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The Genocide Of The Holocaust

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For as long as human history has existed, genocide as existed along with it. Even though the term itself was not coined until the 1940s by Raphael Lemkin in response to the Holocaust, the act of genocide has been occurring for millennia. In 146 BCE the first recorded act of genocide occurred with the Roman destruction of Carthage According to the Genocide Convention, genocide is defined as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Genocide happens for a multitude of reasons and is often a combination of circumstance that leads to its occurrence. The Rwandan genocide in the 1990s is a prime example of genocide and while it can be explained using several sociological theories, it most closely correlates with Marxism and Conflict Theories.
Rwanda is divided into main two ethnic groups: the Hutu and the Tutsi, with the overwhelming majority being Hutu. Ethnic tensions in Rwanda date back in the late 1800s when The Berlin Conference assigned the territory to Germany. European colonists who traveled to Rwanda displayed typical scientific racism tendencies of the time. Convinced the Tutsi had migrated to Rwanda from Ethiopia and were therefore more Caucasian than the Hutu, they enforced notions that the Tutsi were racially superior to the Hutu and racialized the two groups. This led to the Hutu becoming a pariah group in Rwanda. Strong prejudice and discriminatory patterns began to emerge ad Tutsi supremacy continued into the

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