Genocide is a powerful word. We should use it sparingly. Its over-usage cheapens the horrors signified by the term and dishonors those who the act has victimized.
When employing the term, two obvious examples come to mind – the annihilation of the indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere (56 million just from 1492 to 1600) and the decimation of Jews throughout Christian European history (6 million just during the Third Reich).
We can add to this list the Rape of Nanking (about 300,000, about half the city’s population), Stalin’s Holodomor (7 million Ukrainians), and of course, the Armenian Genocide (1.5 million, about half the population).
There are also more recent examples: the killing fields of Cambodia (about 25% of the population), the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina (about 200,000 Muslims), the Rwandan Genocide (800,000 Tutsi or about one-tenth of the population), and the genocide at Darfur (400,000).
“Never Again” is a directive that can never be restricted to just one people group. “Never again” — to honor all who have been victimized by genocide – requires solidarity with those being led to the slaughter.
The perpetrators of genocide will always provide “reasons” why such extreme acts are necessary. They accuse their victims of being “savages,” of controlling a “worldwide financial cabal,” of being terrorists and threats to our security. They label their victims “vermin” and cockroaches.
But let us be clear: there is no justification for the systematic decimation of a people.
Around 1943, as the Jewish Holocaust was in full swing, Raphaël Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, coined the word that would describe this crime against humanity by combining the Greek word for race— genos— with the Latin word for killing— cide.
In his 1947 Draft Convention on Genocide for the newly established United Nations, Lemkin outlines three forms of genocide.
The first is physical genocide. This is implementing a final solution designed to kill and eradicate the target group. But death doesn’t have to come immediately. Lemkin discusses the slow death that occurs when the means for life are denied, like the taking of the target group’s land, removing adequate care or shelter, or performing medical experimentation on them.
The second is biological genocide. This consists of systematically reducing the number of births within the target population. This can be accomplished through forced abortion or involuntary sterilization.
The third form of genocide is understood as cultural genocide. This includes the attempt to eradicate the language of the target group, forcing the exile of their political, religious and intellectual leaders, and destroying their cultural and religious symbols and sites.
Article II of the 1948 Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide concluded that Genocide: “means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Based on this definition of genocide, we must ask— for the sake of our own humanity— is there currently an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group of people?
Can we think today of a people who are physically being eradicated through indiscriminate bombing? A group who are constantly being murdered— without repercussions— by the recent settlers of their land for the slightest perceived offense?
A people who have been driven off their ancestral land by the millions over the past few generations and thus prevented from the livelihood once earned by their parents and grandparents? A people currently being starved by preventing humanitarian aid from reaching them?
Additionally, have their towns’ names been changed after their displacement to erase their historical presence? Have walls been erected to separate them from their holy sites?
Do they need permission, usually denied, to visit these sites? Have some of their worship spaces been turned into alcohol-serving restaurants?
Are strangers now living in the homes of their parents and grandparents, eating off their plates, sleeping in their beds? Is this displacement institutionalized?
If they migrate, do they forfeit all their property that gets defined as “abandoned”? Are those who leave ever allowed to return to the land that witnessed their birth?
If such a group exists, then what is our responsibility to them? Does fear of being mislabeled silence us, as terms signifying ancient hatred are weaponized?
Or do we stand in solidarity with the oppressed, regardless of who they are? Regardless of whether we agree with them or not?
We stand in solidarity with the oppressed not because they are holier but because they are being slaughtered. “Never again” can never succeed if so many are too afraid to speak out.
Or maybe too many simply don’t care.
Professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, and a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.