Genocide: Worse Than War: Film Analysis

Human rights are regarded as basic rights belonging to all peoples. Violations of individual rights based off of divisions such as race, religion, political ideology and gender are captured in the various documentary films we watched throughout the semester. The films “Genocide: Worse than War”, directed by Daniel Goldhagen, “Camp 14: Total Control Zone” directed by Marc Wiese, and “It’s a Girl”, directed by Evan Davis, tell of instances where human rights violations such as genocide, gendercide and wrongful imprisonment are executed. While efforts have increased to protect against these infringements, violations occur every single day. A number of organizations, movements and individuals attempt to raise awareness of these issues, as seen in films

Every human being should have the ability to express themselves in their form of choosing, and we see that strides are being made in regards to individual expression and identification throughout these films. “Genocide: Worse than War” is a documentary that covers the horrors of genocide throughout the years of human existence, and a criticism of the concept that one person or group of people perpetrate mass killings. The narrator and documentarian, Daniel Goldhagen, takes an interesting perspective, as his father is a survivor from the Holocaust. His father says of genocide “Nothing is inevitable… leaders choose to initiate killings and ordinary citizens choose to condone it” (00:08). This is the problem that Goldhagen addresses throughout the film, and suggests that just as it happened in Nazi Germany, it continues to happen around the world today, unnoticed, and entirely ignored by the organizations who have pledged to resist anything similar. Goldhagen states that in recent human history, over 100 million people have lost their lives to the atrocities of genocide, more than those who have died in combat (00:04). The leaders of these nations engrain a mentality of separation, of “us versus them”, and use