Lara Mayfield – History Research Task – Genocide in the modern era
Why did political leaders, government officials, religious leaders and the military – whose role was to protect their citizens, turn against a group of their citizens and why did individuals, who would normally abhor the killing of another human, act as perpetrators or bystanders to genocide? This purpose of this essay it to explain the relationship between the stages of discrimination and dehumanisation and the perpetration of genocide using the examples of the Holocaust and Armenian genocides. The Holocaust was the “systematic, bureaucratic state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews” (United States Holocaust Memorial, n.d.) during World War 11. This represented two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe. During World War 1, the Ottoman Empire, ruled by a Muslim Turkish government, systematically killed or deported…show more content… Stanton (Stanton, 1998). that explains the stages society goes through that allows it to engage in genocide. Genocide cannot be committed by just a few people - it requires the cooperation of a large group of people and the government. According the Stanton, the process generally starts with “classification”, which is a way of distinguishing people into “us and them” by race, religion or nationality. Discrimination and dehumanisation are early stages which play a key role in grooming society to accept significant human rights violations and genocidal acts which occur in the final stages of “persecution” and “termination”. The Nazi Party and the Turkish Government used discriminatory laws such as the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 in Germany and extra taxes for Christians in the Ottoman Empire and dehumanisation techniques such as labelling the Christian Armenians “traitors” and the Jewish as “sub-human”. This paved the way for the eventual mass killings that occurred during the Holocaust and Armenian