Earlier this week I watched Hotel Rwanda for the first time. I knew about the genocide there previously but I didn't knew as much about the differences between the two groups involved. Here is a clip that explains the difference.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAl79s9PMuI
After watching this and realizing that the differentiation between the groups was completely artificial I wondered how somthing like this could happen. Most of the killings in this genocide were carried out with machetes, a very personal way to attack someone. How could the artificial in and out groups become so salient that they allowed people to commit such violent acts? Do you think something like this could have happened if there had not been artificial groups created by the colonials?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAl79s9PMuI
After watching this and realizing that the differentiation between the groups was completely artificial I wondered how somthing like this could happen. Most of the killings in this genocide were carried out with machetes, a very personal way to attack someone. How could the artificial in and out groups become so salient that they allowed people to commit such violent acts? Do you think something like this could have happened if there had not been artificial groups created by the colonials?
Unfortunately I think that it wouldn't have made any difference. Even within our own race we manage to create differences that segregate "us" from "them". For instance in Mexico, many people discriminate against "Indios" or people who are of native tribes. Or even here in the U.S., just look at your local high school and you have jocks, emo's, cheerleaders, geeks, skaters, goths, stoner's, band kids, just to name a few.
This is one of the pre-requisites of things such as genocide. My husband has lecture of genocide so I'm taking some of the material from his lesson. Anyhow, one of the stages before getting to genocide is creating in-groups and out-groups. This can be based on whatever anyone can come up with: race, religion, language, culture, what have you. Creating this separation will allow people to view members of the outgroup as second class citizen's. Giving them a label makes those individuals less human that the members of the out-group, and thus much easier to abuse and kill. I think it's sick but that's how it works.
I wish we learned more about genocides in grade school. The only one they ever teach about is The Holocaust. It's always, The Holocaust this, Hitler that, blah blah. However there have been over 31 genocides recorded in history. 31! When I learned that I was shocked. I think they should teach more about other genocides, as well as how they come about.
Liz- you are right that we should learn more about Genocides, but it doesn't just need to be in grad school. There is a lot that under-grads could do with increased knowledge about genocide, and there are some opportunities to learn about it.
As an undergrad I took a class about genocide from Dr. Steven Gaies in the English department here at UNI. He is very knowledgeable about genocides that world over. He taught in Sarajevo before the Bosnian genocide and teaches classes in Germany and Poland during the summer on the Holocaust. He had us read a book for the class here is the information for the book:
Power, Samantha. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Basic Books, 2002 (original hardcover). ISBN 0-465-06150-8.
I recommend that everyone reads A Problem From Hell at some point, because of the wealth of information in it. It begins with the history of the word genocide and how it came about, and has information about a number of genocides. There is also an extensive section about Raphael Lemkin who is ther person that coined the word genocide and spent the majority of his life trying to get the word to be accepted by the UN. His reason was that if there was no word for the atrocities that were happening there would be no way to stop them.
I think that over the next couple of weeks I will be posing links to documentaries about different genocides because I find them very interesting and think everyone should know about them, it is the only way to stop them no and in the future.
Sorry, I meant that we should learn more about genocides in grade school (K-12). But you are right, everyone should learn about this topic in college as well. Like I said before, I had no clue as to how many genocides we have had. I still can't get past that number...
I think I have some books from one of the sociology classes I took in undergrad that discuss genocides but I'll have to look through them when I go home for Spring Break. I'll post a link to them if I find what books they are. I've also ordered the book you suggested on amazon because I am very interested in this topic. Posting some links is a great idea as well. I think everyone can benefit from learning more about this issue because I don't think people really realize how much of a problem this really is.
It is really shocking to learn the number of violent large-scale phenomena such as genocide that have been recorded in history. It is impossible not to wonder how can such events occur in very different geographical areas and different time periods.
It all begins with the division into ingroups and outgroups, which creates a bias favoring the ingroup and can also lead to a bias against the outgroup (as Liz wrote, seeing the outgroup as "second-class citizens"). This division, together with certain social conditions, can lead to the process of "Moral Disengagement" explained by A. Bandura, through which people are able to justify their actions by convincing themselves that they are not unethical. Moral disengagement processes include seeing the actions as having a higher purpose (such as serving God, or the greater good of society); seeing the victims as less than human (for example, in the Rwandan case, propaganda often used terms such as "cockroach" to refer to the Tutsi group); and minimizing or ignoring the harmful consequences of the actions. These psychological processes enable people to carry out actions that would normally be unthinkable due to their ethical or moral principles.