Genocide

“ We note that there may be differing interpretations of genocide—how and why the Armenian Genocide happened, but to deny its factual and moral reality as genocide is not to engage in scholarship but in propaganda and efforts to absolve the perpetrator, blame the victims, and erase the ethical meaning of this history. ”

“ The Nazi system was unique in the sheer bestiality of the act most commonly associated with its name, the programme of genocide systematically carried out against populations considered either valueless or harmful to humanity’s future, a programme that included a deliberate attempt literally to exterminate the entire Jewish people. ”

“ In some occupied territories the defendants interfered in religious matters, persecuted members of the clergy and monastic orders, and expropriated church property. They conducted deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people and national, racial, or religious groups, particularly Jews, Poles, and Gypsies and others.
Civilians were systematically subjected to tortures of all kinds, with the object of obtaining information. ”

“ TEXT OF THE CONVENTION
The Contracting Parties,
Having considered the declaration made by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its resolution 96 (I) dated 11 December 1946 that genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world;
Recognizing that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity; and
Being convinced that, in order to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge, international co-operation is required ”

“ We want to draw the attention of the United Nations Organisation, the Organisation of African Unity and the Arab League to their historical responsibility towards a peaceful people, victims of an attempt at extermination, a veritable genocide. ”

“ Acknowledging and profoundly regretting the untold suffering and evils inflicted on millions of men, women and children as a result of slavery, the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, apartheid, genocide and past tragedies, noting that some States have taken the initiative to apologize and have paid reparation, where appropriate, for grave and massive violations committed, and calling upon those that have not yet expressed remorse or presented apologies to find some way to contribute to the restoration of the dignity of victims ”

“ The sight of the destroyed homes and cities, the widowed and fatherless, the destitute, the physical misery of a people but partially nourished at best, the deportation of men by tens of thousands to slavery in German mines and factories, the execution of men and women for paltry effusions of their loyalty to their country, the sacking of every resource through financial robbery, the battening of armies on the slender produce of the country, the denudation of the country of cattle, horses and textiles ”

“ It was, no doubt, better to have these scenes buried in oblivion, and for each succeeding historian to fill up this chapter with his own fancies, than to be able to give the minute details of long days and months of probable famine, pestilence, war, captivity, and torture, which have occurred here or in the immediate vicinity. The certain knowledge of them would have awakened in their countrymen sentiments of retaliation and vengeance, and a fearful retribution would have been meted but to the natives, and have fallen upon the innocent as well as the guilty. ”

“ Assaults on countries, massacres of nations, deportation of populations into slavery for powerful munition interests, all such outrages, dignified by the name of war for the defense of the Fatherland, had not their parallel even in the most degrading period of the history of humanity. Man was crazed with the lust of blood, frenzied with rapine and slaughter. ”

“ Who can count the multitude of thy crimes against them, who can measure the height and the depth of the woe that thou laid over their lives. Hearths and homes pillaged and desolated, harvest fields turned into rivers of blood, not thousands upon thousands, but hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children tortured with devilish ingenuities of torture, imprisoned in loathsome dungeons, outraged, butchered, slaughtered, hunted like wild beasts, left to homelessness and starvation. ”

“ As to this massacre, God forbid that I should say a single word in defense of it! As a white man and a Christian, I feel it is an act of horrible atrocity; but it should not make such an impression upon your people, who make wars solely to obtain victims, whom they may sacrifice at the altars of their gods; and who, every year, slay in cold blood fully twenty-five thousand people who have done them no wrong. By the side of such horrible slaughter as this, the murder of six hundred, the other day, was but a drop in the ocean of blood annually shed here. ”

“ Forty thousand people--men, women, and children--were inhumanly butchered, without necessity, quarter, compassion, or remorse. So cold and hard is war! This was the saddest massacre in the history of Germany, and one of the greatest crimes that a successful general ever committed. ”

“ Persecution, imprisonment, crucifixion, burning at the stake, pouring molten lead into the ears, bursting people with water poured into their mouths, tearing them limb from limb, in short, no tortures that devilish ingenuity could invent but were inflicted, and the wars, desolating countries, the destruction of cities, the outrage and murder of helpless women and children, fire and the sword, the fiendish passions of men unrestrained, a greater destruction of property and human life by the Christian religious wars, than in all the wars of the world put together, and for what purpose? ”

“ Starvation, execution or massacre without trial, torture, rape, murder and wanton destruction of property were foremost among the outright violations of the laws of war and of the conscience of a civilized world. ”

“ If we are, or appear to be, satisfied with them, it would indicate that as a Nation we regard the killing of people and the devastation of a country, and the practice of torture as mere peccadillos—offenses more venial than the stealing of a loaf of bread by a beggar. ”

“ We see myriads of men banded together to practice open violation of the very [4] fundamental tenets of humanity; we see the worst passions of mankind, murder, theft, lust, arson, pillage—all the baser possibilities of human nature—coming to the surface. Outside of the natural killing of war, hundreds of men have been murdered, often with incidents of the most revolting brutality; children have been slaughtered; women have been outraged, killed and shamefully mutilated. ”

“ The bestialization produced by war and militant patriotism came openly to the front with all the horrors of savagery, rapine, deportation, atrocities, and the inhuman slaughter of millions of human beings for the glory of the Fatherland and Kultur and for "the making of the world fit for Democracy." ”

“ Women were outraged, murdered and mutilated in unspeakable fashion; poor little children were murdered, bayoneted or maimed; the aged, crippled and infirm were treated with a brutality that was appalling; wounded soldiers and prisoners were tortured and afterwards murdered; innocent civilians, women and children of tender age, were placed before the German troops to act as living screens for the inhuman monsters, while there was looting, burning and destruction of property everywhere. Read, I say, that official report for yourselves! ”

“ The scenes of destruction and murder which we frequently passed in the villages and on our daily march, were dreadful. Houses and furniture burnt, men and women mutilated and murdered, lying about in the most disgusting and barbarous manner, some with their throats cut, some with their eyes and ears gone, and others cut up and most dreadfully exposed; all this for revenge, because they would not, or could not, supply the French army with provisions, and in the hope that these savage proceedings would terrify others into instant compliance. ”

“ Wholesale massacres and torturings, wholesale starvation of prisoners, firing of great cities, piracies of the cruelest kind, persecution of the most hideous character and of vast extent, and finally assassination in high places—whatever is inhuman, whatever is brutal, whatever is fiendish, these men have resorted to. They will leave behind names so black, and the memory of deeds so infamous, that the execration of the slaveholders' rebellion will be eternal. ”

“ Torture-mongers vied with each other in running the gamut of brutality, while the populace, into whose hands the bodies of the hapless victims were delivered, would close in upon their prey, and would so mutilate them as to leave no trace of their original form. The executioners, though accustomed to their own gruesome task, would themselves be amazed at the fiendish cruelty of the populace. ”

“ Because, from Mungo Park, assassinated on the Niger, to Vogel, who disappeared in the Wadai country; from Oudney, who died at Murmur, and Clapperton, lost at Sackatou, to the Frenchman Maizan, who was cut to pieces; from Major Laing, killed by the Touaregs, to Roscher, from Hamburg, massacred in the beginning of 1860, the names of victim after victim have been inscribed on the lists of African martyrdom! Because, to contend successfully against the elements; against hunger, and thirst, and fever; against savage beasts, and still more savage men, is impossible! ”

“ The villages of the Christians were plundered and given to the flames; their male inhabitants slain without mercy, under nameless tortures; women and girls carried off to slavery. The dead lay heaped in the churches to which they had fled for shelter, and dogs and hungry kites tore their flesh as they lay unburied by the wayside. ”

“ Their blasphemies against religion went hand in hand with their desecration of everything holy in social life, and a pre-eminence in guilt became the highest object of ambition. Sated with slaughter, bloated with crime, the nation reeled like a drunken savage over the ruin it created, and with the insane lust of blood poured forth its armed thousands throughout the whole of Europe. ”

“ These unfortunate people, men, women and children, who had witnessed and survived fires and massacres, who had seen their houses blazing and so many of those dear to them fall under the bullets of the assassin, and who were forced in some places to dig graves for their victims, and in others to hold a light for the executioners while they were finishing off the wounded,—these poor wretches are despatched to Germany. ”

“ Or, like the savage despots of Africa, who decree that when they are buried hundreds of their subjects shall be slaughtered and buried in the same grave, they may feel that their victims will have to serve them in the future world. ”

“ The world is being suffocated by poisonous gases of inhuman cruelty spread abroad by Germany, who, in the madness of her rage, is committing needless, purposeless, and senseless murder, solely from lust of blood and horrors! ”

“ Either through a new experience and cultivation of the old blood, coupled with an enhanced fighting will, we will rise to a purificatory action, or the last Germanic-western values of morality and state-culture shall sink away in the filthy human masses of the big cities, become stunted on the sterile burning asphalt of a bestialized inhumanity, or trickle away as a morbific agent in the form of emigrants bastardizing themselves in South America, China, Dutch East India, Africa.
“A new faith is arising today: the myth of the blood, the faith, to defend with the blood the divine essence of man. ”

“ We will show them to be living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. ”

“ I tremble at the thought that our own civilized and chivalrous people may at any moment be confronted with this lava flood of savagery and destructiveness. Now, if ever, the opportune moment has come for all civilized nations to join in protest, stiffened with a unanimous threat, against the continuance of such crimes against the human race. Europe ought surely to have the line drawn at the poisoning of wells, the persecution of prisoners, and the massacre of women and children. ”

“ I attack the monsters, the phantoms of imagination that have ruled the world. I attack slavery. I ask for room—room for the human mind.
Why should we sacrifice a real world that we have, for one we know not of? Why should we enslave ourselves? Why should we forge fetters for our own hands? Why should we be the slaves of phantoms. The darkness of barbarism was the womb of these shadows. In the light of science they cannot cloud the sky forever. They have reddened the hands of man with innocent blood. They made the cradle a curse, and the grave a place of torment. ”

“ Our comrades had been slaughtered in a most inhuman and brutal manner, and slaves were trampling over their mangled and bleeding corpses. Revenge must have fired every heart, and strung every arm with nerves of steel, for the herculean task of blood. ”

“ I further left no one in doubt that this time not only would millions of children of Europe's Aryan peoples die of hunger, not only would millions of grown men suffer death, and not only hundreds of thousands of women and children be burnt and bombed to death in the towns, without the real criminal having to atone for this guilt, even if by more humane means. ”

“ I recalled that such massacres, often on an infinitely larger scale, had happened a thousand times in history, and that still through them, often, indeed, by means of them, civilisation has marched forward, and mercy and peace have kissed each other over the bloody graves of the victims. ”