Memories of the 28th Century

Genocide: the policy of deliberately killing a nationality or ethnic group.

As a follow-up to my post about ethnic cleansing I want to look at genocide. I started by looking at definitions, such as the one from dictionary.com that makes up the title. Then there’s: Genocide is the systematic destruction of all or part of a racial, ethnic, religious or national group via the (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; or (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide . The Wikipedia definition is wide enough to include any killing, but it out there. I could find several more definitions, but the concept should be apparent that “genocide” means what someone wants it to mean. There have been a few times when a tribe of nation was eliminated; I mentioned that tribe of about two thousand that the Maoris appear to have eliminated, and the Caribs tried to wipe out the Arawaks a few centuries ago, and they got rid of all of the males on several islands. There was a generalized attack at of an ethnic group that happened in Rwanda, and that might have been genocide, if there hadn’t been too many people to get rid of. In ancient times there may have been some attempts at genocide, but from what I have been able to find the practice was not to kill everyone but to kill the fighting men and sell off the rest. There are a number of instances in the Bible of the Hebrews killing off the men and keeping the women for themselves. That method did eliminate an ethnic group but not by killing them off.

The Romans were good at defeating foes, but they didn’t eliminate ethnic groups; they incorporated foreigners in their empire. Corpses don’t add economic value. The Romans did send entire tribes into slavery, but isn’t killing an ethnic group.

The Mongols did depopulate areas, but that was to scare other areas into giving in. What good is an empire without subjects? Most of the horse barbarians had no interest in killing in great numbers; they just wanted to take control of people who could pay taxes. And many such peoples were raiders who raided other tribes year after year, so they had no interest in their victims dying; that would have been killing the goose that laid golden eggs.

I get the impression that many of the past events that have been called genocide are simply misunderstandings. A people disappeared after being attacked, so some people think they must have been wiped out, but a closer look shows that they went somewhere else. I mentioned the Carthaginians above. Another nation that disappeared was the Khazars, but they migrated to the northwest and later became called by their religion, because they had converted Judaism. I had learned in my youth that the Mandan Indians had disappeared, wiped out by war and epidemic, but I just read about their continued existence.

Take a look at the Wikipedia article on genocide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocid...re-World_War_I . The examples are interesting, but some appear to be misunderstandings. The matter of how much murder the Spanish did in Latin America is on target; there weren’t enough Spaniards to kill as many people as have been claimed, and the Spanish encouraged cooperation in many areas. Many of the deaths of Indians in both South and North America were from disease, and the lack of reliable population numbers make it impossible to tell what they did. With estimates of pre-Columbian population ranging from “8.4 million to 112.5 million” we can’t reliably say anything about population then. There probably were examples of attempts to eliminate whole tribes, but disease was more efficient than war and weapons.

Reading that article had only one salient matter; the extermination order by the government of German South-West Africa against the Herero and Nama people, which I had never heard of before.
A few comments by General Trotha, the German army commander in German Southwest Africa:
"I believe that the nation as such should be annihilated, or, if this was not possible by tactical measures, have to be expelled from the country”
“Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed.”
It appears that this was an attempt at eliminating the two tribes, but it was unsuccessful, because fifteen thousand Herero were still living after the end of the campaign, down from about eighty thousand.

After looking through the list of alleged genocides I determined that the word “genocide” appears to be used as verbal assault, rather than as a word to describe actual events. There have been some extremely nasty attacks on nations or tribes that eliminated most of the group, but those have been few and very far between. Even the elimination of Carthage by the Romans resulted in the city being vacant for a few years until Carthaginians who had fled to the rural areas returned. It is possible that the Russians did eliminate some tribes in Siberia, but those and the Caucasian Wars were attempts to subjugate, rather than attempts to eliminate.

From what I know of history humans are difficult to eliminate by force, but they can easily be absorbed and eliminated as separate ethnic groups. The Chinese were conquered several times, by Mongols, Manchus, etc., but the Chinese overwhelmed the conquerors by their numbers. Further back in time there were invasions by Indo-Europeans that resulted in the peoples they conquered being gone, but they were gone, because they had joined the conquerors. After a preserved body was found in a peat bog in Britain scientists sequenced the DNA and found that it was a match with the people in that local area.

I am not trying to negate nastiness, but I prefer to call things what they are. Genocide is killing a genos, a clan or tribe. Other than that tribe that the Maoris eliminated I haven’t seen any evidence of a tribe being killed. I know of many tribes being absorbed into larger nations (just look at Poland as an example). Recent actions that have been called genocide have been examples of intertribal warfare, and in many cases the groups have been doing similar nastiness for hundreds or thousands of years. The war in South Sudan is an excellent example of something that has been going on as far back as there is history.

It has been said that humans are as hard to kill as cockroaches, and the paucity of successful genocides is more evidence of that.