kuwait inspections by the United Nations had uncovered a huge nuclear-reactor site that had not even been known about by the international community.) I had seen with my own eyes the evidence of a serious breach of the Genocide Convention on Iraqi soil, and I had also seen with my own eyes the evidence that it had been carried out in part with the use of weapons of mass destruction. I was, if you like, the prisoner of this knowledge. I certainly did not have the option of un-knowing it.

Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky ["Letters," December 3], repudiating the very idea that he and I had disagreed on the "roots" of September 11. I rush to agree. Here is what he told his audience at MIT on October 11: I'll talk about the situation in Afghanistan.... Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide.... It indicates that whatever, what will happen we don't know, but plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next—in the next couple of weeks.... very casually with no comment.... we are in the midst of apparently trying to murder three or four million people. Clever of him to have spotted that (his favorite put-down is the preface 'Turning to the facts...') and brave of him to have taken such a lonely position. As he rightly insists, our disagreements are not really political.

Struggle for justice invariably alters the base culture. So did the long Tamil Eelam struggle. Its crystallization was the Vanni society during the last years of LTTE. My four years experience in Vanni also gave me a unique opportunity to see firsthand the devastating truth about the ways of the powerful on this globe - about which I and many other Tamils have puzzled over for many years. For us Tamils of Tamil Eelam it is a new source of power through knowing. It is also our proud history.

Strain on the community -- That's a ridiculous arguement. Then nobody in the world should have children. I think asking people not to have children is just another form of genocide.

Surely it is foolish to hate facts. The struggle against the past is a futile struggle. Acceptance seems so much more like wisdom. I know all this. And yet there are some facts that one must never, never accept. This is not merely an emotional matter. The reason that one must hate certain facts is that one must prepare for the possibility of their return. If the past were really past, then one might permit oneself an attitude of acceptance, and come away from the study of history with a feeling of serenity. But the past is often only an earlier instantiation of the evil in our hearts. It is not precisely the case that history repeats itself. We repeat history—or we do not repeat it, if we choose to stand in the way of its repetition. For this reason, it is one of the purposes of the study of history that we learn to oppose it.

The colonel stood up. “I hope you enjoy your trip to Uruguay. Its government is stable, democratic, and politically mature. There’s even a welfare state. Of course, the people are entirely European in origin. I believe they exterminated all the Indians. As a German, you should feel very much at home there.

The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times when we must take this poison - just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live. We can not succumb to despair. Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral. We in the industrialized world bear responsibility for the world’s genocides because we had the power to intervene and did not. We stood by and watched the slaughter in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Rwanda where a million people died. The blood for the victims of Srebrenica- a designated UN safe area in Bosnia- is on our hands. The generation before mine watched, with much the same passivity, the genocides of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and the Ukraine. These slaughters were, as in, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book Chronical of a Death Foretold, often announced in advance

There are no worse oppressors than those who have been oppressed themselves for they will justify all means of self-preservation, including persecution and oppression of others, to the extent of, and worse than that which they had endured. This will weigh heavily on the souls of future generations.

...there's a sickness worse than the risk of death and that's forgetting what we should never forget.

There were waves of genocide that overcame indigenous populations of Oceania and do we have a library of books or films to tell our story? No. We have tourist hula shows and commercials where the “natives” tend to tourists like indentured servants with plastic, lifeless smiles. It’s not such a charming picture, is it? The truth is ugly, but so is ignorance or denial of such atrocities and pain.

...The typhoon of madness that swept through the country [of Rwanda] between April 7 and the third week of May accounted for 80 percent of the victims of the genocide. That means about eight hundred thousand people were murdered during those six weeks, making the daily killing rate at least five times that of the Nazi death camps. The simple peasants of Rwanda, with their machetes, clubs, and sticks with nails, had killed at a faster rate than the Nazi death machine with its gas chambers, mass ovens, and firing squads. In my opinion, the killing frenzy of the Rwandan genocide shared a vital common thread with the technological efficiency of the Nazi genocide--satanic hate in abundance was at the core of both.

The UN lacked the ability to act without the support of its more powerful members, notably the United States. The American government wanted to avoid a repetition of its unsuccessful intervention in Somalia, in which thirty American troops were killed. President Clinton issued a directive on UN military conditions. The operations would also have to be directly relevant to American interests. These conditions excluded American support for UN intervention to stop the genocide [in Rwanda].

The white men in the East are like birds. They are hatching out their eggs every year, and there is not room enough in the East and they must go elsewhere; and they come west, as you have seen them coming for the last few years. And they are still coming, and will come until they overrun all of this country; and you can't prevent it. [...] Everything is decided in Washington by the majority, and these people come out west and see that the Indians have a big body of land they are not using, and they say we want the land.

This new situation, in which "humanity" has in effect assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history, would mean in this context that the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether this is possible. For, contrary to the best-intentioned humanitarian attempts to obtain new declarations of human rights from international organizations, it should be understood that this idea transcends the present sphere of international law which still operates in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties between sovereign states; and, for the time being, a sphere that is above the nation does not exist. Furthermore, this dilemma would by no means be eliminated by the establishment of a "world government." Such a world government is indeed within the realm of possibility, but one may suspect that in reality it might differ considerably from the version promoted by idealistic-minded organizations. The crimes against human rights, which have become a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always be justified by the pretext that right is equivalent to being good or useful for the whole in distinction to its parts. (Hitler's motto that "Right is what is good for the German people" is only the vulgarized form of a conception of law which can be found everywhere and which in practice will remain effectual only so long as older traditions that are still effective in the constitutions prevent this.) A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for—for the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number—becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. And this predicament is by no means solved if the unit to which the "good for" applies is as large as mankind itself. For it is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically—namely by majority decision—that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof.

Though Israel is charged with engaging in genocide against Palestinians, in the last 20 years, the number of Palestinians has doubled; and since Israel's founding in 1948, the Palestinian population has grown five-fold. It must surely rank as the least effective genocide in world history.

To reject any vast group of one's cultural ancestors in the cause of some current theory is not just arrogance; it's posthumous mass murder. It's the same kind of thinking that makes genocide possible. The masses (albeit the dead masses) and the pathetic little lives they lived are irrelevant compared to this greater purpose we have at hand. Write them out of the record. They never existed. ... One could not judge things by the brief span of one's own lifetime. That was at the core of modern arrogance: only my lifetime counts. My lifetime is 'forever.' Time before it and time after it do not exist. Everything of importance must come to pass in my lifetime. This is what drives the frenzy for change.

Under the crust of that portion of Earth called the United States of America—"from California . . . to the Gulf Stream waters"—are interred the bones, villages, fields, and sacred objects of American Indians. They cry out for their stories to be heard through their descendants who carry the memories of how the country was founded and how it came to be as it is today. [opening lines of the Introduction; ellipsis sic].

That war [Bosnian war] in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.

The 20th Century proved that there is nothing more dangerous to the health of ethnic minority communities than big government.

...the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon.

The coining of their new catch-phrase 'homophiliac' displayed in contrast to 'homophobic' was rather amusing, though to think that they believe it means anything different to 'homophobic' is just facetious. It's like someone trying to create a difference in definition between 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' - or to make the one look better or less reprehensible than the other.

The conflict is mainly between the two major linguistic groups, the Sinhalese and the Tamils. The two races are locked, as it were, in a mortal combat, the Sinhalese majority fighting for perpetual domination over the Tamils with the ultimate object of an extinction of the Tamils as a distinct entity and the Tamils struggling for sheer survival. The combat is an unequal one, for the Sinhalese with their numerical superiority are in possession of all political power and the exclusive control of Government. The Tamils have only the justice of their cause to give them the necessary strength to sustain the struggle

The downside to gun control is genocide.

The greatest single reason for [the] Christian church’s failure . . . is its failure to combat racism. . . . I believe that God now is giving the world’s so-called “Christian” white society its last opportunity to repent and atone for the crimes of exploiting and enslaving the world’s non-white peoples. It is exactly as when God gave Pharaoh a chance to repent. But Pharaoh persisted in his refusal to give justice to those whom he oppressed. And, we know, God finally destroyed Pharaoh. Is white America really sorry for her crimes against the black people? Does white America have the capacity to repent—and to atone? Does the capacity to repent, to atone, exist in a majority, in one-half, in even one-third of American white society? Most black [people] . . . would like to be able to forgive, to forget, the crimes. But most American white people seem not to have it in them to make any serious atonement—to do justice to [black people]. Indeed, how can white society atone for enslaving, for raping, for unmanning, for otherwise brutalizing millions of human beings, for centuries? What atonement would the God of Justice demand for the robbery of the black people’s labor, their lives, their true identities, their culture, their history—and even their human dignity? A desegregated cup of coffee, a theater, public toilets—the whole range of hypocritical 'integration'—these are not atonement.

The horrors of wars have shadowed our path in life. The soil of our land is saturated and soaked with the blood of the victims of genocides.

Their disappearance from the human family would be no great loss to the world.

The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a 'warrant for genocide' forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test.

The millions and millions of corpses, the wasted lives that communism left behind as testament to its main accomplishment, were enough to give any sane believer pause. There were some true believers left, like the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, but the world generally reacted to them with the incredulity deserved for a person standing on top of a pile of corpses promising that with just a few more deaths he could make the whole thing right.

The more division the Iraqi authorities cultivated, the more we worked for inclusion. The more aggression they showed us, the more time we devoted to peace and reconciliation. The more civilians they tortured and slaughtered, the more my instinct guided me to reach out to all segments of society. The more they tried to erase the evidence, the more risks we took to document the atrocities and the harms inflected on humans and the environment. Because one day, we thought, one day the world will wake up and realize the repercussions of overlooking our suffering, and on that day, the souls of victims will finally find peace.

The one ring, to rule them all’? Sounds very far-fetched to me!

The organization of the camps in the east revealed a contempt for life, the life of Slavs and Asians and Jews anyway, that made such mass starvation thinkable. In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5 percent. In the first eight months after Operation Barbarossa, it must have been far higher. In German prisoner-of-war camps for soldiers of the western Allies, the death rate was less than five percent. As many Soviet prisoners of war died on a single given day in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War. pp. 181-182

There are no worse oppressors than those who have been oppressed themselves. For they will justify all means of self-preservation, including the persecution and oppression of others to the extent of, and worse than that they had endured. This will weigh heavily on the souls of future generations.

THE SADNESS IN OUR HEARTS SEEMS ENDLESS

The spectre of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual - always an annoyance to totality - ceases to exist.

The tyrant’s formula for every genocide since the beginning of time: differentiate, divide, destroy.

The US government sponsors a publication called Managing Diversity, which is supposed to help federal employees work better in an increasingly mixed-race workplace. One of its 1997 issues published a front-page story called “What are the Values of White People?” The author, Harris Sussman, explained that merely to speak of whites is “to invoke [a] history and experience of injustice and cruelty. When we say ‘white people,’ we mean the people of greed who value things over people, who value money over people.” Noel Ignatiev, formerly of Harvard, endorsed such sentiments in a publication called Race Traitor, which promoted the slogan, “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” The lead article of the first issue of Race Traitor was called “Abolish the White Race—by any Means Necessary.” By this Prof. Ignatiev did not mean that whites should be physically eliminated, only that they should “dissolve the club” of white privilege whose alleged purpose is to exploit non-whites. Christine Sleeter, President of the National Association for Multicultural Education, explains what whiteness means: “ravenous materialism, competitive individualism, and a way of living characterized by putting acquisition of possessions above humanity.” In 2000, there were bomb threats and anti-black e-mail at the University of Iowa that turned out to be a fake hate crime staged by a black woman. Ann Rhodes, a white woman who was vice president for university relations was surprised: “I figured it was going to be a white guy between 25 and 55 because they’re the root of most evil.

The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care & reproductive health services, we could LOWER that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.

UPON FACES ANGEL TEARS... YOUR VOICES IN OUR EARS

We are instant spectators of every atrocity; we sit in our living rooms and see the murdered children, the desperate refugees. Perhaps horrific crimes are still committed in dark places, but not many; contemporary horrors are well-lit.

We are preaching hope, standing on the bones of the past.

We don’t need guns. 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.

We have been south and suffered a great deal down there. Many have died of diseases which we have no name for. Our hearts looked and longed for this country where we were born. There are only a few of us left, and we only wanted a little ground, where we could live. We left our lodges standing, and ran away in the night. The troops followed us. I rode out and told the troops we did not want to fight; we only wanted to go north, and if they would let us alone we would kill no one. The only reply we got was a volley. After that we had to fight our way, but we killed none who did not fire at us first. My brother, Dull Knife, took one-half of the band and surrendered near Fort Robinson. [...] They gave up their guns, and then the whites killed them all.

We have seen too many armed conflicts. We have witnessed far too many violations of human rights. The 2014 genocide wasn't the first genocide, and if history is any indication, it won't be the last if we don't do something now. We must ask ourselves what should we do to help prevent new genocides. It is time to embody justice in our intentions and actions.

What are commonly known as the Nuremberg Racial Laws should in actuality be referred to as the Cold Spring Harbor, NY laws.