Reification And Its Effects In The Holocaust And The Rwandan Genocide

Throughout the course of human history, crimes against humanity have continuously shaped perceptions of civilisation and society. The 20th century was undeniably a pivotal epoch in the development of such atrocities, with the first prosecution for a crime against humanity being the Holocaust. One of the most defining historical atrocities, the Holocaust was the systematic genocide of six million Jews and five million other minority groups enacted by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The responsibility for the conception of the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ is an elusive notion which has been extensively studied and theorised by two schools of thought; the Intentionalists and Functionalists, which both focus on the notion

By establishing humans as inherently capable of evil, and perpetrators of evil as no less human, Hatzfield encourages a nuanced understanding of the causes of genocide. In doing so, Hatzfield warns readers of the ease with which genocide can take place and cautions against allowing prejudice to take hold in communities. In Rwanda, Hutus lived with Tutsis as friends and neighbors mere days prior to slaughtering them. However, the groundwork for the massacres “was the result of plans and preparations formulated essentially by collective decision” long before the genocide began (52). Radio propaganda drove tensions far in advance, and the assassination of the Hutu president was not the reason for the genocide but the signal for it to finally begin. Hatzfield establishes this point by humanizing the Hutus. One of the interviewees explains that when “you receive a new order, you hesitate but you obey, or else you’re taking a risk. When you have been prepared the right way by the radios and the official advice, you obey more easily, even if the order is to kill your neighbors” (71). While this could easily be dismissed as an excuse born of fear and guilt, understanding the truth of this statement is crucial to the prevention of further mass violence; indeed, if the preparation through propaganda and conditioning can be identified,

For years, Rwanda has been a hotbed of racial tension. The majority of the Rwandan population is made up of Hutu's, with Tutsi's making up the rest of it. Ever since European colonial powers entered the country and favoured the Tutsi ethnic group over the Hutu by putting Tutsi people in all important positions in society, there has been a decisive political divide between the two groups. This favouring of the Tutsi over the Hutu, and the Hutu subjugation as an ethnic lower class resulted in the civil war and revolution of 1959, where the Hutu overthrew the Tutsi dominated government, and resulted in Rwanda gaining their independence in 1962.

In the last few years, some publications have appeared that treats one group or another, yet the state of our knowledge about the perpetrators remains incomplete. We know little about many of the institutions of killing, little about many aspects of the perpetration of the genocide, and still less about the perpetrators themselves. As a consequence, popular and scholarly myths and misconceptions about the perpetrators abound, including the following. It is commonly believed that the Germans slaughtered Jews by and large in the gas chambers, and that without gas chambers, modern means of transportation, and efficient bureaucracies, the Germans would have been unable to kill millions of Jews. The belief persists that somehow only technology made horror on this scale possible. It is generally believed that gas chambers, because of their efficiency, were a necessary instrument for the genocidal slaughter, and that the Germans chose to construct the gas chambers in the first place because they needed more efficient means of killing the Jews. It has been generally believed that the perpetrators were primarily, overwhelmingly SS men, the most devoted and brutal Nazis. It has been held that had a German refused to kill Jews, then he himself would have been killed, sent to a concentration camp, or severely punished. All of these views, views that fundamentally shape people's understanding of the Holocaust, have been believed as though they were

The strongest and most influential emotion, hate, can drive man to do horrendous acts. Such as, in Eliezer Wiesel's memoir Night, tells the story of the millions of death caused by the evil that controls man. Although Wiesel does not use the word “genocide,” his account of his experience shows that it was definitely genocide that he witnessed. To start off, classification,

The Holocaust can be seen as one of the most devastating genocide that occurred in history and that is well known in many places worldwide. One may assume that those who played a part in the acts done by the Nazis in Germany may have been mentally disturbed and/or sick, evil people. However, the novel Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning provides another alternative to this statement. Browning provides the reader with the idea that anyone is capable of becoming a murderer, especially when the opportunity presents itself. In his book he attempts to prove this statement through multiple ideas and theories and also provides events which took place to analyze some of those ideas.

Throughout history, there are different examples of how races were being oppressed, while the higher power does not intervene, and would almost act as a bystander, except that they have the power to stop it, and the point is that the higher power, should be the one to advocate on behalf of the oppressed. Some examples would be the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, in which the higher power, or the government, would not interfere with the injustices really when they should have since a whole race could have been killed off. I do however, understand that some believe that the bystander, or the others that are standing by as this happens, should be the ones to stop it. Although this may be true, the others, for example civilians who are standing by, do not have as much power as let us say, governments who have the resources and the power to make a change to other countries in need.

6 million exterminated. That number rolls off of our tongues as we sit and learn history in the 6th grade, or we write a paper on WW1. How about 800,000 murdered in 100 days, while Americans attempted to keep our troops of the conflict yet watched the bloody images daily on CNN. Genocide in our world is something that is impossible to justify or embrace, but we must attempt to understand it. It is only through this understanding will we be able to prevent or stop one of the most horrific acts man can do in the future. Genocide, in both the Holocaust and in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, is grounded in self-reification and the external reification of others. This then, when put into certain contexts, can manifest itself in a

A common misconception about the Holocaust is that the world was naïve of the atrocities happening under the Nazi’s rule. The horrors of the Holocaust were not left undocumented. Unfortunately, many saw these malicious acts as insignificant to the global population; people only start sympathizing when the hindrance affects them. Hitler, with the help of his many allies, achieved to murder millions of innocent men, women, and children. After spending this semester studying the Holocaust, I have realized that the Nazis’ greatest ally was neither an individual nor a country; Hitler’s greatest ally was indifference.

First of all, men resulting on wanting power over and having a perfect society. As well, modern plan with the systematic of ethnic groups a continually advancing society. Third of all, Armenians, Jews,and Tutsi were seen as despicable groups. For the Tutsi in Rwanda thought they had lost power after the murder of their president so killed the tutsi to feel superior and to dicipline the Tutsi because they thought the Tutsi had murdered their president. Dominique also thinks genocide and holocaust is about gaining power.

The crime of genocide is a horrible, despicable crime, though many have fallen victim to it throughout the years.Their voices silenced forever, leaving the world with few records of their experiences. Elie Wiesel, author and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, survived the Holocaust. His family members and friends were victims of this genocide. He captures in his memoir, Night, the grim feeling of suffering during the Holocaust when he reports, “Not a sound of distress, not a plaintive cry, nothing but a sound of mass agony and silence.” (89) At the time of the Holocaust, genocide had not been defined, but when the definition came out, it became apparent that the definition only protected

The crime of genocide is one of the most devastating human tragedies throughout the history. And the word genocide refers to an organised destruction to a specific group of people who belongs to the same culture, ethnic, racial, religious, or national group often in a war situation. Similar to mass killing, where anyone who is related to the particular group regardless their age, gender and ethnic background becomes the killing targets, genocide involves in more depth towards destroying people’s identity and it usually consists a fine thorough plan prearranged in order to demolish the unwanted group due to political reasons mostly. While the term genocide had only been created recently in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal

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.

Genocide is rightfully seen as one of the most emotionally heavy words in the English language. When many people think of genocide, they might correlate the word to the attempted, and nearly successful, extermination of the Jewish people during World War II. To stand by and watch fellow human beings killing each other because of their race, religion, sexuality, etc., leads many to conclude those who stand by are just as guilty as those who commit the act. Unfortunately, countless horrendous acts are kept silent from the global eye, as the film The Devil Came on Horseback intends to show us. Anne Sundeburg’s 2007 documentary, The Devil Came on Horseback, creatively uses persuasion techniques, which include: the credibility of Marine Brian

Reification serves to reduce a person or other living creature to the status of merely an object or to ‘thingify’ them. According to Weisband, to ‘reify’ someone is “to attribute fixed, frozen, materiality or substantiality to those who character or status includes freedom, rationality, or features of spiritual status” (Weisband, “Cultural Constructions of Collective Identity in Multiple Perspectives”). When you reify someone, you reduce them from a dynamic character to a concrete symbol for a fixed idea. The atrocities of mass violence and genocide have their roots in the process of the reification of a minority group which stems from the self-reification of the majority group due to the psychological stream of the logic of illogic which perpetuates false ideas that justify violence and annihilation of the minority group. Collective identity plays a large role in reification that results in genocide due its ability to create a divide between two perceived distinct groups. Collective identities, which “are constructed through shared beliefs, values, habits, customs, norms, and traditions associated with common heritage, background, or lineage,” cause a group to unite and discriminate against those who seem to have an ‘otherness’ about them, making the ‘Other’ vulnerable to becoming a scapegoat for any problems that in-group has endured (Weisband and Thomas, 21). Hence, the effects of the logic of