How does genocide happen?

I can get behind murder.

LMAO I was not ready for that. Anyway, genocide is usually the result of a group of people being blamed for another's problems. Once the blaming starts, it's easy to dehumanize them to the point where it makes sense to get rid of them.

Granted, I could've phrased that little better 😅.
- No it’s perfect. Your profile picture and username only serves to make it better.

You create an outgroup, portray them as subhuman, whip people into a frenzy with propaganda, and you're there.

People are also emotional, you tap into that. Anger and hate are easy emotions.

When you put it like in-group out-group, it does feel like a very human thing. We seem to be quite naturally very cliquey.

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.

You begin by classifying anyone you don't know as "the others"... They're not like you. They don't share your values. Their ways are weird.

If you use that language with your citizens long enough, it slowly seeps in that those people aren't really people at all. Eventually, killing them isn't killing humans, it's just getting rid of vermin; poisoning rats or bug-bombing your home.

You see politicians doing it every day. They're not humans...they're "illegals", is probably the most modern example. But it's insidious, and pervasive. Slowly and deliberately inuring a populous to greater and larger acts of inhumanity.

The short answer is that it doesn't just happen. It's a culmination of a process that ends with one group of people completely rejected the very humanity of another group. After that, who cares if they die.

Kill a person, it's a tragedy. Kill a million and it's a statistic.

Human brains aren't capable of actually imagining a million people.

1k 1m 1b, all are drastically greater than the number of fingers and toes available to reference. The factor between 1 and 1,000 is 1,000. Seems tangible. The factor between 1,000 and 1,000,000 is 1,000. Basically the same

You ever drown or wipe out an ant colony? Take down a wasps nest? Swat away the hoards of mosquitos annoying you?

That's genocide but they aren't what you would consider equals as a human. I'm aware some super vegan froo froos, do. But anyways. Your ability to genocide an entire village of beings you don't consider equal is where most of these feelings come from.

It's also why the playbook, heavily updated by Hitler in the past, and Israel today, say that's an important step. Dehumanize your enemy. Then wiping them off the face of the earth is a casual comment much like calling an exterminator to genocide those pesky wasps under your front porch. And I'm not being snarky when I say Israeli playbook. They have published and public books on exactly how to do this, how to wage a propaganda war, etc. It is not a secret. The US, and other 5 eye countries also follows the same aided by their intelligence agencies because it's so powerful on the majority of low intellect people. Remember half the people are below average intelligence... Many that are above average aren't interested. So you always have a minority that can critically think for themselves. The rest want it spoonfed.

Edit: Also if you want a laugh, Eddie Izzard somewhat explains it in his Dressed To Kill tour.

Any pointers on where in the 2hr show you're referencing? I've seen the "do you have a flag" and the "mass murder" parts

@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.

Genocide is just murder on an industrial scale intended to solve some social problem (at least that's a modern way of looking at it). The justification for a single murder is extended to a whole group and those people become history.

Hey, Fat Tony! You of all people should know Geno had it comin'.

He was a made guy!

Kraut I believe provides a good step by step of it using the Armenian Genocide as the case study. It's in part 1 of his series on the history of Turkey.

Imagine that you know someone who intends to kill you. You can run and hide, or you can can kill them instead. Genocide is that on a large scale.

Or at least that's the version of genocide thar is easiest to understand. There is also the Nazi version where you kill an entire people just because you hate them, not because they threaten you or have a resource that you desperately need for survival.

There is also the type of genocide that was committed against the indigenous people of the Americas. That happened over a long period of time and over two continents. It involved every type of genocide noted above at different times and places, plus the initial accidental genocide by disease (probably influenza) that killed off about 90% of the population prior to the colonizing that came later.

And just because you can't imagine it doesn't mean you wouldn't do it in the right circumstances. There is nothing more human than genocide. The only other animal that does it is chimps, if I remember correctly.

Sorry, that is a depressing note to end this comment on. Humans are scary.

This YouTube video from Sprouts explains it very well.

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.

Let's expand from murder of one person to more. People live with a family. There is another family nearby. Both families have some resources, but not enough. If one family kills the other family, the surviving family can have more resources to distribute within their family.

Ethnic groups are effectively very extended family.

It's very human, that's why it happens everywhere in history and also in at least like 4 or 5 different places right now.

We'd like to think we're nice and rational and empathetic, but we're just not as a species.

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.

Read itt get a summary Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning. It details how these police officers were dragged into being part of the WW2 genocide. Now have the government have the same thing happen in every city and it effects millions.

But you're watching a genocide happen right now. You can look at the news articles now. You can read in real time people laying the case for it, including in their original language using Google translate.

Indeed, ask the fascist, communists, racists and the religious nutters.

Fascism

Genocides predate this political ideology by millennia.
- Forms of proto-fascism predate formal Fascism by millennia, and elements of it can be found in many ancient cultures.
  
  Besides, I’m not saying that Fascism is the only way it happens, just a way it happens.

Imagine the stone age. Your tribe is running out of food, but there's a nearby tribe with plenty of it. You group up, visit them during the night, murder them all and steal their food. This is pretty much a genocide. And it's part of our nature. Always was, always will be.

But that's the thing, I guess. When is the point reached, when I want food turns into I want to destroy a whole or maybe at least a part of a people?
- Killing others is always at the back of our minds, it's just that different people have different triggers to do so. The amount of people killed doesn't really matter.

Enough people accepting it and not resisting.

Like we're seeing right now from all the liberals saying that they will vote for Biden anyways.

🤔