Armenian Genocide Case Study

“‘A genocide - that’s when an ethnic group wants to bury another ethnic group. Genocide goes beyond war, because the intention lasts forever, even if it’s not crowned with success. It is a final intention.’” (qtd. in Machete Season 107). As humanity continues to learn of the horrendous atrocities that they are able to commit, it becomes a question of why. Throughout history, there have been many cases of the elimination of an ethnic or religious population. One case study is the Armenian Genocide. From 1915 to 1916 was the massacre against the minority of Christian Armenians by the Young Turks, an extremist group that governed the Ottoman Empire at the time. Millions of Armenians were forced from their homes, marched into the desert, and murdered
Some had even participated in the raping and killing of innocent lives. Another example was while World War II wreaked havoc, the Nazi Party of Germany had begun to persecute what became six million Jews and six million more “sub-humans” in an attempt to create the perfect “master race.” After the repercussions of what would be known as the Holocaust and the war that left nations in chaos, it seemed that the world would not be capable of another genocide. However in 1994, Rwanda had become a bloodbath. The Hutu population tore apart their neighboring Tutsi in the Rwandan Genocide in a dispute over politics, driven by the long history of hostility between the groups. When analyzing each, these massacres show multiple factors that contribute to the result of genocide. In regions where genocide has occurred, hardships such as poverty or war produces a desperate yearning for a brighter future. This leads to people blaming a minority population, believing that their problems will disappear along with the elimination of the victimized people. As they build upon the history of hatred, it grows to the extent of allowing the genocide of
For example, similar to the Armenian Genocide, the causes go back to before the event itself takes place. Fifteen years earlier, the struggle and hardships following the “defeat in World War I (1914-1918) devastated the morale of German citizens” (McElroy 6). The Germans had been forced to sign a treaty that called for the retribution for the entire war, which amounted to billions of dollars (McElroy 6). Much similar to the Ottoman Empire, Germany had been humiliated in the defeat of the Great War and had to endure starvation to the point of death and crushing poverty as a result. Just as the Ottomans had, the Germans had crumbled into a state of despair as they nourished their bitterness, inducing a desire to direct their blame toward anyone. This hatred was soon aimed at the minority of Jews as anti-Semitism grew to great heights. However, prejudice toward Jews has been around long before the Nazi party took it to such lengths as extermination. “In the ancient Greco-Roman world, religious differences were the primary basis for anti-Semitism...pagans saw Jews’ principled refusal to worship emperors as gods as a sign of disloyalty” (Berenbaum, "Anti-Semitism"). To be able to build upon this history of anti-Semitism, the Germans had also begun to label them as greedy or indecent because, like the