Preventing genocide
Genocide is not unique to any one people or country. It cannot be explained, justified, or ignored. It is a mass slaughter perpetrated by humans upon other humans. It is complete human inhumanity. When perpetrators are not denying their crimes, or blaming others for their own actions, they often try to justify their crimes using religion, politics, and other manmade conditions.
Eight hundred thousand Rwandan Tutsi’s were murdered (and possibly, very many more).
Six million Jews were murdered in Europe, including 1,500,000 Jewish children.
One and a half million Armenians were murdered by the Ottoman Empire.
Three million Cambodians were massacred.
A half million people in Darfur – butchered.
Three hundred and ninety thousand in Syria, and still counting.
The list is continues…..
Genocides are currently underway in Burma, Uyghurs in Xinjiang and more. Dictators in many parts of the world would like to commit genocide. There are distinctions between the conscious, calculated slaughter in genocide and the insanity of mass maniacal murderous rampage. There has never been complete peace and there never will be, until humans no longer have the insatiable need for someone to look down upon.
It would be difficult to point to just one psychotic leader of a country as the worst of the lot, but an example on the African continent was Idi Amin Dada Oumee of Uganda. Amin was a crazed mass murderer who slaughtered indiscriminately. Anywhere from 100,000 – 500,000 random innocents were victims of his insanity. Amin murdered for sport and entertainment and to slake his thirst for blood. He wanted to be the ultimate authority as to who would live, and who would die. Amin has been entered into the annals of history by virtue of the sheer cruelty of his crimes. He was as an apex predator.
By comparison, in Lithuania, the idea of genocide was proposed by Kazys Skirpa. Skirpa longed to make Lithuania an ethnically pure state of white people, and to eliminate Lithuania’s Jewish population. Skirpa’s victims were not random. They were carefully identified, selected, dehumanized, robbed, raped, tortured, starved and overworked to death, victims of diseases erupting from their confinement, and ultimately murdered.
In Lithuania, Jewish victims were offered to Lithuanian basketball players as human prizes to be dealt with as their victorious new owners would see fit – murder. Ten Jews offered for murder for each Lithuanian on the victorious basketball team. Just as savage and barbaric; Amin ate his victims, fed them to crocodiles, and was as brutal as anything conceived by Lithuanians.
Skirpa’s coterie of murderers, thieves, racists and criminals devised the elimination of their ethnic minority, whose bodies now lie in over 200 mass death pits dotted over the Lithuanian countryside.
Genocide is not something that happens overnight or without warning. Genocide requires organization and constitutes a deliberate strategy solely for the purpose of wiping out individuals they consider undesirable, from the face of the earth.
It is the duty of all humans to prevent genocide; to do so, we must learn to recognize the signs of impending genocides. There are two primary reasons why genocide is still committed in the world:
The world has not developed the international institutions needed to predict and prevent it.
World leaders do not have the political will or desire to stop it.
To prevent genocide, international institutions need to be created to identify the start and warning signs of impending genocide. Four departments are equally needed:
- Centers for early warning
- Programs for conflict transformation
- Standing forces for rapid intervention, and
- International courts for effective punishment.
None of these programs will work unless perpetrators know they will be held to account for their deeds. Amin has been judged as a madman by history. Lithuania has elevated Skirpa into a national hero and denied his crimes. When genocide perpetrators are excused and elevated to national hero status, why would future genocidaires have any hesitation to commit crimes? They would not.
For the four programs to prevent genocide, European Lithuania fails any or all of what is needed.
Lithuania has an entire governmental department dedicated to rewriting the history of the Holocaust. This destroys any intent of an early warning system.
Lithuania has “Tolerance Centers” ostensibly to teach “tolerance” but these are also Holocaust disinformation centers. This justification allows for disinformation, denial and allows for conflict transformation by simply rewriting it into fraudulent misses.
Lithuania does have a standing force for rapid intervention, but there is the added safety of US troops on the ground to defend them from enemies, foreign and domestic.
Lithuanian Courts are rigged to rule according to the demands of the government. Twenty legal claims related to Lithuanian government holocaust revisionism were summarily dismissed by kangaroo courts designed to maintain the official cover up.
In these four programs, Uganda is substantially ahead of their Lithuanian counterpart.
I find it astounding that Europe and America hold their white European Lithuanian ally to a substantially lower standard of truth and historical accuracy. Of three of the four prevention tools, the onus falls squarely on US taxpayer funding to compensate troops in order to justify young American soldiers being put in harms way in conflicts they know nothing about, to defend a white supremist ideology.
Genocide is the far worse crime, yet Europe condemns events in Africa while ignoring Lithuania.
As the world seeks to come to grips with the legacies of its mass murderers and genociders, it needs to be careful of the lessons it draws. All too often it appears that the words of Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony, “The evil that men do lives after them,” are readily recalled and easily applied to instances of these acts in Africa. While in Europe, history takes the form of a memory void that leads to forgetting and, worse, denial, which fosters an environment that can lead to a repetition of the act. Truth is a prerequisite to prevention.
