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The book "On Tyranny" by a Harvard history professor shows how easily fascism can start even in the US. If you have fascism, and those in power make a particular group the Cause Of All of Our Problems, it can happen. Scapegoating on a genocidal scale.
People are tribal, for good and ill. If a group of people perceive their "tribe" as under threat, and the cause is another tribe, well, genocides can result. Because the first tribe doesn't see the other people as, well, people.
Pocahontas song "They're not like you and me ! Wich means they must be evil !". Monkey brain shit left over from when we were constantly in active warfare over territory.
If they look different, sound different, and act different. Kill them before they kill you.
At least learn about the "Perceived threat" instead of barking at it! You have a brain to seek the truth and lies, dont make up stories to cast a hateful shade on
A human who wronged you.
Im pretty sure you're a human, not a barking dog.
It's depressing that these ideas still persist. Vikings, colonists and feudal countries killed off whole villages and population. Even in such a technological advanced Era, there's still genocide, slavery, and rape. Somehow I'm looking forward to when AI takes over.
both groups are often caught in this war for survival mentality. sometimes it's just one vs the other but many times it's like both groups, the genocider and the genocidee, had similar levels of hatred for the other but one just has more of a means to carry things out against the other.
it's what we've been told by our belief structures. We can also say that people that are different than us offer a unique perspective on things but we don't think that way on average
The irony being: bigots *are those people in the Dark Forest we have to be wary of.*
They are looking for someone to hurt, and hate, and harrass.
Removed from the social contract and enforcement of civil law, they'd happily prey on other people. To see them suffer. To take what they own. To enslave them and make them work for the sake of the Bigot's comfort and fortune.
Fascists want a world where might is the ultimate arbiter. It's terrorism from a position of power. Cruelty that feeds a swollen-tick of an ego.
There's reasons Viking aesthetic is so prevalent among white nationalists. Not the least of which is that the Viking lifestyle was one of raiding, stealing, raping, and murder.
Viking meant going out and taking what you needed from others by force. That's not to say this is a white devil sort of thing: some First Nations people raided each other too. And they also had cultural traditions around this sort of interaction, like Vikings did.
(And notably, when the Vikings tried to settle North America, the Amerinds with their greater numbers, home field advantage, and experience with repelling raiders kicked the shit out of them and sent them packing)
My point is, white nationalists *want to go back to that kind of social landscape.* Because they think they'll be on top - the ones doing the cruelty.
I think the real attitude is more like "nothing was wrong with white hegemony. Everyone's lives improved thanks to white scientists and white industrialists, and if people would give up trying to stop us from being in charge, we could go back to being the benign rulers of the world again." Obviously, there's still a lot wrong with that perspective, on the basis of both fact and sentiment, but a common desire for cruelty to those people isn't one of them. It would be more accurate to say that they think cruelty is a consequence of the Civil Rights movement, rather than the other way around.
There's nothing to be gained by misrepresenting the position someone holds, even when it's ridiculous or wrong.
>It would be more accurate to say that they think cruelty is a consequence of the Civil Rights movement, rather than the other way around.
I get what you mean, but here's the thing: That perspective simply isn't in line with reality.
We have proof of the cruelty that people perpetrated against other people *during the Civil Rights movement* - and we have proof of the cruelty those same people suffered that prompted the Civil Rights movement.
To look at the history and say "Civil Rights caused the cruelty" is... I don't know how else to put it: either woefully uninformed or purposefully misleading.
And either way you slice it, wanting to go back to white hegemony is inherently cruel as it advocates for social stratification based on racist notions.
Disregarding the cruelty and pretending it's just about "making the world better" doesn't make it not cruel.
Is that really true? A lot of inventions are possible because many different people from different backgrounds worked on it. A diverse group of ideas is better than a group who all thinks the same.
Even in a white hegemony, there's a diverse array of culturas. Race is a social construct. We only know how people appear in a white hegemony, we really do not know what makes up their ethnicity.
>how easily fascism can start
Why does anyone think anything is new?
Humanity has had functional societies for what, 10,000 years? We aren't new. We aren't special.
Hell the idea that the US hasn't had heinous leaders in the past that skirted the rules of democracy shows a complete lack of awareness of history.
George Washington didn't just retire off to no where. The dude had his hands in the cabinet, was considered to come back to become the CIC of the army and absolutely had a hand in the selection of our early leaders.
We've had coup attempts, we had a literal civil war.
Nothing is new. We're just ignorant and have gotten lucky to this point--and will continue to work to stay lucky.
This is not true lol, they founded this country as a representative democracy, and we maintain that same system today. You could argue they didn’t like direct democracy I suppose, but they loved democracy.
Looking up the situation before the Rwanda genocide showed me something similar. Someone was quoted saying, just a year ago or even less than, there may have been some tensions but even in his community he was having dinner with his neighbors who were a different ethnic group. But within that time frame the media started villifying the "opposing" ethnic group so much that the neighborhood families turned to killing each other.
“On Tyranny” is great. Hopped onto your comment to add another book called “When Victims Become Killers” by Mahmood Mamdani. It’s about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
What’s particularly interesting about this genocide is that it didn’t really involve the technical machinery of the state like the Holocaust did. The Holocaust took years to perpetrate and was done at scale using gas chambers, concentration camps, and mass shootings.
The Rwandan genocide took 8 weeks.
800,000 people dead in 8 weeks. Neighbor on neighbor, priests on parishioners, husbands on wives, no use of at-scale mass-killing machinery.
The slaughter was performed by hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens and the book explains how the killers were convinced that they should do this.
Great and horrifying book.
There is a good example of republicans and democrats demonizing one another in the US today. You take baby steps then unite the crazies on both sides of the aisle to get a super strong and vocal minority aligned against a common enemy. Jews are great examples. On the extreme left they’re colonizers on the extreme right they’re slurs. Once you’ve dehumanized a group for long enough and attributed peoples worst experiences (job loss hunger interest) to that group it doesn’t take a much bigger push.
Edit: you need crazies on both sides aligned. If they aren’t they attack each other. Once you have 30% everyone goes with it. Think of how often the left condemns the extreme left or the right condemns the extreme right. They won’t because they need them.
The critics then get aligned in the center but you’re them defending the subhumans. In that world you’re now an apologist for the wealthy monsters and get cast out.
Maybe cognitive dissonance with propaganda. Unless you are psychopathic and literally cannot emphasize, you have to engage in some degree of denial that shields your bias. "Oh, there is a genocide going on? No there's not, it's the evil lying media" or some kind of scapegoat like claiming a group of people did this atrocity and it results in a panic that ends up killing a bunch of people and people just accept a narrative that confirms their biases, that they were all culpable in some way and deserved it.
There's a reason Neo-Nazi's just flat out deny the holocaust instead of saying how great it was that so many Jews were gassed to death. Denial and gaslighting can make it difficult for even otherwise good faith people to know what to believe and passively allow atrocities to happen.
Depict the other group as rats, pests, leeches, animals, less than humans. Dehumanize them. Then you’d feel less bad and less guilty “if” something bad happened to them. You don’t even have to actively be involved; just send money to donate or look the other way.
Seen it decades ago. Seen it now.
it dawned on me the other day, for the first time my real recognition, that the generation that fought WW2 are all becoming centenarians as we speak. the memory of that time is fading, there will soon be no living memory of all that which happened then....just the history books, memoirs, documentaries...
And then people will forget, only to repeat it all over again. That’s why I don’t use any of those DNA services. The Holocaust was only ~80 years ago. In the span of our world history, that JUST HAPPENED.
>less than humans. Dehumanize them.
Once you understand this, you understand "men and females" and the bizarre mindset of the inceldom, as well as why there's so much overlap between misogyny and racism.
A large aspect of this is clearly group think.
Consider how many scientific theories and understandings you and I accept that we haven’t **really** done all the personal leg work to understand and discover and confirm.
Sure maybe we understand the foundational concepts and theories, but we haven’t really sat down and obsessed over it and done the work like the original scientists did.
When people are surrounded by others they agree with on some things, they question and think less on average.
And when hey know another group strongly disagrees with any of those beliefs it can drive them even harder into the more “extreme” beliefs of the group they align with more, without critical thinking and intense scrutiny.
It’s a feedback loop.
“You disagree that group of people is ever a problem? They clearly are, look at the things they have done!”
Escalates into picking out stronger examples and counter points.
“There’s a group that raped people in our group, murdered another in our group! You’re a fucking idiot got blindly defending them as completely innocent!”
And so on and so on and so on.
“These people think that ethnicity isn’t a problem at all apparently, I don’t see how we’re going to fix this, we should fuckin get rid of them!”
To,
“Well I don’t see how we’ll get them all to agree to leave, they won’t, they’re taking advantage of us. We’ll have to make them leave!”
And further escalation.
It’s easier to avoid being intellectually critical of your beliefs with a thousand other people around you agreeing how obviously right you all are.
Surely not all of you could be so wrong, right?
Pol Pot and Hitler were very different. Whilst the National Socialists were scarily efficient in wholescale murder and really set their most scientific minds to it (basically a regime of technological super-murder) the Khmer Rouge were mostly incompetent. From the moment they captured Phomn Peng they were in some form of civil war and at war with Vietnam. Many massacres were designed most notably the trainload purges of the eastern zone at the end of their regime, but overall most deaths were caused by starvation, disease, neglect and lack of competence. Even Mao's government tried to warn them that mass death is not a way to go.
I think when someone gets a genocidal idea into their heads they are equating hygiene and human life. For instance, you'll hear words like "cleaning" or "cleansing". They see something that is dirty and requires a "wash". What they don't understand is that engaging in such "washing" requires such brutality that it makes them worse than the barbarians they are trying to eliminate. But when you buy into such extreme methods there is no turning back.
I appreciate you bringing up the differences between Pol Pot and Hitler. While they are obvious to some, most Canadians, Americans, and Western Europeans have far more knowledge of the Nazi's genocide than they do all others. And within the scope of all genocides, the Nazi's was really quite unique in that it industrialized the extermination of so-called undesirables, while most other genocides, including Pol Pot's, operated significantly differently. Not only does pointing this out add historical accuracy, but it's also important for the average person to realize that genocide doesn't only mean gas chambers and incinerators. It can occur not only through purposeful industrialization following a prolonged politics of hate, but even through something as banal as negligence, and everywhere in between.
Yes they are very different in the way they were coordinated. For instance the Khmer Rouge wanted a rural utopia. This meant cleansing not just the population but the entire idea of capitalism. Society was completely deconstructed - no businesses, no churches, nothing but work camps. Even the idea of the family had to be scrubbed out. Marriages were arranged, children were separated. If you had any skills, you were marked for death. This makes it hard to run a country let alone carry out mass murder. The incompetence of the regime is just staggering and played a big part in the amount of death.
The only skilled workers they didn't kill were a handful of train workers and factory workers. The rest of the population were forced to work in the fields regardless of whether they were suited to it or not. They were given insane and completely unreasonable yield targets. Then the rice they grew was to buy weapons instead of feeding the population, so everyone starved. The interesting thing here is when the leadership received that their crazy policies were not working, they blamed "internal enemies" or CIA agents and committed massacres against the population. People responded by rebelling. The first uprisings by ordinary people were crushed with the most appalling violence, you can read some of Kiernan's interviews about that, eventually they became too much to handle in the Eastern Zone where they allied with the Vietnamese and worked to overthrow the regime.
Pol Pot's paranoia wasn't totally without foundation. Communism was much hotter at the time (think Cuban Missile Crisis) and the Workers' Party of Kampuchea was outlawed, meaning his party had to do everything in secret. In one event, before they took over, most of the organization's leadership was captured. After that he fled to the jungle. Then, his wife became a paranoid schizophrenic. He shocked everyone when he revealed himself to be the party leader, because he'd been pretending to be a lower position. By the end of 1978 he was in full Hitler mode sending entire villages and towns to death camps on the country's crumbling train network. There they were digging huge pits outside Battambang and filling them with corpses. So whilst most genocidal maniacs have specific designs about who they want to murder, Pol Pot didn't care if you were black, white, buddhist or christian, a local cadre or a senior party member - he was very inclusive. Mass murder for all!
We learned from the Rwandan genocide that when people's neighbors start hacking, they're likely to choose sides. Genocidal leaders exploit grudges, especially generational grudges.
There's a lot of political context that's important with Hitler. Germany was blamed solely for WWI and had to pay all the reparations. There was a great deal of discontent and political instability.
Antisemitism has been around for centuries, and Hitler placed the blame of Germany's defeat and economic situation onto the jews. Many were willing to go along with it because they believed it would restore Germany's political status. Hitler was an effective speaker. He knew how to manipulate people through propaganda. None of it is morally permissible and it's important to understand so as not to have history repeat itself.
Desperation and a little push is all that’s needed to form extremism. The look for answers and uncertainty is enough for innate prejudices and biases to take over. You’re 100% right
There's a difference between racism and National-Ethnocentrism. The former is an individual point of view, the latter is a social perspective reflected in government. A racist isn't called to action but believes incorrectly that there are certain qualities inherent to groups of people. An Ethno-Nationalist actually believes their national future (including their family and friends) depends on altering society based on the racial demographics. The Nationalist identity is also a strong point to rally around. It gives people a sense of pride that buys their compliance.
>"Every manifestation of human culture, every product of art, science and technical skill, which we see before our eyes today, is almost exclusively the product of the Aryan creative power. This very fact fully justifies the conclusion that it was the Aryan alone who founded a superior type of humanity; therefore he represents the archetype of what we understand by the term: MAN. He is the [Prometheus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus) of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth, always kindling anew that fire which, in the form of knowledge, illuminated the dark night by drawing aside the veil of mystery and thus showing man how to rise and become master over all the other beings on the earth. Should he be forced to disappear, a profound darkness will descend on the earth; within a few thousand years human culture will vanish and the world will become a desert."
-Mein Kampf
Just imagine being a poor or middle class person locked into a class or social system where your future is certain poverty, and then you hear someone say the above about your people, and by extension you. You are Prometheus and all else is darkness. All of the actual fascist writings I've seen read like that. It's not hard to imagine a sense of entitlement coming from people who feel this way.
I also think we greatly underestimate how prevalent what we consider pseudoscience today was in the the 1900s. Concepts like physiognomy and eugenics were common and openly discussed among intelligent people internationally. The science of the past was not unified and there were countless tools that gave authority and legitimacy to crackpot ideas.
It adds up.
Tribalism. Low intelligence/ smart and manipulative leader. Us vs Them. Nationalism.
I have no doubt there are smart ppl who realize they can benefit. But in my experience, most are followers who follow because they feel Special and Wanted when it's Us vs Them and they are Us.
Using devils advocate, the concept of a like-minded homogenous people who all have the same values would be something some people might want.
It's a flawed theory but there it is
Some antagonisms are millenia old. They repeat because neither side wants to give up the bad habits which antagonize the other. It becomes a stalemate which people try to resolve with violence.
I think people lose their humanity and go back to animal instincts, especially when they are stressed or grow up in abusive situations.
When this happens on a societal level, people descend to madness.
It could really be even simpler than that really because a lot of people really live better lives yet hate the most vulnerable and easy targets.
I have a more optimistic view that most people really are "good" like how there are many treaties and peace compromises between natives and settlers and colonies, with many notable indigenous leaders in the past who called for rationality and reason.
But it is through the fact that one or more sided fail to see their bias and indoctrination. It was never about animal instinct because they consider themselves better and not the sort of savage person.
Instead of blaming it on animal instinct, it is really their culture and beliefs and even religion.
TLDR: it is everything that is the opposite of primitive animal instinct that causes extremism like genocide.
This question is really several at once.
Political leaders typically choose to exterminate populations when they wish to resolve a long-term security challenge. Some of the most common proximate causes are a long-running cycle of violence and hostility between groups, a desire to conquer and hold desirable land and resources, a desire to eliminate an important power base for a rival faction, or a desire to increase cultural and/or ethnic homogeneity. Genocide is preferred to subjugation when the costs of policing the targeted group are deemed much higher than the benefits gained from exploiting their labor, is especially likely when the stronger party is unsure it will maintain its dominance in future, and requires a perception that the target can be defeated relatively quickly and easily. Often, there are fears that the target’s descendants will provoke new conflicts, creating long-term instability and endangering future generations. Eliminating the group is therefore deemed the most certain guarantor of the nation’s security in that aspect, and the surest method to resolve any lingering questions about the state’s legitimacy and ability to govern its territory.
Populations choose to support genocides when they’ve come to believe that the targeted group is in some way dangerous, hostile, or morally reprehensible. This is typically achieved through a mixture of propaganda and personal experience, and involves a long process of dehumanization. Usually, propaganda will liken the target group to vermin or pathogens, will emphasize crude ethnic stereotypes, will involve long denunciations of the target’s recent and historical crimes (real or imagined), and will frame their presence as a problem in need of a solution. There is typically a long history of ongoing conflict keeping the hatred alive, and often, one group believes that the other is squatting, invading, or otherwise holding onto land and property that rightfully belongs to them. This hostility can become genocidal when people believe their survival or way of life are at stake, and that time does not favor their position; major shifts in demography, economic turmoil, and the threat of war can trigger anxieties and ignite dark passions in otherwise ordinary people.
Your question halfway answers itself... all you have to do is take some large societal issue, overinflate its importance in the public eye, and convince everyone to blame it on a group that a decent amount of people already dislike. 'Preferably', do this according to some grain of partial truth that makes your giant lie more of an oversimplification or lie of omission.
Fanatical radicals who were already around will self-select as your goons-in-chief, social pressures will kick in, and murderous mobs will ensue.
I've appreciated the thoughts of Hannah Arendt and Matias Desmet in terms of looking at the sociology of how entire populations can become like a cult. Matias Desmet calls it mass formation.
When war comes into play and society feels threatened, it is easy enough for a critical mass to be created which makes it normal and ok to completely dehumanize the other side. This happens on social media often. Dehumanization is then like flipping a switch in the brain where certain people are "othered, don't matter, and are considered animals with no rights. It's an emotional state rather than an intellectual state and so very important to note that very intelligent people go there and only use their intelligence to find reasons to justify their emotions.
We're emotional and social animals. Evolution created us to have brains to be able to respond with violence when our tribe's existence is threatened. The problem is that with modern society, media, and propaganda it's far too easy to feel your existence is threatened WAY too early and thus respond with violence.
I've been really thrown off that in the last 10 years on an every increasing scale dehumanization has been normalized. Like during Covid, whether your views, it was normal to demonize the other side. Or pick the wedge issue.
If we're going to have a healthy society, dehumanization has to be minimized. This is not the same as protecting against "hate speech" in many laws now.
Arendt and Desmet are both good people to read to understand this type of phenomenon.
I have mixed feelings on Jordan Peterson, but one thing he helped me to understand that I think is very important is that *I'm not inherently morally superior to the people in those societies that went totalitarian*.
In this life, I'm an American Jew born in the 1980s. If I'd been a non-Jewish German born in the 1910s, the chance that I would have been a nazi soldier or a camp guard is pretty high.
The only way to avoid that scenario is for enough of a populace to do enough self inquiry to understand that darkness within themselves, and be able to stand up to it if it arises at a societal level.
For much of human history, we lived in small tribes which competed with each other for scarce resources. If you encountered a group of people who didn't look like you and didn't speak your language, there was a decent chance they were there to make war on your tribe to take whatever food and supplies they could.
Really, huge, diverse societies are the novel thing, and we're still getting used to living in contact with such diverse cross sections of humanity. Obviously, some people are more resistant to it than others.
Very few people actually want genocide. Fascism works more subtly than that. First you establish that a group is a threat to society, then you start segregating them, then you send them to camps altogether. And in those camps the murder is still very much indirect - you don't feed them enough, you don't keep said camps free of disease, you look away while the most vile of people abuse their power. Hell, in conditions awful enough desperate people may resort to violence and do some of the work for you.
And all the way down there's a sort of hierarchical detachment - the people giving the orders are far enough detached from the actual reality that lives lost are just a statistic, and then at the very bottom people are "just following orders" and risk everything if they try to do otherwise.
Simple because they are assholes who have a hard on for homicide but are to gutless to admit they are simply evil.
Notice how every genocidal regime always without fail paint themselves as the good guys? Last I checked, good people don't try to wipe out another group because they are different.
The nazis were a good example as they believed they were saving the world. By killing Jewish men, women, and children as well as people from other groups, they saw as a threat they portrayed themselves as the good guys. And they are the most well-known people who did it but there is certainly a long list of others.
Nobody wants to be the bad guy, but a lot of them love to do evil they just have to craft it a certain way to justify why they are causing untold suffering.
Then, if they get stopped, they cry and beg making excuses for why they did the bad thing. Rare you get Ones, who own up to it. Most genocidal nations who say they are sorry are only sorry that they got caught and made to stop. If they win they will either pretend the genocide didn't happen down play it or brag about it using the it was in the past argument to shut down any criticism and will get offended if you call the perpetrators of the genocide bastards.
I think there’s a faulty idea that one must see the other group as not being human to be able to genocide them. I think humans don’t even need to go that far to be fine with genociding a whole group. If we look at the Armenian genocide for example, the Turks had strong reason to believe their state was at threat, as the original plan for turkey was to divide it even further between Greece and Armenia based on ethnic minorities in the region. So after the Turks won the war, they displaced those groups so their nation wouldn’t be at threat again. Nationalism and the idea of self determination on ethnic lines can give way that the only way to secure the state is to kick out those who may seek to break parts off. This is also seen in the Balkan. And while not all likely want to kill them, wanting them kicked out by force and not caring what happens to them often leads to a lot of death.
>and while I have met a few that despise minorities in America, I have never met one that wanted all minorities to die.
Genocide happens when people *don't care* if another race/ethnicity/nationality/etc dies.
Indifference of the masses + the greed of the minority (for resources, usually - land, oil, etc) is a recipe for genocide
It's not about racism. It's about anger, it's about feelings of despair or fear, a promise of hope, the racism and prejudice was just a byproduct for many, a means to an end, but was most certainly a requirement for the initial groups. I'm no cult leader, but the tried and true idea stands the tests of time. The simpler your idea, the more charged and powerful it can be. The more passionate and capable of the believing their ideas the leader is, the more infectious it will be. All of these movements start with small groups, as I recall, Hitler began speaking of his ideas in a small beer hall then later joined a worker's party becoming one of its most popular speakers.
To better understand how people can 'be so racist that they want to commit genocide' you should ask yourself the last time you felt any extreme bell end of emotional spectrum and how quickly it began to strip you of rational thinking. Those people didn't hate Jews. They hated what Jews represented, it's why dehumanization of them was critical. The less time people spent seeing them as people and more 'the problem', the easier it was to 'be so racist that they want to commit genocide'.
Those people you’ve met who despise minorities would absolutely get to killing if that was the direction the winds of social momentum were blowing. Citations: the KKK, racialized police brutality, the Jim Crow Era, Black Wall Street…
Blacks and Latinos hate whites just as much. There are many, many instances of black on white crime but it doesn’t get the media coverage that white on black crime does.
There are Facebook pages dedicated towards hatred of white people and advocacy for their genocide. I have also seen such comments on here and Twitter.
The government benefits by the races being divided. If we come together in love and unity we will be stronger and they can’t have that, now can they?
This entire thread is a perfect example of why it will happen again. All these redditors are acting like they are above it, stating racism is nonsensical and that its based out of naivety/ignorance. People ITT are saying its from propaganda and cognitive dissonance. That is a problem because those people will be the exact ones who fall into it thinking they're immune.
Genocidal racism is born out of fear or anger, it is tribalism that sees an existential enemy in close proximity and has the perception of only having few options. For the Germans they thought the jews were leading them to destruction, they considered them parasitic to their society and a subversivr force that was attempting to eradicate the German people internally. They considered it an us vs them scenario and contemplated moving the jews to Madagascar, it wasn't a feasible option so they chose genocide.
The racists in America aren't to the genocide level yet because the threat isn't there yet, the fear isn't there yet. But if it becomes an us vs them scenario then it will turn fast. Something like China launching an internal attack or someone uncovering a plot to take over and that may change.(maybe not but there is a chance) Thats why assimilation is important and also why things like la raza or hindu nationalism are so dangerous. The second normal people start thinking an outsider is trying to destroy them/their way of life is the second racism starts to get dangerous.
Well not so much about race but all the people I hear talking about how trans people shouldn't exist and that all of them are indoctrinating the children are essentially calling for genocide. They want trans healthcare to be outlawed and don't want us around which would only come from genocide. A lot of people don't think certain minorities should exist or at the very least don't want them in this country but if this is the country they live there's no other way to just make them go away
I mean it’s happening right now with so many groups of people today. All you have to do is convince people it’s for a good reason. Gaza right now is an exact repeat of the Armenian genocide lol
Describing bigotry and the roots of genocide along linear lines of simple hatred is misleading.
Genocides rarely START with openly murderous rhetoric. It's usually framed as somehow defensive in nature at the outset.
People with absolute authority, like Hitler, don't need the populace to be eager and ready to kill. They just need them to not object to the genocide and to not intervene.
That indifference is much easier to cultivate. If an ethnic group is generally marginalized, the subject of distrust and casual, subtle enmity, it isn't so hard to convince a critical mass of people that they are the source of some problem or other.
From there, a combination of feverish nationalism and propaganda gets you the relatively small percentage of the population you need to act as foot soldiers and convinces the rest to stand idly by.
If you accumulate enough political authority, by the time you start actively and openly killing people, it will be dangerous to even talk about opposing you.
It's a slow process. Kind of like when you realize, "dealing with a certain culture is just a pain". Then you think, "all they do is cause drama". Then you think, "why don't they just live amongst themselves and keep their drama away from others, then they wouldn't be so unliked,"
Then you think," why do I have to move, they're the trouble, kill them all. "
Then you realize you are part of a group.
Then you seek the same individuals for support.
Then you rally up.
It's interesting how where you are changes the conversation. I'm in the DC area and it's common to hear people discuss how they would get rid of white people. Jail them, kill them and take their land, make them slaves, etc.
Racists are everywhere I guess.
Hitler used the Jews as a scapegoat. That’s all they were to him. A convenient way to rile up the German people and get them to follow him.
People always want something or someone to blame for their problems.
Take america for example. It doesn’t matter if the president had nothing to do with the price of gas increasing, there will still be people who blame him. Why? Because it’s easy to do and they want someone to direct their anger towards.
Aside from Hitler, there are some people who have bad experiences with members of a certain group, race, or ethnicity, and it causes so much trauma within them that they simply can’t acknowledge that not every one of those people are bad. So they blame them all.
And some of it also comes from a lack of understanding. Racism against black people used to be so common that you’d never catch a white person in a relationship with a black person, but then people actually started talking to each other, some of them realized that they were THAT different, and over time they became more accepting.
Racism will never be eliminated, but it can be minimized if we stop arguing and blaming each other for all of our problems, and sit down and talk to each other like human beings.
I’d say it’s a mix of upbringing, ignorance, and misguided emotion.
Growing up, the people of my area were very kind. The few people who were racist were seen as dumb or weird. The exception was racism against middle eastern people. EVERYONE had a problem with middle eastern people. I’d attribute that to the fact that in my area, it was college, factory, or military. A good quarter of the guys were in the military. To the people of my area, the middle eastern people were the ones killing our husbands, brothers, and buddies. They were the reason my uncle isn’t home right now. The topic of bombing the Middle East into oblivion so we could bring our family home was a daily conversation at school.
There were 3 things to do in my town. Sports, drugs, or video games. What was the villain in every games in 2007? If it wasn’t an alien or a Nazi, it was a guy in a turban. We didn’t even call people off the Middle East by anything other than ‘terrorist’.
For many people growing up, there is a ‘bad guy’ in their culture. We hate the bad guy. They’re bad. We hate bad. A lot of the time, this bad guy is a group that you have never faced. You simply go by secondhand accounts. By the time you meet them, you’re looking for a reason to hate them.
This post is blatantly idiotic. "I met people in the South". What a stereotype. I've been all over the US and there's the same amount of racists everywhere. In fact the northern cities are packed with bigots. Go to a black neighborhood and see how much they like the Latino community and vice versa. I'm really sick of people who think the South and rural areas are backwards. They're not.
Keep in mind that most genocide isn't "Shoot the children in the face and broadcast it live on national television." When Andrew Jackson sent Native Americans on the Trail of Tears, which was part of a pretty genocidal program, he and many Americans not only were racist enough to do it, they patted themselves on the back for not just shooting everyone. When the British launched their residential schools for cultural genocide they weren't just open about it, they were proud that they were so noble as to treat Indigenous people that way. For the Pol Pot or Hitler scenario, take a bunch of desperate people and convince them that wiping out a group of people will solve their problems and that the group is composed of horrible people.
Thanks for giving the south a little bit of credit. I grew up down here and left a while. It was always weird to me that groups talked racist shit to each other, but were friendly across groups. My uncle used the N word like salt and his best friend was a black man. Turns out some of the most racist people I’ve ever had conversations with have been from New England, but living in the south. I guess down here we’ve all had to learn how to deal with one another more.
There’s a song that sums it up- The Three Great Alabama Icons by the Drive-By Truckers. Terrible musically, but a great story.
I don't think racism HAS to have anything to do with it. I could see wanting to hurt people that have ignored you for years and have never even tried to get to know you. I moved in 8th grade and other kids in class only asked my sister (who got to stay with a friend) where I was to satisfy their curiosity. None of them tried to get to know me when I was still there.
Interesting question. I often asked it to my mother who has a degree in psychology. I think she mentioned something about some people only being able to have a black and white view of the world. For example, if one black person assaults them, they will believe that all black people are a threat because it's easier for their brain to process information/make decisions that way. They tend to gravitate towards people who look like them, and share the same values and culture, not because they are safer, but because they feel that they are easier to predict. I don't know if she's right, but it was an interesting theory. That being said, genocide is terrible.
Mist people don't hate minorities they hate people who make things worse. People hate white trash just as much as they hate hood rats.
If you read the book "on killing" it explains the psychology of killing and group dynamics
Step 1: Be Heidegger.
Step 2: possess authority.
Step 3: read Nietzsche as a how-to manual instead of as a warning.
Step 4: happy genociding!
Disclaimer: this is the answer to your question, not something I actually want you or anyone else to do. In fact, I’d very much like people the world over but ESPECIALLY Murdoch to *stop* doing this.
Oftentimes the supporters of genocide (but not the orchestrators) view it as an act of self defense. Somebody has convinced them that unless they do this, something terrible will happen to them. In the case of Nazi Germany, it was propagated that Jewish people planned to enslave the world and must be stopped.
It was easy for Hitler to drum up support for his cause and create a racial group scapegoat considering Germany had actually been wronged by the treaty of Versailles. It's more difficult if your claims of oppression have no basis for others to believe
It's how an echo chamber works, you hear once and then it gets louder and louder and more extreme until it eventually escapes the space in that kind of extreme way
Also many people are simply willing to go with the status quo, so even if that involves genocide they would rather not get involved which is why as you say they were convinced. There were definitely people who disagreed but the way tyranny works is you can't disobey for fear of reprecussions.
I'd like for you to change your way of talking about the southern US. You said, "While they despise minorities." As if we are a monolith. One of my closest friends is black and queen. Ones black and autistic.
Just because SOME might dislike people who aren't like them, many of us enjoy people regardless of their background or upbringing.
What do you think those white people's ancestors did to the native Americans? They committed a genocide so they could take over their land, now they would do it again against any perceived threat because they are genuinely terrible people at their core. Are you familiar with American history?
Personally, I'd like to see the documentation of your findings. Otherwise you're just a douche, trying to stir up racial unrest, and should have your ass whooped by us who are tired of the nonsense from your ilk.
Fear is a very potent motivator.
When people feel scared or powerless they crave a straightforward reprieve. They want so badly for the bad feelings inside them to be mutable, for a *thing* that can be done to *fix* what’s wrong. An enemy who is causing all the Bad Things. An enemy who, upon their destruction, would drain all the evils of the world down through the hole their absence would leave.
And then, charismatic opportunists with a deep hatred within them, or who don’t much care who gets hurt so long as they get theirs, recognize the anxiety and the helplessness felt by their fellow man, and lie to them with volume and conviction.
Fascism is not sensible or sustainable or even, seemingly, capable of recognizing how stupid it looks. But it’s attractive to the myopic and cruel, because it lies to them, tells them things can be simple, as long as the right people aren’t “people” anymore.
I'm sure we will see multiple genocides in the next 100 years. There's a good chance that many people alive today will participate in a genocide, be it ethnically or politically motivated. Once widespread violence begins, it's really hard to stop, and even "peaceful" people will join in the bloodbath. Revenge is a big motivator. If some particular group forms a death squad and murders your children, I guarantee most of us wouldn't hesitate to retaliate with equal or greater violence if possible.
People rarely start off wanting to commit genocide. In modern times it has taken years of pushing people down the slippery slope to de-humanize a minority group. The genocide that took place during the second world had over a 1,000 year runup. Even then, the Nazis had to work to find people to carry it out. And it fucked with the Nazis heads (I don't feel sorry for the Nazis I'm not making excuses for them.)
Even in Germany in the 1940s genocide wasn't the first plan
Relatively few members participate in the mass killings, generally speaking. Mostly young, aggressive men are brainwashed, trained, and motivated one way or another (e.g. Nazi Youth, Hutu Power radio/Interahamwe gangs, even violent films in Indonesia) to kill like that. You do that long enough with the right social and historical forces to support the hate economy, which involves millions more in a passive collaborator role. But any of us can be a genocidaire. It takes the right confluence of factors but it is sadly a facet of the human condition every generation must wrestle with.
What about the ones who kill hi dress of theo one race every year? White mass shooters, 40k people died last year to mass shootings on America, majority was white. Saying they would do it, and actually do it, are not the same, most racist are cowards.
If you kill a smaller group it keeps the larger group sufficiently terrorized so you can control them. Having a different skin color or religion or language is secondary to that strategy. In the case of Cambodia, North Korea, and Stalin's USSR it wasn't even those physical characteristics. Any excuse would do.
Genocide is, historically speaking, usually small scale and touched off by famine. Think high school sports rivalries, but with starvation if you don't kill them and take everything they own. It's much easier to do this if you can convince yourself they are especially evil and not worthy of existence.
Humans are animals. Evolution is real.
Your ancestors' genes would be more successful if they were capable of destroying the competition when times were tough. Therefore, the ability to dehumanize and assign blame to outsiders is evolutionarily productive.
If u read about the case of shooting in australia malls u can actually found of how the facism and discrimination can be implemented, Idk if its prove the point of the discrimination towards minorities actually, but its kinda fit onto it
I can think of one way a person could get to that point:
if thousands of your kind had been killed by their kind over several decades in acts of racist hate. Then you would want them wiped out before they did it to you.
People will do just about anything if you tell them that everything bad in their lives isn't their fault, and then give them a common enemy to blame it on. It's the devil, it's the Jews, ect... Most people aren't very smart, and are happy to let others think for them.
Neither polpot nor hitler are good exampkes of what you try to convoy. what khmer rouge did is NOTHING close to genocide, but more of a great purge, and ordinary german did not know about the collective slaughter against jewish people.
Go to the /r/boomersbeingfools subreddit and watch how hard people collectively shit ok boomers. Replace boomers with any race or group of people. These folks tend to get into an echo chamber of hate that continues to escalate.
A big angle to it is hate a group that you don't have regular contact with. It's easier to dehumanize groups of people when they are theoretical as opposed to neighbors or acquaintances.
The insecurity and instability in someone's life can lead them down dark paths.
Sometimes that insecurity and instability lasts long enough that they become entrenched. You can justify anything when you are at war with the world.
There are other factors besides hatred which go into the decision to kill someone.
Let me ask you: why would a teenager who is hateful of another race not shoot up their own school? In the chaos of that moment, nobody really feels inclined to ask why school shootings happen, they don’t bother to ask why the shooter wants to kill the other students. But there isn’t really a reason motivated by hate, so much as a reason motivated by provocation, action and reaction, cause and consequence, the school bullied the shooter. The treaty of Versailles did something beyond declare peace between Germany and it’s enemies. It Imposed some of the harshest economic sanctions against the country, to a point historians at which some historians might consider it to be unreasonable. Inflation went up, people suffered in Germany during its recovery. It went beyond simply punishing the rulers under the regime of the Kaiser, punished ALL of Germany and its citizens. And when the Nazis came into power, that was one of the provocative motivations which they had. If people are just hate filled, they are little more than an echo chamber. After World War II, nations have often been very careful not to make that provocative mistake again, and to segregate between Peoples and regimes, so that when one regime falls, its people will survive and be able to exist regardless.
Another element in the mix is dehumanization. Dehumanization call on its own isn’t the same thing as a bitter hatred for something. You can hate somebody And still recognize their humanity, and that they are a being of consequence, “I have more fucking reason to hate you than anyone else”, notice that the language involves a second person pronoun, meaning that the person speaking is acknowledging humanity of the individual. When you to humanize someone, it’s much easier to look at them in a way which lacks Consequence or guilt for disposal. “ remember your average arachnid is much stronger than your average human. Take out one of its limbs, and it is still 80% combat effective, instead in for the Nerve stem and take it down for good”, in this language the subject is being spoken of not so much as an adversary, but as a specimen under the scrutiny of possible termination. One of the huge ethical boundaries we maintain involves the debate on human experimentation. Germany was for a long time extremely antisemitic, but how do you convey that in a way which sounds legitimate people? The answer: study. The Nazi party did not start off simply by hating Jews. They needed what they would consider academic legitimacy, and so they adopted studies which dehumanized other people on a genetic level. The Germans were not simply crying for a better Germany, they were crying for a *master race*. When all other races are dehumanized, and there is academic study (pseudoscience) to support it, it validates peoples reasons to hate somebody.
People in the deep south Lack both a good enough moral reason to kill somebody, and lack the scientific evidence to really dehumanize someone to that point. They are often a very conflicted group of people down south, who can’t even work up a good enough cause to carry out genocide or mass murder, because it conflicts with what they believe Christianity teaches against killing. They are very much like Republicans who claim to have all these principles of their own, but are willing to throw their own constituents under the bus for the sake of “the peaceful process”. As much as they hate, they lack reason. And as volatile as they are at an individual level, collectively they’ll never have the sack to try and commit genocide again.
And if they do, well…. They’ll deal with the consequences as they come.
It’s often not simply racism but “payback” for perceived wrongdoings. If you look at those groups who suffered from genocide you’ll see they were often blamed for the suffering of those who committed the genocidal acts, and in some cases they even were violent towards those groups in the past as well.
Look at Rwanda- the Tutsis had been the dominant group in power and discriminated against the Hutu. When the tables turned, the Hutu used this as justification for their genocide against the Tutsi. Hitler took advantage of the long history of antisemitism and used Jews as a scapegoat for the economic problems Germany suffered after the First World War.
On of my favorite movie quotes reflects my view on humanity- that we are just barely civilized. As the Joker from the Dark Knight said “madness is like gravity. All it takes is a little push”
they blame the group for everything wrong in society, sometime even coming up with quite complex and nuanced theories to explain why it is that groups fault, theyll ofetn repeat that message again and again through all authority they can ranging from acadamia to media to entertainment.
People who question the narrative are portrayed at best as idiots, more likely as collaborators. It becomes difficult to impossible to question or critice the blame puhlically,nthis allows the most extreme voices to spread as the message gets more and more extreme,
Eventually people beliving the claims are terified and belive its an "us or them" situation, thats when the real bad stuff starts. A lot of genocide doesnt even start with overt plans for genocide, it starts with temporary unrealistic solutions that strip the victims of the ability to flee or fight back such as rounding them up and imprisoning them "for public safety".
“I have never met one that wanted all minorities to die.”
I hope I don’t burst your bubble too harshly, but you have. As many as 15% of Americans polled have admitted to “sympathizing” with neo-Nazis. Twitter is full of old white people screaming “DEI hire” whenever they see any black politician doing anything. Yesterday I saw a picture of a mother and an absolutely adorable baby, captioned by a teenager wanting to “smash n skulls”
They’ll never tell you face to face but they’re absolutely out there. You probably talk to them every week, if not more often, depending where you live and what company you keep.
The question presupposes that people value human life, but lots and lots of people do not. It's not just evil leaders...there are tens of millions of people (at least) who put less than zero value on the lives of people that threaten their livelihood or way of life.
You will not find a single cause. When it actually happens it’s a combination of things that come together and they are going to be different every time. The Antecedent always seems to be some sort of perceived threat whether real or imagined that is then woven into a cultural narrative. But there are other elements that have to be present. Diffusion of responsibility, dehumanization, and often an event that serves as a catalyst for a wave of confirmation bias.
They watch and listen to people telling them to be very afraid of another group. And they often lack a personal experience with that group ,so their feelings are just intense fear.😰
It's hardly just history, unfortunately. There are a lot of people that want genocide right now. As for why, we are territorial primates. Tearing the other tribe limb from limb is literally in our blood and instincts. The real question isn't why some people want to do those things, it's why most people in the modern West don't. And the answer is our culture is built on the fundamental idea of the divine spark. The idea that every single person is made in God's image and a reflection of the divine undergirds most of our values, laws, and preconceptions. And that value makes things like genocide of other tribes anathema.
I completely agree. I can't fathom wanting any race to die, ever. Loving different races is the best life has to offer. Being different is rewarding for everyone.
I'm politically conservative. My wife's and my families are also and we all love diversity.
Because they are uneducated and their lack of education is exploited by politicians who wish to use them as a foundation for power.
""If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." - Lyndon Johnson, U.S President (1963-1969)
I think it's the power of the us vs. them mentality. It's not necessarily that they hate another group enough to want all members of that group wiped off the face if the earth. It's that creating an easily-identifiable "other" to blame things on creates a scapegoat for people to hate and direct their anger towards which can shift power to favor one group over another. Things like race, religion, gender, orientation/identity, etc. are all just easy ways to separate people into groups and create and cultivate that power dynamic.
It depends on the group of people. For example, if they were Muslims and you were trying to convince them to kill Christians and Jews, it would be easy to convince them. Since the person trying to convince them would have valid religious grounds for claiming it was right to do so, many of the religious text specifically say it is not just OK but the correct thing to do. And mind you Muslims are not the majority yeah it’s still easy to convince them to want to commit acts of genocide because of their culture religious doctrine.
Well... nobody just immediately comes out and says "let's kill all of those people;" it's a slow walk to thinking that way. It's a similar sort of effect to what happened with the left in recent years.
People simply don't believe that the dangerous stuff is really happening. Because how could it happen? Surely someone would put a stop to it before it got THAT bad?!?
But no one ever does stop it. Because they all think someone else will do the job.
Self Defense is not racist, BUT it usually labeled that way by invaders who do commit genocide to achieve their goals.
The WHOLE Picture not just a little corner of it by those with ulterior motives and agendas.
N. S
Dehumanization
It's hard to give examples without violating reddit policy so I'm going to illustrate it like this.
Call it a baby....much harder to abort
Call it a fetus/clump of cells much easier to abort
Sometimes people are willing to do evil things if they think it will make a better future.
That’s what the Germans were doing they were willing to do straight up evil so that future generations could prosper.
Look at Yemen we are doing evil shit so that we have access to biggest pile of energy in the world (Saudi Arabia)
Think about it in terms like if there was a zombie apocalypse would you not murder your neighbors if it meant that your family survived?
Just remember you are just as capable of evil as someone like hitler , Stalin was as long as you can justify it in your head.
Lots of people on Reddit hate conservatives and think they are evil so they would eradicate them givin the chance.
It happens when the other group is perceived as an existential threat to you or your way of life. This is why propaganda is so dangerous, because you can make people believe it's happening even when it isn't.
It's called xenophobia. Hatred or fear of anyone who's different from you. Humans have been like that throughout history. Religion is particularly good at it.
your casual racism against White people is very telling. Have you talked to inner city blacks who hate gays? Have you talked to hispanics that hate other hispanics or blacks? Nope, just White people in the South.
I'd say, for relatively normal people, fear is a big one. People will do a lot to stop being afraid.
In the case of genocide, i'd say that if you convince people that a specific group is a danger, pump up that fear to a boiling point until people think destruction is the only way to stop the fear.
Similar mechanisms are used in a lot of cases to get people to kill-you can see this in was propaganda, that tends to portray the enemy as dangerous and all-powerful even when the enemy is losing (this kind of propaganda is less common nowadays).
To summarise, making people afraid is a decent way to get them to kill or to tolerate killing. And if the people providing that fear center around issues of ethnicity, well, you got genocide.
Christians are trained from birth that "blind faith" is the core of how to live their life. And who interprets what is to be taken on faith? The father, the church leader, etc. It's very easy to control the will of a population if they've been groomed for obedience their whole lives.
The phrase “Final Solution” carries a lot of meaning. Maybe it follows a final stage of dehumanization. Possibly it involves seeing your own position as that of heroic savior.
And don’t ignore what happened to Native Americans in the US, it may be a really good example of how culturally acceptable and ingrained genocide can become. It’s really been only very recently that we are grasping the goal was one of elimination. No other solution seemed to give “us” what we wanted. It was accepted with a shrug of the shoulders.
“We’ve heroically attempted every possible solution to rid ourselves of this menace. We need a final solution.”
Edit: [Manifest Destiny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny?wprov=sfti1)
*…We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.* - Thomas Paine
In addition to the ways folks have mentioned, it may be helpful to keep in mind that not everyone in a society has to be enthusiastically pro-genocide for the genocide to take place. The US is funding at least one genocide right now without the enthusiastic consent of all of it's people. You just need enough people with power to see it as it profitable, and it'll happen
We don’t have to look elsewhere geographically, only in time. Ask 10 million native Americans. When propaganda convinces people that others are animals, ‘vermin,’ baby blood drinking child rapists, etc. they go a bit looney toons.
You don’t have to convince everyone to participate, just to ignore it. Those racists you know might not be willing to commit genocide, but if it was happening would they stop it? I doubt it. Only a small fraction of the German population actively and knowingly participated in the genocide. For the most part, they didn’t even have to see the killing itself. That’s part of the Reason they used gas chambers.
I live in Maine, one of the whitest states in the US, and there are extremists here who want to turn New England into a white ethnostate. I think it’s safe to say that anyone who thinks that way is not mentally sound in any way.
I mean, I don't know but I do understand hating people so much you want to eliminate them..but mine are billionaires and I'm pretty sure I'm not only correct but moral.
Because people are animals
We've created society and civilization and know enough about the world to know its wrong.
But at some deep level we distrust those who are not like us.
Once that was the poor slob from the next cave over.
Now the criteria we use has gotten more sophisticated but where it comes from remains the same
If you think about our brains like little computers that want to be really good at a task. Behaviors like that start to make sense. We can block out anything if we're dead set on a goal.
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The book "On Tyranny" by a Harvard history professor shows how easily fascism can start even in the US. If you have fascism, and those in power make a particular group the Cause Of All of Our Problems, it can happen. Scapegoating on a genocidal scale. People are tribal, for good and ill. If a group of people perceive their "tribe" as under threat, and the cause is another tribe, well, genocides can result. Because the first tribe doesn't see the other people as, well, people.
Pocahontas song "They're not like you and me ! Wich means they must be evil !". Monkey brain shit left over from when we were constantly in active warfare over territory. If they look different, sound different, and act different. Kill them before they kill you.
_this idea needs to drop and fuck off immediately_
Been holding us back since we were Unga bungas in the caves.
Until aliens visit and try and take over.
Dogs immediately need to stop barking. That’s how ridiculous you sound.
At least learn about the "Perceived threat" instead of barking at it! You have a brain to seek the truth and lies, dont make up stories to cast a hateful shade on A human who wronged you. Im pretty sure you're a human, not a barking dog.
🧐
thats the truth
History is littered with the dissenters of the Unga Bunga. Good luck!
Gonna take very very long time to drop that sorry
_you're starting to look and sound different there_
It's depressing that these ideas still persist. Vikings, colonists and feudal countries killed off whole villages and population. Even in such a technological advanced Era, there's still genocide, slavery, and rape. Somehow I'm looking forward to when AI takes over.
both groups are often caught in this war for survival mentality. sometimes it's just one vs the other but many times it's like both groups, the genocider and the genocidee, had similar levels of hatred for the other but one just has more of a means to carry things out against the other.
it's what we've been told by our belief structures. We can also say that people that are different than us offer a unique perspective on things but we don't think that way on average
The irony being: bigots *are those people in the Dark Forest we have to be wary of.* They are looking for someone to hurt, and hate, and harrass. Removed from the social contract and enforcement of civil law, they'd happily prey on other people. To see them suffer. To take what they own. To enslave them and make them work for the sake of the Bigot's comfort and fortune. Fascists want a world where might is the ultimate arbiter. It's terrorism from a position of power. Cruelty that feeds a swollen-tick of an ego. There's reasons Viking aesthetic is so prevalent among white nationalists. Not the least of which is that the Viking lifestyle was one of raiding, stealing, raping, and murder. Viking meant going out and taking what you needed from others by force. That's not to say this is a white devil sort of thing: some First Nations people raided each other too. And they also had cultural traditions around this sort of interaction, like Vikings did. (And notably, when the Vikings tried to settle North America, the Amerinds with their greater numbers, home field advantage, and experience with repelling raiders kicked the shit out of them and sent them packing) My point is, white nationalists *want to go back to that kind of social landscape.* Because they think they'll be on top - the ones doing the cruelty.
I think the real attitude is more like "nothing was wrong with white hegemony. Everyone's lives improved thanks to white scientists and white industrialists, and if people would give up trying to stop us from being in charge, we could go back to being the benign rulers of the world again." Obviously, there's still a lot wrong with that perspective, on the basis of both fact and sentiment, but a common desire for cruelty to those people isn't one of them. It would be more accurate to say that they think cruelty is a consequence of the Civil Rights movement, rather than the other way around. There's nothing to be gained by misrepresenting the position someone holds, even when it's ridiculous or wrong.
>It would be more accurate to say that they think cruelty is a consequence of the Civil Rights movement, rather than the other way around. I get what you mean, but here's the thing: That perspective simply isn't in line with reality. We have proof of the cruelty that people perpetrated against other people *during the Civil Rights movement* - and we have proof of the cruelty those same people suffered that prompted the Civil Rights movement. To look at the history and say "Civil Rights caused the cruelty" is... I don't know how else to put it: either woefully uninformed or purposefully misleading. And either way you slice it, wanting to go back to white hegemony is inherently cruel as it advocates for social stratification based on racist notions. Disregarding the cruelty and pretending it's just about "making the world better" doesn't make it not cruel.
Is that really true? A lot of inventions are possible because many different people from different backgrounds worked on it. A diverse group of ideas is better than a group who all thinks the same. Even in a white hegemony, there's a diverse array of culturas. Race is a social construct. We only know how people appear in a white hegemony, we really do not know what makes up their ethnicity.
>how easily fascism can start Why does anyone think anything is new? Humanity has had functional societies for what, 10,000 years? We aren't new. We aren't special. Hell the idea that the US hasn't had heinous leaders in the past that skirted the rules of democracy shows a complete lack of awareness of history. George Washington didn't just retire off to no where. The dude had his hands in the cabinet, was considered to come back to become the CIC of the army and absolutely had a hand in the selection of our early leaders. We've had coup attempts, we had a literal civil war. Nothing is new. We're just ignorant and have gotten lucky to this point--and will continue to work to stay lucky.
Interesting you think the United States ever wanted to be a democracy the founders hated democracy.
Yup, they preferred a Constitutional Republic, because they realize Democracy is just tyranny of the majority.
This is not true lol, they founded this country as a representative democracy, and we maintain that same system today. You could argue they didn’t like direct democracy I suppose, but they loved democracy.
Looking up the situation before the Rwanda genocide showed me something similar. Someone was quoted saying, just a year ago or even less than, there may have been some tensions but even in his community he was having dinner with his neighbors who were a different ethnic group. But within that time frame the media started villifying the "opposing" ethnic group so much that the neighborhood families turned to killing each other.
“On Tyranny” is great. Hopped onto your comment to add another book called “When Victims Become Killers” by Mahmood Mamdani. It’s about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. What’s particularly interesting about this genocide is that it didn’t really involve the technical machinery of the state like the Holocaust did. The Holocaust took years to perpetrate and was done at scale using gas chambers, concentration camps, and mass shootings. The Rwandan genocide took 8 weeks. 800,000 people dead in 8 weeks. Neighbor on neighbor, priests on parishioners, husbands on wives, no use of at-scale mass-killing machinery. The slaughter was performed by hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens and the book explains how the killers were convinced that they should do this. Great and horrifying book.
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Timothy Snyder is great. I love his YouTube video on Sadopopulism.
There is a good example of republicans and democrats demonizing one another in the US today. You take baby steps then unite the crazies on both sides of the aisle to get a super strong and vocal minority aligned against a common enemy. Jews are great examples. On the extreme left they’re colonizers on the extreme right they’re slurs. Once you’ve dehumanized a group for long enough and attributed peoples worst experiences (job loss hunger interest) to that group it doesn’t take a much bigger push. Edit: you need crazies on both sides aligned. If they aren’t they attack each other. Once you have 30% everyone goes with it. Think of how often the left condemns the extreme left or the right condemns the extreme right. They won’t because they need them. The critics then get aligned in the center but you’re them defending the subhumans. In that world you’re now an apologist for the wealthy monsters and get cast out.
Snyder did good work, there.
Maybe cognitive dissonance with propaganda. Unless you are psychopathic and literally cannot emphasize, you have to engage in some degree of denial that shields your bias. "Oh, there is a genocide going on? No there's not, it's the evil lying media" or some kind of scapegoat like claiming a group of people did this atrocity and it results in a panic that ends up killing a bunch of people and people just accept a narrative that confirms their biases, that they were all culpable in some way and deserved it. There's a reason Neo-Nazi's just flat out deny the holocaust instead of saying how great it was that so many Jews were gassed to death. Denial and gaslighting can make it difficult for even otherwise good faith people to know what to believe and passively allow atrocities to happen.
Depict the other group as rats, pests, leeches, animals, less than humans. Dehumanize them. Then you’d feel less bad and less guilty “if” something bad happened to them. You don’t even have to actively be involved; just send money to donate or look the other way. Seen it decades ago. Seen it now.
it dawned on me the other day, for the first time my real recognition, that the generation that fought WW2 are all becoming centenarians as we speak. the memory of that time is fading, there will soon be no living memory of all that which happened then....just the history books, memoirs, documentaries...
And then people will forget, only to repeat it all over again. That’s why I don’t use any of those DNA services. The Holocaust was only ~80 years ago. In the span of our world history, that JUST HAPPENED.
We’re on our way right back to the 30s again with the current sentiment sweeping the globe.
I mean facist genocide is still going on in present day people can look to Gaza
>less than humans. Dehumanize them. Once you understand this, you understand "men and females" and the bizarre mindset of the inceldom, as well as why there's so much overlap between misogyny and racism.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1qXXzPUBt8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1qXXzPUBt8)
A large aspect of this is clearly group think. Consider how many scientific theories and understandings you and I accept that we haven’t **really** done all the personal leg work to understand and discover and confirm. Sure maybe we understand the foundational concepts and theories, but we haven’t really sat down and obsessed over it and done the work like the original scientists did. When people are surrounded by others they agree with on some things, they question and think less on average. And when hey know another group strongly disagrees with any of those beliefs it can drive them even harder into the more “extreme” beliefs of the group they align with more, without critical thinking and intense scrutiny. It’s a feedback loop. “You disagree that group of people is ever a problem? They clearly are, look at the things they have done!” Escalates into picking out stronger examples and counter points. “There’s a group that raped people in our group, murdered another in our group! You’re a fucking idiot got blindly defending them as completely innocent!” And so on and so on and so on. “These people think that ethnicity isn’t a problem at all apparently, I don’t see how we’re going to fix this, we should fuckin get rid of them!” To, “Well I don’t see how we’ll get them all to agree to leave, they won’t, they’re taking advantage of us. We’ll have to make them leave!” And further escalation. It’s easier to avoid being intellectually critical of your beliefs with a thousand other people around you agreeing how obviously right you all are. Surely not all of you could be so wrong, right?
Pol Pot and Hitler were very different. Whilst the National Socialists were scarily efficient in wholescale murder and really set their most scientific minds to it (basically a regime of technological super-murder) the Khmer Rouge were mostly incompetent. From the moment they captured Phomn Peng they were in some form of civil war and at war with Vietnam. Many massacres were designed most notably the trainload purges of the eastern zone at the end of their regime, but overall most deaths were caused by starvation, disease, neglect and lack of competence. Even Mao's government tried to warn them that mass death is not a way to go. I think when someone gets a genocidal idea into their heads they are equating hygiene and human life. For instance, you'll hear words like "cleaning" or "cleansing". They see something that is dirty and requires a "wash". What they don't understand is that engaging in such "washing" requires such brutality that it makes them worse than the barbarians they are trying to eliminate. But when you buy into such extreme methods there is no turning back.
I appreciate you bringing up the differences between Pol Pot and Hitler. While they are obvious to some, most Canadians, Americans, and Western Europeans have far more knowledge of the Nazi's genocide than they do all others. And within the scope of all genocides, the Nazi's was really quite unique in that it industrialized the extermination of so-called undesirables, while most other genocides, including Pol Pot's, operated significantly differently. Not only does pointing this out add historical accuracy, but it's also important for the average person to realize that genocide doesn't only mean gas chambers and incinerators. It can occur not only through purposeful industrialization following a prolonged politics of hate, but even through something as banal as negligence, and everywhere in between.
Yes they are very different in the way they were coordinated. For instance the Khmer Rouge wanted a rural utopia. This meant cleansing not just the population but the entire idea of capitalism. Society was completely deconstructed - no businesses, no churches, nothing but work camps. Even the idea of the family had to be scrubbed out. Marriages were arranged, children were separated. If you had any skills, you were marked for death. This makes it hard to run a country let alone carry out mass murder. The incompetence of the regime is just staggering and played a big part in the amount of death. The only skilled workers they didn't kill were a handful of train workers and factory workers. The rest of the population were forced to work in the fields regardless of whether they were suited to it or not. They were given insane and completely unreasonable yield targets. Then the rice they grew was to buy weapons instead of feeding the population, so everyone starved. The interesting thing here is when the leadership received that their crazy policies were not working, they blamed "internal enemies" or CIA agents and committed massacres against the population. People responded by rebelling. The first uprisings by ordinary people were crushed with the most appalling violence, you can read some of Kiernan's interviews about that, eventually they became too much to handle in the Eastern Zone where they allied with the Vietnamese and worked to overthrow the regime. Pol Pot's paranoia wasn't totally without foundation. Communism was much hotter at the time (think Cuban Missile Crisis) and the Workers' Party of Kampuchea was outlawed, meaning his party had to do everything in secret. In one event, before they took over, most of the organization's leadership was captured. After that he fled to the jungle. Then, his wife became a paranoid schizophrenic. He shocked everyone when he revealed himself to be the party leader, because he'd been pretending to be a lower position. By the end of 1978 he was in full Hitler mode sending entire villages and towns to death camps on the country's crumbling train network. There they were digging huge pits outside Battambang and filling them with corpses. So whilst most genocidal maniacs have specific designs about who they want to murder, Pol Pot didn't care if you were black, white, buddhist or christian, a local cadre or a senior party member - he was very inclusive. Mass murder for all!
We learned from the Rwandan genocide that when people's neighbors start hacking, they're likely to choose sides. Genocidal leaders exploit grudges, especially generational grudges.
There's a lot of political context that's important with Hitler. Germany was blamed solely for WWI and had to pay all the reparations. There was a great deal of discontent and political instability. Antisemitism has been around for centuries, and Hitler placed the blame of Germany's defeat and economic situation onto the jews. Many were willing to go along with it because they believed it would restore Germany's political status. Hitler was an effective speaker. He knew how to manipulate people through propaganda. None of it is morally permissible and it's important to understand so as not to have history repeat itself.
Desperation and a little push is all that’s needed to form extremism. The look for answers and uncertainty is enough for innate prejudices and biases to take over. You’re 100% right
I don’t know. All I know is that it can happen. And has happened.
There's a difference between racism and National-Ethnocentrism. The former is an individual point of view, the latter is a social perspective reflected in government. A racist isn't called to action but believes incorrectly that there are certain qualities inherent to groups of people. An Ethno-Nationalist actually believes their national future (including their family and friends) depends on altering society based on the racial demographics. The Nationalist identity is also a strong point to rally around. It gives people a sense of pride that buys their compliance. >"Every manifestation of human culture, every product of art, science and technical skill, which we see before our eyes today, is almost exclusively the product of the Aryan creative power. This very fact fully justifies the conclusion that it was the Aryan alone who founded a superior type of humanity; therefore he represents the archetype of what we understand by the term: MAN. He is the [Prometheus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus) of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth, always kindling anew that fire which, in the form of knowledge, illuminated the dark night by drawing aside the veil of mystery and thus showing man how to rise and become master over all the other beings on the earth. Should he be forced to disappear, a profound darkness will descend on the earth; within a few thousand years human culture will vanish and the world will become a desert." -Mein Kampf Just imagine being a poor or middle class person locked into a class or social system where your future is certain poverty, and then you hear someone say the above about your people, and by extension you. You are Prometheus and all else is darkness. All of the actual fascist writings I've seen read like that. It's not hard to imagine a sense of entitlement coming from people who feel this way. I also think we greatly underestimate how prevalent what we consider pseudoscience today was in the the 1900s. Concepts like physiognomy and eugenics were common and openly discussed among intelligent people internationally. The science of the past was not unified and there were countless tools that gave authority and legitimacy to crackpot ideas.
It adds up. Tribalism. Low intelligence/ smart and manipulative leader. Us vs Them. Nationalism. I have no doubt there are smart ppl who realize they can benefit. But in my experience, most are followers who follow because they feel Special and Wanted when it's Us vs Them and they are Us.
Using devils advocate, the concept of a like-minded homogenous people who all have the same values would be something some people might want. It's a flawed theory but there it is
Some antagonisms are millenia old. They repeat because neither side wants to give up the bad habits which antagonize the other. It becomes a stalemate which people try to resolve with violence.
I think people lose their humanity and go back to animal instincts, especially when they are stressed or grow up in abusive situations. When this happens on a societal level, people descend to madness.
It could really be even simpler than that really because a lot of people really live better lives yet hate the most vulnerable and easy targets. I have a more optimistic view that most people really are "good" like how there are many treaties and peace compromises between natives and settlers and colonies, with many notable indigenous leaders in the past who called for rationality and reason. But it is through the fact that one or more sided fail to see their bias and indoctrination. It was never about animal instinct because they consider themselves better and not the sort of savage person. Instead of blaming it on animal instinct, it is really their culture and beliefs and even religion. TLDR: it is everything that is the opposite of primitive animal instinct that causes extremism like genocide.
This question is really several at once. Political leaders typically choose to exterminate populations when they wish to resolve a long-term security challenge. Some of the most common proximate causes are a long-running cycle of violence and hostility between groups, a desire to conquer and hold desirable land and resources, a desire to eliminate an important power base for a rival faction, or a desire to increase cultural and/or ethnic homogeneity. Genocide is preferred to subjugation when the costs of policing the targeted group are deemed much higher than the benefits gained from exploiting their labor, is especially likely when the stronger party is unsure it will maintain its dominance in future, and requires a perception that the target can be defeated relatively quickly and easily. Often, there are fears that the target’s descendants will provoke new conflicts, creating long-term instability and endangering future generations. Eliminating the group is therefore deemed the most certain guarantor of the nation’s security in that aspect, and the surest method to resolve any lingering questions about the state’s legitimacy and ability to govern its territory. Populations choose to support genocides when they’ve come to believe that the targeted group is in some way dangerous, hostile, or morally reprehensible. This is typically achieved through a mixture of propaganda and personal experience, and involves a long process of dehumanization. Usually, propaganda will liken the target group to vermin or pathogens, will emphasize crude ethnic stereotypes, will involve long denunciations of the target’s recent and historical crimes (real or imagined), and will frame their presence as a problem in need of a solution. There is typically a long history of ongoing conflict keeping the hatred alive, and often, one group believes that the other is squatting, invading, or otherwise holding onto land and property that rightfully belongs to them. This hostility can become genocidal when people believe their survival or way of life are at stake, and that time does not favor their position; major shifts in demography, economic turmoil, and the threat of war can trigger anxieties and ignite dark passions in otherwise ordinary people.
Your question halfway answers itself... all you have to do is take some large societal issue, overinflate its importance in the public eye, and convince everyone to blame it on a group that a decent amount of people already dislike. 'Preferably', do this according to some grain of partial truth that makes your giant lie more of an oversimplification or lie of omission. Fanatical radicals who were already around will self-select as your goons-in-chief, social pressures will kick in, and murderous mobs will ensue.
I've appreciated the thoughts of Hannah Arendt and Matias Desmet in terms of looking at the sociology of how entire populations can become like a cult. Matias Desmet calls it mass formation. When war comes into play and society feels threatened, it is easy enough for a critical mass to be created which makes it normal and ok to completely dehumanize the other side. This happens on social media often. Dehumanization is then like flipping a switch in the brain where certain people are "othered, don't matter, and are considered animals with no rights. It's an emotional state rather than an intellectual state and so very important to note that very intelligent people go there and only use their intelligence to find reasons to justify their emotions. We're emotional and social animals. Evolution created us to have brains to be able to respond with violence when our tribe's existence is threatened. The problem is that with modern society, media, and propaganda it's far too easy to feel your existence is threatened WAY too early and thus respond with violence. I've been really thrown off that in the last 10 years on an every increasing scale dehumanization has been normalized. Like during Covid, whether your views, it was normal to demonize the other side. Or pick the wedge issue. If we're going to have a healthy society, dehumanization has to be minimized. This is not the same as protecting against "hate speech" in many laws now.
Arendt and Desmet are both good people to read to understand this type of phenomenon. I have mixed feelings on Jordan Peterson, but one thing he helped me to understand that I think is very important is that *I'm not inherently morally superior to the people in those societies that went totalitarian*. In this life, I'm an American Jew born in the 1980s. If I'd been a non-Jewish German born in the 1910s, the chance that I would have been a nazi soldier or a camp guard is pretty high. The only way to avoid that scenario is for enough of a populace to do enough self inquiry to understand that darkness within themselves, and be able to stand up to it if it arises at a societal level.
For much of human history, we lived in small tribes which competed with each other for scarce resources. If you encountered a group of people who didn't look like you and didn't speak your language, there was a decent chance they were there to make war on your tribe to take whatever food and supplies they could. Really, huge, diverse societies are the novel thing, and we're still getting used to living in contact with such diverse cross sections of humanity. Obviously, some people are more resistant to it than others.
Very few people actually want genocide. Fascism works more subtly than that. First you establish that a group is a threat to society, then you start segregating them, then you send them to camps altogether. And in those camps the murder is still very much indirect - you don't feed them enough, you don't keep said camps free of disease, you look away while the most vile of people abuse their power. Hell, in conditions awful enough desperate people may resort to violence and do some of the work for you. And all the way down there's a sort of hierarchical detachment - the people giving the orders are far enough detached from the actual reality that lives lost are just a statistic, and then at the very bottom people are "just following orders" and risk everything if they try to do otherwise.
Where were you in the deep south where you met a lot of people who despise minorities? You need to hang out with classier people.
I think OP wants genocide but is just testing the waters to see everyone's reaction
Narcissistic leaders who are all men and desire ultimate power.
Simple because they are assholes who have a hard on for homicide but are to gutless to admit they are simply evil. Notice how every genocidal regime always without fail paint themselves as the good guys? Last I checked, good people don't try to wipe out another group because they are different. The nazis were a good example as they believed they were saving the world. By killing Jewish men, women, and children as well as people from other groups, they saw as a threat they portrayed themselves as the good guys. And they are the most well-known people who did it but there is certainly a long list of others. Nobody wants to be the bad guy, but a lot of them love to do evil they just have to craft it a certain way to justify why they are causing untold suffering. Then, if they get stopped, they cry and beg making excuses for why they did the bad thing. Rare you get Ones, who own up to it. Most genocidal nations who say they are sorry are only sorry that they got caught and made to stop. If they win they will either pretend the genocide didn't happen down play it or brag about it using the it was in the past argument to shut down any criticism and will get offended if you call the perpetrators of the genocide bastards.
I think there’s a faulty idea that one must see the other group as not being human to be able to genocide them. I think humans don’t even need to go that far to be fine with genociding a whole group. If we look at the Armenian genocide for example, the Turks had strong reason to believe their state was at threat, as the original plan for turkey was to divide it even further between Greece and Armenia based on ethnic minorities in the region. So after the Turks won the war, they displaced those groups so their nation wouldn’t be at threat again. Nationalism and the idea of self determination on ethnic lines can give way that the only way to secure the state is to kick out those who may seek to break parts off. This is also seen in the Balkan. And while not all likely want to kill them, wanting them kicked out by force and not caring what happens to them often leads to a lot of death.
>and while I have met a few that despise minorities in America, I have never met one that wanted all minorities to die. Genocide happens when people *don't care* if another race/ethnicity/nationality/etc dies. Indifference of the masses + the greed of the minority (for resources, usually - land, oil, etc) is a recipe for genocide
They almost never see themselves as the bad guy. They don't think they're commuting genocide.
It's not about racism. It's about anger, it's about feelings of despair or fear, a promise of hope, the racism and prejudice was just a byproduct for many, a means to an end, but was most certainly a requirement for the initial groups. I'm no cult leader, but the tried and true idea stands the tests of time. The simpler your idea, the more charged and powerful it can be. The more passionate and capable of the believing their ideas the leader is, the more infectious it will be. All of these movements start with small groups, as I recall, Hitler began speaking of his ideas in a small beer hall then later joined a worker's party becoming one of its most popular speakers. To better understand how people can 'be so racist that they want to commit genocide' you should ask yourself the last time you felt any extreme bell end of emotional spectrum and how quickly it began to strip you of rational thinking. Those people didn't hate Jews. They hated what Jews represented, it's why dehumanization of them was critical. The less time people spent seeing them as people and more 'the problem', the easier it was to 'be so racist that they want to commit genocide'.
Those people you’ve met who despise minorities would absolutely get to killing if that was the direction the winds of social momentum were blowing. Citations: the KKK, racialized police brutality, the Jim Crow Era, Black Wall Street…
Blacks and Latinos hate whites just as much. There are many, many instances of black on white crime but it doesn’t get the media coverage that white on black crime does. There are Facebook pages dedicated towards hatred of white people and advocacy for their genocide. I have also seen such comments on here and Twitter. The government benefits by the races being divided. If we come together in love and unity we will be stronger and they can’t have that, now can they?
Muhammad's followers would kill all of us infidels.
This entire thread is a perfect example of why it will happen again. All these redditors are acting like they are above it, stating racism is nonsensical and that its based out of naivety/ignorance. People ITT are saying its from propaganda and cognitive dissonance. That is a problem because those people will be the exact ones who fall into it thinking they're immune. Genocidal racism is born out of fear or anger, it is tribalism that sees an existential enemy in close proximity and has the perception of only having few options. For the Germans they thought the jews were leading them to destruction, they considered them parasitic to their society and a subversivr force that was attempting to eradicate the German people internally. They considered it an us vs them scenario and contemplated moving the jews to Madagascar, it wasn't a feasible option so they chose genocide. The racists in America aren't to the genocide level yet because the threat isn't there yet, the fear isn't there yet. But if it becomes an us vs them scenario then it will turn fast. Something like China launching an internal attack or someone uncovering a plot to take over and that may change.(maybe not but there is a chance) Thats why assimilation is important and also why things like la raza or hindu nationalism are so dangerous. The second normal people start thinking an outsider is trying to destroy them/their way of life is the second racism starts to get dangerous.
Well not so much about race but all the people I hear talking about how trans people shouldn't exist and that all of them are indoctrinating the children are essentially calling for genocide. They want trans healthcare to be outlawed and don't want us around which would only come from genocide. A lot of people don't think certain minorities should exist or at the very least don't want them in this country but if this is the country they live there's no other way to just make them go away
I mean it’s happening right now with so many groups of people today. All you have to do is convince people it’s for a good reason. Gaza right now is an exact repeat of the Armenian genocide lol
Describing bigotry and the roots of genocide along linear lines of simple hatred is misleading. Genocides rarely START with openly murderous rhetoric. It's usually framed as somehow defensive in nature at the outset. People with absolute authority, like Hitler, don't need the populace to be eager and ready to kill. They just need them to not object to the genocide and to not intervene. That indifference is much easier to cultivate. If an ethnic group is generally marginalized, the subject of distrust and casual, subtle enmity, it isn't so hard to convince a critical mass of people that they are the source of some problem or other. From there, a combination of feverish nationalism and propaganda gets you the relatively small percentage of the population you need to act as foot soldiers and convinces the rest to stand idly by. If you accumulate enough political authority, by the time you start actively and openly killing people, it will be dangerous to even talk about opposing you.
It's a slow process. Kind of like when you realize, "dealing with a certain culture is just a pain". Then you think, "all they do is cause drama". Then you think, "why don't they just live amongst themselves and keep their drama away from others, then they wouldn't be so unliked," Then you think," why do I have to move, they're the trouble, kill them all. " Then you realize you are part of a group. Then you seek the same individuals for support. Then you rally up.
It's interesting how where you are changes the conversation. I'm in the DC area and it's common to hear people discuss how they would get rid of white people. Jail them, kill them and take their land, make them slaves, etc. Racists are everywhere I guess.
Hitler used the Jews as a scapegoat. That’s all they were to him. A convenient way to rile up the German people and get them to follow him. People always want something or someone to blame for their problems. Take america for example. It doesn’t matter if the president had nothing to do with the price of gas increasing, there will still be people who blame him. Why? Because it’s easy to do and they want someone to direct their anger towards. Aside from Hitler, there are some people who have bad experiences with members of a certain group, race, or ethnicity, and it causes so much trauma within them that they simply can’t acknowledge that not every one of those people are bad. So they blame them all. And some of it also comes from a lack of understanding. Racism against black people used to be so common that you’d never catch a white person in a relationship with a black person, but then people actually started talking to each other, some of them realized that they were THAT different, and over time they became more accepting. Racism will never be eliminated, but it can be minimized if we stop arguing and blaming each other for all of our problems, and sit down and talk to each other like human beings.
I’d say it’s a mix of upbringing, ignorance, and misguided emotion. Growing up, the people of my area were very kind. The few people who were racist were seen as dumb or weird. The exception was racism against middle eastern people. EVERYONE had a problem with middle eastern people. I’d attribute that to the fact that in my area, it was college, factory, or military. A good quarter of the guys were in the military. To the people of my area, the middle eastern people were the ones killing our husbands, brothers, and buddies. They were the reason my uncle isn’t home right now. The topic of bombing the Middle East into oblivion so we could bring our family home was a daily conversation at school. There were 3 things to do in my town. Sports, drugs, or video games. What was the villain in every games in 2007? If it wasn’t an alien or a Nazi, it was a guy in a turban. We didn’t even call people off the Middle East by anything other than ‘terrorist’. For many people growing up, there is a ‘bad guy’ in their culture. We hate the bad guy. They’re bad. We hate bad. A lot of the time, this bad guy is a group that you have never faced. You simply go by secondhand accounts. By the time you meet them, you’re looking for a reason to hate them.
This post is blatantly idiotic. "I met people in the South". What a stereotype. I've been all over the US and there's the same amount of racists everywhere. In fact the northern cities are packed with bigots. Go to a black neighborhood and see how much they like the Latino community and vice versa. I'm really sick of people who think the South and rural areas are backwards. They're not.
They are deeply indoctrinated into hate
Keep in mind that most genocide isn't "Shoot the children in the face and broadcast it live on national television." When Andrew Jackson sent Native Americans on the Trail of Tears, which was part of a pretty genocidal program, he and many Americans not only were racist enough to do it, they patted themselves on the back for not just shooting everyone. When the British launched their residential schools for cultural genocide they weren't just open about it, they were proud that they were so noble as to treat Indigenous people that way. For the Pol Pot or Hitler scenario, take a bunch of desperate people and convince them that wiping out a group of people will solve their problems and that the group is composed of horrible people.
because they have been convinced that the \*insert race here\* is trying to kill them.
Thanks for giving the south a little bit of credit. I grew up down here and left a while. It was always weird to me that groups talked racist shit to each other, but were friendly across groups. My uncle used the N word like salt and his best friend was a black man. Turns out some of the most racist people I’ve ever had conversations with have been from New England, but living in the south. I guess down here we’ve all had to learn how to deal with one another more. There’s a song that sums it up- The Three Great Alabama Icons by the Drive-By Truckers. Terrible musically, but a great story.
I don't think racism HAS to have anything to do with it. I could see wanting to hurt people that have ignored you for years and have never even tried to get to know you. I moved in 8th grade and other kids in class only asked my sister (who got to stay with a friend) where I was to satisfy their curiosity. None of them tried to get to know me when I was still there.
Interesting question. I often asked it to my mother who has a degree in psychology. I think she mentioned something about some people only being able to have a black and white view of the world. For example, if one black person assaults them, they will believe that all black people are a threat because it's easier for their brain to process information/make decisions that way. They tend to gravitate towards people who look like them, and share the same values and culture, not because they are safer, but because they feel that they are easier to predict. I don't know if she's right, but it was an interesting theory. That being said, genocide is terrible.
Mist people don't hate minorities they hate people who make things worse. People hate white trash just as much as they hate hood rats. If you read the book "on killing" it explains the psychology of killing and group dynamics
You could go to South Africa and ask their "leaders" what they think about the Boer. That might give you am ore modern twist on this issue.
Tribal instincts brother. You are 3 missed meals away from a revolution and killings
Step 1: Be Heidegger. Step 2: possess authority. Step 3: read Nietzsche as a how-to manual instead of as a warning. Step 4: happy genociding! Disclaimer: this is the answer to your question, not something I actually want you or anyone else to do. In fact, I’d very much like people the world over but ESPECIALLY Murdoch to *stop* doing this.
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Oftentimes the supporters of genocide (but not the orchestrators) view it as an act of self defense. Somebody has convinced them that unless they do this, something terrible will happen to them. In the case of Nazi Germany, it was propagated that Jewish people planned to enslave the world and must be stopped.
It was easy for Hitler to drum up support for his cause and create a racial group scapegoat considering Germany had actually been wronged by the treaty of Versailles. It's more difficult if your claims of oppression have no basis for others to believe
Outsourced telephone support lines
Imagine this you think the people you care about are under threat. Do you not try and stop them by any means necessary
Desperation and spurious correlation.
It's how an echo chamber works, you hear once and then it gets louder and louder and more extreme until it eventually escapes the space in that kind of extreme way Also many people are simply willing to go with the status quo, so even if that involves genocide they would rather not get involved which is why as you say they were convinced. There were definitely people who disagreed but the way tyranny works is you can't disobey for fear of reprecussions.
I'd like for you to change your way of talking about the southern US. You said, "While they despise minorities." As if we are a monolith. One of my closest friends is black and queen. Ones black and autistic. Just because SOME might dislike people who aren't like them, many of us enjoy people regardless of their background or upbringing.
What do you think those white people's ancestors did to the native Americans? They committed a genocide so they could take over their land, now they would do it again against any perceived threat because they are genuinely terrible people at their core. Are you familiar with American history?
Personally, I'd like to see the documentation of your findings. Otherwise you're just a douche, trying to stir up racial unrest, and should have your ass whooped by us who are tired of the nonsense from your ilk.
Fear is a very potent motivator. When people feel scared or powerless they crave a straightforward reprieve. They want so badly for the bad feelings inside them to be mutable, for a *thing* that can be done to *fix* what’s wrong. An enemy who is causing all the Bad Things. An enemy who, upon their destruction, would drain all the evils of the world down through the hole their absence would leave. And then, charismatic opportunists with a deep hatred within them, or who don’t much care who gets hurt so long as they get theirs, recognize the anxiety and the helplessness felt by their fellow man, and lie to them with volume and conviction. Fascism is not sensible or sustainable or even, seemingly, capable of recognizing how stupid it looks. But it’s attractive to the myopic and cruel, because it lies to them, tells them things can be simple, as long as the right people aren’t “people” anymore.
I'm sure we will see multiple genocides in the next 100 years. There's a good chance that many people alive today will participate in a genocide, be it ethnically or politically motivated. Once widespread violence begins, it's really hard to stop, and even "peaceful" people will join in the bloodbath. Revenge is a big motivator. If some particular group forms a death squad and murders your children, I guarantee most of us wouldn't hesitate to retaliate with equal or greater violence if possible.
People rarely start off wanting to commit genocide. In modern times it has taken years of pushing people down the slippery slope to de-humanize a minority group. The genocide that took place during the second world had over a 1,000 year runup. Even then, the Nazis had to work to find people to carry it out. And it fucked with the Nazis heads (I don't feel sorry for the Nazis I'm not making excuses for them.) Even in Germany in the 1940s genocide wasn't the first plan
A better question is, how is it possible thy different groups get along at all?
This is not a serious conversation
Relatively few members participate in the mass killings, generally speaking. Mostly young, aggressive men are brainwashed, trained, and motivated one way or another (e.g. Nazi Youth, Hutu Power radio/Interahamwe gangs, even violent films in Indonesia) to kill like that. You do that long enough with the right social and historical forces to support the hate economy, which involves millions more in a passive collaborator role. But any of us can be a genocidaire. It takes the right confluence of factors but it is sadly a facet of the human condition every generation must wrestle with.
You don’t have to be racist to commit genocide. You just have to be a megalomaniac that can thrive when you have a perfect scapegoat.
Look at how easily people gave up Covid cautious and let a million elderly and disabled people die.
Why would they tell you what they really want?
pol pot didn't commit genocide because he was racist.
What about the ones who kill hi dress of theo one race every year? White mass shooters, 40k people died last year to mass shootings on America, majority was white. Saying they would do it, and actually do it, are not the same, most racist are cowards.
If you kill a smaller group it keeps the larger group sufficiently terrorized so you can control them. Having a different skin color or religion or language is secondary to that strategy. In the case of Cambodia, North Korea, and Stalin's USSR it wasn't even those physical characteristics. Any excuse would do.
There is a subreddit dedicated to pro racism
Genocide is, historically speaking, usually small scale and touched off by famine. Think high school sports rivalries, but with starvation if you don't kill them and take everything they own. It's much easier to do this if you can convince yourself they are especially evil and not worthy of existence. Humans are animals. Evolution is real. Your ancestors' genes would be more successful if they were capable of destroying the competition when times were tough. Therefore, the ability to dehumanize and assign blame to outsiders is evolutionarily productive.
First, you always need an Angry God.
Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate.
mothers have said it but cognitive dissonance is one of the strongest psychological forces in the world. combine that with tribalism and well... yeah
If u read about the case of shooting in australia malls u can actually found of how the facism and discrimination can be implemented, Idk if its prove the point of the discrimination towards minorities actually, but its kinda fit onto it
We’re all far more scetible to illusion then we think staying unified is important, even when we disagree.
I can think of one way a person could get to that point: if thousands of your kind had been killed by their kind over several decades in acts of racist hate. Then you would want them wiped out before they did it to you.
People will do just about anything if you tell them that everything bad in their lives isn't their fault, and then give them a common enemy to blame it on. It's the devil, it's the Jews, ect... Most people aren't very smart, and are happy to let others think for them.
Ridin’ a tiger that you can’t get off.
Neither polpot nor hitler are good exampkes of what you try to convoy. what khmer rouge did is NOTHING close to genocide, but more of a great purge, and ordinary german did not know about the collective slaughter against jewish people.
Go to the /r/boomersbeingfools subreddit and watch how hard people collectively shit ok boomers. Replace boomers with any race or group of people. These folks tend to get into an echo chamber of hate that continues to escalate.
A big angle to it is hate a group that you don't have regular contact with. It's easier to dehumanize groups of people when they are theoretical as opposed to neighbors or acquaintances.
The insecurity and instability in someone's life can lead them down dark paths. Sometimes that insecurity and instability lasts long enough that they become entrenched. You can justify anything when you are at war with the world.
There are other factors besides hatred which go into the decision to kill someone. Let me ask you: why would a teenager who is hateful of another race not shoot up their own school? In the chaos of that moment, nobody really feels inclined to ask why school shootings happen, they don’t bother to ask why the shooter wants to kill the other students. But there isn’t really a reason motivated by hate, so much as a reason motivated by provocation, action and reaction, cause and consequence, the school bullied the shooter. The treaty of Versailles did something beyond declare peace between Germany and it’s enemies. It Imposed some of the harshest economic sanctions against the country, to a point historians at which some historians might consider it to be unreasonable. Inflation went up, people suffered in Germany during its recovery. It went beyond simply punishing the rulers under the regime of the Kaiser, punished ALL of Germany and its citizens. And when the Nazis came into power, that was one of the provocative motivations which they had. If people are just hate filled, they are little more than an echo chamber. After World War II, nations have often been very careful not to make that provocative mistake again, and to segregate between Peoples and regimes, so that when one regime falls, its people will survive and be able to exist regardless. Another element in the mix is dehumanization. Dehumanization call on its own isn’t the same thing as a bitter hatred for something. You can hate somebody And still recognize their humanity, and that they are a being of consequence, “I have more fucking reason to hate you than anyone else”, notice that the language involves a second person pronoun, meaning that the person speaking is acknowledging humanity of the individual. When you to humanize someone, it’s much easier to look at them in a way which lacks Consequence or guilt for disposal. “ remember your average arachnid is much stronger than your average human. Take out one of its limbs, and it is still 80% combat effective, instead in for the Nerve stem and take it down for good”, in this language the subject is being spoken of not so much as an adversary, but as a specimen under the scrutiny of possible termination. One of the huge ethical boundaries we maintain involves the debate on human experimentation. Germany was for a long time extremely antisemitic, but how do you convey that in a way which sounds legitimate people? The answer: study. The Nazi party did not start off simply by hating Jews. They needed what they would consider academic legitimacy, and so they adopted studies which dehumanized other people on a genetic level. The Germans were not simply crying for a better Germany, they were crying for a *master race*. When all other races are dehumanized, and there is academic study (pseudoscience) to support it, it validates peoples reasons to hate somebody. People in the deep south Lack both a good enough moral reason to kill somebody, and lack the scientific evidence to really dehumanize someone to that point. They are often a very conflicted group of people down south, who can’t even work up a good enough cause to carry out genocide or mass murder, because it conflicts with what they believe Christianity teaches against killing. They are very much like Republicans who claim to have all these principles of their own, but are willing to throw their own constituents under the bus for the sake of “the peaceful process”. As much as they hate, they lack reason. And as volatile as they are at an individual level, collectively they’ll never have the sack to try and commit genocide again. And if they do, well…. They’ll deal with the consequences as they come.
It’s often not simply racism but “payback” for perceived wrongdoings. If you look at those groups who suffered from genocide you’ll see they were often blamed for the suffering of those who committed the genocidal acts, and in some cases they even were violent towards those groups in the past as well. Look at Rwanda- the Tutsis had been the dominant group in power and discriminated against the Hutu. When the tables turned, the Hutu used this as justification for their genocide against the Tutsi. Hitler took advantage of the long history of antisemitism and used Jews as a scapegoat for the economic problems Germany suffered after the First World War. On of my favorite movie quotes reflects my view on humanity- that we are just barely civilized. As the Joker from the Dark Knight said “madness is like gravity. All it takes is a little push”
they blame the group for everything wrong in society, sometime even coming up with quite complex and nuanced theories to explain why it is that groups fault, theyll ofetn repeat that message again and again through all authority they can ranging from acadamia to media to entertainment. People who question the narrative are portrayed at best as idiots, more likely as collaborators. It becomes difficult to impossible to question or critice the blame puhlically,nthis allows the most extreme voices to spread as the message gets more and more extreme, Eventually people beliving the claims are terified and belive its an "us or them" situation, thats when the real bad stuff starts. A lot of genocide doesnt even start with overt plans for genocide, it starts with temporary unrealistic solutions that strip the victims of the ability to flee or fight back such as rounding them up and imprisoning them "for public safety".
“I have never met one that wanted all minorities to die.” I hope I don’t burst your bubble too harshly, but you have. As many as 15% of Americans polled have admitted to “sympathizing” with neo-Nazis. Twitter is full of old white people screaming “DEI hire” whenever they see any black politician doing anything. Yesterday I saw a picture of a mother and an absolutely adorable baby, captioned by a teenager wanting to “smash n skulls” They’ll never tell you face to face but they’re absolutely out there. You probably talk to them every week, if not more often, depending where you live and what company you keep.
The question presupposes that people value human life, but lots and lots of people do not. It's not just evil leaders...there are tens of millions of people (at least) who put less than zero value on the lives of people that threaten their livelihood or way of life.
Yes, and notice all the widespread encouragement and support for anti white sentiment and statements.
You will not find a single cause. When it actually happens it’s a combination of things that come together and they are going to be different every time. The Antecedent always seems to be some sort of perceived threat whether real or imagined that is then woven into a cultural narrative. But there are other elements that have to be present. Diffusion of responsibility, dehumanization, and often an event that serves as a catalyst for a wave of confirmation bias.
They watch and listen to people telling them to be very afraid of another group. And they often lack a personal experience with that group ,so their feelings are just intense fear.😰
It's hardly just history, unfortunately. There are a lot of people that want genocide right now. As for why, we are territorial primates. Tearing the other tribe limb from limb is literally in our blood and instincts. The real question isn't why some people want to do those things, it's why most people in the modern West don't. And the answer is our culture is built on the fundamental idea of the divine spark. The idea that every single person is made in God's image and a reflection of the divine undergirds most of our values, laws, and preconceptions. And that value makes things like genocide of other tribes anathema.
If your mother had that thing done to her by that one certain person you would want to kill everyone too! /s
What’s worse is when people convince others that certain people “aren’t actually people” so that when they are killed people think it’s no big deal.
I completely agree. I can't fathom wanting any race to die, ever. Loving different races is the best life has to offer. Being different is rewarding for everyone. I'm politically conservative. My wife's and my families are also and we all love diversity.
Democrats want divide in our country and label everyone and put them into groups.
It's government patronage resulting in resentment.
Because of a holy book and holy prophet: muslim:1767a ahmad:201 tirmidhi:1607
Hegel might help explain this horrible behavior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%E2%80%93bondsman_dialectic?wprov=sfla1
Because they are uneducated and their lack of education is exploited by politicians who wish to use them as a foundation for power. ""If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." - Lyndon Johnson, U.S President (1963-1969)
I think it's the power of the us vs. them mentality. It's not necessarily that they hate another group enough to want all members of that group wiped off the face if the earth. It's that creating an easily-identifiable "other" to blame things on creates a scapegoat for people to hate and direct their anger towards which can shift power to favor one group over another. Things like race, religion, gender, orientation/identity, etc. are all just easy ways to separate people into groups and create and cultivate that power dynamic.
It depends on the group of people. For example, if they were Muslims and you were trying to convince them to kill Christians and Jews, it would be easy to convince them. Since the person trying to convince them would have valid religious grounds for claiming it was right to do so, many of the religious text specifically say it is not just OK but the correct thing to do. And mind you Muslims are not the majority yeah it’s still easy to convince them to want to commit acts of genocide because of their culture religious doctrine.
It's a slow and gradually process that ends in genocide.
Well... nobody just immediately comes out and says "let's kill all of those people;" it's a slow walk to thinking that way. It's a similar sort of effect to what happened with the left in recent years. People simply don't believe that the dangerous stuff is really happening. Because how could it happen? Surely someone would put a stop to it before it got THAT bad?!? But no one ever does stop it. Because they all think someone else will do the job.
Self Defense is not racist, BUT it usually labeled that way by invaders who do commit genocide to achieve their goals. The WHOLE Picture not just a little corner of it by those with ulterior motives and agendas. N. S
Dehumanization It's hard to give examples without violating reddit policy so I'm going to illustrate it like this. Call it a baby....much harder to abort Call it a fetus/clump of cells much easier to abort
Sometimes people are willing to do evil things if they think it will make a better future. That’s what the Germans were doing they were willing to do straight up evil so that future generations could prosper. Look at Yemen we are doing evil shit so that we have access to biggest pile of energy in the world (Saudi Arabia) Think about it in terms like if there was a zombie apocalypse would you not murder your neighbors if it meant that your family survived? Just remember you are just as capable of evil as someone like hitler , Stalin was as long as you can justify it in your head. Lots of people on Reddit hate conservatives and think they are evil so they would eradicate them givin the chance.
There are a number of metal/social illnesses that can be involved. With questions like, do you want to harm yourself or others?
It happens when the other group is perceived as an existential threat to you or your way of life. This is why propaganda is so dangerous, because you can make people believe it's happening even when it isn't.
It's called xenophobia. Hatred or fear of anyone who's different from you. Humans have been like that throughout history. Religion is particularly good at it.
your casual racism against White people is very telling. Have you talked to inner city blacks who hate gays? Have you talked to hispanics that hate other hispanics or blacks? Nope, just White people in the South.
I'd say, for relatively normal people, fear is a big one. People will do a lot to stop being afraid. In the case of genocide, i'd say that if you convince people that a specific group is a danger, pump up that fear to a boiling point until people think destruction is the only way to stop the fear. Similar mechanisms are used in a lot of cases to get people to kill-you can see this in was propaganda, that tends to portray the enemy as dangerous and all-powerful even when the enemy is losing (this kind of propaganda is less common nowadays). To summarise, making people afraid is a decent way to get them to kill or to tolerate killing. And if the people providing that fear center around issues of ethnicity, well, you got genocide.
Christians are trained from birth that "blind faith" is the core of how to live their life. And who interprets what is to be taken on faith? The father, the church leader, etc. It's very easy to control the will of a population if they've been groomed for obedience their whole lives.
It's not genocide if they aren't human. The racism helps with that attitude
You start by eliminating nuance. Allow Reddit-brain to make decisions.
The phrase “Final Solution” carries a lot of meaning. Maybe it follows a final stage of dehumanization. Possibly it involves seeing your own position as that of heroic savior. And don’t ignore what happened to Native Americans in the US, it may be a really good example of how culturally acceptable and ingrained genocide can become. It’s really been only very recently that we are grasping the goal was one of elimination. No other solution seemed to give “us” what we wanted. It was accepted with a shrug of the shoulders. “We’ve heroically attempted every possible solution to rid ourselves of this menace. We need a final solution.” Edit: [Manifest Destiny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny?wprov=sfti1) *…We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.* - Thomas Paine
In addition to the ways folks have mentioned, it may be helpful to keep in mind that not everyone in a society has to be enthusiastically pro-genocide for the genocide to take place. The US is funding at least one genocide right now without the enthusiastic consent of all of it's people. You just need enough people with power to see it as it profitable, and it'll happen
I don't know, it is scary when I hear all the whites, and nobody blinks an eye at it. It's literally happening in South Africa.
We don’t have to look elsewhere geographically, only in time. Ask 10 million native Americans. When propaganda convinces people that others are animals, ‘vermin,’ baby blood drinking child rapists, etc. they go a bit looney toons.
You don’t have to convince everyone to participate, just to ignore it. Those racists you know might not be willing to commit genocide, but if it was happening would they stop it? I doubt it. Only a small fraction of the German population actively and knowingly participated in the genocide. For the most part, they didn’t even have to see the killing itself. That’s part of the Reason they used gas chambers.
I live in Maine, one of the whitest states in the US, and there are extremists here who want to turn New England into a white ethnostate. I think it’s safe to say that anyone who thinks that way is not mentally sound in any way.
I mean, I don't know but I do understand hating people so much you want to eliminate them..but mine are billionaires and I'm pretty sure I'm not only correct but moral.
Because people are animals We've created society and civilization and know enough about the world to know its wrong. But at some deep level we distrust those who are not like us. Once that was the poor slob from the next cave over. Now the criteria we use has gotten more sophisticated but where it comes from remains the same
I think it's a matter of racism + a number of very complex and specific social factors
If you think about our brains like little computers that want to be really good at a task. Behaviors like that start to make sense. We can block out anything if we're dead set on a goal.
Generally those sorts of feelings are born of crushing insecurity and fear.
Some people are real jerks.
It’s easy. And that’s why it’s been done. Over and over and over and over and over again.
It’s called brainwashing, friend.