GENOCIDE

[Dr. Goodword]

• genocide •

Pronunciation: jen-ê-side • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun, mass

Meaning: The deliberate extermination of a people, race, or similar national group.

Notes: Killing a large number of human beings is a massacre. An attempt to destroy a race is genocide. The adjective is genocidal, the adverb, genocidally.

In Play: The Rwandan genocide was the massacre of an estimated 800,000 to 1,000,000 or more ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda by Hutu militia groups in a period of only 100 days from April 6th to mid-July 1994. It is depicted in the Academy-award winning movie Hotel Rwanda staring Don Cheadle. This year's Nobel Prize winner in literature, Orhan Pamuk, was indicted for embarrassing his country with the simple admission that Ottoman Turks had killed 1 million Armenians living in Turkey in 1915. The French government this past Thursday (October 12, 2006) passed an odd law making it illegal to deny the Armenian genocide, which is known throughout the world as an established historical fact.

Word History: Today's Good Word is a combination of Latin genus "race" + cide "killing". -Cide is an Old French suffix from Latin cidium "killing", whose root, cid, is a reduction of the caed- in caedere "to cut, chop, kill". Both the original root and the reduction often appear with an S rather than a D in such words as caesura "a pause", incisor, excise, and even decision, an act that cuts off discussion. (The French law mentioned previously and the continuing genocide in Darfur, Sudan, led Peggy Northcraft to think that today's heinously Good Word would be worth remembering.)

[Palewriter]

As Stalin put it: "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." And he knew of what he spoke.

-- PW

[Perry]

And genocide-denial and holocaust-denial are reprehensible perversions of history; yet are all too prevalent.

[Bailey]

Perry, I agree but then some people who never saw the great depression don't believe it ever really happened, time heals way too much sometimes

mark outta-sight-outta-mind Bailey

[Perry]

According to my late father and aged mother, there was nothing great about it.

[Palewriter]

According to my late father and aged mother, there was nothing great about it.

I think it kind of ticked my parents off, too. Of course, they had World War II to look forward to, though I know my mother found the Blitz and the buzbombs to be something of an inconvenience. Lucky Dad was in Burma, happily murdering our Japanese friends' grandpas.

Most people didn't experience the Black Death directly, I guess, and while time may heal most, if not all, wounds, that doesn't seem to lead them to pretend that it never happened.

I'm with Perry. Genocide-denial and Holocaust-denial are simply despicable. What happened happened.

-- PW

[Bailey]

I don't know that people really don't believe they happened but are mostly incredulous as to the extent, just like 50 years from now the Twin Towers and all the carnage of 9-11 will seem abstract. I was on a web-site once where some bright young thing from North Dakota was complaining that people still talk of the Fargo flood/fire disaster of 2001....How's that for insensitivity? Youth is like thta. Maybe because they've killed more people* before breakfast than Any disaster since Pompey?

*realistic video games

mark dyed-in-the-war Bailey

[Palewriter]

I don't know that people really don't believe they happened

Read this disgusting nonsense and weep.

-- PW

[Bailey]

And genocide-denial and holocaust-denial are reprehensible perversions of history; yet are all too prevalent.

You know Perry, they don't really believe it didn't happen, they just want grist for their own mills.. It's just another Big Lie.



[speculation] Just like we all have our little pet prejudices, maybe we all believe in some Big Lie or another[/speculation]

mark yes-I-know-I'll-be-getting-letters-please-quote-me-exactly Bailey

[gailr]

I have observed a few holocaust* deniers in televised interviews. Even setting aside how being on camera seems to neutralize the higher brain functions of many people who crave the small screen, I am always struck by the increasingly hysterical behaviour of the supporting crowd. If given the opportunity for 15 seconds of fame in front of a camera and microphone, each seems determined to out-Herod-Herod, if you will, in rabidly shouting down evidence that any atrocities occurred. Even more disturbing is the mob rule agitation for similar atrocities (which never happened, they scream) to be visited upon their living neighbors "to teach them a lesson" and "to put them in their place".

Encouraging pogroms to prove that pogroms did not and do not happen is a psychosis all too ready to bloom whenever a group defines itself by who it hates.

-gailr
*any holocaust

[Stargzer]

The Rwandan genocide was the massacre of an estimated 800,000 to 1,000,000 or more ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda by Hutu militia groups in a period of only 100 days from April 6th to mid-July 1994. It is depicted in the Academy-award winning movie Hotel Rwanda staring Don Cheadle.

That was a good movie; catch it on TV some time. I said at the time that the Hutu theme song was "Tut-Tut-Tutsi Goodbye," and unfortunately there was more truth than humor there. That situation was a prime example of the quandry we humans are in, of being caught between doing what's right (intervention) and doing what's lawful (watching from the sidelines). It's also an example of how useless the UN can be in some situations.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the problem the Bosnians had was not having any oil under their land. The Serbs made me ashamed of being a Christian; the Croats, of being a Catholic.

[Bailey]

Genocide seems to be a trend these days, but frankly I find it hard to share blame in it even though many of my gender weilded machetes. Those who participated are to blame and not those who, unfortunately, share in that religion, creed, color, gender or geographic location.

mark trying-to-keep-it-straight Bailey

Think about it this way, I don't blame ALL Germans for Hitler, or ALL of Islam for 9-11, or ALL of Americans because of the bad image it has in the world.

[gailr]

Taking on responsibility/blame for the actions of others--whether others outside one's influence or others outside of one's lifetime--accomplishes little.

On the other hand, acknowledging benefits or privileges derived from injustices done to others, and turning them to something farther-reaching than one's own comfort and profit, is worthwhile.

-gailr