Life would be meaningless without culture. Throughout history, men and women have bonded through commonalities such as race, gender, or cultural heritage. These communities have become stronger over time through reification, or self-identification through historically and socially constructed identities. From an honor-kinship community in Rwanda to the modern nation-state during the Holocaust, both display patterns of racialized identity, formed by analyzing the meaning of reification through dehumanization and demonization.
On April 6, 1994, Hutus began a mass slaughtering of the Tutsis in the African country of Rwanda. This mass slaughtering was labeled as genocide: the deliberate obliteration of an ethnic, racial, religious, or political group. The Rwandan genocide lasted 100 days while other countries stood idly by and watched the brutal killings continue. Accusations from editorials and radio broadcasts claimed the Tutsis wanted to establish a monarchy with Hutu slaves. After years of ethnic tension, the Hutu were again angered and began distributing racial propaganda, dehumanizing the Tutsis by including depictions of them as cockroaches. Many years prior to the Rwandan genocide, a similar deliberate extinction occurred. Between 1933 and 1945, members of the Nazi party killed over six million Jews in what is known as the Holocaust. The genocide started with the Treaty of Versailles, which caused Germany to pay monetary compensations to the other nations as war
The book I chose from the reading list of nonfiction books was The American Holocaust – The Conquest of the New World by David E. Stannard. In this nonfiction book, David E. Stannard describes in horrifying detail, the destruction and holocaust of nearly all early American societies that resulted from the European contact with the Western Hemisphere. I did not choose this book for any specific reason, but I thought it would be an interesting read to learn about native American destruction. I do however believe that the Native American population and its history is very underrepresented and largely unrecognized. Stannard presents the information in the form of a straight up history
The blood of thousands of murdered Tutsi people ran through the streets of Rwanda on April 7, 1994. Until mid-July of 1994, Hutu supremacists eradicated thousands of Tutsi. Nearly fifty years prior, Nazis claimed the lives of millions of Jews. Within the years that followed, the Nazi forces slaughtered millions of Jewish citizens across Europe. Both massacred by people they once considered friends and coworkers, Tutsi and Jews faced great injustice, but those are not the only similarities between the two genocides. It is evident that during both the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide, the rest of society turned a blind eye to the horrors that both Tutsi and Jews were facing, only kept their best interest in mind, and that both groups faced
Although the Rwandan genocide and the holocaust began because of social tension, the Nazis were manipulated into their anti-semitism, whereas the Hutu and Tutsi had tension long before the killing started. During the holocaust, Nazis drove a wedge in between Jews and other races in
When the war ended in 1945, millions of Jews had perished. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime had almost entirely wiped out a single race of people in what would become known as the Holocaust. However, the Jews were not the only people who had been stripped of their dignity and killed. There were other groups who the Nazi’s persecuted against. The Roma, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Political Prisoners were all systematically gathered up and killed. When the Holocaust gets mentioned, many don't talk about the other millions of innocent people who were murdered alongside the Jews. Many don't see these people as victims at all. The number of people murdered during the Holocaust reaches close to eleven million people. “Contragenics” is the term used to talk about all of the groups who were murdered under the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. These innocent lives were lost in the Holocaust, and while history hasn’t forgotten, humanity has.
Now one of the most kenned and prospering genocides was the holocaust which was the Nazi intention of killing lesser amount of 6 million Jews kindred, this was during world war 2. Another prominent genocide is Rwanda, where an estimated 500,000–1,000,000 Rwandans were tragically killed during the 100-day period from April 7 to mid-July 1994
When one looks through the history of the last century, many great atrocities can come to mind. However, the one that is the most common is that of the Holocaust during World War II. People often wonder how something like this could have been allowed to happen. These same people wonder this without realizing that something similar has happened, right within their own shores. Not only this, but they do not realize how previously close we could become to having this happen again.
The Holocaust and the more recent Rwandan genocide were both events filled with inhumane cruelties and destruction. The Holocaust was led by Adolf Hitler who believed in the extermination of Jews, while also promoting the invincibility of the Aryan race. Similarly, the Hutus attempted to end the Tutsi race over a span of about 100 days. The Holocaust and Rwandan killings both had similarities as to how and who started them, their torture techniques used, the usage of scapegoats, and how the world reacted to these horrible events.
“What exactly was the difference? He wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms” a quote from The Boy with the Striped Pajamas. The Holocaust was a genocide, the intentional killing of certain group or ethnicity, that affected the Jewish community worldwide through sorrow and sympathy of their people; and kibitzers who chose to watch until under pressure. A perfect example was the United States who stood on the sidelines, while the horrific events of the Holocaust were occurring. The United States had played a negative role in the Holocaust due to a lack of aid, immigration, and publication.
The American Holocaust has had a major effect on the Native American people, and changed their lives forever. It all begins with the European and Spanish invasion of North America. The European people brought over dieses that the Native American were not exposed too and it caused deaths with in their groups. Also the Europeans brought over more advanced weapons and were able to take over the Native Americans, and this lead to the American Holocaust and shows the effect on the Native American people. These historical events have been used in many Native American stories, and a person is able to see the connections.
The other side of the story to our great American history is not as pretty as they teach us in grade school. The American Holocaust by David Stannard is a novel full of live excerpts from eyewitnesses to the genocide of the American Indians. He goes as far as to describe what life was most likely like before Europeans came to the Americas and obliterated the "Paradise" so described. Columbus even wrote how beautiful the places were in which he committed acts against the Natives so horrific, it was hard to read about, let alone talk about. The Natives were so innocent and naive, that when Columbus would "show them his sword" they would grab the end and in effect slice open their hand. These people had no chance of
Budapest in January of 1945. Lantos went around trying to locate his family that he had
The Nazi's actively looked for ways to streamline the killing process in order to cause as much damage as possible. The Holocaust was the pinnacle of brutality and efficiency, as the Nazi's used techniques pioneered by the Turks but took them to a new level. The Hutus dehumanized the Tutsis just like the Nazi's did to the Jews. To an extent the Hutus found reasons to carry out and justify the extermination and genocides. The government's participation was significant in all three genocides enabling the persecution of certain ethnic groups to rise to the level of a historic
With the liberation of the concentration camps at the end of WWII, the issue at hand was what to do with the Jewish peoples with no place to go.
The Holocaust was a horrific genocide that occured before and throughout World War II. This massacre was led by Adolf Hitler, a German politician who soon became the leader of the Nazi party. This genocide included specifically torturing innocent Jews and whoever got in the Nazis’ way. Unfortunately, this caused about eighteen million deaths overall.
The world’s history has been tainted by many instances of violence targeted at specific groups of people due to either their ethnicity or beliefs. This paper will discuss the characteristics of the Rwanda Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust. The Rwanda Genocide targeted the Tutsis because of their ethnicity, while the Holocaust targeted the Jews because of their ethnicity and religion.