Genocide: A Historical Cycle of Power and Destruction

Though it is a perverse process, genocide happens time and time again throughout history. Genocide, which is the intent to kill a certain type of people, has continued to plague the world ever since it first started happening. The main thing someone wonders about when they hear about genocide is, why? What reason is there to kill a harmless group of people? A big problem with genocide is that once one occurs, it serves as a model for future groups of people to use for another genocide. Past genocides influence future genocides. Genocide often occurs because of power. A person, or group of people, wants to have power and control over another group. Every genocide is not the same, in that it is always the same group of people targeted; often

Making a person look less like a human being and taking away their unique features, makes them a target of violence. After dehumanizing someone, a person has less guilt when they have to kill because it is like they are not even killing an actual person but something that is deemed as less than human. Historian Philip Pomper uses the term “instrumentalization” to represent the ability to coerce an entire group of people into doing what another person wants. Pomper described instrumentalization as taking “depersonalization one step further by making subjects tools of group projects or cultural tendencies” (Pomper 287). Once dehumanizing has happened, those in power, like Hitler or the Khmer-Rouge, use instrumentalization to get the people they control to kill. The use of this tactic is apparent in the Holocaust. The thousands of Nazis who would follow Hitler’s every order did so because the mentality of a group is substantially different than the mentality of an individual. In a group, each person is seen as an instrument used to achieve a bigger objective rather than each individual having their own

They believe that a certain type of person is greater than another, and that the lesser must be eliminated in order for a population to only have that right type of person. Hitler called this process, “ethnic cleansing;” in which he wanted to “redraw the racial map of the Reich” (Cole & Symes 890). Because his ideals of what a perfect citizen should look like, be like, and act like were so beyond reason, there was no chance for someone who did not fit into these categories to be safe from Hitler’s ethnic cleansing. As the Holocaust progressed, Nazis began searching for other things, beside how they looked, to classify a person as an enemy. For example, they would look into a person’s family history to see if a relative was a Jew, and if so that person would have Jewish blood and would be classified as such. In Cambodia, the Khmer-Rouge called it purifying its citizens in order to reach their goal; which is similar to what Hitler tried to