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1 The Age of Genocide . . . something happened in the twentieth century that made it morally and psychologically possible to realize dreams of destructiveness that had previously been con¤ned to fantasy. —Richard L. Rubenstein1 Camus called the twentieth century an age of murder, but it is, more precisely, an age of politically sanctioned mass murder, of collective, premeditated death intended to serve the ends of the state. —Roger Smith2 If war is, as Alfred Nobel suggested, “the horror of all horrors, and the greatest of all crimes,”then the crime of genocide must surely be its terrible twin. While genocide, or the attempted destruction of a population group, has been a deadly companion to human society for most of recorded history, it has accelerated its locomotive pace and ef¤ciency during this century, especially in the last thirty years. Since 1968 genocides and genocidal massacres have tripled in internal con®icts, and occur so frequently in the present era they may be seen as the norm rather than the exception.3 More and more, it seems, genocide is the preferred method for destroying perceived enemies. In this century alone, many millions of people have been murdered in genocidal actions across the globe. While some have suggested that the twentieth century should be called the age of total war, it should more properly be referred to as the age of genocide, since the genocides of this century have killed more than four times as many people as all the wars and revolutions of the same time period combined.4 Even though the twentieth century is often characterized in terms of technological advancement , it is more accurately and appropriately described as an age of increasing lethality for both combatants and noncombatants alike. In short, genocide is a practice in common use today. Omer Bartov puts it this way: The mechanized, rational, impersonal, and sustained mass destruction of human beings, organized and administered by states, legitimized and set into motion by scientists and jurists, sanctioned and popularized by academics and intellectuals, has become a staple of our civilization, the last, perilous, and often repressed heritage of the millennium.5 Speci¤c examples from the modern era abound. Twentieth-Century Genocide The ¤rst recognizable outbreak of genocide in this century began in 1915 during the First World War, when between six hundred thousand and two million Armenians were killed in Turkey. Long persecuted and politically and socially marginalized, the members of the Armenian minority were vulnerable scapegoats for many of Turkey’s ills. After the Ottoman government was overthrown by the Young Turks, the new regime targeted the Armenian population for destruction as enemies and opponents of Turkish nationalism. In an orchestrated series of mass arrests, deportations, and massacres, the three-thousandyear -old Armenian population of Turkey was largely destroyed.6 Clearly the most well known example of genocide in the twentieth century is the Nazi government’s attempt to “cleanse” the greater German Reich of Jews and other “undesirables”during the 1940s through the deportation and murder of roughly six to eight million Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs in what became widely known as the Holocaust.7 Less well known is the Nazis’ implementation of a covert euthanasia program in the 1930s, known as the T4 project, which killed several thousand mentally and physically handicapped German citizens.8 This practice of killing those who were de¤ned as Lebensunwertes Lebens, or “life unworthy of life,” served as a model for the Holocaust. This program, the ¤rst to experiment with gassing, was halted after widespread protest by German clergy and citizens.9 One bishop’s letter to Wilhelm Frick, Germany’s interior minister, is representative of these remonstrations: What conclusions will the younger generation draw when it realizes that human life is no longer sacred to the state? Cannot every outrage be excused on the grounds that the elimination of another was of advantage to the person concerned? There can be no stopping once one starts down this decline. God does not permit people to mock Him. Either the National Socialist State must recognize the limits which God has laid down, or it will favor a moral decline and carry the state down with it.10 One wonders whether the subsequent Holocaust could have taken place if concerned citizens and religious leaders had taken a similarly strong stand. However , minimal opposition to the persecution of their Jewish neighbors was forthcoming. The Holocaust itself remains a horri¤c example of the deadly ef¤ciency that modern...

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