Race and Ethnicity Essay
The Article II of the United Nations Genocide Convention, year 1948 gives the definition of genocide and defines it as any acts that are committed with intention of destroying in general or particularly any national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
The list of people who became the victims of genocide is very long, that horrifies any human. The most well known nations who became the victims are: Jews, Cambodians, Bosnians, and Rwandan Tutsis. Other ethnic and religious nations can seem to be not so well known in history as the victims of genocide, but nevertheless millions of them died, for example, Armenians, Ukrainian peasants, Gypsies, Bengalis, Burundi Hutus, Guatemalan Indians, etc. These are just some of the examples, but it is possible to continue the list of victims. It involves also the Soviet gulag that was the Soviet slave-labor system. The last researches showed that in Soviet gulag died almost 40,000,000 only in 70 years. It makes over twice as many of those who died because of being captured to be sold as slaves in approximately 400 years of the African slave trade.
62 years ago on the 22nd of June 1941 the most gruesome and brutal war in history of mankind began. It cost 55 million humans lives. But according to Hitler’s plan the European Jews were not to be conquered but simply wiped out.
After seeing the distance to which the Nazi crucifying killings of Jews stretched to during Second World War, Winston Churchill called it “a crime that has no name.” It happened so that before the Second World War started history never knew so numerous terrifying killings of the whole nation groups. So the consequences were the following: the word genocide did not exist until a scholar Raphael Lemkin suggested the term genocide in 1943. As an internationally sanctioned, legal definition, genocide was not accepted until 1951.
Lemkin tried many times without getting any positive results of his attempts to get genocide recognized as a crime. In order to manage that he visited hundreds of official meetings and wrote hundreds of letters in many different languages of the world. And only in 1946 he succeeded in his numerous efforts. Due to it, now we can find in the text of Convention that genocide occurs “when racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part.” It is crucial and unfair to note that genocide includes the destruction of “political and other groups” as well.
During the Second World War genocide was called to be by the Nazi the expulsion; The Nazis used this term to describe the forced deportation of Jews, Gypsys and other victims to death camps during the Holocaust. But between these two terms difference is obvious: expulsion means removing somebody from society without killing. A person can be expelled from a certain society for denying a sort of beliefs and rules that are central to that society or for committing actions that are considered to be unacceptable for this society. Very often, if a person was expelled, he was never aloud to return back to this society again.
The first case of expulsion that was ever used us described in the Hebrew Bible of Yahweh - sending Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden as punishment for their disobedience.
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