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Fat Tony @lemmy.world

How does genocide happen?

I can get behind murder. I feel like this, to some extend, is a genuine part of human behaviour. Even the horrific aftermath of such. But genocide truly feels inhuman to me. So I can never fundamentally understand how in history, civilizations went from point A to point B to Point Genocide. Any thoughts on this?

38 comments

  • A prerequisite is ceasing to see others as individuals but rather groups. Then the (possibly fictional) crimes of one become the crimes of all. Thusly it is justifiable to punish all.

    The important lesson here is to treat others as individuals, not as representatives of a group.

  • Usually one of the first steps is dehumanization - make your targets "less than human" in the eyes of the population. Nazis famously did it by comparing Jews to rats. You'll notice in a lot of recent Israeli press releases and media Palestinians are referred to as "inhuman animals" or some variation of that. By creating that disconnect between your targets and "normal, healthy" humans you reduce empathy and make harsher treatment seem acceptable.

    Another step is to make your audience disgusted or angry. Studies show there's a link between those two emotions and harsher judgments (although degree/method is still very much an area of research). To invoke disgust you may use words like "filthy, wretched, diseased, mindless" etc. Using the Nazi example again, they made cartoons that showed Jews as dirty, greasy and generally disgusting. To make people angry convince them your targets are "immoral, violent, bloodthirsty" and so on. Nazis leaned heavily into blaming Jews for society's ills and calling them thieves. Both effects can be made greater if your audience is conditioned to be sensitive to anger/disgust, i.e. being raised to believe in strict definitions of purity and so on. For Nazis it was the idea that Aryans were racially superior. For Zionism it often involves teaching people they are "God's chosen" with other races not having the same rights (like rights to dwell in territory claimed by Israel) because of religion.

    So if you can make your victims seem less than human and enrage or disgust your audience you convince people to do horrible things. They won't feel like they are doing it to valuable humans and often think it's a form of justice or necessary cleansing. Using the above psychological "levers" can shift perceptions so large populations view some other group as different to relatable, valid people.

  • @FatTony I agree with you. It's not part of human nature. When we look at the fossil records for the earliest humans they are fairly egalitarian.

    Genocides are always the product of intense periods of political manipulation of the genocidaire group by its elites, and almost invariably designed for resource gain.

    We have way more genocides in the modern era because the tools to get people on board with it are more advanced eg communication media. Radio in the case of Rwanda, Facebook in Myanmar.

    But even if you look back at earlier genocides eg the Rhineland Massacres you see this intense communication of propaganda (in that case religious rhetoric that also spurred on the Crusades).

    • I hear what you're saying, but there's a counterpoint to this.

      In prehistoric times, population densities were low. In mesolithic times (hunter gatherers) there were simply no concentration of people large enough to wipe out or to do the killing. Nothing could be called genocide at this time.

      In neolithic times (the first farmers) violence was definitely a part of life. Some early towns do show signs that they were destroyed. But again, population densities are low enough that the scale of violence would not be enough to call 'genocide'. It's a town burnt down with everyone murdered, not a 'people' - whatever that might mean at this time. This is not about egalitarianism - it's population density.

      However as we move to the bronze age, there are definitely signs that large scale events occur that might fit into the modern concept of genocide but archeological evidence is severely lacking. The main line I would argue is that the male lines of the neolithic farmers in Europe are hammered and almost completely replaced with the Yamnaya Y chromosomes across a huge expanse - from the east european plains to the Iberian peninsula. Genetic continuity with the neolithic farmers is maintained though indicating that male newcomers were having children with local women, and very few male locals had children. During this event the culture changed hugely - burial patterns, material goods, etc.

      I don't know if we can call this genocide - at least the full modern concept - because these changes took centuries to roll out across the expanse of Europe, but they speak to local conquests and, at the very least, the newcomers prevented local males from having their own families. At worst you can imagine a constant expansion of this new culture taking control of new areas, killing the men, taking local women as concubines and eradicating their gods, customs and ways of living. Quite a lot of genocidal checklist items ticked off there.

      By the mid to later bronze age, genicide is definitely a widespread thing, recorded in many texts.

      • @modeler thanks, interesting info, esp the Yamnaya Y thing!

        I realise I might sound a bit no true Scotsman but I don't really see anything that doesn't already arise before farming and granaries as being inherent in human nature.

        Anything we adopted that late in the game can be un-adopted.

  • Primarily greed, but secondarily the fear of becoming an out group themselves, this carrot and whip makes for a very plaint population which authoritarian, dictatorial, and/or oligarchical regimes find quite handy. Dispossessing entire groups of people unites the other groups both out of the desire to share in the stolen wealth of the "undesirables" and prevent their own groups from being targeted next.

  • Try watching The Wave (German "Die Welle") from 2008. It's based on a true story. Might enlighten you how these things can occur.

  • Someone who is quite persuasive gets wedded to an idea quite thoroughly. Others disagree with the idea but only after the first person gains enough supporters to make it happen.

38 comments