Genocide Awareness Quotes

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Do not avert your eyes. It is important that you see this. It is important that you feel this.
Kamand Kojouri
We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. We’ve lived with them and the list wearies us. Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there’s enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it’s our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it could lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species. And all the rest – genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape and scores of daily outrages.
Ian McEwan (Machines Like Me)
The more I prayed, the more aware I became that, in order to receive God's true blessing, my heart had to be ready to receive His love. But how could He enter my heart when it was holding so much anger and hatred?
Immaculée Ilibagiza (Led by Faith: Rising from the Ashes of the Rwandan Genocide (Left to Tell))
Here's how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them. This fact bears repeating, as it does not come up at all in Anne Frank's writing. Readers of her diary are aware that the author was murdered in a genocide, but this does not mean that her diary is a work about genocide. If it were, it is unlikely that it would have been anywhere near as universally embraced.
Dara Horn (People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present)
Each day we wake up and make myriad choices that affect others. We clothe ourselves with shirts, pants, and shoes that may have been sewn together by women working in factories fourteen-plus hours a day for a nonliving wage; we buy products manufactured in ways the destroy forests, pollute waterways, and poison the air; we wash our hair with shampoos that may have been squeezed into the eyes of conscious rabbits or force-fed to them in quantities that kill; and on and on. As Derrick Jensen has written in his book "The Culture of Make Believe", "It is possible to destroy a culture without being aware of its existence. It is possible to commit genocide or ecocide from the comfort of one's living room
Zoe Weil (Most Good, Least Harm: A Simple Principle for a Better World and Meaningful Life)
So I assume that those of you who are married and thus purchased a diamond for your wife are aware of how evil and corrupt the diamond cartel is. I was not. Apparently, diamonds are almost worthless other than the value attached to them by the silly tramps that DeBeers has brainwashed into thinking 'diamond equals love.' Congratulations, ladies, your quest for the perfect princess cut not only supports terrorism and genocide, but has managed to destroy an entire continent. - speaking of blood diamonds, what the hell is going on here? Everyone is upset about African children losing their limbs? Perhaps I missed their concern about these same children during the Rwandan genocide. Here's a solution: Stop buying diamonds. No no, the avarice of the entitled whore cannot be contained. And if blood diamonds are so fucking bad, why can't I by them at a discount? Or at least get them with a death certificate or an appendage or some sort of cogent backstory that might indicate an actual meaning to this useless little cube of carbon. Clearly the diamond market is broken on multiple levels.
Tucker Max
{President] Kayibanda's government [in Rwanda] continued the persecution against the Tutsis and began to make use of the media it controlled to launch a propaganda campaign against us. In a country where more than half the people cannot read or write and very few have televisions, radio is the dominant media. The fact that some newspapers were still printing the truth didn't matter much to the part of the population that couldn't read. Most of the literate people were already politically aware. While an educated person might question what they read or hear from the media, the uneducated tend to accept it. The uneducated are more easily affected by threats and the emotional trauma that propaganda like this can create.
John Rucyahana (The Bishop of Rwanda: Finding Forgiveness Amidst a Pile of Bones)
No small part in the new awareness of the horrors of genocide was a willingness of Holocaust survivors to tell their stories. Chalk and Jonassohn note that these memoirs are historically unusual.146 Survivors of earlier genocides had treated them as humiliating defeats and felt that talking about them would only rub in history’s harsh verdict. With the new humanitarian sensibilities, genocides became crimes against humanity, and survivors were witnesses for the prosecution.
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
Far from being accompanied by any offers to resign, there was no evident embarrassment, no shame, apology, or evasion: no apparent awareness of any need for an explanation of this answer to the new president. I thought: this was what the United States had come to, sixteen years after Hiroshima. Plans and preparations, awaiting only presidential order to execute (and, I’d discovered, not requiring even that in some circumstances), for whose foreseen consequences the term “genocidal” was totally inadequate.
Daniel Ellsberg (The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner)
Hitler had studied America from afar, both envying and admiring it, and attributed its achievements to its Aryan stock. He praised the country’s near genocide of Native Americans and the exiling to reservations of those who had survived. He was pleased that the United States had “shot down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.” He saw the U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 as “a model for his program of racial purification,” historian Jonathan Spiro wrote. The Nazis were impressed by the American custom of lynching its subordinate caste of African-Americans, having become aware of the ritual torture and mutilations that typically accompanied them. Hitler especially marveled at the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
Not coincidentally, another who noted their extermination was Hitler, who had a first-hand witness of it among his closest associates in Munich. The former German consul in Erzerum, Max von Scheubner-Richter, reported to his superiors in detail on the ways they were wiped out. A virulent racist, who became manager of the early Nazi Kampfbund and the party’s key liaison with big business, aristocracy and the church, he fell to a shot while holding hands with Hitler in the Beerhall putsch of 1923. ‘Had the bullet which killed Scheubner-Richter been a foot to the right, history would have taken a different course,’ Ian Kershaw remarks. Hitler mourned him as ‘irreplaceable’. Invading Poland 16 years later, he would famously ask his commanders, referring to the Poles, but with obvious implications for the Jews: ‘Who now remembers the Armenians?’ The Third Reich did not need the Turkish precedent for its own genocides. But that Hitler was well aware of it, and cited its success to encourage German operations, is beyond question. Whoever has doubted the comparability of the two, it was not the Nazis themselves.
Perry Anderson
The fact that these statements are true doesn't mean they aren't also rationalizations that you and others use to justify questionable behavior. This uncomfortable truth is crucial to an understanding of the link between rationalization and evil--an understanding that starts with the awareness that sane people rarely, if ever, act in a truly evil manner unless they can successfully rationalize their actions. Hollywood films notwithstanding, villains who proudly embrace evil are virtually nonexistent in real life. The problem is that people are extraordinarily adept at rationalizing. This applies not only to personal misdeeds, but also to the greater sins of omission and commission associated with genocide, slavery, apartheid, war atrocities, and the denial of basic human rights and human dignity. A further problem is that in contrast to the kind of dissonance reduction shown [in studies], the process of rationalizing evil deeds committed by whole societies is a collective effort rather than a solely individual enterprise. Perpetrators are encouraged to rationalize their deeds by leaders and their propaganda machines, who insist that "'they' deserve what is being done to them," or that what is being done serves some noble end or necessary goal.
Thomas Gilovich (The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology's Most Powerful Insights)
They did not have the privilege to express themselves publicly like other social groups. People should not be allowed to disrespect marginalized communities like Bosniaks. I had to face a constant stream of bullies and haters who tried to destroy my success and contributions. Bosniaks like me encountered heartache, considerable hurdles, and pain as a product of the Bosnian War and its aftermath. If they tried to succeed or make a mark, Bosniaks dealt with people who were jealous of what they achieved. Furthermore, these people were fully aware that Bosniaks escaped the Bosnian Genocide. That fact did not stop them from being cruel and sadistic.
Aida Mandic
I encourage readers to get informed and expand their perspective on war and global events. My life has been profoundly affected by the Bosnian War and genocide. I have made it my life mission to spread awareness about the excruciating impact it had on the lives of millions of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Bosnians. My goal is to honor Bosnian people who were raped, tortured, and murdered from senseless violence. Bosnians have literally gone through every form of degradation from Serbs. They were beaten, harassed, discriminated against, threatened, thrown out of their homes, dismissed from workplaces, had their properties robbed, and had their businesses bombed. In addition, Serbs took passports, driver’s licenses, jewelry (among other valuable items), and money from Bosnian families. Religious institutions were completely obliterated. Villages were raided, pillaged, and burned.
Aida Mandic (Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina)
I encourage readers to get informed and expand their perspective on war and global events. My life has been profoundly affected by the Bosnian War and genocide. I have made it my life mission to spread awareness about the excruciating impact it had on the lives of millions of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Bosnians. My goal is to honor Bosnian people who were raped, tortured, and murdered from senseless violence. Bosnians have literally gone through every form of degradation from Serbs. They were beaten, harassed, discriminated against, threatened, thrown out of their homes, dismissed from workplaces, had their properties robbed, and had their businesses bombed. In addition, Serbs took passports, driver’s licenses, jewelry (among other valuable items), and money from Bosnian families. Religious institutions were completely obliterated. Villages were raided, pillaged, and burned.
Aida Mandic (Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Queer contagion, including the anxiety triggered by gender nonnormativity, found its viral materiality in the early 1980s. The diagnosis of gay cancer, or GRID (gay-related immune disorder), the original name for AIDS, was a vengeful nomenclature for the perversion of existing in a world held together, at least in part, by trans/queer undoing. Found by chance, queers began showing symptoms of unexplainable illnesses such as Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP). Unresponsive to the most aggressive treatments, otherwise healthy, often well-resourced and white, young men were deteriorating and dying with genocidal speed. Without remedy, normative culture celebrated its triumph in knowing the tragic ends they always imagined queers would meet. This, while the deaths of Black, Brown, and Indigenous trans and cis women (queer or otherwise) were unthought beyond the communities directly around them. These women, along with many others, were stripped of any claim to tragedy under the conditions of trans/misogyny. Among the architects of this silence was then-President Ronald Reagan, who infamously refused to mention HIV/AIDS in public until 1986. By then, at least 16,000 had died in the U.S. alone. Collective fantasies of mass disappearance through the pulsing death of trans/queer people, Haitians, and drug users - the wish fulfillment of a nightmare world concertized the rhetoric that had always been spoken from the lips of power. The true terror of this response to HIV/AIDS was not only its methodological denial but its joyful humor. In Scott Calonico's experimental short film, "When AIDS Was Funny", a voice-over of Reagan's press secretary Larry Speakes is accompanied by iconic still images of people close to death in hospital beds. LESTER KINSOLVING: "Over a third of them have died. It's known as a 'gay plague.' [Press pool laughter.] No, it is. It's a pretty serious thing. One in every three people that get this have died. And I wonder if the president was aware of this." LARRY SPEAKES: "I don't have it. [Press pool laughter.] Do you?" LESTER KINSOLVING: "You don't have it? Well, I'm relieved to hear that, Larry!" [Press pool laughter.] LARRY SPEAKES: "Do you?" LESTER KINSOLVING: "No, I don't.
Eric A. Stanley (Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable)
Affected by colonialism Awareness of war crimes Informed about apartheid Alarmed at ethnic cleansing Disgraced observing genocide Sickened concerning atrocities Repulsed regarding Imperialism Disillusionment with hate crimes Maddened through displacements This is how Man treats his fellow Man ... and our shared home? - Far, far worse #ecocatastrophe Desolation. No other animal or species on Earth need feel a deep sense of shame, with the sole exception of us repugnant human beings.
MuzWot
suspect in Nazi extermination-through-labor efforts, as prisoners made up most of the workforce in German underground factory construction. Dulles was surely aware, at least in general terms, of the criminal character of much of German war production:
Christopher Simpson (The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Forbidden Bookshelf))
Blunder Down Under (The Sonnet) Humans be human, alive and aware, not tokens of ancestral blunder. Awake, arise and right the wrongs, whether in the west or down under. We gotta fight on the beaches, We gotta fight on human grounds. This time we gotta fight as human, not as puppets to colonial clowns. Fight as brave lions for sacred inclusivity, not for saffronication as domesticated cows. Fight for justice, rejuvenated by reason, not for prejudice, decreed by apeman vows.
Abhijit Naskar (World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets)
In this unending chaos, and with the passage of time since then, the voices of the Kaurs who lived through unimaginable horror and trauma have been silenced. And once I became aware of this silence, I wanted to undo it. I wanted to ensure that the voices of these survivors were heard and their stories remembered.
Sanam Sutirath Wazir (The Kaurs of 1984: The Untold, Unheard Stories of Sikh Women)
But once you’re aware of the political power model of history, the next goal is to guard against both the Scylla and the Charybdis, against being too credulous and too cynical. Because just as the atrocity story is a tool for political power, unfortunately so too is genocide denial — as we can see from The New York Times’ Pulitzer-winning coverup of Stalin’s Ukrainian famine
Balaji S. Srinivasan (The Network State: How To Start a New Country)
In March 1942, Deichmann’s work as a manager of Italian contract labor took him to the IG Farben plant at Auschwitz, where many of the Italian workers he had enlisted were working. Even at that early date, Deichmann says, “no one could have approached the IG Farben works without becoming horribly, fearfully aware of what was happening nearby.
Christopher Simpson (The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Forbidden Bookshelf))
The absurdity of many UFO stories and of many religious visions is not a superficial logical mistake. It may be the key to their function. According to Major Murphy, the confusion in the UFO mystery may have been put there deliberately to achieve certain results. One of these results has been to keep scientists away. The other is to create the conditions for a new form of social control, a change in Man’s perception of his place in the universe. Are his theories fantastic? Before we decide, let us review a few other facts. We need to examine more closely the political connections. Paris Flammonde, in his well-documented Age of Flying Saucers, remarked that “a great many of the contactees purvey philosophies which are tinged, if not tainted, with totalitarian overtones.”1 A catalogue of contactee themes, compiled from interviews I have conducted, includes the following. Intellectual abdication. The widespread belief that human beings are incapable of solving their own problems, and that extraterrestrial intervention is imperative to save us “in spite of ourselves.” The danger in such a philosophy is that it makes its believers dependent on outside forces and discourages personal responsibility: why should we worry about the problems around us, if the Gods from Outer Space are about to solve them? Racist philosophy. The pernicious suggestion that some of us on the Earth are of extraterrestrial descent and therefore constitute a “higher race.” The dangers inherent in this belief should be obvious to anybody who hasn’t forgotten the genocides of World War II, executed on the premise that some races were somehow “purer” or better than others. (Let us note in passing that Adamski’s Venusian, the Stranger of the Canigou seen by Bordas, and many other alleged extraterrestrials were all tall Aryan types with long blond hair.) Technical impotence. The statement that the birth of civilization on this planet resulted not from the genius and ability of mankind, but from repeated assistance by higher beings. Archaeologists and anthropologists are constantly aware of the marvelous skill with which the “Ancient Engineers” (to use L. Sprague de Camp’s phrase) developed the tools of civilization on all continents. No appeal to superior powers is necessary to explain the achievements of early culture. The belief expressed by the contactees reveals a tragic lack of trust on their part in human ability. Social utopia. Fantastic economic theories, including the belief that a “world economy” can be created overnight, and that democracy should be abolished in favor of Utopian systems, usually dictatorial in their outlook.
Jacques F. Vallée (Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults)
However, in these circumstances of prevailing cultural mist there rises to view one cultural tradition which does consistently and radically unearth violent human foundations. It is only because of that tradition—as Girard asserts—that we have a progressive awareness of these foundations today. The Jewish and Christian biblical traditions are unique in speaking for the victim; and above all the figure of Jesus the Crucified has served to disclose and vindicate the multiple victims of history, those at its foundation and those throughout its course. Because of the spread of these traditions throughout the world it is now impossible to ignore the victims we make, from the victims of genocide, through those massacred in war, to those subjected to discrimination, to individual abused children. This is a massive shift in human consciousness and it has only one reasonable historical source, the Jewish and Christian scriptures and their de facto dispersion through global culture. They
Anthony Bartlett (Virtually Christian: How Christ Changes Human Meaning and Makes Creation New)
We are one step closer. The International community is aware. They are watching. Together we stand to help bring awareness to the #genocide #injustice, #defamation and #inequality that exist largely in the world w.r.t #Hindus, Hindu leaders KAILASA's SPH JGM Nithyananda Paramashivam, minority ASMT community , Hindu #women #humanity. We thank the United Nations for acknowledging the Truth for which we stand. There's a long road ahead, but today we celebrate and march forward. OM NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVOHAM Kailasa's Sri Nithyananda Paramashivam Swamiji #Nithyananda #Kailasa
Nithyananda Paramahamsa
For the first time in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, the task of subjecting the colonial legacy to reappraisal has even been adopted as an element of government policy: the programme of the fourth Merkel government states that ‘it is part of the fundamental democratic consensus in Germany that the Nazi reign of terror, the SED dictatorship and Germany’s colonial history need to be reappraised and come to terms with’. Despite this, the debate is concentrated on a narrow range of topics: for example, war crimes and genocide, and whether particular objects in museums were legally acquired. That colonialism in itself was structurally criminal gets lost sight of. For it is indeed the case that not merely were crimes committed under colonialism, as is generally conceded, but rather that colonialism itself is criminal. There is a distinct lack of awareness of this. A favourite method of approaching the issue is to draw up a balance sheet: aspects of colonialism that are considered to have been positive – the ‘civilizatory achievements’ – are set off against the excessively violent episodes. In this way, war crimes are transformed into exceptional events: the genocide committed against the Herero and Nama, for example, is above all laid at the door of the commanding general, Lothar von Trotha. This is alarmingly reminiscent of the strategy with which German colonial offcials sought to justify particularly brutal events in German South West Africa, as is depicted in my book. The blame always lay only with individuals; nobody called the racist colonial system itself into question. Pointing the finger at individuals who bore a particular degree of blame serves to push the structurally racist and structurally criminal nature of colonialism into the background.
Jürgen Zimmerer (German Rule, African Subjects: State Aspirations and the Reality of Power in Colonial Namibia)
There were actual land sites all over the planet that should be very badly contaminated by lipofuscin, because their soil has been seeded with the stuff for generations. I speak, of course, of graveyards. Think about it: hundreds of bodies put into the ground—sometimes en masse, as happened throughout Europe during the horrors of the Plague, and more recently following acts of genocide in Rwanda and elsewhere. These soils should be chockablock with aggregates from their inhabitants’ decaying bodies. Yet, to my knowledge, there was no accumulation of lipofuscin in cemeteries—and if there were, we certainly ought to be aware of it, because lipofuscin is fluorescent. Months later, when I was discussing the issue with fellow Cambridge scientist John Archer, he would put the disconnect succinctly: “Why don’t graveyards glow in the dark?
Anonymous
Joan's claim that God had France in HIs care because France was sacred to him may not be merely a medieval trope, embarrassingly old-fashioned language that today we must expunge from our vocabularies. To claim that France is sacred does not imply that only France is sacred. Throughout history, men and women have arisen everywhere who testify to the sacredness of nations. Perhaps today more than ever, we are aware that the identity and integrity of nations are supremely significant for the human race - that the facile invasion of a sovereign state and genocide are abbhorent. In this regard, the entire Jewish-Chrisian faith tradition is based on the belief that God once summoned ordinary people and through them worked extraordinary eeds for HIs own purpose, which is to bring all peoples to Himself. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and the prophets were but a few of thsoe called to establish and save the nation of Israel. But Israel was brought into existence and alter triumphed over its enimies not only for its own sake. This is made clear throughout the Hebrew scriptures: God saved the nation so that all nations might be emraced. Israel was to be "a light to the gentiles," as both Old and New Testaments reiterate. God chose the ISraelites not to dominate or control but rather to serve others. The Christian Scriptures make the point more specific: the gentiles are not excluded from God's embrace, for the light of ISrael shines on the gentiles and shows the way into that embrace. All the peoples of the world are to be brought into the capacious light of the knowledge of God's friendship.Nowhere is it implied that Israel, or any other nation, should cease to exist. Because no single person or roup represents what it means to be human, its the variety of people within a nation that gives it an irreplaceable character - its national personality. As with individuals, so with nations: it is the diversity of peoples that furthers the process of the world. Although many nations have tried, none may set itself up as the only or the predominant nation, forcing its culture, ideology, religion or political agenda on any other nation. For Joan of Arc, this was precisely what England was trying to do through its nobels, armies and war machinery. France deserved its identity and, as a symbol of its people, the king.
Donald Spoto (Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint)
vast majority of the arrests were based on fabricated crimes. We all lived in fear, aware that we could be arrested at any time, on any pretext.
Tahir Hamut Izgil (Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet's Memoir of China's Genocide)