shift

Whenever you hear mention of genocide, such as the Jewish Holocaust or the near destruction of the Native Americans, you can’t help but wonder how anything like that could happen. You tell yourself that there is no way you’d let that happen to you, or your friends and family. But how can you be sure? Without having actually experienced it, you don’t know for certain how you would act or what you would do.

But, if that time ever came, at least we would have history to learn from. And thus, we would not fall so easily into the tricks and traps set by our persecutors. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the Armenians who suffered and died in the Armenian Holocaust, the western world’s first historical account of genocide.

Thus, the question I would like to address and explore is a simple one: How can the victims of genocide allow such a thing to occur?

In the case of the Armenian Genocide, fellow countrymen were set against one another as the highest officials of the Ottoman Empire spewed poisonous propaganda meant to paint the Armenians in a false light. As a result, their Turkish neighbors turned against them, believing them to be not only traitors, but also the primary reason for many of the nations problems. The facilitators of this genocide used textbook tactics by dehumanizing, dispiriting, and dividing the Armenians so as to prevent them from uniting in revolt. Also, the Turks sought to weaken the wills of the Armenians even further by imprisoning many of their leaders, sending their military men to labor camps, forcefully deporting a large majority of them, and executing many others.

Similar strategies were used both in the Holocaust, where Jews were turned against one another at the labor/death camps, as well as during the colonization of the Americas by the Europeans, who spread lies among the various tribes, causing them to distrust and fight against each other.

These approaches worked because they subscribe to the widely-acknowledged stages of genocide, numbers 3 and 5 in particular. The third stage, dehumanization, focuses mainly on a psychological assault meant to infuse doubt and self-loathing into the victims. Eventually, the genocide progresses to the fifth stage, polarization, in which the perpetrators move to separate the victims both physically and psychologically in an attempt to keep them too busy being wary of one another, so that they become oblivious to the horrible genocide they face.

Now, although many people may say that a modern instance of genocide is impossible, history has contrarily proven it to be a probability. Faced with the hypothetical question of how would one react if one was a victim of genocide, many people would strongly assert that they would resist to the utmost and that the attempted genocide would fail. Regardless of whether or not those assertions would be true, I am simply thankful that we have not yet had to find out.

And I will continue to hope that that remains true.