Best 215 quotes in «genocide quotes» category

It would be logical for any group whose only sense of identity is the negative one of wickedness and oppression to dilute its wickedness by mixing with more virtuous groups. This is, upon reflection, exactly what celebrating diversity implies. James Carignan, a city councilor in Lewiston, Maine, encouraged the city to welcome refugees from the West African country of Togo, writing, “We are too homogeneous at present. We desperately need diversity.” He said the Togolese—of whom it was not known whether they were literate, spoke English, or were employable—“will bring us the diversity that is essential to our quest for excellence.” Likewise in Maine, long-serving state’s attorney James Tierney wrote of racial diversity in the state: “This is not a burden. This is essential.” An overly white population is a handicap. Gwynne Dyer, a London-based Canadian journalist, also believes whites must be leavened with non-whites in a process he calls “ethnic diversification.” He noted, however, that when Canada and Australia opened their borders to non-white immigration, they had to “do good by stealth” and not explain openly that the process would reduce whites to a minority: “Let the magic do its work, but don’t talk about it in front of the children. They’ll just get cross and spoil it all.” Mr. Dyer looked forward to the day when politicians could be more open about their intentions of thinning out whites. President Bill Clinton was open about it. In his 2000 State of the Union speech, he welcomed predictions that whites would become a minority by mid-century, saying, “this diversity can be our greatest strength.” In 2009, before a gathering of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, he again brought up forecasts that whites will become a minority, adding that “this is a very positive thing.” [...] Harvard University professor Robert Putnam says immigrants should not assimilate. “What we shouldn’t do is to say that they should be more like us,” he says. “We should construct a new us.” When Marty Markowitz became the new Brooklyn borough president in 2002, he took down the portrait of George Washington that had hung in the president’s office for many years. He said he would hang a picture of a black or a woman because Washington was an “old white man.” [...] In 2000, John Sharp, a former Texas comptroller and senator told the state Democratic Hispanic Caucus that whites must step aside and let Hispanics govern, “and if that means that some of us gringos are going to have to give up some life-long dreams, then we’ve got to do that.” When Robert Dornan of California was still in Congress, he welcomed the changing demographics of his Orange County district. “I want to see America stay a nation of immigrants,” he said. “And if we lose our Northern European stock—your coloring and mine, blue eyes and fair hair—tough!” Frank Rich, columnist for the New York Times, appears happy to become a minority. He wrote this about Sonya Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearings: “[T]his particular wise Latina, with the richness of her experiences, would far more often than not reach a better [judicial] conclusion than the individual white males she faced in that Senate hearing room. Even those viewers who watched the Sotomayor show for only a few minutes could see that her America is our future and theirs is the rapidly receding past.” It is impossible to imagine people of any other race speaking of themselves this way.

I will follow anyone... and remind everyone... of the pain of the Yazidi women

I will follow anyone and tell everyone my message because it is urgent: Please humanity Protect Yazidis.

Matthew White, a self-described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history’s major wars, massacres, and genocides, counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are specifically enumerated in the Bible. (He excludes the half million casualties in the war between Judah and Israel described in 2 Chronicles 13 because he considers

On with the murderous dance.

Our lives and the lives of future generations do not only depend on the conflicts that take place, but also on the solutions we offer in response to them.

Our minds are malleable. Our minds can be possessed - possessed so gradually that we don’t even realize we’ve lost control.

People deserve to know about that. They need to understand, not so that they can pity the region, but simply because it helps to explain so much of the way Kurdistan has tried to improve itself afterwards. They need to understand to stop it from ever happening again. They need to understand, because it is unacceptable that a genocide that was essentially ignored by many countries around the world at the time should be continued to be ignored by history

[Pope] Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. "The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are abandoned and towns deserted. The wrath of the Lord is upon us and He may be intending to destroy the whole of creation. People are without leaders and direction. They want to be given a reason for this, so they can be reassured, so they will return to their prayers and their obiediences. All this is going on, and you are concerned about the safety of two Jews?

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.

Rumors are the children of truth.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Whoever it was who said history repeats itself must have been talking about the history of the Jews as there have been numerous genocides of Jewish people throughout the centuries before the Holocaust. Those who belittle their immense suffering are not only heartless, they are also historically ignorant because the 20th Century – bad though it was for the Jews – was not necessarily the worst century for these people. Almost every century since Biblical times has been tumultuous and bloody, and a bitter fight to simply survive against enemies intent on eradicating them.

You have driven me from the East to this place, and I have been here two thousand years or more. [...] My friends, if you took me away from this land it would be very hard for me. I wish to die in this land, I wish to be an old man here. [...] I have not wished to give even a part of it to the Great Father [the President]. Though he were to give me a million dollars I would not give him this land. [...] When people want to slaughter cattle they drive them along until they get them to a corral, and then they slaughter them. So it was with us. [...] My children have been exterminated; my brother has been killed.

America was built on an attempted genocide, anyway. Guns were completely necessary.

Aside from the occasional genocide, oppression, evil and torture, etc., it is inarguable that public policy could be implemented more rapidly in an autocracy.

But if Russia is to be part of this larger zone of peace it cannot bring into it its imperial baggage. It cannot bring into it a policy of genocide against the Chechens, and cannot kill journalists, and it cannot repress the mass media.

Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable?

God must have been on leave during the Holocaust.

Happy is the person who cherishes the precious lessons of the past and lives vigorously in the present.

...Have the stresses of war been as bad to you personally as carrying through the policy of Collective Farms?

I believe the only time when we can call for intervention is when there is an ongoing genocide.

I didn't get lessons of any kind I slept through school.

I don't think nations can stand aside for ethnic cleansing and genocide.

If Barack Obama's policies, as he just put the new stages through into operation, if that policy is allowed, you're going to see, open, Hitler-style genocide applied to a large section of the population, who are considered "not fit to survive," "not fit to live"! Just like Hitler, "lives unfit to live.

I find in working always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds.

If we say, as we do, that no one in this country intends for racism to lead to genocide, the effects of racism are genocidal, regardless of our intentions.

I got involved in athletics during physical education lessons at school.

I know for sure that there is only one step from insecticide to genocide.

I'm nihilistic, antagonistic, violent, horrible - but not obliterated, yet. I just refuse to be beaten down. I think it's stubborness that keeps me going.