Genocide and Hitler's Inspiration

One can never go very far wrong overestimating the barbarity of the human species. Nor can one go far wrong in stating that all examples of genocide are repugnant but, it would seem, some are more repugnant than others.

Examples of genocidal attempts to systematically wipe out a race, nation or people have long stained the annals of human history, many instances now lost in the fog of time.

Most recent genocides have occurred in Africa, in Darfur in the present century where the Sudanese government and its surrogates are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of multi-ethnic, non-Arab Muslim civilians, and in Rwanda in 1994 where rampaging Hutus are believed to have massacred over 800,000 minority Tutsis over a period of a hundred days.

Whether the Bosnian Serb efforts at “ethnic cleansing” of the mid 1990’s technically “qualified” as true genocide has been the subject of much debate in the United Nations, which had unknowingly participated in the killing of many thousands and the rape of up to 50,000 Bosniak women and children.

Apparently, the U.N. is much more able to debate than it has the capacity to act in a beneficial fashion since much of the Rwanda horror was conducted while U.N. “peacekeepers” were in that country acting more as facilitators than peacekeepers. Apparently, too, when it comes to publicizing ethnic cleansing or genocide, it’s matters more whom you know than what you know.

That fact is evident from continuing reminders of the Jewish Holocaust more than six decades after its conclusion whereas, aside from show trials after the Bosnian War, relatively little is ever heard about the slaughters there, nor about the horrendous crimes and death tolls in Darfur or Rwanda.

Granted that the Holocaust is probably the single most devastating and sickening example of genocide in the history of the planet in terms of the sheer number of Jews murdered at the hands of Adolph Hitler and Karl Adolf Eichmann. And it should always be remembered, in the probably vain hope that remembrance will insure it “Never again” occurs.

However, if memory of the Holocaust is to be forever imprinted on the collective soul of humanity, should not other catastrophic events, massacres, mass killings, also be recalled?

Wikipedia cites the destruction of Carthage as the first example of a genocide as well as Genghis Khan’s reign of terror and mass murders committed in ancient times by Jews themselves against their foes. Post 1490, some 50 locales are mentioned as the scenes of mass genocidal and “gendercidal,” (males only), slaughters.

One shameful instance of genocide that, with all the emphasis on and reminders of the Holocaust, has been widely overlooked and swept under humanity’s rug, is the “forgotten holocaust,” the World War One murder of 1.5 million Aremenians by Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1917: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-479143/The-forgotten-Holocaust-The-Armenian-massacre-inspired-Hitler.html. It’s misrepresented as “Europe’s First Holocaust” but it did provide inspiration for Adolph Hitler's Holocaust.

More in Part II to follow.
(http://genelalor.com/)