Tag: Nazi Germany

What Is Genocide?

Man’s Inhumanity to Man

BILL ASTORE

FEB 08, 2026

Who the hell wants to talk about genocide and man’s inhumanity to man?

I taught courses on the Holocaust, where I came across a two-volume encyclopedia of genocide (see list of references at the end). We humans have a remarkable record of killing each other (usually couched as killing the “other,” the “bad” people). That a two-volume encyclopedia of genocide exists says something truly horrendous about the human condition. 

Far too often, a chosen people, a “master race,” decides to eliminate barbarians, inferiors, primitives, race enemies, whatever words are used to demonize other humans. Often, it’s said we must kill them before they kill us, so mass murder is defined and defended in terms of safety and security. The “bad” people force us to kill them. We don’t want to do it—they make us! And we hate them all the more for making us kill.

At the same time, mass murder is often quite profitable for the killers. In the Holocaust, the Nazis systematically stole everything from the Jews they were killing. They stole their houses and apartments, their businesses, their furniture, their jewelry, their clothing: everything they could get their greedy murderous hands on. In Gaza today and on the West Bank, we see Israel stealing land and most everything else from murdered and displaced Palestinians. The Israeli government justifies mass theft and mass death as a defensive war against barbaric terrorists, just as the Nazis saw themselves as being at war with inferior Jews and other racial undesirables like the gypsies.

The Nazis claimed the Jews were an existential threat to the “master race,” thus all Jews had to be killed, even women, children, and babies. The Israeli government claims Hamas is an existential threat to Jews and that all Palestinians are, more or less, members or supporters of Hamas and therefore must be eliminated (murdered or expelled). Women, children, babies: they’re all Hamas.

America has its own history of genocide. Various Native American peoples were murdered, shunted aside onto reservations, sent to “civilizing” schools that denied them their history and identity, most of their land stolen from them. This had to be done, the white man claimed, because the Indians were brutal savages, demonically so.

Today, there is great resistance (certainly among U.S. politicians) to the idea that Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza. Most U.S. politicians prefer to think of it as a morally justifiable war against Hamas, and even if they don’t completely buy that, they give Israel everything it wants, weapons and money, to facilitate that genocide. Like Pontius Pilate, they wash their hands of blood shed in Gaza, blaming Hamas (or, perhaps for a few, quietly blaming Israel without daring to say it).

Anyhow, these musings came to me as I contemplated a short encyclopedia article I wrote on genocide about 25 years ago. What follows is that article.

GENOCIDE: Legal term coined in 1944 initially to define and condemn Nazi efforts to destroy, deliberately and systematically, Jews as well as Sinti and Roma (Gypsies) in the Holocaust. The term encompasses not only ethnic- and racially-motivated extermination but also cultural, national, and political. Although the term is fairly recent, genocidal practices are nearly as old as recorded history. Witness the Roman annihilation of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War. Yet genocide as a category is usually applied to events of more recent history, with the Turkish persecution of Armenians during World War I providing a paradigm of ruthless and wholesale murder to extirpate an entire people. Accusing Armenians of being pro-Russian and envying their domination of eastern Anatolia, Turkish officials forced them to emigrate east across mountains in winter. Hundreds of thousands died of exposure, starvation, or in massacres; perhaps 1.5 million died in total from 1915 to 1923.

Josef Stalin’s persecution of Ukrainians in the 1930s also constituted genocide, as Stalin distrusted their political loyalty. By confiscating crops and seed grain and preventing emigration, Stalin consigned five million Ukrainians to early graves. Nazi extermination policies were more racially oriented, as Adolf Hitler considered Jews and Gypsies to be irredeemable biological menaces to the purity of Aryan blood. The machinery of death employed by Nazis—railroads and cattle cars, gas chambers and ovens—and the systematic pillaging and gleeful humiliation of victims set a despicably new standard for human barbarity. Six million Jews and half a million Gypsies died at the hands of this evil regime. The post-war Nuremberg Trials prosecuted a few of the more prominent architects of the so-called Final Solution, but many others escaped judgment.

Although the United Nations’ Genocide Convention (1951) made genocide a crime under international law, lack of military forces and international criminal courts to enforce the convention has crippled efforts to deter or punish perpetrators. Acts of genocide continued, whether by the Khmer Rouge in the Cambodian “killing fields” in the 1970s, where one million perished, or by Hutu extremists in 1994, who massacred 800,000 Tutsis in a matter of months as the international community wrung its hands. Events closer to Europe that endangered Western stability drew greater scrutiny. Thus in 1993 the UN created a War Crimes Tribunal to prosecute practitioners of “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia. Despite a handful of convictions, prosecution and prevention of genocidal crimes remain serious challenges facing the international community in the twenty-first century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bartov, Omer. Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity, Oxford, 2000.

Charny, Israel W. Encyclopedia of Genocide, 2 vols, Santa Barbara, CA, 1999.

Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, New York, 2002.

Rosenbaum, Alan S., ed. Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, Boulder, CO, 1998.

Canada Applauds a Waffen-SS Soldier

W.J. Astore

The Good Nazi?

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan was attacked for visiting a German military cemetery in Bitburg, West Germany, because that cemetery included forty graves of members of the Waffen-SS, the combat branch of the Schutzstaffel led by the infamous Heinrich Himmler. Reagan’s intent was to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the ending of World War II in Europe, not to celebrate those forty graves among the 2000 in that cemetery. Nevertheless, he was deeply criticized for laying a memorial wreath at Bitburg, as the photo below shows.

By Elke Wetzig – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49406384

Fast forward nearly 40 years to 2023 and we recently witnessed the spectacle of the Canadian Parliament giving two sustained standing ovations to a living (former) member of the Waffen-SS, a Ukrainian (Yaroslav Hunka) who’d joined the Nazis to fight against the Soviet Union in World War II.

No one it seems in the Canadian Parliament thought it odd to applaud a soldier who’d fought on the side of the Nazis during World War II against an ally of Canada. And, yes, the Soviet Union was an ally of Canada and the U.S., and more than any other country was responsible for defeating Hitler and his murderously racist regime, whose most fanatical followers were members of the SS.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s apology, meanwhile, was done in two parts. He blamed the House Speaker (who resigned) for this colossal blunder even as he attacked Russia for seeking to exploit the mistake for political advantage. Meanwhile, Poland is seeking to extradite the former member of the Waffen-SS for possible war crimes committed during World War II.

How could such a colossal blunder have occurred, and just before Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar?

Knowledge of history was simply cast aside, I think, because the Canadian political “elite” were so eager to showcase a Ukrainian who’d killed Russians, even if he’d done so as a member of the murderous SS. Of course, President Zelensky was present at this debacle, applauding along. It was all about showing support for Ukraine in its allegedly righteous war against Russia, with Canada naturally being on the side of the righteous. 

In a recent podcast featuring Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn, Kirn noted astutely that the Canadian Parliament, apparently to a person ignorant of World War II and Nazi history, was more than anything applauding itself, celebrating their own rectitude, in saluting an old soldier who’d killed Russians. What did it matter that he’d served Heinrich Himmler, who oversaw the “Final Solution” and the Holocaust? What mattered was showing you stood in solidarity today with Zelensky against Putin.

Heinrich Himmler (center), head of the SS, visits the unit of the Waffen-SS under question, the so-called Galicia Division formed in 1943 (Getty image; BBC News)

If America was “ashamed” of Ronald Reagan in 1985 merely for visiting a cemetery to commemorate war dead where two percent of the graves were Waffen-SS members, how should Canadians feel about their political elite standing as one to stormily applaud a living, breathing, former member of Waffen-SS and saluting him as a hero for killing Russians?

“Ashamed” doesn’t begin to capture the depth of this crime against history.

Trump’s Garden of Heroes

Statues
Silent teachers in stone and metal: U.S. Capitol

W.J. Astore

While castigating the “radical left” in his latest vitriolic speech before Mount Rushmore, Trump proposed a new garden of heroes to celebrate meaningful Americans.  Naturally, that list has generated controversy.  As others have noted, Native Americans are absent from the list; so too are Hispanics; and so too are Democratic presidents.

Here’s a look at Trump’s “heroes”:

John Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Daniel Boone, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Henry Clay, Davy Crockett, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Billy Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, Christa McAuliffe, Audie Murphy, George S. Patton, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, Betsy Ross, Antonin Scalia, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, Orville and Wilbur Wright.

It’s easy to pick apart any list.  Why this person and not that one?  Or why not this person and that one?  For example, why not MLK Jr. and Malcolm X?  Why not Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali?  Is it because MLK Jr. and Jackie are considered safer, or less controversial, or more American because they were “less angry”?

Among other absences, there’s another I’d like to highlight: Any person dedicated to the cause of peace.*

Again, looking at Trump’s list, what struck me was the predictable worship of military men, not just Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain from the Civil War or Audie Murphy from World War II but the usual generals Trump professes to love, Patton and MacArthur.  Two vainglorious wannabe Caesars, the very opposite of America’s citizen-soldier ideal, are Trump’s idea of America’s noblest generals.  Not George C. Marshall and Omar Bradley, also of World War II fame, and both more deserving of acclaim, and more suited to America’s military traditions.  Or how about General Smedley Butler, twice awarded the Medal of Honor, who became an outspoken critic of war after his retirement?

What also struck me was the presence of “the usual suspects” in the list.  Do we really need yet another statue to George Washington?  Abraham Lincoln?  Benjamin Franklin?  Can’t we come up with some lesser known heroes worthy of acclaim, perhaps someone like Prudence Crandall, a schoolteacher who established the first school for African-American girls in New England, and who faced mob violence as she fought to keep her school open.  Or how about Elihu Burritt, the Learned Blacksmith, who fought so hard in antebellum America against war.  America has a wealth of unsung heroes; why not take this chance to celebrate “ordinary” Americans doing extraordinary things?

Notice, naturally, the deep bow to conservative icons such as Billy Graham, Ronald Reagan, and Antonin Scalia.  An evangelist, a president, and a Supreme Court Justice, respectively.  So how about Dorothy Day, Jimmy Carter, and Harry Blackmun to balance the partisan ledger?

Some science might be injected with Carl Sagan or James Watson.  Some environmentalism with Rachel Carson.  During a pandemic, why not Jonas Salk?  And why is America’s greatest inventor, Thomas Edison, not on this list?  Of course, you could go on almost endlessly here.

Perhaps what amused me most was the stipulation the statues have to be lifelike or realistic, not abstract or modernist representations.  They are to be “silent teachers in solid form of stone and metal,” per Trump’s executive order.  This rejection of abstract or modernist representation put me to mind of Nazi Germany’s rejection of so-called degenerate art.  The Nazis preferred art that celebrated uncontroversially the heroism of Germans and the human form: art that was open only to the most obvious interpretation.  As a good friend put it, “Combine Trump’s classical garden of heroes with his edict that public buildings be made ‘beautiful again’ in a neoclassical style and all he’s missing is a catchy antisemitic drinking song.”

In other words, Trump wants a garden of heroes in which we’re expected to bow our heads in awe, rather than hold our heads in thought.  Awe is befitting to a dictatorship, but thought is becoming to a democracy.

* I’ve applauded MLK Jr.’s efforts to end the Vietnam War; he deserves to be recognized as a peace activist, but of course he’s on Trump’s list for his civil rights record, not his critique of America as the world’s greatest purveyor of violence.  One name I’d love to see added to the list is Daniel Ellsberg, who risked everything to expose American lies with the release of the Pentagon Papers.