in a way, war is a form of genocide, and genocide is a form of war. they are closely related. they cling to each other. yet they do not need the other one to happen (there have been wars without genocide, and genocides without war).

one can emerge from the other, but rather than being parent and child (one causing the other), they are siblings from the same breed (born from crisis, which is born from identity struggles, which is born from fear). to understand one of them, you have to take the whole family into account.

Turning to a related topic - the concept of killing, and how we’ve taught to view that in our society. One should conclude from the NRA’s position on hunting - that killing is fun. Or from Shakespeare’s Henry IV- that killing is noble. Or from Catholic Crusades and Inquisitions- that killing is good. Is not Hitler’s holocaust a natural follow-up to the Pope’s inquisition? But the latter was okay, because the good guys were doing it to the bad guys.

That’s how we’re taught to view everything related to this subject. Our books, movies, tv shows often end with the righteous killing of the bad guys. We trained to want that. We’re trained to feel good about that. Children usually don’t want to kill fish or pheasants or deer or anything. But they’re laughed at and shamed into thinking that being able to kill is part of being manly; manly like Hemingway. Perhaps in the ghettos of Baltimore or Palestine, killing the bad guys is the path to manliness.

Killing rids us of evil - from Homer, the Bible, and up to the present. As Rap Brown said - violence is as American as cherry pie. It is a very short step for us to go from 9/11 - they attacked us! To Iraq - we gotta get them before they get us. I’m surprised that in a culture such as ours, that is so ingrained to killing (we slaughter, just to eat meat) that genocide even arouses an emotional reaction. Headlines in my little town newspaper: “For Local Soldiers, Death of Sadham is Good News.” I would suppose that for many people in many parts of the world, the converse would be true - death of Americans is good news.

So I have two questions - why our fascination with killing; and what makes some people good guys and others bad guys. We have to acknowledge that from 1930 to 1970, slaughtering Indians in western movies was thought to be a good thing. And to some Arabs, the holocaust would be similar.

1) if not for the First World War, the Armenian genocide could not have happened

2) if not for the Second World War, the Jewish Holocaust could not have happened

3) if not for the Rwandan civil war, the Tutsi genocide would not have happened

That’s not to say that there weren’t strong forces in Turkey, Germany and Rwanda sowing the seeds of hatred and violence. But war provides tempting motivation for a government to act quickly and decisively against suspect minorities (it’s an important point that all three of the nations above, Turkey, Germany and Hutu Rwanda, were *losing* their wars when they plotted these acts of genocide — in all three cases, these nations were operating under the threat of enemy invasion). War also provides the “smokescreen” that makes genocide possible.

I guess the reason I think it’s a critical point that war is actually a primary cause and enabler of genocide is that war is all too popular a political tool in our modern age. I’m ashamed (every day of my life) to realize that my own elected government is presided over by an administration that wholeheartedly embraces war (and even preemptive invasions of foreign countries) as a method of achieving political change. Needless to say, I am against this. Ironically, my country is now in the position of attempting to prevent civil war in Iraq for the very reason I’ve been spelling out — the potential Shiite genocide against the minority Sunnis of Iraq is all too clear.

War and genocide are co-dependents. I don’t believe you can embrace one without embracing the other. This is, I guess, the point I’m trying to shout from the rooftops here.

… anyway, don’t you think that genocide and war are symptoms of the same cause, rather than causally giving rise each other (they often go hand in hand, or are followed by each other, but that’s because they’re siblings)?

xenophobia, nationalism, genocide, war.
they’re all based on a “feindbild” (don’t you guys have an english word for that? its literal meaning is “image of an enemy”) that we create in order to be sure and proud of our own identity again.