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Many people don’t know the definition of genocide. Genocide is defined as the systematic extermination of a group or people of a certain ethnicity or simply just changing their ways of living. And when someone brings up the topic of genocide, it is usually turned towards the Holocaust. True. The Holocaust was genocide of Jewish people and others that the Germans thought were inferior to them. But the Holocaust wasn’t the only genocide in the past. Past and present genocides include the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the genocide of Native Americans, the Armenian Genocide, the Ukrainian Genocide, the Rape of Nanking, the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, and the genocide in Darfur.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade went from the 15th to the 19th century. The genocide of Africans wasn’t the kind of genocide where systematic mass killing was involved. In this genocide, up to twelve million African were forcefully taken away from their homes and brought over the Atlantic to serve under Americans. The voyage overseas was horrible. Each captive only had around one square foot of moving space on the ships. Many starved and those who died on the way to America were simply dumped overboard. This deadly journey killed around two million people. Those who survived the voyage endured the hundreds of years of working under the harsh rule of the Americans.
The genocide of Native Americans began in the 1830s, when colonists from Europe came over to America in search of riches and route to Asia. The English settled in Jamestown in 1607, when it was already heavily populated. Wars were fought over land and the Europeans removed all the Natives from the land they conquered. By the beginning of the 1830s, colonists created the policy of moving all the Native Americans away to the West of the Mississippi River. The Native Americans were forced on long marches where many died from disease and starvation. For example, in the Trail of Tears, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muschogee, and Seminole tribes were removed from their homes in the autonomous regions of North America. Twenty five to thirty percent of the Natives from each tribe perished on the journey.
The Armenian Genocide lasted from 1915 to 1918. The “Young Turk” government in the Ottoman Empire removed and killed the Armenians working in their army starting in April 1915. Those who remained were split into groups based on gender. The men and boys were deported and later killed. The women and children were forced to travel across many miles of mountains and deserts. They were often raped, tortured and deprived of food and water, which killed hundreds on thousands on the journey. In total, 1.5 million Armenian people were killed.
The Ukrainian Genocide, also known as the Great Famine, started in 1932 and went on for about a year. Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union created a system called collectivization where he took control of private farmlands and livestock. This land was used to grow crops that were sent into the foreign market for money to help with Stalin’s Five-Year Plan. The people of the Soviet Union weren’t given any food until his demands were met. Around twenty five thousand people died each day in Ukraine and the total number of fatalities was estimated to be seven million people.
In December 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army raided China’s capital, Nanking. Three hundred thousand of the six hundred thousand people in the city were murdered. The Japanese were ordered to kill all the captives after the four days of battle. The city was burned and the survivors of the raid suffered from torture, rape, and theft for the next six weeks. Over twenty thousand women were raped and later murdered.
The Holocaust began in 1938 as boycotts against Jewish shops and raiding of Jewish towns. Hitler, the leader of the Holocaust, started this mass extermination of political enemies and people “inferior” to Germans. They first placed the victims in ghettos. The captives were later deported to concentration camps were women, children, and elderly were separated from the men and boys. The women, children, and elderly were killed slowly in “showers” which turned out to be gas chambers or placed into crematories. The men and boys were forced to work with little food and water until they were no longer able to move on. This nightmare finally ended in 1945.
The Rwandan Genocide happened within the year of 1994. On April 6, 1994, Hutu militias, or the Interhamwe in Rwanda, started the attempt to exterminate the Tutsi people. Rwanda’s state radio was controlled by Hutu extremists and was used to encourage the killing with continuous hate propaganda and announcing the hiding places of the Tutsis. The genocide ended in July 1994 when a group of armed Tutsi rebels defeated the Hutus in neighboring countries. About eight hundred thousand people were killed and the country’s industrial foundation was badly harmed.
The genocide in Darfur started in February 2003 when the Janjaweed, government-sponsored militias, created a campaign of slaughter, rape, and displacement. Four hundred thousand people died from the violence, starvation, or disease. Over two million people were forced out of their homes and more than two hundred thousand fled to Chad. Camps are now set up to help the victims, but many lack food, shelter, and good health care.
These are only some of the genocides in the past. There are many more, so many more, they can’t all fit into this one article. And even with the overwhelming numbers of innocent people dying, something still drives certain people to think they are better than others. That something gives them hubris. They are given the thought that they have the right to decide who has the right to live or who should die. Thoughts like these are what created genocides and are what possibly could be the foundation of future genocides.