Was ist Völkermord? ( What is genocide)

Was ist Völkermord?

     Genocide by definition is the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group. The term "genocide" did not exist before 1944 when Polish Jewish scholar Raphael Lemkin used it to describe the atrocities of Hitler's Nazi Germany. Genocide is a term created during the Holocaust and declared an international crime in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Convention defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:


1. Killing members of the group.
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Genocide is generally considered one of the worst moral crimes a government (meaning any ruling authority, including that of a guerrilla group, a Soviet, a terrorist organization, or any kind of authority) can commit against its citizens or those it controls.
     It is impossible to say who participates in genocide. People could debate about it forever and still not come up with an answer. On one side of the topic, we could argue that everyone commits genocide. They commit genocide when they watch the news and see people getting killed, but do nothing about it. Well I can’t really explain why because I simply don’t know. I guess when people watch the news, it’s just like none of their concern and they don’t have anything to do with it since it’s halfway across the world. But on the other hand what can they do from across the world? You can’t stop genocide even if you wanted to. I remember someone saying that there will always be one person that disagrees with the majority. Which is like there will always be that one person to ignite the spark which starts the fire. Individuals opposing this statement may dispute that only people that actually has some substantial links to participating in genocide. Essentially, those who commit genocide are the ones who harm others in some way or another. It doesn’t matter if you’re paying someone to do it for you, you are paying that individual to go out and kill others. Some historians argue that only people that are contributing to the cause participates. This issue about who and who don’t take part in genocide is like the numerical value of Pi. It will keep going and going, there is no end in sight, possibly there never will be. It’s just another one of those unsolvable problems.
     Why does human nature allow genocide? On that same note, why does humanity allow the abuse of animals, and the environment, and resources? Great. Another one of those unexplainable problems that we seem to be running into more and more often. My take on why we allow it? Humans are not perfect. There has never been a perfect human, we are built with flaws that a lot of us call “unique traits”. There will never be a perfect human because that’s how we function. The closest we would ever be to perfect would probably be Leonardo Da Vinci. The reason? He was probably the most diversely talented person ever born because he was an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, botanist and writer. Scientists just found out that his painting, the Mona Lisa was actually a self-portrait. Humans need something to obsess over because we are humans, and we need stimulation. The problem is that our lives need to be interesting coded into our minds. The same reason drug addicts take drugs, is for the excitement. We allow it because we have to have something to talk about, something to rant, write, blog, report, think, and get angry, sad, happy, scared, or nervous about. Like the book Night, the Jews that were living in the community didn’t even worry about the Nazis. When the Nazis came to their town and starting taking people away, they still didn’t do anything. Though the Jews were the ones whom the Nazis were committing genocide on, they didn’t do anything. I guess most of us have just become immune to these things, what with the violence in entertainment today. I’m starting to believe that we’re just going to keep ignoring these problems until it happens to us.