The Hamas attack on Israeli settlements and the massive bombardment of Gaza by the Israeli war machine in response – with a promised full-out invasion – have raised the spectre of a “genocide” in the making. The dictionary tells us that genocide is “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group”. Some of the earliest accounts of genocide were recorded in the Bible in the same land where its possibility is in the offing. In one instance, God ordered the Israelites to slaughter the definitionally “sinful” Canaanites, saying: “You shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them.” And, according to a passage in the Old Testament’s Book of Joshua, they did just that: “Thus Joshua struck all the land, the hill country and the Negev and the lowland and the slopes and all their kings. He left no survivor, but he utterly destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord, the God of Israel, had commanded…. He left nothing undone of all that the Lord had commanded Moses.” (Joshua. 10:40, 11:15)
Unfortunately, genocides have been committed through the ages in all so-called “civilizations”. We know that following Europe’s “discovery” of the Americas, genocide was unleashed on the native peoples of the Caribbean, and then on enslaved Africans they hauled across the Atlantic to labour on their plantations. In the last century alone, some of the genocides committed were of 1.5 million Armenians killed by the Turks from 1915-18; 6 million Jews killed by Germans during WWII; 3 million Bengalis killed by a “famine” in 1943 while the British shipped grains to Europe; 2 million Cambodians killed by the Pol Pot regime between 1975-79; and 800,000 Tutsis killed by Hutus in Rwanda in 1994.
After Rwanda, which occurred in full view while the world looked, a typology was formulated by an academic and activist, Gregory Stanton, who warned in his “Ten Stages of Genocide” that: “Genocide is a process that develops in stages that are predictable, but not inexorable. At each stage, preventive measures can stop it.” We need to be alert to these stages, not just because of what is unfolding in the Middle East, but in our own Guyana, since we exhibit some of the symptoms.
The first stage is CLASSIFICATION: All cultures have categories to distinguish people into “us and them” by ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality etc. and some group can impart an invidious ranking to this classification. In Guyana, the White Colonials created an exclusive category of themselves as “Europeans” that even excluded Portuguese. Stanton warns, “If societies are too segregated (divided), they are most likely to have genocide.”
The second stage is SYMBOLIZATION, where characteristics such as names and other visible characteristics are given meanings to support the ranking. For instance, Africans were initially categorized as “savages”, but ironically, after they accepted the values of the Whites, they ridiculed Indians as “pagans” and “heathens”.
This leads to stage three – DISCRIMINATION such as when, for decades, Indians were prevented from becoming teachers unless they converted to Christianity to fix their defect.
Even more extreme treatment is justified when the “out” group is DEHUMANIZED by attributing characteristics of animals or vermin to them. This is a critical stage, since it becomes much easier to be cruel to animals than to fellow humans.
Dehumanization is followed by ORGANIZATION of powerful groups or the state to plan, arm, and begin killing the “other”. In Guyana, during the ethnic violence of the 1960s, a PNC “X-13 Plan” was discovered that offered detailed measures such as bombings etc, to deal condignly with the “enemy”.
On May 26, 1964, Guyana experienced its first ethnic cleansing of 3000 Indian Guyanese from Wismar. Extremists drive the groups apart by broadcasting propaganda that reinforces prejudice and hate. Rabbi Washington’s House of Israel was given airtime by the PNC to make such broadcasts during the 1970s. They target moderates, and intimidate them as “sellouts” so that they are silenced. Today we hear of “slave catchers” over social media.
Then comes the PREPARATION for the “final solution”, which begins with “PERSECUTION” and ends with “EXTERMINATION”. In the last, the killings are not viewed by the perpetrators as murder, since the victims are sub-human: vermin must be exterminated.
The last and tenth stage is DENIAL, as the perpetrators insist that whatever occurred was actually the fault of the victims: they brought it on themselves. Where is Gaza or Guyana on this genocide spectrum?
