Fascists saw World War I as a revolution that brought massive changes to the nature of war, society, the state, and technology. The advent of total war and the total mass mobilization of society had broken down the distinction between civilians and combatants. A “military citizenship” arose in which all citizens were involved with the military in some manner during the war.[12][13] The war had resulted in the rise of a powerful state capable of mobilizing millions of people to serve on the front lines and providing economic production and logistics to support them, as well as having unprecedented authority to intervene in the lives of citizens.[12][13]
Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete and regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarianone-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties.[14] Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society.[14] Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature and views political violence, war, and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation.[15][16][17][18] Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky(national economic self-sufficiency) through protectionist and interventionist economic policies.[19]
Since the end of World War II in 1945, few parties have openly described themselves as fascist, and the term is instead now usually used pejoratively by political opponents. The descriptions neo-fascist or post-fascist are sometimes applied more formally to describe parties of the far-right with ideologies similar to, or rooted in, 20th-century fascist movements.[6][20]
The symbolism of the fasces suggested strength through unity: a single rod is easily broken, while the bundle is difficult to break.[28] Similar symbols were developed by different fascist movements: for example, the Falange symbol is five arrows joined together by a yoke.[29]
Historians, political scientists, and other scholars have long debated the exact nature of fascism.[30] Each group described as fascist has at least some unique elements, and many definitions of fascism have been criticized as either too wide or narrow.[31][32]
One common definition of the term focuses on three concepts:
nationalist authoritarian goals of creating a regulated economic structure to transform social relations within a modern, self-determined culture; and
a political aesthetic of romantic symbolism, mass mobilization, a positive view of violence, and promotion of masculinity, youth, and charismatic leadership.[33][34][35]
According to many scholars, fascism—especially once in power—has historically attacked communism, conservatism, and parliamentary liberalism, attracting support primarily from the far-right.[36]
Historian Stanley Payne identifies three main strands in fascism. His typology is regularly cited by reliable sources as a standard definition. First, Payne’s “fascist negations” refers to such typical policies as anti-communism and anti-liberalism. Second, “fascist goals” include a nationalist dictatorship and an expanded empire. Third, “fascist style” is seen in its emphasis on violence and authoritarianism and its exultation of men above women and young against old.[37]
Roger Griffin describes fascism as “a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populistultranationalism“.[38] Griffin describes the ideology as having three core components: “(i) the rebirth myth, (ii) populist ultra-nationalism, and (iii) the myth of decadence”.[39] Fascism is “a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism” built on a complex range of theoretical and cultural influences. He distinguishes an inter-war period in which it manifested itself in elite-led but populist “armed party” politics opposing socialism and liberalism and promising radical politics to rescue the nation from decadence.[40]
Robert Paxton says that fascism is “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion”.[41]
Racism was a key feature of German fascism, as they made the Holocaust a high priority. According to the historiography of genocide, “In dealing with the Holocaust, it is the consensus of historians that Nazi Germany targeted Jews as a race, not as a religious group.”[42]Umberto Eco,[43]Kevin Passmore,[44] John Weiss,[45] Ian Adams,[46] and Moyra Grant[47] stress racism as a characteristic component of German fascism. The Encyclopedia Britannica says, “Hitler envisioned the ideal German society as a Volksgemeinschaft, a racially unified and hierarchically organized body in which the interests of individuals would be strictly subordinate to those of the nation, or Volk.”[48] Fascist philosophies vary by application, but remain distinct by one theoretic commonality. All traditionally fall into the far-right sector of any political spectrum, catalyzed by afflicted class identities over conventional social inequities[6]
Historian John Lukacs argues that there is no such thing as generic fascism. He claims that National Socialism and communism are essentially manifestations of populism and that states such as National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy are more different than similar.[49]
Position in the political spectrum
Most scholars place fascism on the far right of the political spectrum.[6][7][8][9][10][11] Such scholarship focuses on its social conservatism and its authoritarian means of opposing egalitarianism.[50][51] Roderick Stackelberg places fascism—including Nazism, which he says is “a radical variant of fascism”—on the political right by explaining: “The more a person deems absolute equality among all people to be a desirable condition, the further left he or she will be on the ideological spectrum. The more a person considers inequality to be unavoidable or even desirable, the further to the right he or she will be”.[52]
Fascism’s origins, however, are complex and include many seemingly contradictory viewpoints, ultimately centered around a myth of national rebirth from decadence.[53] Fascism was founded during World War I by Italian national syndicalists who drew upon both left-wing organizational tactics and right-wing political views.[54]
Italian Fascism gravitated to the right in the early 1920s.[55][56] A major element of fascist ideology that has been deemed to be far-right is its stated goal to promote the right of a supposedly superior people to dominate, while purging society of supposedly inferior elements.[57]
In the 1920s, the Italian Fascists described their ideology as right-wing in the political program The Doctrine of Fascism, stating: “We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the ‘right,’ a fascist century”.[58][59] Mussolini stated that fascism’s position on the political spectrum was not a serious issue for fascists: “Fascism, sitting on the right, could also have sat on the mountain of the center … These words in any case do not have a fixed and unchanged meaning: they do have a variable subject to location, time and spirit. We don’t give a damn about these empty terminologies and we despise those who are terrorized by these words”.[60]
Major Italian groups politically on the right, especially rich landowners and big business, feared an uprising by groups on the left such as sharecroppers and labour unions.[61] They welcomed Fascism and supported its violent suppression of opponents on the left.[62] The accommodation of the political right into the Italian Fascist movement in the early 1920s created internal factions within the movement. The “Fascist left” included Michele Bianchi, Giuseppe Bottai, Angelo Oliviero Olivetti, Sergio Panunzio, and Edmondo Rossoni, who were committed to advancing national syndicalism as a replacement for parliamentary liberalism in order to modernize the economy and advance the interests of workers and common people.[63] The “Fascist right” included members of the paramilitary Squadristi and former members of the Italian Nationalist Association (ANI).[63] The Squadristi wanted to establish Fascism as a complete dictatorship, while the former ANI members, including Alfredo Rocco, sought to institute an authoritarian corporatist state to replace the liberal state in Italy while retaining the existing elites.[63] Upon accommodating the political right, there arose a group of monarchist fascists who sought to use fascism to create an absolute monarchy under King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy.[63]
After King Victor Emmanuel III forced Mussolini to resign as head of government and placed him under arrest in 1943, Mussolini was rescued by German forces. While continuing to rely on Germany for support, Mussolini and the remaining loyal Fascists founded the Italian Social Republic with Mussolini as head of state. Mussolini sought to re-radicalize Italian Fascism, declaring that the Fascist state had been overthrown because Italian Fascism had been subverted by Italian conservatives and the bourgeoisie.[64] Then the new Fascist government proposed the creation of workers’ councils and profit-sharing in industry, although the German authorities, who effectively controlled northern Italy at this point, ignored these measures and did not seek to enforce them.[64]
A number of post-World War II fascist movements described themselves as a “third position” outside the traditional political spectrum.[65] Spanish Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera said: “[B]asically the Right stands for the maintenance of an economic structure, albeit an unjust one, while the Left stands for the attempt to subvert that economic structure, even though the subversion thereof would entail the destruction of much that was worthwhile”.[66]
The term “fascist” has been used as a pejorative,[67] regarding varying movements across the far right of the political spectrum.[68]George Orwell wrote in 1944 that “the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless … almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist'”.[68]
In the United States, Herbert Matthews of The New York Times asked in 1946: “Should we now place Stalinist Russia in the same category as Hitlerite Germany? Should we say that she is Fascist?”.[71]J. Edgar Hoover, longtime FBI director and ardent anti-communist, wrote extensively of “Red Fascism”.[72] The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s was sometimes called “fascist”. Historian Peter Amann states that, “Undeniably, the Klan had some traits in common with European fascism—chauvinism, racism, a mystique of violence, an affirmation of a certain kind of archaic traditionalism—yet their differences were fundamental….[the KKK] never envisioned a change of political or economic system.”[73]
Professor Richard Griffiths of the University of Wales[74] wrote in 2005 that “fascism” is the “most misused, and over-used word, of our times”.[32] “Fascist” is sometimes applied to post-World War II organizations and ways of thinking that academics more commonly term “neo-fascist“.[75]
Fin de siècle era and the fusion of Maurrasism with Sorelianism (1880–1914)
The historian Zeev Sternhell has traced the ideological roots of fascism back to the 1880s and in particular to the fin de siècle theme of that time.[82][83] The theme was based on a revolt against materialism, rationalism, positivism, bourgeois society and democracy.[84] The fin-de-siècle generation supported emotionalism, irrationalism, subjectivism and vitalism.[85] The fin-de-sièclemindset saw civilization as being in a crisis that required a massive and total solution.[84] The fin-de-siècle intellectual school considered the individual only one part of the larger collectivity, which should not be viewed as an atomized numerical sum of individuals.[84] They condemned the rationalistic individualism of liberal society and the dissolution of social links in bourgeois society.[84]
The fin-de-siècle outlook was influenced by various intellectual developments, including Darwinianbiology; Wagnerian aesthetics; Arthur de Gobineau‘s racialism; Gustave Le Bon‘s psychology; and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Henri Bergson.[86]Social Darwinism, which gained widespread acceptance, made no distinction between physical and social life, and viewed the human condition as being an unceasing struggle to achieve the survival of the fittest.[86] Social Darwinism challenged positivism’s claim of deliberate and rational choice as the determining behaviour of humans, with social Darwinism focusing on heredity, race, and environment.[86] Social Darwinism’s emphasis on biogroup identity and the role of organic relations within societies fostered legitimacy and appeal for nationalism.[87] New theories of social and political psychology also rejected the notion of human behaviour being governed by rational choice and instead claimed that emotion was more influential in political issues than reason.[86] Nietzsche’s argument that “God is dead” coincided with his attack on the “herd mentality” of Christianity, democracy and modern collectivism; his concept of the übermensch; and his advocacy of the will to power as a primordial instinct, were major influences upon many of the fin-de-siècle generation.[88] Bergson’s claim of the existence of an “élan vital” or vital instinct centred upon free choice and rejected the processes of materialism and determinism; this challenged Marxism.[89]
Gaetano Mosca in his work The Ruling Class (1896) developed the theory that claims that in all societies an “organized minority” will dominate and rule over the “disorganized majority”.[90][91]Mosca claims that there are only two classes in society, “the governing” (the organized minority) and “the governed” (the disorganized majority).[92] He claims that the organized nature of the organized minority makes it irresistible to any individual of the disorganized majority.[92]
French nationalist and reactionary monarchist Charles Maurras influenced fascism.[93] Maurras promoted what he called integral nationalism, which called for the organic unity of a nation and Maurras insisted that a powerful monarch was an ideal leader of a nation. Maurras distrusted what he considered the democratic mystification of the popular will that created an impersonal collective subject.[93] He claimed that a powerful monarch was a personified sovereign who could exercise authority to unite a nation’s people.[93] Maurras’ integral nationalism was idealized by fascists, but modified into a modernized revolutionary form that was devoid of Maurras’ monarchism.[93]
French revolutionary syndicalist Georges Sorel promoted the legitimacy of political violence in his work Reflections on Violence (1908) and other works in which he advocated radical syndicalist action to achieve a revolution to overthrow capitalism and the bourgeoisie through a general strike.[94]In Reflections on Violence, Sorel emphasized need for a revolutionary political religion.[95] Also in his work The Illusions of Progress, Sorel denounced democracy as reactionary, saying “nothing is more aristocratic than democracy”.[96] By 1909 after the failure of a syndicalist general strike in France, Sorel and his supporters left the radical left and went to the radical right, where they sought to merge militant Catholicism and French patriotism with their views—advocating anti-republican Christian French patriots as ideal revolutionaries.[97] Initially Sorel had officially been a revisionist of Marxism, but by 1910 announced his abandonment of socialist literature and claimed in 1914, using an aphorism of Benedetto Croce that “socialism is dead” because of the “decomposition of Marxism”.[98] Sorel became a supporter of reactionary Maurrassian nationalism beginning in 1909 that influenced his works.[98] Maurras held interest in merging his nationalist ideals with Soreliansyndicalism as a means to confront democracy.[99]Maurras stated “a socialism liberated from the democratic and cosmopolitan element fits nationalism well as a well made glove fits a beautiful hand”.[100]
The fusion of Maurrassian nationalism and Sorelian syndicalism influenced radical Italian nationalist Enrico Corradini.[101] Corradini spoke of the need for a nationalist-syndicalist movement, led by elitist aristocrats and anti-democrats who shared a revolutionary syndicalist commitment to direct action and a willingness to fight.[101] Corradini spoke of Italy as being a “proletarian nation” that needed to pursue imperialism in order to challenge the “plutocratic” French and British.[102] Corradini’s views were part of a wider set of perceptions within the right-wing Italian Nationalist Association (ANI), which claimed that Italy’s economic backwardness was caused by corruption in its political class, liberalism, and division caused by “ignoble socialism”.[102] The ANI held ties and influence among conservatives, Catholics and the business community.[102] Italian national syndicalists held a common set of principles: the rejection of bourgeois values, democracy, liberalism, Marxism, internationalism and pacifism; and the promotion of heroism, vitalism and violence.[103] The ANI claimed that liberal democracy was no longer compatible with the modern world, and advocated a strong state and imperialism, claiming that humans are naturally predatory and that nations were in a constant struggle, in which only the strongest could survive.[104]
Futurism was both an artistic-cultural movement and initially a political movement in Italy led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who founded the Futurist Manifesto (1908), that championed the causes of modernism, action, and political violence as necessary elements of politics while denouncing liberalism and parliamentary politics. Marinetti rejected conventional democracy based on majority rule and egalitarianism, for a new form of democracy, promoting what he described in his work “The Futurist Conception of Democracy” as the following: “We are therefore able to give the directions to create and to dismantle to numbers, to quantity, to the mass, for with us number, quantity and mass will never be—as they are in Germany and Russia—the number, quantity and mass of mediocre men, incapable and indecisive”.[105]
Futurism influenced fascism in its emphasis on recognizing the virile nature of violent action and war as being necessities of modern civilization.[106] Marinetti promoted the need of physical training of young men, saying that in male education, gymnastics should take precedence over books, and he advocated segregation of the genders on this matter, in that womanly sensibility must not enter men’s education whom Marinetti claimed must be “lively, bellicose, muscular and violently dynamic”.[107]
At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the Italian political left became severely split over its position on the war. The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) opposed the war but a number of Italian revolutionary syndicalists supported war against Germany and Austria-Hungary on the grounds that their reactionary regimes had to be defeated to ensure the success of socialism.[108]Angelo Oliviero Olivetti formed a pro-interventionist fascio called the Fasci of International Action in October 1914.[108] Benito Mussolini upon being expelled from his position as chief editor of the PSI’s newspaper Avanti! for his anti-German stance, joined the interventionist cause in a separate fascio.[109] The term “Fascism” was first used in 1915 by members of Mussolini’s movement, the Fasci of Revolutionary Action.[110]
The first meeting of the Fasci of Revolutionary Action was held on 24 January 1915[111] when Mussolini declared that it was necessary for Europe to resolve its national problems—including national borders—of Italy and elsewhere “for the ideals of justice and liberty for which oppressed peoples must acquire the right to belong to those national communities from which they descended”.[111] Attempts to hold mass meetings were ineffective and the organization was regularly harassed by government authorities and socialists.[112]
German soldiers parading through Lübeck in the days leading up to World War I. Johann Plenge‘s concept of the “Spirit of 1914” identified the outbreak of war as a moment that forged nationalistic German solidarity
Similar political ideas arose in Germany after the outbreak of the war. German sociologist Johann Plenge spoke of the rise of a “National Socialism” in Germany within what he termed the “ideas of 1914” that were a declaration of war against the “ideas of 1789” (the French Revolution).[113]According to Plenge, the “ideas of 1789” that included rights of man, democracy, individualism and liberalism were being rejected in favor of “the ideas of 1914” that included “German values” of duty, discipline, law and order.[113] Plenge believed that racial solidarity (Volksgemeinschaft) would replace class division and that “racial comrades” would unite to create a socialist society in the struggle of “proletarian” Germany against “capitalist” Britain.[113] He believed that the “Spirit of 1914” manifested itself in the concept of the “People’s League of National Socialism”.[114] This National Socialism was a form of state socialism that rejected the “idea of boundless freedom” and promoted an economy that would serve the whole of Germany under the leadership of the state.[114] This National Socialism was opposed to capitalism because of the components that were against “the national interest” of Germany, but insisted that National Socialism would strive for greater efficiency in the economy.[114][115] Plenge advocated an authoritarian rational ruling elite to develop National Socialism through a hierarchical technocratic state.[116]
Impact of World War I
Fascists viewed World War I as bringing revolutionary changes in the nature of war, society, the state and technology, as the advent of total war and mass mobilization had broken down the distinction between civilian and combatant, as civilians had become a critical part in economic production for the war effort and thus arose a “military citizenship” in which all citizens were involved to the military in some manner during the war.[12][13] World War I had resulted in the rise of a powerful state capable of mobilizing millions of people to serve on the front lines or provide economic production and logistics to support those on the front lines, as well as having unprecedented authority to intervene in the lives of citizens.[12][13] Fascists viewed technological developments of weaponry and the state’s total mobilization of its population in the war as symbolizing the beginning of a new era fusing state power with mass politics, technology and particularly the mobilizing myth that they contended had triumphed over the myth of progress and the era of liberalism.[12]
Members of Italy’s Arditi corps (here in 1918 holding daggers, a symbol of their group), which was formed in 1917 as groups of soldiers trained for dangerous missions, characterized by refusal to surrender and willingness to fight to the death. Their black uniforms inspired those of the Italian Fascist movement.
Impact of the Bolshevik Revolution
The October Revolution of 1917—in which Bolshevik communists led by Vladimir Lenin seized power in Russia—greatly influenced the development of fascism.[117] In 1917, Mussolini, as leader of the Fasci of Revolutionary Action, praised the October Revolution, but later he became unimpressed with Lenin, regarding him as merely a new version of Tsar Nicholas.[118] After World War I, fascists have commonly campaigned on anti-Marxist agendas.[117]
Liberal opponents of both fascism and the Bolsheviks argue that there are various similarities between the two, including that they believed in the necessity of a vanguard leadership, had disdain for bourgeois values and it is argued had totalitarian ambitions.[117] In practice, both have commonly emphasized revolutionary action, proletarian nation theories, one-party states and party-armies.[117] However, both draw clear distinctions from each other both in aims and tactics, with the Bolsheviks emphasizing the need for an organized participatory democracy and an egalitarian, internationalist vision for society while the fascists emphasize hyper-nationalism and open hostility towards democracy, envisioning a hierarchical social structure as essential to their aims.
With the antagonism between anti-interventionist Marxists and pro-interventionist Fascists complete by the end of the war, the two sides became irreconcilable. The Fascists presented themselves as anti-Marxists and as opposed to the Marxists.[119] Mussolini consolidated control over the Fascist movement, known as Sansepolcrismo, in 1919 with the founding of the Fasci italiani di combattimento.
The Fascist Manifesto of 1919
In 1919, Alceste De Ambris and Futurist movement leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti created The Manifesto of the Italian Fasci of Combat (the Fascist Manifesto).[120] The Manifesto was presented on 6 June 1919 in the Fascist newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia. The Manifesto supported the creation of universal suffrage for both men and women (the latter being realized only partly in late 1925, with all opposition parties banned or disbanded);[121]proportional representation on a regional basis; government representation through a corporatist system of “National Councils” of experts, selected from professionals and tradespeople, elected to represent and hold legislative power over their respective areas, including labour, industry, transportation, public health, communications, etc.; and the abolition of the Italian Senate.[122] The Manifesto supported the creation of an eight-hour work day for all workers, a minimum wage, worker representation in industrial management, equal confidence in labour unions as in industrial executives and public servants, reorganization of the transportation sector, revision of the draft law on invalidity insurance, reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 55, a strong progressive tax on capital, confiscation of the property of religious institutions and abolishment of bishoprics, and revision of military contracts to allow the government to seize 85% of profits.[123] It also called for the fulfillment of expansionist aims in the Balkans and other parts of the Mediterranean,[124] the creation of a short-service national militia to serve defensive duties, nationalization of the armaments industry and a foreign policy designed to be peaceful but also competitive.[125]
Residents of Fiume cheer the arrival of Gabriele d’Annunzio and his blackshirt-wearing nationalist raiders, as D’Annunzio and Fascist Alceste De Ambrisdeveloped the quasi-fascist Italian Regency of Carnaro (a city-state in Fiume) from 1919 to 1920 and whose actions by D’Annunzio in Fiume inspired the Italian Fascist movement
The next events that influenced the Fascists in Italy was the raid of Fiume by Italian nationalist Gabriele d’Annunzio and the founding of the Charter of Carnaro in 1920.[126] D’Annunzio and De Ambris designed the Charter, which advocated national-syndicalistcorporatistproductionism alongside D’Annunzio’s political views.[127] Many Fascists saw the Charter of Carnaro as an ideal constitution for a Fascist Italy.[128] This behaviour of aggression towards Yugoslavia and South Slavs was pursued by Italian Fascists with their persecution of South Slavs—especially Slovenes and Croats.
Italian Fascists in 1920
In 1920, militant strike activity by industrial workers reached its peak in Italy and 1919 and 1920 were known as the “Red Years”.[129]Mussolini and the Fascists took advantage of the situation by allying with industrial businesses and attacking workers and peasants in the name of preserving order and internal peace in Italy.[130]
Fascists identified their primary opponents as the majority of socialists on the left who had opposed intervention in World War I.[128] The Fascists and the Italian political right held common ground: both held Marxism in contempt, discounted class consciousness and believed in the rule of elites.[131] The Fascists assisted the anti-socialist campaign by allying with the other parties and the conservative right in a mutual effort to destroy the Italian Socialist Party and labour organizations committed to class identity above national identity.[131]
Fascism sought to accommodate Italian conservatives by making major alterations to its political agenda—abandoning its previous populism, republicanism and anticlericalism, adopting policies in support of free enterprise and accepting the Catholic Church and the monarchy as institutions in Italy.[132] To appeal to Italian conservatives, Fascism adopted policies such as promoting family values, including promotion policies designed to reduce the number of women in the workforce limiting the woman’s role to that of a mother. The fascists banned literature on birth control and increased penalties for abortion in 1926, declaring both crimes against the state.[133] Though Fascism adopted a number of anti-modern positions designed to appeal to people upset with the new trends in sexuality and women’s rights—especially those with a reactionary point of view—the Fascists sought to maintain Fascism’s revolutionary character, with Angelo Oliviero Olivetti saying: “Fascism would like to be conservative, but it will [be] by being revolutionary”.[134] The Fascists supported revolutionary action and committed to secure law and order to appeal to both conservatives and syndicalists.[135]
Prior to Fascism’s accommodations to the political right, Fascism was a small, urban, northern Italian movement that had about a thousand members.[136] After Fascism’s accommodation of the political right, the Fascist movement’s membership soared to approximately 250,000 by 1921.[137]
Fascist violence in 1922
Beginning in 1922, Fascist paramilitaries escalated their strategy from one of attacking socialist offices and homes of socialist leadership figures to one of violent occupation of cities. The Fascists met little serious resistance from authorities and proceeded to take over several northern Italian cities.[138] The Fascists attacked the headquarters of socialist and Catholic labour unions in Cremona and imposed forced Italianization upon the German-speaking population of Trent and Bolzano.[138] After seizing these cities, the Fascists made plans to take Rome.[138]
On 24 October 1922, the Fascist party held its annual congress in Naples, where Mussolini ordered Blackshirts to take control of public buildings and trains and to converge on three points around Rome.[138] The Fascists managed to seize control of several post offices and trains in northern Italy while the Italian government, led by a left-wing coalition, was internally divided and unable to respond to the Fascist advances.[139] King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy perceived the risk of bloodshed in Rome in response to attempting to disperse the Fascists to be too high.[140] Victor Emmanuel III decided to appoint Mussolini as Prime Minister of Italy and Mussolini arrived in Rome on 30 October to accept the appointment.[140] Fascist propaganda aggrandized this event, known as “March on Rome“, as a “seizure” of power because of Fascists’ heroic exploits.[138]
A primarily political dictatorship….The Fascist Party itself had become almost completely bureaucratized and subservient to, not dominant over, the state itself. Big business, industry, and finance retained extensive autonomy, particularly in the early years. The armed forces also enjoyed considerable autonomy….The Fascist militia was placed under military control….The judicial system was left largely intact and relatively autonomous as well. The police continued to be directed by state officials and were not taken over by party leaders…nor was a major new police elite created….There was never any question of bringing the Church under overall subservience…. Sizable sectors of Italian cultural life retained extensive autonomy, and no major state propaganda-and-culture ministry existed….The Mussolini regime was neither especially sanguinary nor particularly repressive.[141]
Mussolini in power
Upon being appointed Prime Minister of Italy, Mussolini had to form a coalition government because the Fascists did not have control over the Italian parliament.[142] Mussolini’s coalition government initially pursued economically liberal policies under the direction of liberal finance minister Alberto De Stefani, a member of the Center Party, including balancing the budget through deep cuts to the civil service.[142] Initially, little drastic change in government policy had occurred and repressive police actions were limited.[142]
The Fascists began their attempt to entrench Fascism in Italy with the Acerbo Law, which guaranteed a plurality of the seats in parliament to any party or coalition list in an election that received 25% or more of the vote.[143] Through considerable Fascist violence and intimidation, the list won a majority of the vote, allowing many seats to go to the Fascists.[143] In the aftermath of the election, a crisis and political scandal erupted after Socialist Party deputy Giacomo Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered by a Fascist.[143] The liberals and the leftist minority in parliament walked out in protest in what became known as the Aventine Secession.[144] On 3 January 1925, Mussolini addressed the Fascist-dominated Italian parliament and declared that he was personally responsible for what happened, but insisted that he had done nothing wrong. Mussolini proclaimed himself dictator of Italy, assuming full responsibility over the government and announcing the dismissal of parliament.[144] From 1925 to 1929, Fascism steadily became entrenched in power: opposition deputies were denied access to parliament, censorship was introduced and a December 1925 decree made Mussolini solely responsible to the King.[145]
Catholic Church
In 1929, the Fascist regime briefly gained what was in effect a blessing of the Catholic Church after the regime signed a concordat with the Church, known as the Lateran Treaty, which gave the papacy state sovereignty and financial compensation for the seizure of Church lands by the liberal state in the nineteenth century, but within two years the Church had renounced Fascism in the Encyclical Non Abbiamo Bisogno as a “pagan idolotry of the state” which teaches “hatred, violence and irreverence”.[146] Not long after signing the agreement, by Mussolini’s own confession the Church had threatened to have him “excommunicated”, in part because of his intractable nature and that he had “confiscated more issues of Catholic newspapers in the next three months than in the previous seven years”.[147] By the late 1930s, Mussolini became more vocal in his anti-clerical rhetoric, repeatedly denouncing the Catholic Church and discussing ways to depose the pope. He took the position that the “papacy was a malignant tumor in the body of Italy and must ‘be rooted out once and for all,’ because there was no room in Rome for both the Pope and himself”.[148] In her 1974 book, Mussolini’s widow Rachele stated that her husband had always been an atheist until near the end of his life, writing that her husband was “basically irreligious until the later years of his life”.[149]
The National Socialists of Germany employed similar anti-clerical policies. The Gestapo confiscated hundreds of monasteries in Austria and Germany, evicted clergymen and laymen alike and often replaced crosses with a swastikas.[150] Referring to the swastika as the “Devil’s Cross”, church leaders found their youth organizations banned, their meetings limited and various Catholic periodicals censored or banned. Government officials eventually found it necessary to place “Nazis into editorial positions in the Catholic press”.[151] Up to 2,720 clerics, mostly Catholics, were arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned inside of Germany’s Dachau concentration camp, resulting in over 1,000 deaths.[152]
Corporatist economic system
The Fascist regime created a corporatist economic system in 1925 with creation of the Palazzo Vidioni Pact, in which the Italian employers’ association Confindustria and Fascist trade unions agreed to recognize each other as the sole representatives of Italy’s employers and employees, excluding non-Fascist trade unions.[153] The Fascist regime first created a Ministry of Corporations that organized the Italian economy into 22 sectoral corporations, banned workers’ strikes and lock-outs and in 1927 created the Charter of Labour, which established workers’ rights and duties and created labour tribunals to arbitrate employer-employee disputes.[153] In practice, the sectoral corporations exercised little independence and were largely controlled by the regime and employee organizations were rarely led by employees themselves, but instead by appointed Fascist party members.[153]
Aggressive foreign policy
In the 1920s, Fascist Italy pursued an aggressive foreign policy that included an attack on the Greek island of Corfu, aims to expand Italian territory in the Balkans, plans to wage war against Turkey and Yugoslavia, attempts to bring Yugoslavia into civil war by supporting Croat and Macedonian separatists to legitimize Italian intervention and making Albania a de factoprotectorate of Italy, which was achieved through diplomatic means by 1927.[154] In response to revolt in the Italian colony of Libya, Fascist Italy abandoned previous liberal-era colonial policy of cooperation with local leaders. Instead, claiming that Italians were a superior race to African races and thereby had the right to colonize the “inferior” Africans, it sought to settle 10 to 15 million Italians in Libya.[155] This resulted in an aggressive military campaign known as the Pacification of Libya against natives in Libya, including mass killings, the use of concentration camps and the forced starvation of thousands of people.[155] Italian authorities committed ethnic cleansing by forcibly expelling 100,000 Bedouin Cyrenaicans, half the population of Cyrenaica in Libya, from their settlements that was slated to be given to Italian settlers.[156][157]
The March on Rome brought Fascism international attention. One early admirer of the Italian Fascists was Adolf Hitler, who less than a month after the March had begun to model himself and the Nazi Party upon Mussolini and the Fascists.[158] The Nazis, led by Hitler and the German war hero Erich Ludendorff, attempted a “March on Berlin” modeled upon the March on Rome, which resulted in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in November 1923.[159]
International impact of the Great Depression and the buildup to World War II
The conditions of economic hardship caused by the Great Depression brought about an international surge of social unrest. According to historian Philip Morgan, “the onset of the Great Depression…was the greatest stimulus yet to the diffusion and expansion of fascism outside Italy”.[160] Fascist propaganda blamed the problems of the long depression of the 1930s on minorities and scapegoats: “Judeo–Masonic–bolshevik” conspiracies, left-wing internationalism and the presence of immigrants.
In Germany, it contributed to the rise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which resulted in the demise of the Weimar Republic and the establishment of the fascist regime, Nazi Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. With the rise of Hitler and the Nazis to power in 1933, liberal democracy was dissolved in Germany and the Nazis mobilized the country for war, with expansionist territorial aims against several countries. In the 1930s, the Nazis implemented racial laws that deliberately discriminated against, disenfranchised and persecuted Jews and other racial and minority groups.
Fascist movements grew in strength elsewhere in Europe. Hungarian fascist Gyula Gömbös rose to power as Prime Minister of Hungary in 1932 and attempted to entrench his Party of National Unity throughout the country. He created an eight-hour work day, a forty-eight-hour work week in industry and sought to entrench a corporatist economy; and pursued irredentist claims on Hungary’s neighbors.[161] The fascist Iron Guard movement in Romaniasoared in political support after 1933, gaining representation in the Romanian government and an Iron Guard member assassinated Romanian prime minister Ion Duca.[162] During the 6 February 1934 crisis, France faced the greatest domestic political turmoil since the Dreyfus Affair when the fascist Francist Movement and multiple far-right movements rioted en masse in Paris against the French government resulting in major political violence.[163] A variety of para-fascist governments that borrowed elements from fascism were formed during the Great Depression, including those of Greece, Lithuania, Poland and Yugoslavia.[164]
During the Great Depression, Mussolini promoted active state intervention in the economy. He denounced the contemporary “supercapitalism” that he claimed began in 1914 as a failure because of its alleged decadence, its support for unlimited consumerism and its intention to create the “standardization of humankind”.[167] Fascist Italy created the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI), a giant state-owned firm and holding company that provided state funding to failing private enterprises.[168] The IRI was made a permanent institution in Fascist Italy in 1937, pursued Fascist policies to create national autarky and had the power to take over private firms to maximize war production.[168] While Hitler’s regime only nationalized 500 companies in key industries by the early 1940s,[169] Mussolini declared in 1934 that “[t]hree-fourths of Italian economy, industrial and agricultural, is in the hands of the state”.[170] Due to the worldwide depression, Mussolini’s government was able to take over most of Italy’s largest failing banks, who held controlling interest in many Italian businesses. The Institute for Industrial Reconstruction, a state-operated holding company in charge of bankrupt banks and companies, reported in early 1934 that they held assets of “48.5 percent of the share capital of Italy”, which later included the capital of the banks themselves.[171] Political historian Martin Blinkhorn estimated Italy’s scope of state intervention and ownership “greatly surpassed that in Nazi Germany, giving Italy a public sector second only to that of Stalin’s Russia”.[172] In the late 1930s, Italy enacted manufacturing cartels, tariff barriers, currency restrictions and massive regulation of the economy to attempt to balance payments.[173] Italy’s policy of autarky failed to achieve effective economic autonomy.[173] Nazi Germany similarly pursued an economic agenda with the aims of autarky and rearmament and imposed protectionist policies, including forcing the German steel industry to use lower-quality German iron ore rather than superior-quality imported iron.[174]
World War II (1939–1945)
In Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, both Mussolini and Hitler pursued territorial expansionist and interventionist foreign policy agendas from the 1930s through the 1940s culminating in World War II. Mussolini called for irredentist Italian claims to be reclaimed, establishing Italian domination of the Mediterranean Sea and securing Italian access to the Atlantic Ocean and the creation of Italian spazio vitale (“vital space”) in the Mediterranean and Red Sea regions.[175] Hitler called for irredentist German claims to be reclaimed along with the creation of German Lebensraum(“living space”) in Eastern Europe, including territories held by the Soviet Union, that would be colonized by Germans.[176]
From 1935 to 1939, Germany and Italy escalated their demands for territorial claims and greater influence in world affairs. Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935resulting in its condemnation by the League of Nations and its widespread diplomatic isolation. In 1936, Germany remilitarized the industrial Rhineland, a region that had been ordered demilitarized by the Treaty of Versailles. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria and Italy assisted Germany in resolving the diplomatic crisis between Germany versus Britain and France over claims on Czechoslovakia by arranging the Munich Agreement that gave Germany the Sudetenland and was perceived at the time to have averted a European war. These hopes faded when Hitler violated the Munich Agreement by ordering the invasion and partition of Czechoslovakia between Germany and a client state of Slovakia in 1939. At the same time from 1938 to 1939, Italy was demanding territorial and colonial concessions from France and Britain.[177] In 1939, Germany prepared for war with Poland, but attempted to gain territorial concessions from Poland through diplomatic means.[178] The Polish government did not trust Hitler’s promises and refused to accept Germany’s demands.[178]
The invasion of Poland by Germany was deemed unacceptable by Britain, France and their allies, resulting in their mutual declaration of war against Germany that was deemed the aggressor in the war in Poland, resulting in the outbreak of World War II. In 1940, Mussolini led Italy into World War II on the side of the Axis. Mussolini was aware that Italy did not have the military capacity to carry out a long war with France or the United Kingdom and waited until France was on the verge of imminent collapse and surrender from the German invasion before declaring war on France and the United Kingdom on 10 June 1940 on the assumption that the war would be short-lived following France’s collapse.[179] Mussolini believed that following a brief entry of Italy into war with France, followed by the imminent French surrender, Italy could gain some territorial concessions from France and then concentrate its forces on a major offensive in Egypt where British and Commonwealth forces were outnumbered by Italian forces.[180] Plans by Germany to invade the United Kingdom in 1940 failed after Germany lost the aerial warfare campaign in the Battle of Britain. In 1941, the Axis campaign spread to the Soviet Union after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. Axis forces at the height of their power controlled almost all of continental Europe. The war became prolonged—contrary to Mussolini’s plans—resulting in Italy losing battles on multiple fronts and requiring German assistance.
During World War II, the Axis Powers in Europe led by Nazi Germany participated in the extermination of millions of Poles, Jews, Gypsies and others in the genocide known as the Holocaust.
After 1942, Axis forces began to falter. In 1943, after Italy faced multiple military failures, the complete reliance and subordination of Italy to Germany, the Allied invasion of Italy and the corresponding international humiliation, Mussolini was removed as head of government and arrested on the order of King Victor Emmanuel III, who proceeded to dismantle the Fascist state and declared Italy’s switching of allegiance to the Allied side. Mussolini was rescued from arrest by German forces and led the German client state, the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945. Nazi Germany faced multiple losses and steady Soviet and Western Allied offensives from 1943 to 1945.
On 28 April 1945, Mussolini was captured and executed by Italian communist partisans. On 30 April 1945, Hitler committed suicide. Shortly afterwards, Germany surrendered and the Nazi regime was systematically dismantled by the occupying Allied powers. An International Military Tribunal was subsequently convened in Nuremberg. Beginning in November 1945 and lasting through 1949, numerous Nazi political, military and economic leaders were tried and convicted of war crimes, with many of the worst offenders receiving the death penalty.
The victory of the Allies over the Axis powers in World War II led to the collapse of many fascist regimes in Europe. The Nuremberg Trials convicted several Nazi leaders of crimes against humanity involving the Holocaust. However, there remained several movements and governments that were ideologically related to fascism.
Francisco Franco‘s Falangist one-party state in Spain was officially neutral during World War II and it survived the collapse of the Axis Powers. Franco’s rise to power had been directly assisted by the militaries of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany during the Spanish Civil War and Franco had sent volunteers to fight on the side of Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union during World War II. The first years were characterized by a repression against the anti-fascist ideologies, a deep censorship and the suppression of democratic institutions (elected Parliament, Constitution of 1931, Regional Statutes of Autonomy). After World War II and a period of international isolation, Franco’s regime normalized relations with the Western powers during the Cold War, until Franco’s death in 1975 and the transformation of Spain into a liberal democracy.
Historian Robert Paxton observes that one of the main problems in defining fascism is that it was widely mimicked. Paxton says: “In fascism’s heyday, in the 1930s, many regimes that were not functionally fascist borrowed elements of fascist decor in order to lend themselves an aura of force, vitality, and mass mobilization”. He goes on to observe that Salazar “crushed Portuguese fascism after he had copied some of its techniques of popular mobilization”. [181] Paxton says that: “Where Franco subjected Spain’s fascist party to his personal control, Salazar abolished outright in July 1934 the nearest thing Portugal had to an authentic fascist movement, Rolão Preto’s blue-shirted National Syndicalists […] Salazar preferred to control his population through such “organic” institutions traditionally powerful in Portugal as the Church. Salazar’s regime was not only non-fascist, but “voluntarily non-totalitarian,” preferring to let those of its citizens who kept out of politics “live by habit”.[182] Historians tend to view the Estado Novo as para-fascist in nature,[183]possessing minimal fascist tendencies.[184] In Argentina, Peronism, associated with the regime of Juan Perón from 1946 to 1955 and 1973 to 1974, was influenced by fascism.[185] Between 1939 and 1941, prior to his rise to power, Perón had developed a deep admiration of Italian Fascism and modelled his economic policies on Italian Fascist policies.[185]
The term neo-fascism refers to fascist movements after World War II. In Italy, the Italian Social Movement led by Giorgio Almirante was a major neo-fascist movement that transformed itself into a self-described “post-fascist” movement called the National Alliance (AN), which has been an ally of Silvio Berlusconi‘s Forza Italia for a decade. In 2008, AN joined Forza Italia in Berlusconi’s new party The People of Freedom, but in 2012 a group of politicians split from The People of Freedom, refounding the party with the name Brothers of Italy. In Germany, various neo-Nazi movements have been formed and banned in accordance with Germany’s constitutional law which forbids Nazism. The National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) is widely considered a neo-Nazi party, although the party does not publicly identify itself as such.
Golden Dawn demonstration in Greece in 2012
After the onset of the Great Recession and economic crisis in Greece, a movement known as the Golden Dawn, widely considered a neo-Nazi party, soared in support out of obscurity and won seats in Greece‘s parliament, espousing a staunch hostility towards minorities, illegal immigrants and refugees. In 2013, after the murder of an anti-fascist musician by a person with links to Golden Dawn, the Greek government ordered the arrest of Golden Dawn’s leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos and other Golden Dawn members on charges related to being associated with a criminal organization.
Tenets
Robert O. Paxton finds that the transformations undertaken by fascists in power were “profound enough to be called ‘revolutionary.'” They “often set fascists into conflict with conservatives rooted in families, churches, social rank, and property.” Paxton argues:
[F]ascism redrew the frontiers between private and public, sharply diminishing what had once been untouchably private. It changed the practice of citizenship from the enjoyment of constitutional rights and duties to participation in mass ceremonies of affirmation and conformity. It reconfigured relations between the individual and the collectivity, so that an individual had no rights outside community interest. It expanded the powers of the executive—party and state—in a bid for total control. Finally, it unleashed aggressive emotions hitherto known in Europe only during war or social revolution.[186]
Ultranationalism combined with the myth of national rebirth is a key foundation of fascism.[187] Dylan Riley argues that in Italy in the early 1920s:
Neither organized socialism nor the Italian liberals championed the democratic demands of the left nationalists. Fascism stepped into this vacuum, constituting itself as an antisocialist and antiliberal civil society movement. It was the failure of this counterhegemonic movement that would lead to the fascist seizure of power. Veterans’ organizations are the clearest manifestation of civic mobilization in postwar Italy.[188]
The fascist view of a nation is of a single organic entity that binds people together by their ancestry and is a natural unifying force of people.[189]Fascism seeks to solve economic, political and social problems by achieving a millenarian national rebirth, exalting the nation or race above all else and promoting cults of unity, strength and purity.[41][190][191][192][193] European fascist movements typically espouse a racist conception of non-Europeans being inferior to Europeans.[194] Beyond this, fascists in Europe have not held a unified set of racial views.[194] Historically, most fascists promoted imperialism, although there have been several fascist movements that were uninterested in the pursuit of new imperial ambitions.[194]
Totalitarianism
Fascism promotes the establishment of a totalitarian state.[195] It opposes liberal democracy, rejects multi-party systems and supports a one-party state. Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism (1932) – partly ghostwritten by philosopher Giovanni Gentile,[196] who Mussolini described as “the philosopher of Fascism” – states: “The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people”.[197] In The Legal Basis of the Total State, Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt described the Nazi intention to form a “strong state which guarantees a totality of political unity transcending all diversity” in order to avoid a “disastrous pluralism tearing the German people apart”.[198]
Fascist states pursued policies of social indoctrination through propaganda in education and the media and regulation of the production of educational and media materials.[199][200] Education was designed to glorify the fascist movement and inform students of its historical and political importance to the nation. It attempted to purge ideas that were not consistent with the beliefs of the fascist movement and to teach students to be obedient to the state.[201]
Fascism presented itself as a third position,[when?] alternative to both international socialism and free market capitalism.[202] While fascism opposed mainstream socialism, it sometimes regarded itself as a type of nationalist “socialism” to highlight their commitment to national solidarity and unity.[203][204] Fascists opposed international free market capitalism, but supported a type of productive capitalism.[115][205] Economic self-sufficiency, known as autarky, was a major goal of most fascist governments.[206]
Fascist governments advocated resolution of domestic class conflict within a nation in order to secure national solidarity.[207] This would be done through the state mediating relations between the classes (contrary to the views of classical liberal-inspired capitalists).[208] While fascism was opposed to domestic class conflict, it was held that bourgeois-proletarian conflict existed primarily in national conflict between proletarian nations versus bourgeois nations.[209] Fascism condemned what it viewed as widespread character traits that it associated as the typical bourgeois mentality that it opposed, such as materialism, crassness, cowardice, inability to comprehend the heroic ideal of the fascist “warrior”; and associations with liberalism, individualism and parliamentarianism.[210] In 1918, Mussolini defined what he viewed as the proletarian character, defining proletarian as being one and the same with producers, a productivist perspective that associated all people deemed productive, including entrepreneurs, technicians, workers and soldiers as being proletarian.[211] He acknowledged the historical existence of both bourgeois and proletarian producers, but declared the need for bourgeois producers to merge with proletarian producers.[211]
While fascism denounced the mainstream internationalist and Marxist socialisms, it claimed to economically represent a type of nationalist productivist socialism that while condemning parasitical capitalism, it was willing to accommodate productivist capitalism within it.[205] This was derived from Henri de Saint Simon, whose ideas inspired the creation of utopian socialism and influenced other ideologies, that stressed solidarity rather than class war and whose conception of productive people in the economy included both productive workers and productive bosses to challenge the influence of the aristocracy and unproductive financial speculators.[212] Saint Simon’s vision combined the traditionalist right-wing criticisms of the French Revolution combined with a left-wing belief in the need for association or collaboration of productive people in society.[212] Whereas Marxism condemned capitalism as a system of exploitative property relations, fascism saw the nature of the control of credit and money in the contemporary capitalist system as abusive.[205] Unlike Marxism, fascism did not see class conflict between the Marxist-defined proletariat and the bourgeoisie as a given or as an engine of historical materialism.[205] Instead, it viewed workers and productive capitalists in common as productive people who were in conflict with parasitic elements in society including: corrupt political parties, corrupt financial capital and feeble people.[205] Fascist leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler spoke of the need to create a new managerial elite led by engineers and captains of industry—but free from the parasitic leadership of industries.[205] Hitler stated that the Nazi Party supported bodenständigen Kapitalismus(“productive capitalism”) that was based upon profit earned from one’s own labour, but condemned unproductive capitalism or loan capitalism, which derived profit from speculation.[213]
Fascist economics supported a state-controlled economy that accepted a mix of private and public ownership over the means of production.[214]Economic planning was applied to both the public and private sector and the prosperity of private enterprise depended on its acceptance of synchronizing itself with the economic goals of the state.[215] Fascist economic ideology supported the profit motive, but emphasized that industries must uphold the national interest as superior to private profit.[215]
While fascism accepted the importance of material wealth and power, it condemned materialism which identified as being present in both communism and capitalism and criticized materialism for lacking acknowledgement of the role of the spirit.[216] In particular, fascists criticized capitalism not because of its competitive nature nor support of private property, which fascists supported—but due to its materialism, individualism, alleged bourgeois decadence and alleged indifference to the nation.[217] Fascism denounced Marxism for its advocacy of materialist internationalist class identity, which fascists regarded as an attack upon the emotional and spiritual bonds of the nation and a threat to the achievement of genuine national solidarity.[218]
In discussing the spread of fascism beyond Italy, historian Philip Morgan states:
Since the Depression was a crisis of laissez-faire capitalism and its political counterpart, parliamentary democracy, fascism could pose as the ‘third-way’ alternative between capitalism and Bolshevism, the model of a new European ‘civilization’. As Mussolini typically put it in early 1934, “from 1929…fascism has become a universal phenomenon… The dominant forces of the 19th century, democracy, socialism, liberalism have been exhausted…the new political and economic forms of the twentieth-century are fascist'(Mussolini 1935: 32).[160]
Fascists criticized egalitarianism as preserving the weak, and they instead promoted social Darwinist views and policies.[219][220] They were in principle opposed to the idea of social welfare, arguing that it “encouraged the preservation of the degenerate and the feeble.”[221] The Nazi Party condemned the welfare system of the Weimar Republic, as well as private charity and philanthropy, for supporting people whom they regarded as racially inferior and weak, and who should have been weeded out in the process of natural selection.[222] Nevertheless, faced with the mass unemployment and poverty of the Great Depression, the Nazis found it necessary to set up charitable institutions to help racially-pure Germans in order to maintain popular support, while arguing that this represented “racial self-help” and not indiscriminate charity or universal social welfare.[223] Thus, Nazi programs such as the Winter Relief of the German People and the broader National Socialist People’s Welfare (NSV) were organized as quasi-private institutions, officially relying on private donations from Germans to help others of their race—although in practice those who refused to donate could face severe consequences.[224] Unlike the social welfare institutions of the Weimar Republic and the Christian charities, the NSV distributed assistance on explicitly racial grounds. It provided support only to those who were “racially sound, capable of and willing to work, politically reliable, and willing and able to reproduce.” Non-Aryans were excluded, as well as the “work-shy”, “asocials” and the “hereditarily ill.”[225] Under these conditions, by 1939, over 17 million Germans had obtained assistance from the NSV, and the agency “projected a powerful image of caring and support” for “those who were judged to have got into difficulties through no fault of their own.”[225] Yet the organization was “feared and disliked among society’s poorest” because it resorted to intrusive questioning and monitoring to judge who was worthy of support.[226]
Action
Fascism emphasizes direct action, including supporting the legitimacy of political violence, as a core part of its politics.[17][227] Fascism views violent action as a necessity in politics that fascism identifies as being an “endless struggle”.[228] This emphasis on the use of political violence means that most fascist parties have also created their own private militias (e.g. the Nazi Party’s Brown shirts and Fascist Italy’s Blackshirts).
The basis of fascism’s support of violent action in politics is connected to social Darwinism.[228] Fascist movements have commonly held social Darwinist views of nations, races and societies.[229] They say that nations and races must purge themselves of socially and biologically weak or degenerate people, while simultaneously promoting the creation of strong people, in order to survive in a world defined by perpetual national and racial conflict.[230]
Age and gender roles
Members of the Piccole Italiane, an organization for girls within the National Fascist Party in Italy
Members of the League of German Girls, an organization for girls within the Nazi Party in Germany
Fascism emphasizes youth both in a physical sense of age and in a spiritual sense as related to virility and commitment to action.[231] The Italian Fascists’ political anthem was called Giovinezza (“The Youth”).[231] Fascism identifies the physical age period of youth as a critical time for the moral development of people who will affect society.[232]
The corollaries of the cult of war and physical danger were the cult of brutality, strength, and sexuality….[fascism is] a true counter-civilization: rejecting the sophisticated rationalist humanism of Old Europe, fascism sets up as its ideal the primitive instincts and primal emotions of the barbarian.[233]
Italian Fascism pursued what it called “moral hygiene” of youth, particularly regarding sexuality.[234] Fascist Italy promoted what it considered normal sexual behaviour in youth while denouncing what it considered deviant sexual behaviour.[234] It condemned pornography, most forms of birth control and contraceptive devices (with the exception of the condom), homosexuality and prostitution as deviant sexual behaviour, although enforcement of laws opposed to such practices was erratic and authorities often turned a blind eye.[234] Fascist Italy regarded the promotion of male sexual excitation before puberty as the cause of criminality amongst male youth, declared homosexuality a social disease and pursued an aggressive campaign to reduce prostitution of young women.[234]
Mussolini perceived women’s primary role as primarily child bearers and men, warriors—once saying: “War is to man what maternity is to the woman”.[235] In an effort to increase birthrates, the Italian Fascist government gave financial incentives to women who raised large families and initiated policies intended to reduce the number of women employed.[236] Italian Fascism called for women to be honoured as “reproducers of the nation” and the Italian Fascist government held ritual ceremonies to honour women’s role within the Italian nation.[237] In 1934, Mussolini declared that employment of women was a “major aspect of the thorny problem of unemployment” and that for women, working was “incompatible with childbearing”. Mussolini went on to say that the solution to unemployment for men was the “exodus of women from the work force”.[238]
The German Nazi government strongly encouraged women to stay at home to bear children and keep house.[239] This policy was reinforced by bestowing the Cross of Honor of the German Mother on women bearing four or more children. The unemployment rate was cut substantially, mostly through arms production and sending women home so that men could take their jobs. Nazi propaganda sometimes promoted premarital and extramarital sexual relations, unwed motherhood and divorce, but at other times the Nazis opposed such behaviour.[240]
The Nazis decriminalized abortion in cases where fetuses had hereditary defects or were of a race the government disapproved of, while the abortion of healthy pure German, Aryan fetuses remained strictly forbidden.[241] For non-Aryans, abortion was often compulsory. Their eugenics program also stemmed from the “progressive biomedical model” of Weimar Germany.[242] In 1935, Nazi Germany expanded the legality of abortion by amending its eugenics law, to promote abortion for women with hereditary disorders.[241] The law allowed abortion if a woman gave her permission and the fetus was not yet viable[243][244] and for purposes of so-called racial hygiene.[245][246]
The Nazis said that homosexuality was degenerate, effeminate, perverted and undermined masculinity because it did not produce children.[247] They considered homosexuality curable through therapy, citing modern scientism and the study of sexology, which said that homosexuality could be felt by “normal” people and not just an abnormal minority.[248] Open homosexuals were interned in Nazi concentration camps.[249]
Palingenesis and modernism
Fascism emphasizes both palingenesis (national rebirth or re-creation) and modernism.[250] In particular, fascism’s nationalism has been identified as having a palingenetic character.[187]Fascism promotes the regeneration of the nation and purging it of decadence.[250] Fascism accepts forms of modernism that it deems promotes national regeneration while rejecting forms of modernism that are regarded as antithetical to national regeneration.[251] Fascism aestheticized modern technology and its association with speed, power and violence.[252] Fascism admired advances in the economy in the early 20th century, particularly Fordism and scientific management.[253] Fascist modernism has been recognized as inspired or developed by various figures—such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Ernst Jünger, Gottfried Benn, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Knut Hamsun, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis.[254]
In Italy, such modernist influence was exemplified by Marinetti who advocated a palingenetic modernist society that condemned liberal-bourgeois values of tradition and psychology, while promoting a technological-martial religion of national renewal that emphasized militant nationalism.[255] In Germany, it was exemplified by Jünger who was influenced by his observation of the technological warfare during World War I and claimed that a new social class had been created that he described as the “warrior-worker”.[256] Jünger like Marinetti emphasized the revolutionary capacities of technology and emphasized an “organic construction” between human and machine as a liberating and regenerative force in that challenged liberal democracy, conceptions of individual autonomy, bourgeois nihilism and decadence.[256] He conceived of a society based on a totalitarian concept of “total mobilization” of such disciplined warrior-workers.[256]
Criticism
Fascism has been widely criticized and condemned in modern times since the defeat of the Axis Powers in World War II.
One of the most common and strongest criticisms of fascism is that it is a tyranny.[257] Fascism is deliberately and entirely non-democratic and anti-democratic.[258][259][260]
Unprincipled opportunism
Some critics of Italian fascism have said that much of the ideology was merely a by-product of unprincipled opportunism by Mussolini and that he changed his political stances merely to bolster his personal ambitions while he disguised them as being purposeful to the public.[261]Richard Washburn Child, the American ambassador to Italy who worked with Mussolini and became his friend and admirer, defended Mussolini’s opportunistic behaviour by writing: “Opportunist is a term of reproach used to brand men who fit themselves to conditions for the reasons of self-interest. Mussolini, as I have learned to know him, is an opportunist in the sense that he believed that mankind itself must be fitted to changing conditions rather than to fixed theories, no matter how many hopes and prayers have been expended on theories and programmes”.[262] Child quoted Mussolini as saying: “The sanctity of an ism is not in the ism; it has no sanctity beyond its power to do, to work, to succeed in practice. It may have succeeded yesterday and fail to-morrow. Failed yesterday and succeed to-morrow. The machine first of all must run!”.[262]
Some have criticized Mussolini’s actions during the outbreak of World War I as opportunist for seeming to suddenly abandon Marxist egalitarianinternationalism for non-egalitarian nationalism and note to that effect that upon Mussolini endorsing Italy’s intervention in the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, he and the new fascist movement received financial support from foreign sources, such as Ansaldo (an armaments firm) and other companies[263] as well as the British Security Service MI5.[264] Some, including Mussolini’s socialist opponents at the time, have noted that regardless of the financial support he accepted for his pro-interventionist stance, Mussolini was free to write whatever he wished in his newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia without prior sanctioning from his financial backers.[265] Furthermore, the major source of financial support that Mussolini and the fascist movement received in World War I was from France and is widely believed to have been French socialists who supported the French government’s war against Germany and who sent support to Italian socialists who wanted Italian intervention on France’s side.[266]
Mussolini’s transformation away from Marxism into what eventually became fascism began prior to World War I, as Mussolini had grown increasingly pessimistic about Marxism and egalitarianism while becoming increasingly supportive of figures who opposed egalitarianism, such as Friedrich Nietzsche.[267] By 1902, Mussolini was studying Georges Sorel, Nietzsche and Vilfredo Pareto.[268] Sorel’s emphasis on the need for overthrowing decadent liberal democracy and capitalism by the use of violence, direct action, general strikes and neo-Machiavellianappeals to emotion impressed Mussolini deeply.[269] Mussolini’s use of Nietzsche made him a highly unorthodox socialist, due to Nietzsche’s promotion of elitism and anti-egalitarian views.[267]Prior to World War I, Mussolini’s writings over time indicated that he had abandoned the Marxism and egalitarianism that he had previously supported in favour of Nietzsche’s übermenschconcept and anti-egalitarianism.[267] In 1908, Mussolini wrote a short essay called “Philosophy of Strength” based on his Nietzschean influence, in which Mussolini openly spoke fondly of the ramifications of an impending war in Europe in challenging both religion and nihilism: “[A] new kind of free spirit will come, strengthened by the war, … a spirit equipped with a kind of sublime perversity, … a new free spirit will triumph over God and over Nothing”.[106]
Ideological dishonesty
Fascism has been criticized for being ideologically dishonest. Major examples of ideological dishonesty have been identified in Italian fascism’s changing relationship with German Nazism.[270][271] Fascist Italy’s official foreign policy positions were known to commonly utilize rhetorical ideological hyperbole to justify its actions, although during Dino Grandi‘s tenure as Italy’s foreign minister the country engaged in realpolitik free of such fascist hyperbole.[272] Italian fascism’s stance towards German Nazism fluctuated from support from the late 1920s to 1934, when it celebrated Hitler’s rise to power and meeting with Hitler in 1934; to opposition from 1934 to 1936 after the assassination of Italy’s allied leader in Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss, by Austrian Nazis; and again back to support after 1936, when Germany was the only significant power that did not denounce Italy’s invasion and occupation of Ethiopia.
After antagonism exploded between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy over the assassination of Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss in 1934, Mussolini and Italian fascists denounced and ridiculed Nazism’s racial theories, particularly by denouncing its Nordicism, while promoting Mediterraneanism.[271] Mussolini himself responded to Nordicists’ claims of Italy being divided into Nordic and Mediterranean racial areas due to Germanic invasions of Northern Italy by claiming that while Germanic tribes such as the Lombards took control of Italy after the fall of Ancient Rome, they arrived in small numbers (about 8,000) and quickly assimilated into Roman culture and spoke the Latin language within fifty years.[273] Italian fascism was influenced by the tradition of Italian nationalists scornfully looking down upon Nordicists’ claims and taking pride in comparing the age and sophistication of ancient Roman civilization as well as the classical revival in the Renaissance to that of Nordic societies that Italian nationalists described as “newcomers” to civilization in comparison.[270] At the height of antagonism between the Nazis and Italian fascists over race, Mussolini claimed that the Germans themselves were not a pure race and noted with irony that the Nazi theory of German racial superiority was based on the theories of non-German foreigners, such as Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau.[274] After the tension in German-Italian relations diminished during the late 1930s, Italian fascism sought to harmonize its ideology with German Nazism and combined Nordicist and Mediterranean racial theories, noting that Italians were members of the Aryan Race, composed of a mixed Nordic-Mediterranean subtype.[271]
In 1938, Mussolini declared upon Italy’s adoption of antisemitic laws that Italian fascism had always been antisemitic,[271] In fact, Italian fascism did not endorse antisemitism until the late 1930s when Mussolini feared alienating antisemitic Nazi Germany, whose power and influence were growing in Europe. Prior to that period there had been notable Jewish Italians who had been senior Italian fascist officials, including Margherita Sarfatti, who had also been Mussolini’s mistress.[271] Also contrary to Mussolini’s claim in 1938, only a small number of Italian fascists were staunchly antisemitic (such as Roberto Farinacci and Giuseppe Preziosi), while others such as Italo Balbo, who came from Ferrara which had one of Italy’s largest Jewish communities, were disgusted by the antisemitic laws and opposed them.[271] Fascism scholar Mark Neocleous notes that while Italian fascism did not have a clear commitment to antisemitism, there were occasional antisemitic statements issued prior to 1938, such as Mussolini in 1919 declaring that the Jewish bankers in London and New York were connected by race to the Russian Bolsheviks and that eight percent of the Russian Bolsheviks were Jews.[275]
Story 1: Trump Targets Terrorist Control vs. Clinton and Obama Talk Gun Control — Lying Lunatic Left Losers — Americans Armed Against Gun Grabbing Government Tyrants — Defend The Second Amendment — Videos
Oath of office of the President of the United States
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”[1]
ARTICLE II, SECTION 3, United States Constitution
[The President] shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed….
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CIA chief: IS working to send operatives to the West
CIA Director John Brennan will tell Congress on Thursday that Islamic State militants are training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks on the West and will rely more on guerrilla-style tactics to compensate for their territorial losses.
CIA Director John Brennan will tell Congress on Thursday that Islamic State militants are training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks on the West and will rely more on guerrilla-style tactics to compensate for their territorial losses.
In remarks prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee, Brennan says IS has been working to build an apparatus to direct and inspire attacks against its foreign enemies, as in the recent attacks in Paris and Brussels — ones the CIA believes were directed by IS leaders.
“ISIL has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West,” Brennan said, using another acronym for the group. He said IS probably is working to smuggle them into countries, perhaps among refugee flows or through legitimate means of travel.
Brennan also noted the group’s call for followers to conduct so-called lone-wolf attacks in their home countries. He called last week’s attack in Orlando a “heinous act of wanton violence” and an “assault on the values of openness and tolerance” that define the United States as a nation.
He said IS is gradually cultivating its various branches into an interconnected network. The branch in Libya is likely the most advanced and most dangerous, but IS is trying to increase its influence in Africa, he said. The IS branch in the Sinai has become the “most active and capable terrorist group in Egypt,” attacking the Egyptian military and government targets in addition to foreigners and tourists, such as the downing of a Russian passenger jet last October.
Other branches have struggled to gain traction, he says. “The Yemen branch, for instance, has been riven with factionalism. And the Afghanistan-Pakistan branch has struggled to maintain its cohesion, in part because of competition with the Taliban.”
He called IS a “formidable adversary,” but said the U.S.-led coalition has made progress combatting the group, which has had to surrender large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and has lost some of its leaders in airstrikes. IS has struggled to replenish its ranks of fighters, Brennan said, because fewer of them are traveling to Syria and others have defected.
“The group appears to be a long way from realizing the vision that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi laid out when he declared the caliphate two years ago in Mosul,” Iraq, Brennan said.
He said the group’s ability to raise money has also been curtailed, although the group still continues to generate at least tens of millions of dollars in revenue each month, mostly from taxation and from sales of crude oil.
“Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group’s terrorism capability and global reach,” he said.
“In fact, as the pressure mounts on ISIL, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.”
Story 1: Breaking News — Tsarnaev Sentenced To Death — Bring Back Prompt Public Executions — Hillary Clinton’s War On Babies A Woman’s Right To Kill Her Baby In The Womb — We Need To Kill More Black Babies? — Black Genocide and Eugenics Through Planned Parenthood — Videos
Abortion — Killing Babies in The Womb
“it’s not enough to legalize the procedure.
Far too many women are denied access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth, and laws don’t count for much if they’re not enforced.
And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.’
~ Hillary Clinton
I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision,”
“I am really in awe of her, there are a lot of lessons we can learn from her life”
~ Hillary Clinton
Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sentenced to death
Boston Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Sentenced to Death
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The presidential hopeful made her sixth appearance at the Women in the World Summit with a keynote address that challenged viewers to be champions for change.
Tsarnaev sentenced to death
By Milton J. Valencia, Patricia Wen, Kevin Cullen, John R. Ellement and Martin Finucane
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death Friday for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the terror attack on the finish line of the storied race that killed three people and injured more than 260 others.
Tsarnaev, 21, had been convicted last month in US District Court in Boston of 17 charges that carried the possibility of the death penalty.
The death sentence handed down Friday by the seven-woman, five-man jury came at the end of a lengthy, high-profile trial. Tsarnaev, who had taken a sharp turn from hopeful immigrant college student to radical jihadist, also was convicted in the murder of a police officer.
The April 15, 2013, bombing was one of the worst terror attacks in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.
Wearing a blazer and a collared shirt, Tsarnaev, as has been his habit for most of the trial, had no expression as a court clerk read the verdict sentencing him to death. The jury took 14 1/2 hours over three days to render its decision on the penalty.
View Story
Explore the evidence from the trial
A look at the witnesses, evidence, and key players in the trial.
Tsarnaev sentencing verdict form
Live updates from the courtroom
US District Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. will impose the sentence at a hearing where Tsarnaev’s victims will be able to confront him and he also has the option of addressing the court.
After the verdict was announced, O’Toole told jurors, at least three of whom wiped away tears, “You should be justly proud of your service in this case.”
Those in the courtroom included Bill and Denise Richard, parents of 8-year-old Martin Richard of Dorchester, the youngest victim of the attack. Despite the devastating impact on their family, the Richards had called for life in prison, rather than death, for Tsarnaev.
Federal prosecutors said Tsarnaev was a remorseless self-radicalized terrorist who had participated in the bombing to make a political statement. Defense attorneys, seeking to save Tsarnaev’s life, portrayed him as the puppy dog-like follower of his troubled, violence-prone older brother, Tamerlan, who became obsessed with waging jihad and died in a firefight with police.
The jurors decided Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should be sentenced to death for the people he was found directly responsible for killing when he placed one of the two homemade pressure cooker bombs: Martin Richard and 23-year-old Boston University graduate student Lingzi Lu.
The panel also had the right to sentence Tsarnaev to death for the second bomb placed by Tamerlan Tsarnaev, which killed Krystle Campbell, 29, of Arlington. But the jury chose not to impose the death penalty for her death.
The jurors also decided against imposing the death penalty for the subsequent murder of MIT Police Officer Sean A. Collier, whom the defense argued was shot to death by Tamerlan, not Dzhokhar.
The response to the death sentence was immediate from some of the hundreds of people who were injured.
One of those who turned to social media to share their views was Sydney Corcoran, who was seriously injured along with her mother, Celeste, who lost both legs in the blast.
“My mother and I think that NOW he will go away and we will be able to move on. Justice,’’ Sydney Corcoran wrote on the Twitter account. “In his own words, ‘an eye for an eye.’ “
Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh said in a statement that the “verdict provides a small amount of closure to the survivors, families, and all impacted by the violent and tragic events surrounding the 2013 Boston Marathon.’’
“We will forever remember and honor those who lost their lives and were affected by those senseless acts of violence on our City,’’ Walsh said. “Today, more than ever, we know that Boston is a City of hope, strength and resilience, that can overcome any challenge.”
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was convicted last month of 30 charges, including 17 that carried a possible death penalty, in the first phase of the two-phase federal death penalty trial.
The defense never contested his guilt, focusing instead on the second phase of the trial, in which the jury was asked to determine whether Tsarnaev should get life in prison without parole or a death sentence. Over 11 days of testimony jurors heard from more than 60 witnesses, most of them called by the defense in an effort to humanize Tsarnaev.
Tsarnaev did not testify himself during either phase, showing little emotion as he sat in the courtroom, leaving him an inscrutable figure to the jury that decided his fate.
But in a statement he wrote when he was hiding from police several days after the bombing, he said he had acted because the US government was “killing our innocent civilians. … We Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all.”
Prosecutor Steven Mellin, in his closing argument, cited a line from the note that said, “Now I don’t like killing innocent people, but in this case it is allowed.”
“These are the words of a terrorist who thought he did the right thing,” Mellin told jurors. “His actions have earned him a sentence of death.”
Defense attorney Judy Clarke suggested that Tsarnaev’s parents were emotionally, and later physically, absent from his life, and that Tamerlan had filled the void.
The root cause of the violence that erupted on Boylston Street on April 15, 2013, was Tamerlan, Clarke said.
“Dzhokhar would not have done this but for Tamerlan,” she said.
“We’re asking you to choose life,” she said. “Yes, even for the Boston Marathon bomber. It’s a sentence that reflects justice and mercy.”
The homemade pressure cooker bombs planted by the Tsarnaev brothers went off just before 3 p.m. at the race, a colorful rite of spring in which thousands of runners, including top competitors from around the world, stream down the course into the heart of the city.
In addition to the three people killed, more than 260 others were injured, including 17 who lost limbs. First responders and people in the crowd rushed forward to help, and the city’s renowned medical community saved lives that were hanging by a thread.
A massive manhunt followed that ended several days later in a violent, chaotic showdown. After authorities released their pictures, Tsarnaev, who was 19 at the time, and his 26-year-old brother murdered Collier while he sat in his cruiser on the night of April 18, 2013, in an unsuccessful attempt to get a second gun.
When police caught up with the brothers in Watertown, just outside the city, in the early hours of April 19, the brothers hurled more deadly bombs and fired dozens of shots at police. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died after being shot by police and run over by his own brother as he made his escape.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev slipped away from the legions of police who swarmed to the area as the governor, in an unprecedented step, urged residents of Boston, Watertown and other nearby areas to stay indoors and “shelter in place.” But Tsarnaev was ultimately captured later in the day, hiding in a boat stored in a Watertown back yard, where he had written the note explaining his actions. A stunned region breathed a sigh of relief.
People in Boston and beyond rallied together after the attacks, expressing sympathy and offering support to the bombing victims. At the same time, questions were raised and investigations launched into why the attacks weren’t prevented.
One mystery remaining at the heart of the case was how Dzhokhar Tsarnaev transformed from a hard-working teenager to a failing college student who joined a deadly terrorist plot.
“If you expect me to have an answer, a simple clean answer, I don’t have it,” Clarke said in her closing argument.
Tsarnaev arrived in America with his family when he was 9 years old. Jurors heard from his teachers in Cambridge that as a young boy, he was an A student, smart, popular, and kind. He became captain of the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School wrestling team and went on to the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and witnesses described him as a laid-back, and fun-loving college student.
But jurors also heard about Tsarnaev’s upbringing in a dysfunctional immigrant Chechen family that held to old cultural traditions that gave outsized rank to the oldest brother. And an expert on Chechnya described how that country’s struggles for independence became intertwined over the last two decades with the global jihad movement by Islamic militants.
When his parents returned to Russia in 2012, the jihad-obsessed Tamerlan was the only adult figure in his life, the defense said.
Prosecutors rejected the idea that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had influenced his young brother.
“These weren’t youthful crimes,” said prosecutor William Weinreb. “There was nothing immature or impulsive about them. These were political crimes, designed to punish the United States . . . by killing and mutilating innocent civilians on US soil.”
Governor Charlie Baker met reporters at the State House after the verdict, but refused to say whether he believed the death sentence was the right choice to have been made. Instead, he said, the verdict resulted from the persistence of the 12 jurors who were in court day after day and for 10 weeks.
“This was their call,’’ he said.
As a parent and husband, Baker said he was stunned by the “randomness” of the bombings. He also said that the region would be reminded about the bombings every April when the Marathon is held.
“I think it will be a long time before this event and all that came with it ever lands in my rear view mirror,’’ Baker said. “It changed the Marathon and thereby by definition, changed Boston as well.’’
He said that he hopes some closure, some healing will be forthcoming for anyone connected to the bombings.
Hillary Clinton Reaffirms Her Commitment to Women’s Rights
At Tina Brown’s Women in the World conference, the presidential hopeful spoke about the obstacles women still face in this country and abroad.
Today at Tina Brown’s Women in the World summit, presidential hopeful and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the stage to reaffirm her commitment to women’s and girls’ rights, and outlined what will likely be her talking points on women, girls, and minorities as she travels the country trying to gain voter support in the coming months.
“It’s not just enough for some women to get ahead,” Clinton said, adding that all women need support, “no matter where you live and who you are.”
Clinton outlined issues facing women from birth through retirement, noting that “all the evidence tells us that despite the enormous obstacles that remain, there has never been a better time in history to be born female.” But when women enter the workforce, she said, they face a pay gap, which is particularly wide for women of color. She pointed to the recent Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision to assert that a woman’s boss should not determine what kind of health care she can access.Sexual assault on college campuses and in the military remains a pressing issue in need of legislative solutions, Clinton said. And she criticized discrimination in retirement benefits, saying, “When we deny women access to retirement that is secure, when we continue as we do to discriminate against women in the Social Security system, we are leaving too many women on their own.”
The way forward, Clinton said — and presumably what she will campaign on — is to embrace those who have long been marginalized in American society.
“We move forward when gay and transgender women are embraced as our colleagues and friends, not fired from good jobs because of who they love and who they are,” she said. Immigrants too, Clinton said, need protections and a path to citizenship. Striking a populist tone, Clinton highlighted economic inequality and the value of closing the wage gap — not just for women and their families, but for the U.S. economy as a whole.
Tina Brown’s Women in the World is a global conference, and Clinton emphasized her longtime advocacy for international women’s rights. She famously spoke at the 1995 Beijing conference on women’s rights, where she declared, “Women’s rights are human rights once and for all.” And at Women in the World today, she not only focused heavily on a domestic agenda centered on women’s rights, but mentioned her Beijing work, saying that when she gave her speech back in 1995, 189 countries came together to declare that “human rights are women rights and women rights are human rights, once and for all. And finally, the world began to listen.”
But, Clinton said, “Despite all this progress, we’re just not there yet. Yes, we’ve nearly closed the global gender gap in primary school, but secondary school remains out of reach for so many girls around the world. Yes, we’ve increased the number of countries prohibiting domestic violence, but still more than half the nations in the world have no such laws on the books, and an estimated one in three women still experience violence. Yes, we’ve cut the maternal mortality rate in half, but far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth.”
Clinton announced her run for president earlier this month and is the presumptive Democratic nominee. But when she sought the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, she moved away from her women’s rights bona fides, staking out a more gender-neutral position.
Now, running again eight years later, Clinton may be more inclined to embrace her potentially historic role as the first female candidate for president from a major political party. A month before she announced her intent to run, Clinton gave the keynote speech at the anniversary gala of EMILY’s List, an organization that raises money for pro-choice female politicians.
The Women in the World speech focused on women and girls, handily avoiding any mention ofallegations of inappropriate relationships between governments Clinton dealt with at the State Department and her family’s nonprofit, the Clinton Foundation. Those allegations originated in a book called Clinton Cash written by a Republican consultant, and the accusations of unethical behavior are now being investigated further by several media outlets, including The New York Times and TheWashington Post.
The Women in the World conference runs through Friday and features a long list of female activists and celebrities, including actresses Meryl Streep, Ashley Judd, Robin Wright, and Friedo Pinto; journalists Katie Couric, Poppy Harlow, Nora O’Donnell, and Mika Brzezinski; writers Tavi Gevinson, Jon Krakauer, and Janet Mock; and political leaders Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris.
Hillary Clinton’s remarks last week at the sixth annual Women in The World Summit raised eyebrows when she openly admitted her goal to steamroll conservative religious beliefs to clear the way for abortion on demand.
As the Daily Caller reports, “Clinton said, ‘it’s not enough to legalize the procedure. Far too many women are denied access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth, and laws don’t count for much if they’re not enforced. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.’”
Hillary is right about one thing. Laws can’t simply be created, they have to be enforced, and you can’t enforce the progressive agenda fully unless you completely uproot the “deep seated cultural codes and religious beliefs” of society. Then, and only then, will the liberals secure their progressive dream.
That’s why progressives push so hard to “normalize” single motherhood, non-traditional families, transgenderism and remove all trappings of our Judeo-Christian faith heritage.
Law and morality cannot entirely be separated, because nearly all laws are based on moral standards: codes of right and wrong. Our Founders recognized this and made us “one nation under God” with certain rights endowed to us by our Creator.
Hillary’s progressive worldviews include the “woman’s right to choose” – death, actually. Death for the unborn. And primarily, death for unborn non-white babies.
But liberals’ credal commitment to abortion hides an appalling racial bias.
While progressives are quick to label conservatives as racists, they support a genocidal industry that targets and slaughters African American babies more than any other race. This industry is abortion on demand.
According to CDC estimates, an average of “1,876 black babies are aborted every day in the United States.” Also, in 2011, the CDC released a shocking report that “black women were 3.7 times more likely to have an abortion..than non-Hispanic white women.”
In 2012, black women were almost five times as likely to have an abortion as white women. Among white women there were 138 abortions for every 1,000 births. Among black women, there were 501 abortions for every 1,000 births.”
Right now, we’re seeing Baltimore erupt in anger over the tragic death of Freddy Gray. The current narrative is that policemen are rampantly killing young black men. In fact, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) even went so far as to say the recent deaths of unarmed African-American men at the hands of police officers make it feel like “open season” on members of his race.
No sir, it’s open season on babies of your race. Self-inflicted.
According to the FBI there were about 33 homicides each day across the United States in 2013. That’s right, only 33 – whatever their color. But 1,876 black babies are aborted every day. In other words, 5,685% more black babies aborted by their mothers every day then there are homicides in the entire nation.
Rep. Johnson, I hope those figures alarm you. And Mrs. Clinton, aren’t you interested in changing that “deep-seated cultural code?”
In the end, when political leaders like Hillary Clinton promote the destruction of human life through abortion, they are willfully aiding Margaret Sanger’s eugenical dream to purify the population.
Story 1: Remembering The Armenian Genocide — Genocides and Democides Past and Present — Government Kills People — Videos
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
~Edmund Burke
20TH CENTURY
DEMOCIDE
IMPORTANT NOTE: Among all the democide estimates appearing on this website, and in the table on the lower right, some have been revised upward. I have changed that for Mao’s famine, 1958-1962, from zero to 38,000,000. And thus I have had to change the overall democide for the PRC (1928-1987) from 38,702,000 to 76,702,000. Details here.
I have changed my estimate for colonial democide from 870,000 to an additional 50,000,000. Details here.
Thus, the new world total: old total 1900-1999 = 174,000,000. New World total = 174,000,000 + 38,000,000 (new for China) + 50,000,000 (new for Colonies) = 262,000,000.
Just to give perspective on this incredible murder by government, if all these bodies were laid head to toe, with the average height being 5′, then they would circle the earth ten times. Also, this democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century. Finally, given popular estimates of the dead in a major nuclear war, this total democide is as though such a war did occur, but with its dead spread over a century.
CONTENTS
Books on Democide
Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocides and Mass Murders 1917-1987, Rutgers, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1990: Preface, References, and all tables of estimates, calculations and sources for each historical period.
China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900. Rutgers, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1991: Preface, Chapter 1, Methods Appendix, References, and all tables of estimates, calculations and sources for each historical period.
Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder. Rutgers, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1992: Preface, Chapter 1, References, and the summary overall table of estimates, calculations and sources.
Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder in the Twentieth Century, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1994: Preface; Chapters 1, 2, and 3; References; and the summary table for each megamurderer.
Statistics of Democide. Center on National Security and Law, University of Virginia, 1997: entire. Republished by Lit Verlag, MŸster, Germany in 1998 and distributed in North America by Transaction Publishers.
Armenian President: “The 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide is “a new starting point”
Armenia: ‘Genocide’ as a word ‘exactly sho…
25 Leaders Responsible For The Worst Genocides Ever Committed
Genocide: Worse Than War | Full-length documentary | PBS
Pope Francis calls Armenian massacre ‘first genocide of 20th century’
White House avoids calling Armenian deaths ‘genocide’
[FLASHBACK] Obama: Preventing genocide is a core moral responsibility of the US”
CNN Slams Obama for Breaking Armenian Genocide Pledge
Glenn Beck Salutes Armenian Genocide Upstander – Mehmet Celal Bey
Armenian Genocide 100 Year Commemoration Short Video Documentary
CBS 60 Minutes Past Report on the Armenian Genocide
The Armenian Journey – A Story Of An Armenian Genocide
The Armenian Genocide [ The Hidden Holocaust ] 1992 Documentary
BBC Documentary: Armenian Genocide – ‘The Betrayed’ – part 1/5
BBC Documentary: Armenian Genocide – ‘The Betrayed’ – part 2/5
BBC Documentary: Armenian Genocide – ‘The Betrayed’ – part 3/5
BBC Documentary: Armenian Genocide – ‘The Betrayed’ – part 4/5
BBC Documentary: Armenian Genocide – ‘The Betrayed’ – part 5/5
Geoffrey Robertson QC Discusses the Armenian Genocide on the Charlie Rose Show
Geoffrey Robertson: Armenia and the G-Word
The Untold Genocide: The Greek Genocide
Karl Marx: Father of Modern Genocide – Genocide Mac Daddy (NWO)
A little known historical fact is that Karl Marx, Founder of Communism, was also the father of modern genocide.
Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, were all guided by the writings of Marx, the first politician to publicly declare a need for political genocide, so Marx is the Mac Daddy of modern genocide.
This is to inform people who do not know that Communism does include genocide mass murder, genocides plots are not limited to the Illuminati.
The truth about Lenin and the Bolsheviks
Lenin regarded Europeans as animals
Stalin Mass Murder Documentary Ukraine 1933 Exterminations
Communist Genocide of 150 million 1917-1985
The Path to Nazi Genocide
Genocide: Worse Than War | Full-length documentary | PBS
Mao’s Great Famine HDTV great leap foward, history of china
Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group. The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) of 1948 as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the groups conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”[1]
The preamble to the CPPCG states that “genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of theUnited Nations and condemned by the civilized world” and that “at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity”.[1]
Determining what historical events constitute a genocide and which are merely criminal or inhuman behavior is not a clear-cut matter. In nearly every case where accusations of genocide have circulated, partisans of various sides have fiercely disputed the details and interpretation of the event, often to the point of depicting wildly different versions of the facts. Alleged genocides should be understood in this context and such allegations cannot be regarded as the final word.
Legally, genocide is defined as any conflict that the International Criminal Court has so designated. Many conflicts that have been labeled genocide in the popular press have not been so designated.[2]
M. Hassan Kakar[3] argued that the definition should include political groups or any group so defined by the perpetrator. He prefers the definition Chalk and Jonassohn: “Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group so defined by the perpetrator.”[4]
Some critics of the international definition argued that the definition was influenced by Joseph Stalin to exclude political groups.[5][6]
According to R. J. Rummel, genocide has multiple meanings. The ordinary meaning is murder by a government of people due to their national, ethnic, racial, or religious group membership. The legal meaning is defined by CCPG. This includes actions such as preventing births or forcibly transferring children to another group. Rummel created the term democide to include assaults on political groups.[7]
In this article, atrocities that have been called genocide by some reliable source are included, whether or not they match one of these definitions. The acts may involve mass killings, mass deportations, withholding of food and/or other necessities of life, death by invasive infectious disease agents or combinations of these, whether or not specific evidence documents an intent by the perpetrators to destroy a people.
According to Adam Jones, if a dominant group of people has little in common with a marginalized group of people, it is easy for the dominant group to define the other as subhuman. As a result, the marginalized group might be labeled as a threat that must be eliminated.[8] Jones continues: “The difficulty, as Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn pointed out in their early study, is that such historical records as exist are ambiguous and undependable. While history today is generally written with some fealty to ‘objective’ facts, most previous accounts aimed rather to praise the writer’s patron (normally the leader) and to emphasize the superiority of one’s own gods and religious beliefs.”[9]
Chalk and Jonassohn: “Historically and anthropologically peoples have always had a name for themselves. In a great many cases, that name meant ‘the people’ to set the owners of that name off against all other people who were considered of lesser quality in some way. If the differences between the people and some other society were particularly large in terms of religion, language, manners, customs, and so on, then such others were seen as less than fully human: pagans, savages, or even animals.”[10][11]
Scholars of antiquity differentiate between genocide and gendercide, in which males were killed but the children (particularly the girls) and women were incorporated into the conquering group. Jones notes, “Chalk and Jonassohn provide a wide-ranging selection of historical events such as the Assyrian Empire‘s root-and branch depredations in the first half of the first millennium BCE, and the destruction of Melos by Athens during the Peloponnesian War (fifth century BCE), a gendercidal rampage described by Thucydides in his ‘Melian Dialogue‘”.[12] The Old Testament documents the destruction of the Midianites, taking place during the life ofMoses in the 2nd millenium BC. The Book of Numbers chapter 31 recounts that an army of Isrealites kill every Midianite man but capture the women and children as plunder. These are later killed at the command of Moses, with the exception of girls who have not slept with a man. The total number killed is not recorded but the number of surviving girls is recorded as thirty two thousand.
Jared Diamond suggested that genocidal violence may have caused the Neanderthals to go extinct.[13] Ronald Wright also suggested such a genocide.[14] However, several scholars have formed alternative ideas as to why the Neanderthals died off, with there being no clear consensus viewpoint in the scientific community. Some academics have theorized that the beings were overly sensitive to the massive climate changes taking place, lacking advantages against cold that humans had.[15]
A 2010 study suggests that a group of Anasazi in the American Southwest were killed in a genocide that took place circa 800 AD.[16][17]
Quoting Eric Margolis, Jones observes that in the 13th century the Mongol horsemen of TemüjinGenghis Khan were genocidal killers (génocidaires)[11] who were known to kill whole nations, leaving nothing but empty ruins and bones.[18] He ordered the extermination of the Tata Mongols, and all Kankalis males in Bukhara “taller than a wheel”[19] using a technique called measuring against the linchpin. Rosanne Klass referred to the Mongols’ rule of Afghanistan as “genocide”.[20]
Similarly, the Turko-Mongol conqueror Tamerlane was known for his extreme brutality and his conquests were accompanied by genocidal massacres.[21] William Rubinstein wrote: “In Assyria (1393–4) – Tamerlane got around – he killed all the Christians he could find, including everyone in the, then, Christian city of Tikrit, thus virtually destroying Christianity in Mesopotamia. Impartially, however, Tamerlane also slaughtered Shi’ite Muslims, Jews and heathens.”[22]
Between 1810 and 1828, the Zulu kingdom under Shaka Zulu laid waste to large parts of present-day South Africa and Zimbabwe. Zulu armies often aimed not only at defeating enemies but at their total destruction. Those exterminated included prisoners of war, women, children and even dogs.[14] (Controversial) estimates for the death toll range from 1 million to 2 million.[23][24][25][26]
A copy of Trotha’s Extermination Order survives in the Botswana National Archives. The order states “every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women or children, I will drive them back to their people [to die in the desert] or let them be shot at.”[30] Olusoga and Erichsen write: “It is an almost unique document: an explicit, written declaration of intent to commit genocide”.[31] These mass killings were named as the first example of a 20th-century genocide in the 1985 Whitaker Report, commissioned but never adopted by the now defunct United Nations subcommittee ECOSOC.[32]
From the 1490s when Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas to the end of the 19th century, the indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere declined, mostly from disease, to 1.8 million from around 50 million, a decline of 96%.[33] In Brazil alone, the indigenous population declined from a pre-Columbian high of an estimated 3 million to some 300,000 (1997).[34][35] Estimates of how many people were living in the Americas when Columbus arrived have varied tremendously; 20th century scholarly estimates ranged from 8.4 million to 112.5 million.[36] However, Robert Royal stated, “estimates of pre-Columbian population figures have become heavily politicized with scholars who are particularly critical of Europe and/or Western civilization often favoring wildly higher figures.”[37]
Epidemic disease was the overwhelming direct cause of the population decline of the American natives.[38][39] After first contacts with Europeans and Africans, the death of 90 to 95 percent of the native population of the New World was caused by Old World diseases such as smallpox and measles.[40] Some estimates indicate that smallpox had a 80–90% fatality rate in Native American populations.[41]
British commander Jeffery Amherst may have authorized the intentional use of disease as a biological weapon against indigenous populations during the Siege of Fort Pitt.[42][43] It was the only documented case of germ warfare and it is uncertain whether it successfully infected the target population.[44]
Some historians argue that genocide, as a crime of intent, does not describe the colonization experience. Stafford Poole, a research historian, wrote: “There are other terms to describe what happened in the Western Hemisphere, but genocide is not one of them. It is a good propaganda term in an age where slogans and shouting have replaced reflection and learning, but to use it in this context is to cheapen both the word itself and the appalling experiences of the Jews andArmenians, to mention but two of the major victims of this century.”[45]Holocaust scholar and political scientist Guenter Lewy rejects the label of genocide and views the depopulation of the Americas as “not a crime but a tragedy”.[46] Likewise, Noble David Cook writing about the Black Legend wrote “There were too few Spaniards to have killed the millions who were reported to have died in the first century after Old and New World contact.”[47]
By contrast, David Stannard argued that the destruction of the American aboriginals from 76 million down to a quarter-million over 4 centuries, in a “string of genocide campaigns”, killing “countless tens of millions”, was the most massive genocide in world history.[48] Several works on the subject were released around the year 1992 to coincide with the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage.
In 2003, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez urged Latin Americans to not celebrate the Columbus Day holiday. Chavez blamed Columbus for leading to the alleged genocide.[49]
Contemporary sources indicate that it was a deliberate genocide by the Argentine government.[52] Others perceived the campaign as intending to suppress only groups of aboriginals that refused to submit to the government and carried out attacks on European settlements.[53][54]
Haiti
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first ruler of an independent Haiti, ordered the killing of the white population of French creoles on Haiti which culminated in the 1804 Haiti Massacre. According to Philippe Girard, “when the genocide was over, Haiti’s white population was virtually non-existent.”[55]
Mexico
The Caste War of Yucatán (approx. 1847–1901) against the population of European descent, called Yucatecos, who held political and economic control of the region. Adam Jones wrote: Genocidal atrocities on both sides cost up to 200,000 killed.”[56]
In 1835, Don Ignacio Zuniga, commander of the presidios of northern Sonora, asserted that since 1820 the Apaches had killed at least five thousand settlers. The state of Sonora then offered a bounty on Apache scalps in 1835. Beginning in 1837 Chihuahua state also offered a bounty of 100 pesos per warrior, 50 pesos per woman and 25 pesos per child.[57]
Peru
The indigenous rebellions of Túpac Amaru II and Túpac Katari against the Spanish between 1780 and 1782, cost over 100,000 colonists’ lives in Peru and Upper Peru (present-day Bolivia).”[58]
Authors, such as David Cesarani, argued that United States government policies in furtherance of its so-called Manifest Destiny constituted genocide.[59]
Statistics regarding deaths due to armed conflict between Native Americans and Europeans are sparse, as in many cases there were no records kept.[22] A study by Gregory Michno concluded that of 21,586 tabulated casualties in a selected 672 battles and skirmishes, military personnel and settlers accounted for 6,596 (31%), while indigenous casualties totaled about 14,990 (69%) for the period 1850–90. Michno’s study almost exclusively uses Army estimates. His follow-up book “Forgotten Battles and Skirmishes” covers over 300 additional fights not included in these statistics.[60] According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census (1894), “The Indian wars under the government of the United States have been more than 40 in number. They have cost the lives of about 19,000 white men, women and children, including those killed in individual combats, and the lives of about 30,000 Indians. The actual number of killed and wounded Indians must be very much higher than the given… Fifty percent additional would be a safe estimate…”[61]
Chalk and Jonassohn claimed that the deportation of the Cherokee tribe along the Trail of Tears would almost certainly be considered an act of genocide today.[62]The Indian Removal Act of 1830 led to the exodus. About 17,000 Cherokees—along with approximately 2,000 Cherokee-owned black slaves—were removed from their homes.[63] The number of people who died as a result of the Trail of Tears has been variously estimated. American doctor and missionary Elizur Butler, who made the journey with one party, estimated 4,000 deaths.[64]
The native population of the United States has been difficult to pin down due to the lack of reliable source materials. Historian and Information Scientist Dr. David Henige asserts that the modern trend of high population estimates is “pseudo-scientific number-crunching.” While he does not advocate a low population estimates, he argues that the scarce and uncomprehensive nature of the evidence renders broad estimates(eg.as high as the entire population of the US at the onset of World War I) to be somewhat suspect, saying “Examining the methodologies used by “high counters” have been particularly flagrant in their misuse of sources.”[65]
Credible evidence exists that epidemic disease was the overwhelming cause of the population decline of the American natives because of their lack of immunity to new diseases brought from Europe.[66][67][68] Contemporaneous accounts of the effects of smallpox, among the native population suggest an 80% to 95% mortality rate of the entire population effected. Governor William Bradford wrote, in 1633, about the second reported outbreak (e.g. 1617, 1633) in New England: “… for it pleased God to visit these Indians with a great sickness, and such a mortality that of a 1000. above 900.and a half of them died, and many of them did rot above ground for want of burial, …”[69][70]
The Beothuks attempted to avoid contact with Europeans in Newfoundland by moving from their traditional settlements.[71] The Beothuks were put into a position where they were forced from their traditional land and lifestyle into ecosystems that could not support them and that led to undernourishment and eventually starvation.[72] While some scholars believe that the Beothuk primarily died out due to the elements noted above, another theory is that Europeans conducted a sustained campaign of genocide against them.[73] They were officially declared “extinct” after the death of Shanawdithit in 1829 in the capital, St. John’s, where she had been taken.
The Ainu are an indigenous people in Japan (Hokkaidō).[74] In a 2009 news story, Japan Today reported, “Many Ainu were forced to work, essentially as slaves, forWajin (ethnic Japanese), resulting in the breakup of families and the introduction of smallpox, measles, cholera and tuberculosis into their community. In 1869, the new Meiji government renamed Ezo Hokkaido and unilaterally incorporated it into Japan. It banned the Ainu language, took Ainu land away, and prohibited salmon fishing and deer hunting.”[75] Roy Thomas wrote: “Ill treatment of native peoples is common to all colonial powers, and, at its worst, leads to genocide. Japan’s native people, the Ainu, have, however, been the object of a particularly cruel hoax, because the Japanese have refused to accept them officially as a separate minority people.”[76] In 2004 the small Ainu community living in Russia wrote a letter to Vladimir Putin, urging him to recognize Japanese behaviour against the Ainu people as genocide, which Putin declined to do.[77]
The Dzungar (or Zunghar), Oirat Mongols who lived in an area that stretched from the west end of the Great Wall of China to present-day eastern Kazakhstan and from present-day northern Kyrgyzstan to southern Siberia (most of which is located in present-day Xinjiang), were the last nomadic empire to threaten China, which they did from the early 17th century through the middle of the 18th century.[78] After a series of inconclusive military conflicts that started in the 1680s, the Dzungars were subjugated by the Manchu-led Qing dynasty (1644–1911) in the late 1750s. According to Qing scholar Wei Yuan, 40 percent of the 600,000 Zunghar people were killed by smallpox, 20 percent fled to Russia or sought refuge among the Kazakh tribes and 30 percent were killed by the Qing army of Manchu Bannermenand Khalkha Mongols.[79][80] Historian Michael Edmund Clarke has argued that the Qing campaign in 1757–58 “amounted to the complete destruction of not only the Zunghar state but of the Zunghars as a people.”[81] Historian Peter Perdue has attributed the decimation of the Dzungars to a “deliberate use of massacre” and has described it as an “ethnic genocide”.[82] Mark Levene, a historian of genocide,[83] has stated that the extermination of the Dzungars was “arguably the eighteenth century genocide par excellence.”[84]
According to research published from 2009, in 1789 the British deliberately spread smallpox from the First Fleet to counter overwhelming native tribes near Sydney in New South Wales. In his book “An Indelible Stain”, Henry Reynolds described this act as genocide.[85] Many scholars disagree that the initial smallpox was the result of deliberate biological warfare and have suggested other causes.[86][87][88]
The Black War was a period of conflict between British colonists and Tasmanian Aborigines in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) in the early 19th century. The conflict, in combination with introduced diseases and other factors, had such devastating impacts on the Tasmanian Aboriginal population that it was reported the Tasmanian Aborigines had been exterminated.[89][90] Historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote that by 1830, “Disease had killed most of them but warfare and private violence had also been devastating.”[91] In the 19th century, smallpox was the principal cause of Aboriginal deaths.[92]
Lemkin and most other comparative genocide scholars present the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines as a textbook example of a genocide, while the majority of Australian experts are more circumspect.[93][94] Detailed studies of the events surrounding the extinction have raised questions about some of the details and interpretations in earlier histories.[95][96] Curthoys concluded, “It is time for a more robust exchange between genocide and Tasmanian historical scholarship if we are to understand better what did happen in Tasmania.”[93]
On the Australian continent during the colonial period (1788–1901), the population of 500,000–750,000 Australian Aborigines was reduced to fewer than 50,000.[97][98] Most were devastated by the introduction of alien diseases after contact with Europeans, while perhaps 20,000 were killed by massacres and fighting with colonists.[97]
In 1835, some Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama from the Taranaki region of North Island invaded the Chathams. On 19 November 1835, the Rodney, a European ship hired by the Māori, arrived carrying 500 Māori armed with guns, clubs, and axes, followed by another ship with 400 more warriors on 5 December 1835. They proceeded to enslave some Moriori and kill and cannibalise others. “Parties of warriors armed with muskets, clubs and tomahawks, led by their chiefs, walked through Moriori tribal territories and settlements without warning, permission or greeting. If the districts were wanted by the invaders, they curtly informed the inhabitants that their land had been taken and the Moriori living there were now vassals.”[100]
A council of Moriori elders was convened at the settlement called Te Awapatiki. Despite knowing of the Māori predilection for killing and eating the conquered, and despite the admonition by some of the elder chiefs that the principle of Nunuku was not appropriate now, two chiefs—Tapata and Torea—declared that “the law of Nunuku was not a strategy for survival, to be varied as conditions changed; it was a moral imperative.”[101] A Moriori survivor recalled: “[The Maori] commenced to kill us like sheep…. [We] were terrified, fled to the bush, concealed ourselves in holes underground, and in any place to escape our enemies. It was of no avail; we were discovered and killed – men, women and children indiscriminately.” A Māori conqueror explained, “We took possession… in accordance with our customs and we caught all the people. Not one escaped…”[102]
After the invasion, Moriori were forbidden to marry Moriori, or to have children with each other. All became slaves of the invaders. Many Moriori women had children by their Maori masters. A small number of Moriori women eventually married either Maori or European men. Some were taken from the Chathams and never returned. Only 101 Moriori out of a population of about 2,000 were left alive by 1862.[103] Although the last Moriori of unmixed ancestry, Tommy Solomon,[104] died in 1933 several thousand mixed ancestry Moriori are alive today.
In 1986, Reynald Secher argued that the actions of the French republican government during the revolt in the Vendée (1793–1796), a popular mostly Catholic uprising against the anti-clerical Republican government during the French Revolution was the first modern genocide.[105] Secher’s claims caused a minor uproar in France and mainstream authorities rejected Secher’s claims.[106][107] Timothy Tackett countered that “the Vendée was a tragic civil war with endless horrors committed by both sides—initiated, in fact, by the rebels themselves. The Vendeans were no more blameless than were the republicans. The use of the word genocide is wholly inaccurate and inappropriate.”[108] However, historians Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn consider the Vendée a case of genocide.[109] Historian Pierre Chaunu called the Vendée the first ideological genocide.[110] Adam Jones estimates 150,000 Vendeans died in what he also considers to be genocide.[111]
Toward the end of the War of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651) the English Rump Parliament sent the New Model Army to Ireland to subdue and take revenge on the Catholic population of the country and to prevent Royalists loyal to Charles II from using Ireland as a base to threaten England. The force was initially under the command of Oliver Cromwell and later under other parliamentary generals. The Army sought to secure the country, but also to confiscate lands of Irish families involved in the fighting. This became a continuation of the Elizabethan policy of encouraging Protestant settlement of Ireland, because the Protestant New Model army soldiers—could be paid in confiscated lands rather than in cash.[112]
During the Interregnum (1651–1660), this policy was enhanced with the passing of the Act of Settlement of Ireland in 1652. Its goal was a further transfer of land from Irish to English hands.[112] The immediate war aims and the longer term policies of the English Parliamentarians resulted in an attempt by the English to transfer the native population to the western fringes to make way for Protestant settlers. This policy was reflected in a phrase attributed to Cromwell: “To Hell or to Connaught” and has been described by historians as ethnic cleansing, if not genocide.[113]
During the Irish Potato Famine (1845–1852), approximately 1 million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland,[114]causing the island’s population to fall by between 20% and 25%.[115] The proximate cause of famine was a potato disease commonly known as potato blight.[116] Although blight ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, the impact and human cost in Ireland – where one-third of the population was entirely dependent on the potato for food – was exacerbated by a host of political, social, and economic factors which remain the subject of historical debate.[117][118]
During the Famine, Ireland produced enough food, flax, and wool to feed and clothe double its nine million people.[119] When Ireland had experienced a famine in 1782–83, ports were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland to feed the Irish. Local food prices promptly dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export ban, but government in the 1780s overrode their protests. There was no such export ban in the 1840s.[120] Some historians[121][122] have argued that in this sense the famine was artificial, caused by the British government’s choice not to stop exports.[119]
The claims were contested by Peter Gray, who concluded that UK government policy “was not a policy of deliberate genocide”, but a dogmatic refusal to admit that the policy was wrong. James S. Donnelly, Jr., split the difference, writing, “while genocide was not in fact committed, what happened … had the look of genocide to a great many Irish”.[126]
Cecil Woodham-Smith claimed that while the export policy embittered the Irish, this did not implicate the policy in genocide, but rather in excessive parsimony obtuseness, short-sightedness, and ignorance.[127]
Irish historian Cormac O’ Grada rejects the term, stating that the English exhibited no desire to exterminate the Irish and that the challenges for providing relief were enormous.[121][128]
W.D. Rubinstein also rejected the genocide claim.[22]
The Russian Tsarist Empire waged war against Circassia in the Northwest Caucasus for more than one hundred years, trying to replace Circassia’s hold along theBlack Sea coast. After a century of insurgency and war and failure to end the conflict, the Tsar ordered the expulsion of most of the Muslim population of the North Caucasus. Many Circassians, Western historians, Turks and Chechens claimed that the events of the 1860s constituted one of the first modern genocides, in that a whole population was eliminated to satisfy the desires (in this case economic) of a powerful country.[citation needed]
Antero Leitzinger flagged the affair as the 19th century’s largest genocide.[129] Some estimates cite that approximately 1-1.5 million Circassians were killed and most of the Muslim population was deported. Ossete Muslims and Kabardins generally did not leave. The modern Circassians and Abazins descend from those who managed to escape the onslaught and later returned another 1.5 million Circassians and others. This effectively annihilated (or deported) 90% of the nation.[130]Tsarist documents recorded more than 400,000 Circassians killed, 497,000 forced to flee and only 80,000 were left in their native area.[131] Circassians were viewed as tools by the Ottoman government, and settled in restive areas whose populations had nationalist yearnings- Armenia, the Arab regions and the Balkans. Many more Circassians were killed by the policies of the Balkan states, primarily Serbia and Bulgaria, which became independent at that time.[citation needed] Still more Circassians were forcefully assimilated by nationalist Muslim states (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, etc.) who looked upon non-Turk/Arab ethnicity as a foreign presence and a threat.
In May 1994, the then Russian PresidentBoris Yeltsin admitted that resistance to the tsarist forces was legitimate, but he did not recognize “the guilt of the tsarist government for the genocide.”[131] In 1997 and 1998, the leaders of Kabardino-Balkaria and of Adygea sent appeals to the Duma to reconsider the situation and to apologize, without response. In October 2006, the Adygeyan public organizations of Russia, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Syria, the USA, Belgium, Canada and Germany sent the president of the European Parliament a letter with a request to recognize the genocide.[citation needed]
On 5 July 2005 the Circassian Congress, an organisation that unites representatives of the various Circassian peoples in the Russian Federation, called on Moscow to acknowledge and apologize for the genocide.[132]
On May 24, 1915, the Allied Powers (Britain, France, and Russia) jointly issued a statement that for the first time ever explicitly charged a government with committing a “crime against humanity” in reference to that regime’s persecution of its Christian minorities, including Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks.[134] Many researchers consider these events to be part of the policy of planned ethnoreligious purification of the Turkish state advanced by the Young Turks.[135][136][137][138][139]
This joint statement stated, “[i]n view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres.”[133]
Armenian
Armenian civilians, escorted by armed Ottoman soldiers, are marched through Kharpert to a prison in the nearby Mezireh district, April 1915.
The Armenian Genocide (Armenian: ՀայոցՑեղասպանություն, translit.:Hayots’ Ts’eġaspanout’youn; Turkish: Ermeni Soykırımı and Ermeni Kıyımı) refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was implemented through wholesale massacres and deportations, with the deportations consisting of forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees. The total number of resulting deaths is generally held to have been between one and one and a half million.[140]
The genocide began on April 24, 1915, when Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thereafter, the Ottoman military uprooted Armenians from their homes and forced them to march for hundreds of miles, without food and water, to the desert of what is now Syria. Massacres ignored age and gender, withrape and other acts of sexual abuse being commonplace.[141] The majority of Armenian diaspora communities were founded as a result of these events. Mass killings continued under the Republic of Turkey during the Turkish–Armenian War phase of Turkish War of Independence.[142]
Modern Turkey succeeded the Ottoman Empire in 1923 and vehemently denies that a genocide took place. It has resisted calls in recent years by scholars, countries and international organizations to acknowledge the crime. It is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust. Lemkin coined “genocide” to describe these events.
Assyrian
The Assyrian Genocide (also known as Sayfo or Seyfo; Aramaic: ܩܛܠܐ ܕܥܡܐ ܐܬܘܪܝܐ or ܣܝܦܐ, Turkish: Süryani Soykırımı) was committed against the Assyrian population of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War by the Young Turks.[143] The Assyrian population of northern Mesopotamia (Tur Abdin, Hakkari, Van,Siirt region in modern-day southeastern Turkey and Urmia region in northwestern Iran) was forcibly relocated and massacred by Ottoman (Turkish and alliedKurdish) forces between 1914 and 1920.[144] This genocide paralleled the Armenian Genocide and Greek genocide.[145][146] The Assyro-Chaldean National Council stated in a December 4, 1922, memorandum that the total death toll is unknown, but it estimated that about 750,000 Assyrians died between 1914 and 1918.[147]
Greek
The Greek genocide[148] refers to the fate of the Greek population of the Ottoman Empire during and in the aftermath of World War I (1914–18). Like Armenians and Assyrians, the Greeks were subjected to various forms of persecution including massacres, expulsions, and death marches by Young Turks.[149][146] Mass killing of Greeks continued under the Turkish National Movement during the Greco-Turkish War phase of the Turkish War of Independence.[150] George W. Rendel of the British Foreign Office, among other diplomats, noted the massacres and deportations of Greeks during the post-Armistice period.[151] They killed an estimate of 348,000 Anatolian Greeks.[152]
Dersim Kurds
The Dersim Massacre refers to the depopulation of Dersim in Turkish Kurdistan, in 1937–38, in which approximately 65,000–70,000 Alevi Kurds[153] were killed and thousands more were driven into exile. A key component of the Turkification process was a policy of massive population resettlement. The main document, the1934 Law on Resettlement, was used to target the region of Dersim as one of its first test cases, with disastrous consequences for the local population.[154]
Many Kurds and some ethnic Turks consider the events that took place in Dersim to constitute genocide. A prominent proponent of this view is İsmail Beşikçi.[155]Under international laws, the actions of the Turkish authorities were arguably not genocide, because they were not aimed at the extermination of a people, but at resettlement and suppression.[156] A Turkish court ruled in 2011 that the events could not be considered genocide because they were not directed systematically against an ethnic group.[157] Scholars such as Martin van Bruinessen, have instead talked of an ethnocide directed against the local language and identity.[156]
Multiple documented instances of unnatural mass death occurred in the Soviet Union. These include Union-wide famines in the early 1920s and early 1930s and deportations of ethnic minorities.
Soviet diplomatic efforts removed the extermination of political groups from the United Nations Convention on Genocide. This left many of the Soviet atrocities outside the United Nations definition of genocide, because the atrocities targeted political or economic groups rather than the ethnic, racial, religious, or national groups listed in the UN convention.
During the Soviet famine of 1932–33 that affected Ukraine, Kazakhstan and some densely populated regions of Russia, the scale of death in Ukraine is referred to as the Holodomor and is recognized as genocide by the governments of Australia, Argentina, Georgia, Estonia, Italy, Canada, Lithuania, Poland, the USA and Hungary. The famine was caused by the confiscation of the whole 1933 harvest in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the Kuban (a densely populated Russian region), and some other parts of the Soviet Union, leaving the peasants too little to feed themselves. As a result, an estimated ten million died, including over seven million in Ukraine, one million in the North Caucasus and one million elsewhere.[164] American historian Timothy Snyder wrote of “3.3 million Soviet citizens (mostly Ukrainians) deliberately starved by their own government in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933”[165]
In addition to the requisitioning of crops and livestock in Ukraine, all food was confiscated by Soviet authorities. Any and all aid and food was prohibited from entering the Ukrainian republic. Ukraine’s Yuschenko administration recognised the Holodomor as an act of genocide and pushed international governments to acknowledge this.[166] This move was opposed by the Russian government and some members of the Ukrainian parliament, especially the Communists. A Ukrainian court found Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Stanislav Kosior, Pavel Postyshev, Vlas Chubar and Mendel Khatayevich posthumously guilty of genocide on 13 January 2010.[167][168]As of 2010, the Russian government’s official position was that the famine took place, but was not an ethnic genocide;[166] former Ukrainian presidentViktor Yanukovych supported this position.[169][170] A ruling of January 13, 2010 by Kyiv’s Court of Appeal declared the Soviet leaders guilty of ‘genocide against the Ukrainian national group in 1932–33 through the artificial creation of living conditions intended for its partial physical destruction.'”[171]
A few scholars argue that the killing, on the basis of nationality and politics, of more than 120,000 ethnic Poles in the Soviet Union during 1937–38 was genocide.[172]
The event began on 23 February 1944, when the entire population of Checheno-Ingushetia was summoned to local party buildings where they were told they were to be deported as punishment for their alleged collaboration with the Germans. The inhabitants were rounded up and imprisoned in Studebaker trucks and sent to Siberia.[174][175]
Many times, resistance was met with slaughter, and in one such instance, in the aul of Khaibakh, about 700 people were locked in a barn and burned to death. By the next summer, Checheno-Ingushetia was dissolved; a number of Chechen and Ingush placenames were replaced with Russian ones; mosques and graveyards were destroyed, and a massive campaign to burn numerous historical Chechen texts was nearly complete.[176]
[177] Throughout the North Caucasus, about 700,000 (according to Dalkhat Ediev, 724297,[178] of which the majority, 412,548, were Chechens, along with 96,327Ingush, 104,146 Kalmyks, 39,407 Balkars and 71,869 Karachais). Many died on the trip, of exposure in Siberia’s extremely harsh environment. The NKVD, supplying the Russian perspective, gives the statistic of 144,704 killed in 1944–1948 alone (with a death rate of 23.5% for all groups). Estimates for Chechen deaths alone (excluding the NKVD statistic), range from about 170,000 to 200,000,[179][180] thus ranging from over a third of the total Chechen population to nearly half being killed (of those that were deported, not counting those killed on the spot) in those 4 years alone. Both the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and the European Union Parliament marked it as genocide in 2004.[181]
Deportations of Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians
The mass deportations of up to 17,500 Lithuanians, 17,000 Latvians and 6,000 Estonians carried out by Stalin were allegedly the start of another genocide. Added to the killing of the Forest Brethren and the renewed Dekulakization that followed the Soviet reconquest of the Baltic states at the end of World War Two, the total number deported to Siberia was 118,559 from Lithuania, 52,541 from Latvia, and 32,540 from Estonia.[182] The high death rate of deportees during the first few years of exile, caused by the failure of Soviet authorities to provide suitable clothing and housing at the destination, led some sources to label the affair an act of genocide.[183] Based on the Martens Clause and the principles of the Nuremberg Charter, the European Court of Human Rights held that the March deportationconstituted a crime against humanity.[184][185] According to Erwin Oberlander, these deportations are a crime against humanity, rather than genocide.[186]
Lithuania began trials for genocide in 1997. Latvia and Estonia followed in 1998.[187] Latvia has since convicted four security officers and in 2003 sentenced a former KGB agent to five years. Estonia tried and convicted ten men and is investigating others. In Lithuania by 2004 23 cases were before the courts, but as of the end of the year none had been convicted.[188]
In 2007 Estonia charged Arnold Meri (then 88 years old), a former Soviet Communist Party official and highly decorated former Red Army soldier, with genocide. Shortly after the trial opened, it was suspended because of Meri’s frail health and then abandoned when he died.[189][190] A memorial in Vilnius, Lithuania, is dedicated to genocidal victims of Stalin and Hitler,[191] and the Museum of Genocide Victims in Lithuania, which opened on 14 October 1992 in the former KGB headquarters, chronicles the imprisonment and deportation of Lithuanians.[192]
Japan
During the Nanking Massacre in the period of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese engaged in mass killings against the Chinese. Bradley Campbell described the Nanking Massacre as a genocide, because the Chinese were unilaterally killed by the Japanese en masse during the aftermath, despite the successful and certain outcome of their battle.[193]
The Nazi Holocaust is universally recognized as genocide. The term appeared in the indictment of 24 German leaders. Count three of the indictment stated that all the defendants had “conducted deliberate and systematic genocide – namely, the extermination of racial and national groups…”[195]
The term “the Holocaust” (from the Greekhólos, “whole” and kaustós, “burnt”) is often used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist German Workers Party in Germany led by Adolf Hitler.[196][197] Many scholars do not include other groups in the definition of the Holocaust, reserving the term to refer only to the genocide of the Jews,[198]
The Holocaust: Definition and Preliminary Discussion, Yad Vashem, The Holocaust, as presented in this resource center, is defined as the sum total of all anti-Jewish actions carried out by the German regime between 1933 and 1945: from stripping the German Jews of their legal and economic status in the 1930s, to segregating and starving Jews in the various occupied countries, to the murder of close to six million Jews in Europe. The Holocaust is part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression and murder of various ethnic and political groups in Europe by the Germans.
The Holocaust was accomplished in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave laborers until they died. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings.[203] Jews and Romani were crammed into ghettos before being transported in box cars by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority were killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Germany’s bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called “a genocidal nation.”[204]
Men are forced to dig their own graves before being shot by SS troops.Šiauliai, Lithuania, July 1941
The following figures from Lucy Dawidowicz show the annihilation of the Jewish population of Europe by (pre-war) country:[205]
This gives a total of over 3.8 million; of these, 80–90% were estimated to be Jews. These seven camps thus accounted for half the total number of Jews killed in the entire Nazi Holocaust. Virtually the entire Jewish population of Poland died in these camps.[205]
Since 1945, the most commonly cited figure for the total number of Jews killed has been six million. The Yad VashemHolocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, writes that there is no precise figure for the number of Jews killed,[214] but has been able to find documentation of more than three million names of Jewish victims killed,[215]which it displays at its visitors center. The figure most commonly used is the six million attributed to Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS official.[216]
Members of the Sonderkommando burn corpses in the fire pits at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.[217]
There were about eight to ten million Jews in the territories controlled directly or indirectly by Germany (the uncertainty arises from the lack of knowledge about how many Jews there were in the Soviet Union). The six million killed in the Holocaust thus represent 60 to 75 percent of these Jews. Of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews, about 90 percent were killed.[218] The same proportion were killed in Latvia and Lithuania, but most of Estonia‘s Jews were evacuated in time. Of the 750,000 Jews in Germany and Austria in 1933, only about a quarter survived. Although many German Jews emigrated before 1939, the majority of these fled to Czechoslovakia, France or the Netherlands, from where they were later deported to their deaths.
In Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia, over 70 percent were killed. 50 to 70 percent were killed in Romania, Belgium and Hungary. It is likely that a similar proportion were killed in Belarus and Ukraine, but these figures are less certain. Countries with notably lower proportions of deaths include Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Italy, and Norway. Albania was the only country occupied by Germany that had a significantly larger Jewish population in 1945 than in 1939. About two hundred native Jews and over a thousand refugees were provided with false documents, hidden when necessary, and generally treated as honored guests in a country whose population was roughly 60% Muslim.[219] Additionally, Japan, as an Axis member, had its own unique response to German policies regarding Jews; see Shanghai Ghetto.
In addition to those who died in extermination camps, at least half a million Jews died in other camps, including the major concentration camps in Germany. These were not extermination camps, but had large numbers of Jewish prisoners at various times, particularly in the last year of the war as the Nazis withdrew from Poland. About a million people died in these camps, and although the proportion of Jews is not known with certainty, it was estimated to be at least 50 percent.[citation needed] Another 800,000 to one million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet territories (an approximate figure, since the Einsatzgruppen killings were frequently undocumented).[220] Many more died through execution or of disease and malnutrition in the ghettos of Poland before they could be deported.
Jewish Holocaust death toll as a percentage of the total pre-war Jewish population
In the 1990s, the opening of government archives in Eastern Europe resulted in the adjustment of the death tolls published in the pioneering work by Hilberg, Dawidowicz and Gilbert (e.g. compare Gilbert’s estimation of two million deaths in Auschwitz-Birkenau with the updated figure of one million in the Extermination Camp data box). As pointed out above, Wolfgang Benz has been carrying out work on the more recent data. He concluded in 1999:
The goal of annihilating all of the Jews of Europe, as it was proclaimed at the conference in the villa Am Grossen Wannsee in January 1942, was not reached. Yet the six million murder victims make the holocaust a unique crime in the history of mankind. The number of victims—and with certainty the following represent the minimum number in each case—cannot express that adequately. Numbers are just too abstract. However they must be stated in order to make clear the dimension of the genocide: 165,000 Jews from Germany, 65,000 from Austria, 32,000 from France and Belgium, more than 100,000 from the Netherlands, 60,000 from Greece, the same number from Yugoslavia, more than 140,000 from Czechoslovakia, half a million from Hungary, 2.2 million from the Soviet Union, and 2.7 million from Poland. To these numbers must be added all those killed in the pogroms and massacres in Romania and Transitrien (over 200,000) and the deported and murdered Jews from Albania and Norway, Denmark and Italy, from Luxembourg and Bulgaria.
—Benz, Wolfgang The Holocaust: A German Historian Examines the Genocide[221]
Some scholars broaden the definition to include other German killing policies during the war, including the mistreatment of Soviet POWs, crimes against ethnic Poles,euthanasia of mentally and physically disabled Germans, persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the killing of Romani, and other crimes committed against ethnic and political minorities.[234] Using this definition, the total number of Holocaust victims is 11 million people. Donald Niewyk suggests that the broadest definition, including Soviet deaths due to war-related famine and disease, would produce a death toll of 17 million. Overall, about 5.7 million (78 percent) of the 7.3 million Jews in occupied Europe perished.[235] This was in contrast to the five to 11 million (1.4 percent to 3.0 percent) of the 360 million non-Jews in German-dominated Europe.[236][237]
In 1995 a paper published by M. V. Philimoshin at the Russian Academy of Scienceput the civilian death toll in the regions occupied by Germany at 13.7 million. Philimoshin cited sources from the Soviet era to support his figures, he used the terms “genocide” and “premeditated extermination” when referring to the deaths of 7.4 million civilians in the occupied USSR caused by the direct, intentional actions of violence. Civilians killed in reprisals during the Soviet partisan war account for a major part of the huge toll. The report of Philimoshin lists the deaths of civilian forced laborers in Germany as totaling 2,164,313. G. I. Krivosheev in the report on military casualties gives a total of 1,103,300 dead POWs. The total of these two figures is 3,267,613, which is in close agreement with estimates by western historians of about 3 million deaths of prisoners in German captivity. In the occupied regions Nazi Germany had a policy of forced confiscation of food that resulted in the famine deaths of an estimated 6% of the population, 4.1 million persons.[238]
Soviet civilian war dead estimated by Russian Academy of Science[239][240][241]
Deaths caused by the result of direct, intentional actions of violence
After the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, Nazis and fascists established the Croatian state known as the Nezavisna Država Hrvatska (Independent State of Croatia) or NDH. Immediately afterwards, the NDH began a terror campaign against Serbs, Jews and Romani people. From 1941 to 1945, when Josip Broz Tito‘s partisansliberated Croatia, the Ustaše regime killed approximately 300,000 to 350,000 people,[244] mostly Serbs and almost the entire Jewish and Romani population, many of them in the Jasenovac concentration camp. Helen Fein estimated that the Ustaše killed virtually every Romani in the country.[245] The Ustaše enacted a policy that called for a solution to the “Serbian problem” in Croatia. The solution was to “kill one-third of the Serbs, expel one-third, and convert one-third”.[246] According to the United States Holocaust Museum, 320,000–340,000 ethnic Serbs were murdered under Ustaše rule.[247] The Yad Vashem World Holocaust Museum and Research Center concludes that “more than 500,000 Serbs were murdered in horribly sadistic ways, 250,000 were expelled, and another 200,000 were forced to convert”.[248] The Ustaše killed nearly 80,000 Roma and 35,000 Jews.
Some historians consider the crimes of the Chetniks in Bosnia against non-Serbs to constitute genocide.[249][250]
Volhynia and Eastern Galicia
Massacres of Poles in Volhynia in 1943. Most Poles of Volhynia (now in Ukraine) had either been murdered or had fled the area
The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were part of an ethnic cleansing operation carried out by theUkrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) West in the Nazi-occupied regions of Eastern Galicia (Nazi created Distrikt Galizien inGeneral Government), and UPA North in Volhynia (in Nazi created Reichskommissariat Ukraine), from March 1943 until the end of 1944. The peak took place in July/August 1943 when a senior UPA commander, Dmytro Klyachkivsky, ordered the liquidation of the entire male Polish population between 16 and 60 years of age.[251][252] Despite this, most were women and children. The UPA killed 40,000–60,000 Polish civilians in Volhynia,[253] from 25,000[254] to 30,000–40,000 in Eastern Galicia.[253] The killings were directly linked with the policies of the Bandera fraction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, whose goal, specified at the Second Conference of the OUN-B, was to remove non-Ukrainians from a future Ukrainian state.[255]
The massacres are recognized in Poland as ethnic cleansing with “marks of genocide.”[256] According to IPN prosecutor Piotr Zając, the crimes have a “character of genocide”.[257] However, according to Katchanovski, the actions in Volhynia lacked evidence of an intent to eliminate all or part of the Polish population, and the anti-Polish action was mostly limited to a small region.
The treatment of the Romani was not consistent in the different areas that Nazi Germany conquered. In some areas (e.g. Luxembourg and the Baltic countries), the Nazis killed virtually the entire Romani population. In other areas (e.g. Denmark, Greece), there is no record of Romanis being subjected to mass killings.[258]
Donald Niewyk and Frances Nicosia write that the death toll was at least 130,000 of the nearly one million Romani in Nazi-controlled Europe.[259] Michael Berenbaum writes that serious scholarly estimates lie between 90,000 and 220,000.[260] A study by Sybil Milton, senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, calculated a death toll of at least 220,000 and possibly closer to 500,000, but this study explicitly excluded the Independent State of Croatia where the genocide of Romanies was intense.[226][261] Martin Gilbert estimates a total of more than 220,000 of the 700,000 Romani in Europe.[262]Ian Hancock, Director of the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, has argued in favour of a much higher figure of between 500,000 and 1,500,000, claiming the Romani toll proportionally equaled or exceeded that of Jewish victims.[227][263]
Our starting-point is not the individual, and we do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty or clothe the naked—those are not our objectives. Our objectives are entirely different. They can be put most crisply in the sentence: we must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.
Between 1939 and 1941, 80,000 to 100,000 mentally ill adults in institutions were killed; 5,000 children in institutions; and 1,000 Jews in institutions.[265] Outside the mental health institutions, the figures are estimated to number 20,000 (according to Dr. Georg Renno, the deputy director of Schloss Hartheim, one of the euthanasia centers) or 400,000 (according to Franz Ziereis, the commandant of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp).[265] Another 300,000 were forcibly sterilized.[266] Overall it has been estimated that over 270,000 individuals[225] with mental disorders of all kinds were put to death, although their mass murder has received relatively little historical attention. Along with the physically disabled, people suffering from dwarfism were persecuted as well. Many were put on display in cages and experimented on by the Nazis.[267] Despite not being formally ordered to take part, psychiatrists and psychiatric institutions were at the center of justifying, planning and carrying out the atrocities at every stage, and “constituted the connection” to the later annihilation of Jews and other “undesirables” in the Holocaust.[268] After strong protests by the German Catholic and Protestant churches on 24 August 1941 Hitler ordered the cancellation of the T4 program.[269]
The program was named after Tiergartenstraße 4, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, the headquarters of the General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care,[270] led by Philipp Bouhler, head of Hitler’s private chancellery (Kanzlei des Führer der NSDAP) and Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician.
Brandt was tried in December 1946 at Nuremberg, along with 22 others, in a case known as United States of America vs. Karl Brandt et al., also known as theDoctors’ Trial. He was hanged at Landsberg Prison on 2 June 1948.
After WWII ended at least 12 million[271][272][273] Germans fled or were expelled from Germany’s former eastern provinces or migrated from other countries to what remained of Germany, the largest transfer of a single ethnic population in modern history.[271][272] Estimates of the total number of dead range from 500,000 to 2,000,000, where the higher figures include “unsolved cases” of persons reported as missing and presumed dead. Many German civilians were sent to internment and labor camps, where they died. Rummel estimated that 1,585,000 Germans were killed in Poland and 197,000 were killed in Czechoslovakia.[274] The German-Czech Historians Commission, on the other hand, established a death toll for Czechoslovakia of 15-30,000.[275] The events are usually classified as population transfer,[276][277] or as ethnic cleansing.[278][279][280][281]Felix Ermacora, among a minority of legal scholars, equated ethnic cleansing with genocide,[282][283] and stated that the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans therefore constituted genocide.[284]
Dominican Republic
In 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the execution of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. The Parsley Massacre, known in the Dominican Republic as “El Corte” (the Cutting), lasted approximately five days. Trujillo had his soldiers show parsley to suspected Haitians and ask, “What is this?” Spanish-speaking Dominicans would be able to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley (“perejil”) perfectly. In Haitian Creole, the word for parsley is “persil”. Those who mispronounced “perejil” were assumed to be Haitian and slaughtered. The program resulted in the deaths of 20,000 to 30,000 people.[285]
Republic of China and Tibet
The Kuomintang‘s Republic of China government supported Muslim warlordMa Bufang when he launched seven expeditions into Golog, causing the deaths of thousands of Tibetans.[286] Uradyn Erden Bulag called the events that followed genocidal, while David Goodman called them ethnic cleansing. One Tibetan counted the number of times Ma attacked him, remembering the seventh attack that made life impossible.[287] Ma was anti-communist and he and his army wiped out many Tibetans in northeast and eastern Qinghai and destroyed Tibetan Buddhist Temples.[288][289] Ma also patronized the Panchen Lama, who was exiled from Tibet by the Dalai Lama‘s government.
1951 to 2000
The CPPCG was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948 and came into effect on 12 January 1951 (Resolution 260 (III)). After the necessary 20 countries became parties to the Convention, it came into force as international law on 12 January 1951. At that time however, only two of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) were parties to the treaty, which caused the Convention to languish for over four decades.
Sir Ronald Wilson was once the president of Australia’s Human Rights Commission. He stated that Australia’s program in which 20-25,000 Aboriginal children were forcibly separated from their natural families[290] was genocide, because it was intended to cause the Aboriginal people to die out. The program ran from 1900 to 1969.[291] The nature and extent of the removals have been disputed within Australia, with opponents questioning the findings contained in the Commission report and asserting that the size of the Stolen Generation had been exaggerated. The intent and effects of the government policy were also disputed.[290]
Zanzibar
In 1964, towards the end of the Zanzibar Revolution—which led to the overthrow of the Sultan of Zanzibar and his mainly Arab government by local African revolutionaries—John Okello claimed in radio speeches to have killed or imprisoned tens of thousands of the Sultan’s “enemies and stooges,”[292] but estimates of the number of deaths vary greatly, from “hundreds” to 20,000. The New York Times and other Western newspapers gave figures of 2-4,000;[293][294] the higher numbers possibly were inflated by Okello’s own broadcasts and exaggerated media reports.[292][295][296] The killing of Arab prisoners and their burial in mass graveswas documented by an Italian film crew, filming from a helicopter, in Africa Addio.[297] Many Arabs fled to safety in Oman[295] and by Okello’s order no Europeans were harmed.[298] The violence did not spread to Pemba.[296]Leo Kuper described the killing of Arabs in Zanzibar as genocide.[299]
During the Guatemalan civil war, some thousands of people died and more than one million fled their homes and hundreds of villages were destroyed. The officially chartered Historical Clarification Commission attributed more than 93% of all documented human rights violations to Guatemala’s military government; and estimated that MayaIndians accounted for 83% of the victims.[300] Although the war lasted from 1960 to 1996, the Historical Clarification Commission concluded that genocide might have occurred between 1981 and 1983, when the government and guerrilla had the fiercest and bloodiest combats and strategies, especially in the oil-rich area of Ixcán on the northern part of Quiché[disambiguation needed].[301] The total numbers of mortal victims was estimated to be around 200,000, although this is an extrapolation that was done by the Historical Clarification Commission based on the cases that they documented, and there were no more than 50,000.[302]
In 1999, Nobel peace prize winner Rigoberta Menchú brought a case against the military leadership in a Spanish Court. Six officials, among them Efraín Ríos Monttand Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores, were formally charged on 7 July 2006 to appear in the Spanish National Court after Spain’s Constitutional Court ruled in 2005 that Spanish courts could exercise universal jurisdiction over war crimes committed during the Guatemalan Civil War.[303] In May 2013, Rios Montt was found guilty of genocide for killing 1,700 indigenous Ixil Mayans during 1982–83 by a Guatemalan court and sentenced to 80 years in prison.[304] However, on May 20, 2013, theConstitutional Court of Guatemala overturned the conviction, voiding all proceedings back to April 19 and ordering that the trial be “reset” to that point, pending a dispute over the recusal of judges.[305][306] Officials have said that Ríos Montt’s trial will resume in January 2015.[307]
An academic consensus holds that the events that took place during the Bangladesh Liberation War constituted genocide.[308] During the nine-month-long conflict an estimated 300,000 to 3 million people were killed and that Pakistani armed forces raped between 200-400,000 Bangladeshi women and girls in an act ofgenocidal rape.[309]
According to Sarmila Bose, 50-100,000 combatants and civilians were killed by both sides.[310][unreliable source?] Bose’s work and methodology were heavily critiqued.[311] A 2008 study estimated that up to 269,000 civilians died in the conflict; the authors noted that this is far higher than two earlier estimates.[312]According to Serajur Rahman, the official Bangladeshi estimate of “3 lahks” (300,000) was wrongly translated into English as 3 million.[313][unreliable source?]
A case was filed in the Federal Court of Australia on 20 September 2006 for alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide during 1971 by the Pakistani Armed Forces and its collaborators:[314]
“
We are glad to announce that a case has been filed in the Federal Magistrate’s Court of Australia today under the Genocide Conventions Act 1949 and War Crimes Act. This is the first time in history that someone is attending a court proceeding in relation to the [alleged] crimes of Genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity during 1971 by the Pakistani Armed Forces and its collaborators. The Proceeding number is SYG 2672 of 2006. On 25 October 2006, a direction hearing will take place in the Federal Magistrates Court of Australia, Sydney registry before Federal Magistrate His Honor Nicholls.
”
On 21 May 2007, at the request of the applicant the case was discontinued.[315]
After Burundi‘s independence in 1962, two events were called genocide. The 1972 mass-killings of Hutu by the Tutsi army[316] and the 1993 killing of Tutsi by the Hutu population that is recognised as an act of genocide in the final report of the International Commission of Inquiry for Burundi presented to the United Nations Security Council in 2002.[317]
Several million in North Korea have died of starvation since the mid-1990s, with aid groups and human rightsNGOs stating often that North Korea has systematically and deliberately prevented food aid from reaching the areas most devastated by food shortages.[318] A further one million have died in North Korea’s political prison camps that detain dissidents and their entire families, including children, for perceived political offences.[319]
In 2004, Yad Vashem called on the international community to investigate “political genocide” in North Korea.[319]
In September 2011, a Harvard International Review article argued that North Korea was violating the UN Genocide Convention by its systematic killing of half-Chinese babies and members of religious groups.[320] North Korea’s Christian population, which included 25–30% of the inhabitants of Pyongyang and was considered to be the center of Christianity in East Asia in 1945, has been systematically massacred and persecuted; as of 2012 50,000–70,000 Christians were imprisoned in North Korea’s concentration camps.[321]
Equatorial Guinea
Francisco Macías Nguema was the first President of Equatorial Guinea, from 1968 until his overthrow in 1979.[322] During his presidency, his country was nicknamed “the Auschwitz of Africa”. Nguema’s regime was characterized by its abandonment of all government functions except internal security, which was accomplished by terror; he acted as chief judge and sentenced thousands to death. This led to the death or exile of up to 1/3 of the country’s population. From a population of 300,000, an estimated 80,000 had been killed, in particular those of the Bubi ethnic minority on Bioko associated with relative wealth and education.[323] Uneasy around educated people, he had killed everyone who wore spectacles. All schools were ordered closed in 1975. The economy collapsed and skilled citizens and foreigners emigrated.[324]
On August 3, 1979, he was overthrown by Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.[325] Macías Nguema was captured and tried for genocide and other crimes along with 10 others. All were found guilty, four received terms of imprisonment and Nguema and the other six were executed on September 29.[326]
John B. Quigley noted at Macías Nguema’s trial that Equatorial Guinea had not ratified the Genocide convention and that records of the court proceedings show that there was some confusion over whether Nguema and his co-defendants were tried under the laws of Spain (the former colonial government) or whether the trial was justified on the claim that the Genocide Convention was part of customary international law. Quigley stated, “The Macias case stands out as the most confusing of domestic genocide prosecutions from the standpoint of the applicable law. The Macias conviction is also problematic from the standpoint of the identity of the protected group.”[327]
East Timor was occupied by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999 as an annexed territory with provincial status. A detailed statistical report prepared for the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor cited a lower range of 102,800 conflict-related deaths in the period 1974–1999, namely, approximately 18,600 killings and 84,200 excess deaths from hunger and illness, including the Indonesian military using “starvation as a weapon to exterminate the East Timorese”,[328]most of which occurred during the Indonesian occupation.[329][330] Earlier estimates of deaths during the occupation ranged from 60,000 to 200,000.[331]
According to Sian Powell a UN report confirmed that the Indonesian military used starvation as a weapon and employed Napalm and chemical weapons, which poisoned the food and water supply.[330] Ben Kiernan wrote:
the crimes committed … in East Timor, with a toll of 150,000 in a population of 650,000, clearly meet a range of sociological definitions of genocide …[with] both political and ethnic groups as possible victims of genocide. The victims in East Timor included not only that substantial ‘part’ of the Timorese ‘national group’ targeted for destruction because of their resistance to Indonesian annexation…but also most members of the twenty-thousand strong ethnic Chinese minority.[332]
West New Guinea/West Papua
An estimated 100,000+ Papuans have died since Indonesia took control of West New Guinea from the Dutch Government in 1963.[333] An academic report alleged that “contemporary evidence set out [in this report] suggests that the Indonesian government has committed proscribed acts with the intent to destroy the West Papuans as such, in violation of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the customary international law prohibition this Convention embodies”.[334]
In September 2006, Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz, who had been the police commissioner of the province of Buenos Airesduring the Dirty War (1976–1983), was found guilty of six counts of murder, six counts of unlawful imprisonment and seven counts of torture in a federal court. The judge who presided over the case, Carlos Rozanski, described the offences as part of a systematic attack that was intended to destroy parts of society that the victims represented and as such was genocide. Rozanski noted that CPPCG does not include the elimination of political groups (because that group was removed at the behest of Stalin), but instead based his findings on 11 December 1946 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 96barring acts of genocide “when racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part” (which passed unanimously), because he considered the original UN definition to be more legitimate than the politically compromised CPPCG definition.[339]
Ethiopia
Ethiopia‘s former Soviet-backed Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam was tried in an Ethiopian court, in absentia, for his role in mass killings. Mengistu’s charge sheet and evidence list covered 8,000 pages. The evidence against him included signed execution orders, videos of torture sessions and personal testimonies.[340]The trial began in 1994 and on 12 December 2006 Mengistu was found guilty of genocide and other offences. He was sentenced to life in prison in January 2007.[341][342] Ethiopian law includes attempts to annihilate political groups in its definition of genocide.[343] 106 Derg officials were accused of genocide during the trials, but only 36 of them were present. Several former Derg members have been sentenced to death.[344]Zimbabwe refused to respond to Ethiopia’s extradition request for Mengistu, which permitted him to avoid a life sentence. Mengistu supported Robert Mugabe, the long-standing President of Zimbabwe, during his leadership of Ethiopia.[345]
Michael Clough, a US attorney and longtime Ethiopia observer told Voice of America in a statement released on December 13, 2006,[346]
“The biggest problem with prosecuting Mengistu for genocide is that his actions did not necessarily target a particular group. They were directed against anybody who was opposing his government, and they were generally much more political than based on any ethnic targeting. In contrast, the irony is the Ethiopian government itself has been accused of genocide based on atrocities committed in Gambella. I’m not sure that they qualify as genocide either. But in Gambella, the incidents, which were well documented in a human rights report of about 2 years ago, were clearly directed at a particular group, the tribal group, the Anuak.”
An estimated 150,000 university students, intellectuals and politicians were killed during Mengistu’s rule.[347]Amnesty International estimates that up to 500,000 people were killed during the Ethiopian Red Terror[348]Human Rights Watch described the Red Terror as “one of the most systematic uses of mass murder by a state ever witnessed in Africa.”[340] During his reign it was not uncommon to see students, suspected government critics or rebel sympathisers hanging from lampposts. Mengistu himself is alleged to have murdered opponents by garroting or shooting them, saying that he was leading by example.[349]
On December 23, 2005 a Dutch court ruled in a case brought against Frans van Anraat for supplying chemicals to Iraq, that “[it] thinks and considers it legally and convincingly proven that the Kurdish population meets the requirement under the genocide conventions as an ethnic group. The court has no other conclusion than that these attacks were committed with the intent to destroy the Kurdish population of Iraq.” Because van Anraat supplied the chemicals before 16 March 1988, the date of the Halabja poison gas attack he was guilty of a war crime but not guilty of complicity in genocide.[350][351]
From the facts stated above the following conclusions may be drawn: … (e) To examine all such evidence obtained by this Committee and from other sources and to take appropriate action thereon and in particular to determine whether the crime of Genocide – for which already there is strong presumption – is established and, in that case, to initiate such action as envisaged by the Genocide Convention of 1948 and by the Charter of the United Nations for suppression of these acts and appropriate redress;[352]
”
The report of the International Commission of Jurists (1960) claimed that there was ‘only’ “cultural” genocide. ICJ Report (1960) page 346: “The committee found that acts of genocide had been committed in Tibet in an attempt to destroy the Tibetans as a religious group, and that such acts are acts of genocide independently of any conventional obligation. The committee did not find that there was sufficient proof of the destruction of Tibetans as a race, nation or ethnic group as such by methods that can be regarded as genocide in international law”.
However cultural genocide is also contested by academics such as Barry Sautman.[353]Tibetan is the everyday language of the Tibetan people.[354]
The Central Tibetan Administration and other Tibetan in exile media claimed that approximately 1.2 million Tibetans have died of starvation, violence, or other indirect causes since 1950.[355] White states “In all, over one million Tibetans, a fifth of the population, had died as a result of Chinese occupation up until the end of the Cultural Revolution.”[356] This figure has been denied by Patrick French, the former Director of the Free Tibet Campaign in London.[357]
Jones argued that the struggle sessions after the 1959 Tibetan uprising may be considered genocide, based on the claim that the conflict resulted in 92,000 deaths.[358] However, according to tibetologist Tom Grunfeld, “the veracity of such a claim is difficult to verify.”[359]
In 2013 Spain’s top criminal court decided to hear a case brought by Tibetan rights activists who allege that China’s former President Hu Jintao committed genocide in Tibet.[360] Spain’s High Court dropped this case in June 2014.[361]
Brazil
The Helmet Massacre of the Tikuna people took place in 1988 and was initially treated as homicide. During the massacre four people died, nineteen were wounded, and ten disappeared. Since 1994 the episode has been treated by Brazilian courts as genocide. Thirteen men were convicted of genocide in 2001. In November 2004, after an appeal was filed before Brazil’s federal court, the man initially found guilty of hiring men to carry out the genocide was acquitted, and the killers had their initial sentences of 15–25 years reduced to 12 years.[362]
In November 2005 during an investigation code-named Operation Rio Pardo, Mario Lucio Avelar, a Brazilian public prosecutor in Cuiabá, told Survival Internationalthat he believed that there were sufficient grounds to prosecute for genocide of the Rio Pardo Indians. In November 2006 twenty-nine people were arrested with others implicated, such as a former police commander and the governor of Mato Grosso state.[363]
In 2006 the [Brazilian] Supreme Federal Court (STF) unanimously reaffirmed that the crime known as the Haximu Massacre [perpetrated on the Yanomami Indians in 1993][364] was a genocide and that the decision of a federal court to sentence miners to 19 years in prison for genocide in connection with other offenses, such as smuggling and illegal mining, was valid.[364][365]
Democratic Republic of Congo
During the Congo Civil War (1998–2003), Pygmies were hunted down and eaten by both sides in the conflict, who regarded them as subhuman.[366] Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of Mbuti pygmies, asked the UN Security Council to recognize cannibalism as a crime against humanity and also as an act of genocide.[367]Minority Rights Group International reported evidence of mass killings, cannibalism and rape. The report, which labeled these events as a campaign of extermination, linked the violence to beliefs about special powers held by the Bambuti.[368] In Ituri district, rebel forces ran an operation code-named “Effacer le tableau” (to wipe the slate clean). The aim of the operation, according to witnesses, was to rid the forest of pygmies.[369]
In 2010 a report accused Rwanda‘s Tutsi-led army of committing genocide against ethnic Hutus. The report accused the Rwandan Army and allied Congolese rebels of killing tens of thousands of ethnic Hutu refugees from Rwanda and locals in systematic attacks between 1996 and 1997. The government of Rwanda rejected the accusation.[370]
In 2007 attacks on Somalia’s Bantu population and Jubba Valley dwellers from 1991 onwards were reported, noting that “Somalia is a rare case in which genocidal acts were carried out by militias in the utter absence of a governing state structure.”[371]
In 2009 thousands of Tamils protested in cities all over the world against the atrocities.[378] Various diaspora activists formed a group called Tamils Against Genocide to continue the protest.[379] Legal action against Sri Lankan leaders for alleged genocide has been initiated. Norwegian human rights lawyer Harald Stabell filed a case in Norwegian courts against Sri Lankan PresidentRajapaksa and others officials.[380]
Politicians in the Indianstate of Tamil Nadu also made genocide accusations.[381] In 2008 and 2009 the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu M. Karunanidhi repeatedly appealed to the Indian government to intervene to “stop the genocide of Tamils”,[382] while his successor J. Jayalalithaa called on the Indian government to bring Rajapaksa before international courts for genocide.[383]The women’s wing of the Communist Party of India, passed a resolution in August 2012 finding that “Systematic sexual violence against Tamil women” by Sri Lankan forces constituted genocide, calling for an “independent international investigation”.[384]
In January 2010 a Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) held in Dublin, Ireland found Sri Lanka guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but found insufficient evidence to justify the charge of genocide.[385][386] The tribunal requested a thorough investigation as some of the evidence indicated “possible acts of genocide”.[385] Its panel found Sri Lanka guilty of genocide at its December 7–10, 2013 hearings in Berman, Germany. It also found that the US and UK were guilty of complicity. A decision on whether India, and other states, had also acted in complicity was withheld. PPT reported that LTTE could not be accurately characterized as “terrorist”, stating that movements classified as “terrorist” because of their rebellion against a state, can become political entities recognized by the international community.[387][388] The International Commission of Jurists stated that the camps used to intern nearly 300,000 Tamils after the war’s end may have breached the convention against genocide.[389]
In 2015, Sri Lankan Tamil majority Sri Lanka’s Northern Provincial Council (NPC) “passed a strongly worded resolution accusing successive governments in the island nation of committing ‘genocide’ against Tamils.” [390] The resolution asserts that “Tamils across Sri Lanka, particularly in the historical Tamil homeland of the NorthEast, have been subject to gross and systematic human rights violations, culminating in the mass atrocities committed in 2009. Sri Lanka’s historic violations include over 60 years of state sponsored anti-Tamil pogroms, massacres, sexual violence, and acts of cultural and linguistic destruction perpetrated by the state. These atrocities have been perpetrated with the intent to destroy the Tamil people, and therefore constitute genocide.”[391]
The Sri Lankan government denied the allegations of genocide and war crimes.[392]
International prosecution
Ad hoc tribunals
In 1951 only two of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) were parties to the CPPCG: France and the Republic of China. The CPPCG was ratified by the Soviet Union in 1954, the United Kingdom in 1970, the People’s Republic of China in 1983 (having replaced the Taiwan-based Republic of China on the UNSC in 1971), and the United States in 1988. In the 1990s the international law on the crime of genocide began to be enforced.
Male mourners at the reburial ceremony for an exhumed victim of the Srebrenica massacre.
In July 1995 Serbian forces killed more than 8,000[393][394]Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), mainly men and boys, in and around the town of Srebrenica during the Bosnian War. The killing was perpetrated by units of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS)under the command of General Ratko Mladić. The Secretary-General of the United Nations described the mass murder as the worst crime on European soil since the Second World War.[395][396] A paramilitary unit from Serbia known as theScorpions, officially part of the Serbian Interior Ministry until 1991, participated in the massacre,[397][398] along with several hundred Russian and Greek volunteers.[399]
In 2001 the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) delivered its first conviction for the crime of genocide, against General Krstić for his role in the 1994 Srebrenica massacre (on appeal he was found not guilty of genocide but guilty of aiding and abetting genocide).[400]
In February 2007 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) returned a judgement in the Bosnian Genocide Case. It upheld by the findings by the ICTY that genocide had been committed in and around Srebrenica but did not find that genocide had been committed on the wider territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war. The ICJ also ruled that Serbia was not responsible for the genocide nor for “aiding and abetting it”, although it ruled that Serbia could have done more to prevent the genocide and that Serbia failed to punish the perpetrators.[401] Before this ruling the term Bosnian Genocide had been used by some academics[402] and human rights officials.[403]
German courts handed down convictions for genocide during the Bosnian War. Novislav Djajic was indicted for participation in genocide, but the Higher Regional Court failed to find that there was sufficient certainty for a criminal conviction for genocide. Nevertheless Djajic was found guilty of 14 cases of murder and one case of attempted murder.[405] At Djajic’s appeal on 23 May 1997, the Bavarian Appeals Chamber found that acts of genocide were committed in June 1992, confined within the administrative district of Foca.[406] The Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht) of Düsseldorf, in September 1997, handed down a genocide conviction against Nikola Jorgic, a Bosnian Serb from the Doboj region who was the leader of a paramilitary group located in the Doboj region. He was sentenced to four terms of life imprisonment for his involvement in genocidal actions that took place in regions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, other than Srebrenica;[407] and “On 29 November 1999, the Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht) of Düsseldorf condemned Maksim Sokolovic to 9 years in prison for aiding and abetting the crime of genocide and for grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions”.[408]
Rwanda
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) is a court under the auspices of the United Nations for the prosecution of offenses committed in Rwandaduring the genocide that occurred there during April and May 1994, commencing on April 6. The ICTR was created on November 8, 1994 by the UN Security Council to resolve claims in Rwanda, or by Rwandan citizens in nearby states, between January 1 and December 31, 1994. Over the course of approximately 100 days from the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana on April 6 through mid-July, at least 800,000 people were killed, according to a Human Rights Watch estimate.
As of mid-2011, the ICTR had convicted 57 people and acquitted 8. Another ten persons were still on trial while one is awaiting trial. Nine remain at large.[409] The first trial, of Jean-Paul Akayesu, ended in 1998 with his conviction for genocide and crimes against humanity.[410] This was the world’s first conviction for genocide, as defined by the 1948 Convention. Jean Kambanda, interim Prime Minister during the genocide, pled guilty.
The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, Ta Mok and other leaders, organized the mass killing of ideologically suspect groups, ethnic minorities such as ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese (or Sino-Khmers), Chams and Thais, former civil servants, former government soldiers, Buddhist monks, secular intellectuals and professionals, and former city dwellers. Khmer Rouge cadres defeated in factional struggles were also liquidated in purges. Man-made famine and slave labor resulted in many hundreds of thousands of deaths.[411] Craig Etcheson suggested that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a “most likely” figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching 20,000 grave sites, he concluded that “these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution.”[412] However, some scholars argued that the Khmer Rouge were not racist and had no intention of exterminating ethnic minorities or the Cambodian people; in this view, their brutality was the product of an extreme version of communist ideology.[413]
The investigating judges were presented with the names of five possible suspects by the prosecution on 18 July 2007.[415][416]
Khieu Samphan at a public hearing before the Pre-Trial Cambodia Tribunalon 3 July 2009.
Kang Kek Iew was formally charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity and detained by the Tribunal on 31 July 2007. He was indicted on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity on 12 August 2008.[417] His appeal was rejected on 3 February 2012, and he continued serving a sentence of life imprisonment.[418]
Nuon Chea, a former prime minister, was indicted on charges of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and several other crimes under Cambodian law on 15 September 2010. He was transferred into the custody of the ECCC on 19 September 2007. His trial began on 27 June 2011.[419][420]
Khieu Samphan, a former head of state, was indicted on charges of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and several other crimes under Cambodian law on 15 September 2010. He was transferred into the custody of the ECCC on 19 September 2007. His trial also began on 27 June 2011.[419][420]
Ieng Sary, a former foreign minister, was indicted on charges of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and several other crimes under Cambodian law on 15 September 2010. He was transferred into the custody of the ECCC on 12 November 2007. His trial began on 27 June 2011.[419][420] He died in March 2013.
Ieng Thirith, wife of Ieng Sary and a former minister for social affairs, was indicted on charges of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and several other crimes under Cambodian law on 15 September 2010. She was transferred into the custody of the ECCC on 12 November 2007. Proceedings against her have been suspended pending a health evaluation.[420][421]
Some of the international jurists and the Cambodian government disagreed over whether any other people should be tried by the Tribunal.[416]
The ongoing racial[423][424] conflict in Darfur, Sudan, which started in 2003, was declared genocide by United States Secretary of StateColin Powell on September 9, 2004 in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.[425]Since that time however, no other permanent member of the UN Security Council has followed suit. In January 2005, anInternational Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1564 of 2004, issued a report to the Secretary-General stating that “the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide.”[426]Nevertheless, the Commission cautioned that “The conclusion that no genocidal policy has been pursued and implemented in Darfur by the Government authorities, directly or through the militias under their control, should not be taken in any way as detracting from the gravity of the crimes perpetrated in that region. International offences such as the crimes against humanity and war crimes that have been committed in Darfur may be no less serious and heinous than genocide.”[426]
In March 2005, the Security Council formally referred the situation in Darfur to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), taking into account the Commission report but without mentioning any specific crimes.[427] Two permanent members of the Security Council, the United States and China, abstained from the vote on the referral resolution.[428] As of his fourth report to the Security Council, the Prosecutor found “reasonable grounds to believe that the individuals identified [in the UN Security Council Resolution 1593] have committed crimes against humanity and war crimes”, but did not find sufficient evidence to prosecute for genocide.[429]
In April 2007, the Judges of the ICC issued arrest warrants against the former Minister of State for the Interior, Ahmad Harun, and a Militia Janjaweed leader, Ali Kushayb, for crimes against humanity and war crimes.[430]
On July 14, 2008, ICC prosecutors filed ten charges of war crimes against Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir, three counts of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and two of murder. The prosecutors claimed that al-Bashir “masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part” three tribal groups in Darfur because of their ethnicity.[431] On 4 March 2009 the ICC issued a warrant for al-Bashir’s arrest for crimes against humanity and war crimes, but not genocide. This is the first warrant issued by the ICC against a sitting head of state.[432]
This list of genocides by death toll includes death toll estimates of all deaths that are either directly or indirectly caused by genocide.
The United NationsConvention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) defines genocide in part as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Determining what historical events constitute a genocide and which are merely criminal or inhuman behavior is not a clear-cut matter. Some of accounts below may include ancillary causes of death such as malnutrition and disease, which may or may not have been intentionally inflicted.
The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. It was initially carried out in German-occupied Europe by Einsatzgruppenparamilitary death squads, later the primary method of extermination was gassing in extermination camps.Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia write in The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust that the term is commonly defined as the mass murder of more than five million European Jews by the Nazi regime.[1] They further state that ‘Not everyone finds this a fully satisfactory definition.’[6][7]According to British historian Martin Gilbert, the total number of victims is just under six million—around 78 percent of the 7.3 million Jews in occupied Europe at the time.[8]The War Against the Jewswritten by Lucy Dawidowicz provides detailed listings by country of the number of Jews killed in World War II. Dawidowicz researched birth and death records in many cities of prewar Europe to come up with a death toll of 5,933,900 Jews. The higher figure of 11 million is a broader definition of the Holocaust, including the victims of the Romani Genocide, Soviet POWs, Poles, Germany’s eugenics program, Communists, and Homosexuals.
Between 1915-1923, an estimated 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians, approximately half the Armenian population living in the Ottoman Empire, were killed in massacres or died as a consequence of military deportations, forced marches and mass starvations carried out by the Young Turks. The extermination of the Armenians coined the word “genocide”. The Armenian Genocide occurred alongside the Greek and Assyrian genocides. The State of Turkeydenies that a genocide occurred.
On 7 August 2014, Nuon Chea, second in command to Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, received a life sentence for crimes against humanity, alongside another top-tier Khmer Rouge leader,Khieu Samphan.[10]
The Ethiopian Red Terror was a violent political campaign in Ethiopia and Eritrea that most visibly took place after Communist Mengistu Haile Mariam achieved control of the Derg, the military junta, on 3 February 1977. In December 2006, Mengistu Haile Mariam was convicted in absentia for his role in the Red Terror while leader of Ethiopia. He remains in hiding today under the protection of Zimbabwe.
Holodomor was a famine in Ukraine caused by the government of Joseph Stalin, a part of the Soviet famine of 1932–1933. Holodomor is claimed by the contemporary Ukrainian government to be a genocide of the Ukrainians.As of March 2008, Ukraine and nineteen other governments[18] have recognized the actions of the Soviet government as an act of genocide. The joint statement at the United Nations in 2003 has defined the famine as the result of cruel actions and policies of the totalitarian regime that caused the deaths of millions of Ukrainians, Russians, Kazakhs and other nationalities in the USSR. On 23 October 2008 theEuropean Parliament adopted a resolution[19] that recognized the Holodomor as a crime against humanity.[20]On January 12, 2010, the court of appeals in Kievopened hearings into the “fact of genocide-famine Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932–33”, in May 2009 theSecurity Service of Ukraine had started a criminal case “in relation to the genocide in Ukraine in 1932–33”.[21] In a ruling on January 13, 2010 the court found Stalin and other Bolshevik leaders guilty of genocide against the Ukrainians.[22]
Since the independence of Nigeria in 1960 the 3 ethnic groups, the Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo, had always been fighting over control in the political realm. The Igbos seemed to have control over most of Nigeria’s politics until the assassination of the then Igbo president Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi by Hausa general Yakubu Gowon. With this the Igbos seceded from Nigeria and created the Republic of Biafra. The Igbos had the upper hand until late 1967 when food supplies were cut off. By mid-1968 50% of Igbos were starving and thousands more were being slaughtered by Hausa and Yoruba soldiers. In 1970 the Igbos surrendered to the Nigerians and by then anywhere from 1 to 3 million Igbos had either starved or been killed.
Some 50 perpetrators of the genocide have been found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, but most others have not been charged due to no witness accounts. Another 120,000 were arrested by Rwanda; of these, 60,000 were tried and convicted in the gacaca court system. Genocidaires who fled into Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo) were used as a justification when Rwanda and Uganda invaded Zaire (First and Second Congo Wars).
With at least 12 million[26][27][28] Germans directly involved, it was the largest movement or transfer of any single ethnic population in modern history[27]and largest among the post-war expulsions inCentral and Eastern Europe (which displaced more than twenty million people in total).[26] The events are generally classified as population transfer,[29] or as ethnic cleansing.[30] Martin Shaw (2007) and W.D. Rubinstein (2004) describe the expulsions as genocide.[31]Felix Ermacora writing in 1991, (in line with a minority of legal scholars) considered ethnic cleansing to be genocide, though it doesn’t meet the legal definition as adopted by the UN Genocide Convention.
The Qing dynastyQianlong emperor moved the remaining Zunghar people to the mainland and ordered the generals to kill all the men in Barkol orSuzhou, and divided their wives and children to Qing soldiers.[33][34] The Qing soldiers who massacred the Zunghars were Manchu Bannermen and Khalkha Mongols. In an account of the war, Wei Yuan wrote that about 40% of the Zunghar households were killed by smallpox, 20% fled toRussia or the Kazakh Khanate, and 30% were killed by the army, leaving no yurts in an area of several thousands of li except those of the surrendered.[32][35][36] Clarke wrote 80%, or between 480,000 and 600,000 people, were killed between 1755 and 1758 in what “amounted to the complete destruction of not only the Zunghar state but of the Zunghars as a people.”[32][37] HistorianPeter Perdue has shown that the decimation of the Dzungars was the result of an explicit policy of extermination launched by Qianlong.[32] Although this “deliberate use of massacre” has been largely ignored by modern scholars,[32] Mark Levene, a historian whose recent research interests focus on genocide, has stated that the extermination of the Dzungars was “arguably the eighteenth century genocide par excellence.”[38]
Although there is no legal continuity between the Russian Empire and the modern Russian Federation, and the concept of genocide was only adopted in international law in the 20th century, on 5 July 2005 the Circassian Congress, an organization that unites representatives of the various Circassian peoples in the Russian Federation, called on Moscow first to acknowledge and then to apologize for Tsarist policies that Circassians say constituted a genocide. Their appeal pointed out that “according to the official tsarist documents more than 400,000 Circassians were killed, 497,000 were forced to flee abroad to Turkey, and only 80,000 were left alive in their native area.” Other sources give much higher numbers, totaling 1 million- 1.5 million deported and/or killed.[39] See also: Circassian Genocide
In the Russian Civil War that followed the October Revolution, the Cossacks found themselves on both sides of the conflict. Many officers and experienced Cossacks fought for the White Army, and some for the Red Army. Following the defeat of the White Army, a policy of Decossackization(Raskazachivaniye) took place on the surviving Cossacks and their homelands since they were viewed as a potential threat to the new regime. This mostly involved dividing their territory amongst other divisions and giving it to new autonomous republics of minorities, and then actively encouraging settlement of these territories with those peoples. This was especially true for the Terek Cossacksland. According to Michael Kort, “During 1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 3 million, the Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 Cossacks”.[40]
Genocide during period of Independent State of Croatia and Yugoslavia, with official policy of extermination similar to that of Nazi Germany. See also The Holocaust in Croatia.
The al-Anfal Campaign (Arabic: حملة الأنفال), also known as the Kurdish Genocide,[60] was agenocidal[61] campaign against the Kurdish people(and other non-Arab populations) in northern Iraq, led by the Ba’athist Iraqi President Saddam Husseinand headed by Ali Hassan al-Majid in the final stages of Iran–Iraq War. The campaign takes its name from Suratal-Anfal in the Qur’an, which was used as a code name by the former Iraqi Baathistgovernment for a series of systematic attacks against the Kurdish population of northern Iraq, conducted between 1986 and 1989 and culminating in 1988. The campaign also targeted other minority communities in Iraq including Assyrians, Shabaks,Iraqi Turkmens, Yazidis, Jews, Mandeans, and many villages belonging to these ethnic groups were also destroyed. As many as 180,000 Kurds were murdered.[62][63]
Mass murder and mass rape committed by Japanese troops against Nanking (current official spelling: Nanjing) during the Second Sino-Japanese War. During this period, hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed combatants were murdered by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army. Widespread rape and looting also occurred.
A reduction of the population of the Congo is noted by all who have compared the country at the beginning of Leopold’s control with the beginning of Belgian state rule in 1908, but estimates of the deaths toll vary considerably. Estimates of contemporary observers suggest that the population decreased by half during this period and these are supported by some modern scholars such as Jan Vansina.[66] Others dispute this. Scholars at the Royal Museum for Central Africa argue that a decrease of 15% over the first forty years of colonial rule (up to the census of 1924).[citation needed] This depopulation had four main causes: “indiscriminate war”, starvation, reduction of births and diseases.[67]Sleeping sickness was also a major cause of fatality at the time. Opponents of Leopold’s rule argue, however, that the administration itself was to be considered responsible for the spreading of the epidemic.[68] In the absence of a census providing even an initial idea of the size of population of the region at the inception of the Congo Free State (the first was taken in 1924),[69] it is impossible to quantify population changes in the period.[70]Estimates of the death toll vary considerably, but the figure of 10 million deaths was obtained by estimating a 50% decline in the total population during the Congo Free State and applying it to the total population of 10 million in 1924.[67] Assuming the validity of these estimates, it is controversial whether the depopulation would be considered genocide. While the crimes against humanity which occurred under the forced labour system of the Congo Free State are well documented, it is not considered by mainstream scholars to constitute a genocide under the legal definition.
Massacres, killings, rape, arson and systematic elimination of religious minorities (particularly Hindus), political dissidents and the members of the liberation forces of Bangladesh were conducted by the Pakistan Army with support from paramilitary militias—the Razakars, Al-Badr and Al-Shams—formed by the radical Islamist Jamaat-e-Islamiparty.
Francisco Macías Nguema led a brutal dictatorship in his country, most notably against the minorityBubi. It is estimated that his regime killed at least 20,000 people, while around 100,000 (one third of the population) fled the country.[74] At his trial, Nguema was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. He was executed in 1979.[76]
A genocidal massacre according to the ICTY. The Srebrenica massacre is the most recent genocide committed in Europe. On 31 March 2010, theSerbian Parliament passed a resolution condemning the Srebrenica massacre and apologizing to the families of Srebrenica for the deaths of Bosniaks.[81] See also: War in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnian genocide.
A campaign by the Chinese government against theFalun Gong spiritual practice.[84] It is estimated that since 1999, at least 2,000 Falun Gong adherents have died as a result of the suppression.[82] Some courts[85][86][87] and observers have likened the crackdown to genocide.[88][89]
The genocidal persecution of the Yazidi people of Iraq by the terrorist group ISIL—including massacres, abductions and rape of Yazidis, expulsions, and forced conversion, is considered by the UN to amount to attempted genocide.[90]
During the civil war between Adolph of Nassau andAlbrecht of Austria, German knight Rintfleischclaims to have received a mission from heaven to exterminate “the accursed race of the Jews”. Under his leadership, the mob goes from town to town destroying Jewish communities and massacring about 100,000 Jews, often by mass burning at stake. Among 146 localities in Franconia, Bavaria and Austria are Röttingen (20 April), Würzburg (24 July), Nuremberg (1 August).[91][92]
Democide is a term revived and redefined by the political scientistR. J. Rummel as “the murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder.” Rummel created the term as an extended concept to include forms of government murder that are not covered by the term genocide, and it has become accepted among other scholars.[1][2][3] According to Rummel, democide passed war as the leading cause of non-natural death in the 20th century.[4][5]
Democide is the murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder. Democide is not necessarily the elimination of entire cultural groups but rather groups within the country that the government feels need to be eradicated for political reasons and due to claimed future threats. According to Rummel, genocide has three different meanings. The ordinary meaning is murder by government of people due to their national, ethnic, racial or religious group membership. The legal meaning of genocide refers to the international treaty on genocide, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This also includes nonlethal acts that in the end eliminate or greatly hinder the group. Looking back on history, one can see the different variations of democides that have occurred, but it still consists of acts of killing or mass murder. A generalized meaning of genocide is similar to the ordinary meaning but also includes government killings of political opponents or otherwise intentional murder. In order to avoid confusion over which meaning is intended, Rummel created the term democide for the third meaning.[6]
The objectives of such a plan of democide include the disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups; the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity; and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.[7]
Rummel defines democide as “the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder”. For example, government-sponsored killings for political reasons would be considered democide. Democide can also include deaths arising from “intentionally or knowingly reckless and depraved disregard for life”; this brings into account many deaths arising through various neglects and abuses, such as forced mass starvation. Rummel explicitly excludes battle deaths in his definition. Capital punishment, actions taken against armed civilians during mob action or riot, and the deaths of noncombatants killed during attacks on military targets so long as the primary target is military, are not considered democide.[8]
He has further stated: “I use the civil definition of murder, where someone can be guilty of murder if they are responsible in a reckless and wanton way for the loss of life, as in incarcerating people in camps where they may soon die of malnutrition, unattended disease, and forced labor, or deporting them into wastelands where they may die rapidly from exposure and disease.”
Some examples of democide cited by Rummel include the Great Purges carried out by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, the deaths from the colonial policy in theCongo Free State, and Mao Zedong‘s Great Leap Forward, which resulted in a famine killing millions of people. According to Rummel, these were not cases of genocide because those who were killed were not selected on the basis of their race, but were killed in large numbers as a result of government policies. Famine is classified by Rummel as democide if it fits the definition above.
For instance, Rummel re-classified Mao Zedong‘s Great Leap Forward as democide in 2005. He had believed that Mao’s policies were largely responsible for the famine, but that Mao was misled about it, and finally when he found out, he stopped it and changed his policies. Therefore, thought Rummel, it was not an intentional famine and thus not a democide. However, claims from Jung Chang and Jon Halliday‘s controversial Mao: the Unknown Story allege that Mao knew about the famine from the beginning but didn’t care, and eventually Mao had to be stopped by a meeting of 7,000 top Communist Party members. Based on the book’s claims, Rummel now views the famine as intentional and a democide. Taking this into account, the total for Chinese Communist Party democide is 77 million, more than the Soviet Union (62 million), Nazi Germany (21 million), or any other regime in the 20th century.[9]
Research on democide
Rummel’s sources include scholarly works, refugee reports, memoirs, biographies, historical analyses, actual exhumed-body counts and records kept by the murderers themselves. He estimates the death-toll for each country over the course of a century, along with a low- and a high-end estimate to account for uncertainty. These high-end estimates might be considered absurd estimates by others.
Rummel’s counts 43 million deaths due to democide inside and outside the Soviet Union during Stalin’s regime.[citation needed] This is much higher than an often quoted figure of 20 million. Rummel has responded that the 20 million estimate is based on a figure from Robert Conquest‘s 1968 book The Great Terror, and that Conquest’s qualifier “almost certainly too low” is usually forgotten. Conquest’s calculations excluded camp deaths before 1936 and after 1950, executions from 1939–1953, the vast deportation of the people of captive nations into the camps and their deaths 1939–1953, the massive deportation within the Soviet Union of minorities 1941–1944 and their deaths, and those the Soviet Red Army and secret police executed throughout Eastern Europe after their conquest during 1944–1945. Moreover, the Holodomor that killed 5 million in 1932–1934 is also not included.[citation needed]
His research shows that the death toll from democide is far greater than the death toll from war. After studying over 8,000 reports of government-caused deaths, Rummel estimates that there have been 262 million victims of democide in the last century. According to his figures, six times as many people have died from the actions of people working for governments than have died in battle.
One of his main findings is that liberal democracies have much less democide than authoritarian regimes.[10] He argues that there is a relation between political power and democide. Political mass murder grows increasingly common as political power becomes unconstrained. At the other end of the scale, where power is diffuse, checked, and balanced, political violence is a rarity. According to Rummel, “The more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed. This is a major reason for promoting freedom.” Rummel concludes that “concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth.”
Several other researchers have found similar results. “Numerous researchers point out that democratic norms and political structures constrain elite decisions about the use of repression against their citizens whereas autocratic elites are not so constrained. Once in place, democratic institutions — even partial ones — reduce the likelihood of armed conflict and all but eliminate the risk that it will lead to geno/politicide.”[11]
For books, articles, data, and analyses regarding democide, see Rummel’s website. In particular, he has an extensiveFAQ. He has also made his many sources and the calculations used, from a pre-publisher manuscript of his book Statistics of Democide, available online.
Researchers often give widely different estimates of mass murder. They use different definitions, methodology, and sources. For example, some include battle deaths in their calculations. Matthew White has compiled some of these different estimates.
Jump up^Understanding and Preventing Violence: The Psychology of Human Destructiveness, Leighton C. Whitaker, CRC Press, 2000, ISBN 0-8493-2265-0Google Books
America is under attack. Its institutions and values are under daily assault. But the principal culprits are not foreign terrorists. They are influential and powerful Americans secretly stirring up disunion and disloyalty in the shifting shadows of the Democratic Party. New York Times best-selling authors David Horowitz and Richard Poe (both former radicals) weave together riveting history, investigative reporting, and cutting political analysis to help expose and explain:
The Shadow Party’s plan to rewrite the US Constitution.
How the Shadow Party overthrows foreign governments—and why it may attempt to use the same methods here.
The vast network of private think tanks, foundations, unions, stealth PACs, and other front groups through which the Shadow Party operates in America.
The network’s voluminous contributions to the Democrats, which totaled more than $300 million in the 2004 elections, and its growing influence over the party’s message and policy.
The politicians on both sides of the aisle who have exchanged political favors with George Soros and his “government-in-the-wings.”
The Shadow Party’s efforts to conceal its radical agenda behind the “moderate” pose of Hillary Clinton and other public figures.
The radical network’s plan to seize power in 2008. …”
Communism: The Promise and The Reality – Red Flag [pt 1/6]
Communism: The Promise and The Reality – Red Flag [pt 2/6]
Communism: The Promise and The Reality – Red Flag [pt 3/6]
Communism: The Promise and The Reality – Red Flag [pt 4/6]
Communism: The Promise and The Reality – Red Flag [pt 5/6]
Communism: The Promise and The Reality – Red Flag [pt 6/6]
Stalin the Myth [pt 1/5]
Stalin the Myth [pt 2/5]
Stalin the Myth [pt 3/5]
Stalin the Myth [pt 4/5]
Stalin the Myth [pt 5/5]
Holomodor Part 1
Holomodor Part 2
The Soviet Story The Holodomo death by starvation in Ukrainian
The Great Leap Forward
Chinese economic planning under Mao part 1 of2
Chinese economic planning under Mao part 2 of2
Democide
“…Democide is a term coined by political scientist R. J. Rummel for “the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.” Rummel created the term as an extended concept to include forms of government murder that are not covered by the legal definition of genocide, and it has found currency among other scholars.[1][2][3]
According to Rummel, genocide has three different meanings. The ordinary meaning is murder by government of people due to their national, ethnic, racial, or religious group membership. The legal meaning of genocide refers to the international treaty, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This also includes nonlethal acts that in the end eliminate the group, such as preventing births or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group. A generalized meaning of genocide is similar to the ordinary meaning but also includes government killings of political opponents or otherwise intentional murder. In order to avoid confusion over which meaning is intended, Rummel created the term democide for the third meaning.[4]
Rummel defines democide as “The murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder“. For example, government-sponsored killings for political reasons would be considered democide. Democide can also include deaths arising from “intentionally or knowingly reckless and depraved disregard for life”; this brings into account many deaths arising through various neglects and abuses, such as forced mass starvation. Rummel explicitly excludes battle deaths in his definition. Capital punishment, actions taken against armed civilians during mob action or riot, and the deaths of noncombatants killed during attacks on military targets so long as the primary target is military, are not considered democide.[5]
He has further stated: “I use the civil definition of murder, where someone can be guilty of murder if they are responsible in a reckless and wanton way for the loss of life, as in incarcerating people in camps where they may soon die of malnutrition, unattended disease, and forced labor, or deporting them into wastelands where they may die rapidly from exposure and disease.”
Some examples of democide cited by Rummel include the Great Purges carried out by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union (despite those people were executed), the deaths from the colonial policy in the Congo Free State, and Mao Zedong‘s Great Leap Forward resulting in a famine which killed millions of people. According to Rummel, these were not cases of genocide, because those who were killed were not selected on the basis of their race, but were killed in large numbers as a result of government policies. Famine is classified by Rummel as democide if it fits the definition above.
For instance, Rummel only recently classified Mao Zedong‘s Great Leap Forward as democide. He believed that Mao’s policies were largely responsible for the famine, but he was misled about it, and finally when he found out, he stopped it and changed his policies. Thus, according to Rummel, is not an intentional famine and thus not a democide. However, contradictory claims from Jung Chang and John Halliday‘s controversial Mao: the Unknown Story allege that Mao knew about the famine from the beginning but didn’t care, and eventually Mao had to be stopped by a meeting of 7,000 top Communist Party members. Based on the book’s claims, Rummel now views the famine as intentional and a democide.[citation needed]
…”
20th century democides causing more than one million deaths.
20th century democides causing more than one million deaths. From Death by Government, Rummel, 1987. Several estimates have been revised after this date:[citation needed].
“…They fear that the development and building of People’s (community) Organizations is the building of a vast power group which may fall prey to a fascistic demagogue who will seize leadership and control and turn an organization into a Frankenstein’s monster against democracy.” – Saul Alinsky responding to his critics, Reveille for Radicals; p. 199
When Saul Alinsky began building his community-organization movement in 1930s Chicago, observers were watching Alinsky with one eye, while with the other eye observing the building of communist and fascist movements in Europe. It wasn’t hard then to see in Alinsky’s programs at home, elements of the people’s revolution from Russia, as well as some of the same “in your face” tactics being employed by Hitler’s Brownshirts.
What Alinsky’s critics saw was the burgeoning of a national movement, the carefully manipulated construction of people’s organizations, which all had two elements in common: (1) a collectivist creed, which denied the existence of personal responsibility; and (2) an amoral dogma, in which all means were justified by an imaginary utopian end.
While most modern Americans remember well Hitler’s Holocaust and the Cold War waged by a solid U.S.S.R., many of these same Americans have swallowed some false history regarding the movements that spawned such widespread, horrendous results. In what may be regarded as the most triumphant propaganda victory of our time, fascism has been scrubbed of all its Marxist roots, while communism has been scrubbed of its millions of callous murders.
This post-WWII propaganda coup undeniably set the stage for the early Alinsky critics’ most feared eventuality, that the massive organizations could be shrewdly adopted by a fascist demagogue, someone who could “seize leadership and control” and turn them into a “Frankenstein’s monster against democracy.” …”
“…In the end, however slow the process, however seemingly benign the growth of the state may seem, liberal fascism has the same result of all tyrannies before it: hell on earth for most and a self-indulgent feast for the Statists in power.
As Barack Obama speaks, thinking Americans ought to hear the echoes of past fascist demagogues and remember. Remember.
When Barack Obama promises “collective redemption” through his profligate spending programs and vast overtures to a new world order built on love for our fellow man, we ought to shudder not swoon.
We ought to remember that healthy global relationships are built upon respect, not all-encompassing love, and that redemption for one’s soul is a commodity the state is not empowered to offer.
As Pope Benedict XVI has so presciently warned:
Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes, not divine, but demonic.
Be not fooled, America. The movement, which appears most benign is instead the most malignant growth ever seen on our soil. It’s a cancer that will kill, and however slowly it grows or however nice it may look on the surface, doesn’t change a thing.” …”
“…Communism is a social structure in which classes are abolished and property is commonly controlled, as well as a political philosophy and social movement that advocates and aims to create such a society.[1] Karl Marx, the father of communist thought, posited that communism would be the final stage in society, which would be achieved through a proletarian revolution and only possible after a socialist stage develops the productive forces, leading to a superabundance of goods and services.[2][3]
“Pure communism” in the Marxian sense refers to a classless, stateless and oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made democratically, allowing every member of society to participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life. In modern usage, communism is often used to refer to Bolshevism or Marxism-Leninism and the policies of the various communist states which had government ownership of all the means of production and centrally planned economies. Communist regimes, all inspired only by the Leninist current, have historically been authoritarian, repressive, and coercive governments concerned primarily with preserving their own power.
As a political ideology, communism is usually considered to be a branch of socialism; a broad group of economic and political philosophies that draw on the various political and intellectual movements with origins in the work of theorists of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution.[4] Communism attempts to offer an alternative to the problems with the capitalist market economy and the legacy of imperialism and nationalism.
Marx states that the only way to solve these problems is for the working class (proletariat), who according to Marx are the main producers of wealth in society and are exploited by the Capitalist-class (bourgeoisie), to replace the bourgeoisie as the ruling class in order to establish a free society, without class or racial divisions.[1] The dominant forms of communism, such as Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism and Trotskyism are based on Marxism, as well as others forms of communism (such as Luxemburgism and Council communism), but non-Marxist versions of communism (such as Christian communism and Anarchist communism) also exist.
Karl Marx never provided a detailed description as to how communism would function as an economic system, but it is understood that a communist economy would consist of common ownership of the means of production, culminating in the negation of the concept of private ownership of capital, which referred to the means of production in Marxian terminology. …”
Should Resign or Be Fired Obama’s Czar Ron Bloom Agrees With Mao – address at Investor Conf part3
Resigned
White House Communications Director Anita Dunn Loves Mao Zedong
Resigned Meet Obama’s “Green Job Czar” Van Jones
Mao’s Red Guards
FBI Agent Talking About Bill Ayers
Obama Poster
Background Articles and Videos
Mao Zedong
“…Mao Zedong (simplified Chinese: 毛泽东; traditional Chinese: 毛澤東; pinyin: Máo Zédōng; Wade-Giles: Mao Tse-tung) pronunciation (help·info) (26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976) was a Chinese revolutionary, political theorist and Communist leader. He led the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. His theoretical contribution to Marxism-Leninism, military strategies, and his brand of Communist policies are now collectively known as Maoism.
Mao remains a controversial figure to this day, with a contentious and ever-evolving legacy. He is officially held in high regard in China where he is known as a great revolutionary, political strategist, military mastermind, and savior of the nation. Many Chinese also believe that through his policies, he laid the economic, technological and cultural foundations of modern China, transforming the country from a backward agrarian society into a major world power. Additionally, Mao is viewed by many in China as a poet, philosopher, and visionary, owing the latter primarily to the cult of personality fostered during his time in power.[1] As a consequence, his portrait continues to be featured prominently on Tiananmen and on all Renminbi bills.
Conversely, Mao’s socio-political programs, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, are blamed for causing severe famine and damage to the culture, society and economy of China. Mao’s policies and political purges from 1949-1975 are widely believed to have caused the deaths of between 40 to 60 million people.[2][3][4] Since Deng Xiaoping assumed power in 1978, many Maoist policies have been abandoned in favour of economic reforms.
Mao is regarded as one of the most influential figures in modern world history,[5] and named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.[6]
“..Carl Davidson was a former Maoist and Vice President and National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society. He was one of the first American citizens to visit China after the Maoist takeover of that country, and played a role in opening relations. Born July 17, 1943, he graduated (with B.A. in philosophy) from Penn State; and (with M.A. in philosophy) from University of Nebraska. Evolving towards Social Democracy he is also the founder of Solidarity Economy, advocating a mixture of market and worker ownership. Recently Davidson led Progressives for Obama, to convince those on the radical left to pursue what he considers more pragmatic alternatives. He is also on the board of Committees of Correspondence, a group which emerged from the post-Soviet collapse of the Communist Party USA and United for Peace and Justice. …”
Former member of Students for a Democratic Society
Political supporter of Barack Obama
Carl Davidson is an American Marxist who serves as a national steering committee member of United for Peace and Justice, a field organizer for the Solidarity Economy Network, and co-chair of Chicagoans Against War & Injustice. The latter organization has formed alliances with such groups as the League of Women Voters, Rainbow/PUSH, Citizen Action, People for the American Way, the Progressive Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Aiming ultimately to transform the United States into a socialist nation, Davidson advocates the mobilization of “new grassroots majorities required for progressive, systemic change.”
As a college student in the 1960s, Davidson was a national secretary of Students of a Democratic Society and a national leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement. He received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Penn State University and later found employment as a philosophy instructor at the University of Nebraska, also in the 1960s.
Davidson and Tom Hayden take credit for having launched in 1969 the “Venceremos Brigades,” which covertly transported hundreds of young Americans to Cuba to help harvest sugar cane and interact with Havana’s communist revolutionary leadership. (The Brigades were organized by Fidel Castro’s Cuban intelligence agency, which trained “brigadistas” in guerrilla warfare techniques, including the use of arms and explosives.)
Many years later, Davidson would reflect on his SDS days when he, along with Dave Dellinger and Tom Hayden, had taken advantage of an opportunity to converse at length with President Castro. Said Davidson: “He [Castro] is a remarkable man, with a photographic memory, wide knowledge and keen insights…. We should all wish Fidel and Cuba well, and double our voices against the blockcade.”
In 1988 Davidson founded Networking for Democracy (NFD), an initiative that teaches computer skills and radical politics to Chicago-area teenagers. The NFD program encourages students to engage in “mass action” aimed at “tearing down the old structures of race and class privilege” in the U.S. “and around the world.”
In 1992 Davidson became a leader of the newly formed Committees of Correspondence, a Marxist coalition of former Maoists, Trotskyists, and Communist Party USA members. The organization has since changed its name to the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, where Davidson remains a prominent figure.
In the mid-1990s Davidson was a major player in the Chicago branch of the New Party, a Marxist political coalition whose objective was to endorse and elect leftist public officials. Most New Party members hailed from the Committees of Correspondence (the Marxist coalition cited in the preceding paragraph), the Democratic Socialists of America, and the militant leftist organization ACORN. Davidson first met Barack Obama through the New Party, which endorsed the latter in his run for the Illinois state senate in 1996. Obama had actively sought this endorsement, and he used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers.
Davidson quickly became one of Obama’s most ardent political supporters. He helped organize a large 2002 rally where Obama first established himself as an eloquent anti-war spokesman.
A longtime admirer of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Davidson views the Iraq War as an endeavor rooted in American imperialism and “racism.” In June 2004 he endorsed John Kerry for U.S. President and condemned “the Bush administration’s ill-conceived ‘War on Terror’ [the sneer quotes are Davidson’s], its drive to an unjust war with Iraq, and … the ongoing brutal occupation of that country.” Blaming “Bush’s unilateralist, militaristic approach” for having “lost the battle for hearts and minds … in the Islamic world,” he accused the President of using the professed goal of “expanding democracy” as “a cover for U.S. hegemonism and Empire.”
In Davis’ view, “[T]he U.S government, at least over the past 50 years, has been the chief terrorist and sponsor of terrorism in the world. We can never forget that our government has the blood of a million Vietnamese on its hands.” …”
David Axelrod: Fox News “Not Really A News Station”
Rahm Emanuel on White House’s War with Fox News
Glenn Beck-10-19-09-A
Glenn Beck-10-19-09-B
Glenn Beck-10-19-09-C
Glenn Beck-10-19-09-D
Glenn Beck-10-19-09-E
Liars hate to hear the truth.
This is especially true if you are President of the United States with a severe case of narcissistic personality disorder or NPD.
The White House is putting the so-called news networks on notice.
If you follow the example of the Fox Network and tell the truth about President Obama. his supporters and policies, we will punish you by limiting your access to the White House and the President.
If you continue to praise the President and support the President by being one of his narcissistic suppliers, your access to the White House and the President will continue.
Ratings or access, you decide.
A real dumb offer that clearly shows the White House is weak and desperate.
The audience is watching the Fox Network both on their television sets and on their computer monitors via YouTube.
Advertising dollars follow the ratings.
The White House staff are acting like cry-babies and bullies.
The American people are cheering the Fox Network and look forward to watching every evening.
Free enterprise and consumer sovereignity beat progressive radical socialism.
The White House is playing a losers game.
Background Articles and Videos
Obama’s Fox News policy: Isolation over engagement
By Michelle Malkin
“…President Obama’s New Era of Engagement does not include Fox News:
Senior Obama administration officials took to the airwaves Sunday to accuse Fox News of pushing a particular point of view, one week after the administration fired its initial salvo to try to isolate the news network by accusing it of being a GOP mouthpiece.
“A lot of their news programming, it’s really not news. It’s pushing a point of view,” senior adviser David Axelrod said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“The way we — the president looks at it and we look at it, is, it is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective,” White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel added on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The open assault on Fox News began last weekend when White House Communications Director Anita Dunn accused the network of being a “wing of the Republican Party.”
“What I think is fair to say about Fox — and certainly it’s the way we view it — is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party,” Dunn said on CNN. “They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”
Despite calls to the White House this week, the administration did not offer a guest for this weekend’s “Fox News Sunday” to talk about Dunn’s comments, although administration officials appeared on all four Sunday morning shows to speak on various issues.
President Obama has had interviews with all of the other Sunday talk shows except “Fox News Sunday,” including a whirlwind weekend in late September where he appeared on all other Sunday talk shows. …”
We all search for positive cues from people around us. These cues reinforce in us certain behaviour patterns. There is nothing special in the fact that the narcissist does the same. However there are two major differences between the narcissistic and the normal personality.
The first is quantitative. The normal person is likely to welcome a moderate amount of attention – verbal and non-verbal – in the form of affirmation, approval, or admiration. Too much attention, though, is perceived as onerous and is avoided. Destructive and negative criticism is avoided altogether.
The narcissist, in contrast, is the mental equivalent of an alcoholic. He is insatiable. He directs his whole behaviour, in fact his life, to obtain these pleasurable titbits of attention. He embeds them in a coherent, completely biased, picture of himself. He uses them to regulates his labile sense of self-worth and self-esteem.
To elicit constant interest, he projects to others a confabulated, fictitious version of himself, known as the False Self. The False Self is everything the narcissist is not: omniscient, omnipotent, charming, intelligent, rich, or well-connected.
The narcissist then proceeds to harvest reactions to this projected image from family members, friends, co-workers, neighbours, business partners and from colleagues. If these – the adulation, admiration, attention, fear, respect, applause, affirmation – are not forthcoming, the narcissist demands them, or extorts them. Money, compliments, a favourable critique, an appearance in the media, a sexual conquest are all converted into the same currency in the narcissist’s mind.
This currency is what I call Narcissistic Supply.
It is important to distinguish between the various components of the process of narcissistic supply:
1. The trigger of supply is the person or object that provokes the source into yielding narcissistic supply by confronting the source with information about the narcissist’s False Self.
2. The source of narcissistic supply is the person that provides the narcissistic supply
3. Narcissistic supply is the reaction of the source to the trigger.
Publicity (celebrity or notoriety, being famous or being infamous) is a trigger of narcissistic supply because it provokes people to pay attention to the narcissist (in other words, it moves sources to provide the narcissist with narcissistic supply). Publicity can be obtained by exposing oneself, by creating something, or by provoking attention. The narcissist resorts to all three repeatedly (as drug addicts do to secure their daily dose). A mate or a companion is one such source of narcissistic supply.
But the picture is more complicated. There are two categories of Narcissistic Supply and their Sources (NSS):
The Primary Narcissistic Supply is attention, in both its public forms (fame, notoriety, infamy, celebrity) and its private, interpersonal, forms (adoration, adulation, applause, fear, repulsion). It is important to understand that attention of any kind – positive or negative – constitutes Primary Narcissistic Supply. Infamy is as sought after as fame, being notorious is as good as being renowned.
To the narcissist his “achievements” can be imaginary, fictitious, or only apparent, as long as others believe in them. Appearances count more than substance, what matters is not the truth but its perception.
Triggers of Primary Narcissistic Supply include, apart from being famous (celebrity, notoriety, fame, infamy) – having an air of mystique (when the narcissist is considered to be mysterious), having sex and deriving from it a sense of masculinity/virility/femininity, and being close or connected to political, financial, military, or spiritual power or authority or yielding them. …”
“…Communism (from Latin: communis = “common”) is a family of economic and political ideas and social movements related to the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, or stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general, as well as the name given to such a society.[1][2][3] The term “Communism”, usually spelled with the capital letter C, is however often used to refer to a form of government in which the state operates under a one-party system and declares allegiance to Marxism-Leninism or a derivative thereof, even if the party does not actually claim that the society has already reached communism.
Forerunners of communist ideas existed in antiquity and particularly in the 18th and early 19th century France, with thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the more radical Gracchus Babeuf. Radical egalitarianism then emerged as a significant political power in the first half of 19th century in Western Europe. In the world shaped by the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, the newly established political left included many various political and intellectual movements, which are the direct ancestors of today’s communism and socialism – these two then newly minted words were almost interchangeable at the time – and of anarchism or anarcho-communism. The two most influential theoreticians of communism of the 19th century were Germans Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), who also helped to form the first openly communist political organisations and firmly tied communism with the idea of working class revolution conducted by the exploited proletariat (or the working class). Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human society, which would be achieved after an intermediate stage called socialism, and through the temporary and revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Communism in the Marxist sense refers to a classless, stateless, and oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies to pursue are made directly and democratically, allowing every member of society to participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic spheres of life. Some “revisionist” Marxists of the following generations, henceforth known as reformists or social democrats, have slowly drifted away from the revolutionary views of Marx, instead arguing for a gradual parliamentary road to socialism; other communists, such as Rosa Luxemburg or Vladimir Lenin, continued to agitate and argue for world revolution.
The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, were brought to power by the Russia Revolution of 1917, where the Tsarist regime disrupted by World War I was smashed by the world’s first workers revolution. After years of civil war (1917–1921), international isolation, erosion of the soviets (workers and peasants’ councils) and internal struggle within the Bolshevik leadership, the Soviet Union was founded (1922). Lenin died after a second stroke in 1924, and despite of his warnings was succeeded by Joseph Stalin. Once in power, Stalin carried out multiple purges of dissidents and left communists/opposition, particularly of those around Leon Trotsky, and established the character of Communism as the totalitarian ideology it is most commonly known as and referred to today. The Soviet Union emerged as a new global superpower on the victorious side of World War II. In the five years after the World War, Communist regimes were established in many states of Central and Eastern Europe and in China. Communism began to spread its influence in the Third World while continuing to be a significant political force in many Western countries. International relations between the Soviet Bloc and the West, led by USA, quickly worsened after the end of the war and the Cold War began, a continuing state of conflict, tension and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and those countries’ respective allies. The “Iron curtain” between West and East then divided Europe and world from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s. Despite many Communist successes like the victorious Vietnam War (1959-1975) or the first human spaceflight (1961), the Communist regimes were ultimately unable to keep up with their Western rivals. People under Communist regimes showed their discontent in events like the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Prague Spring of 1968 or Polish Solidarity movement in early 1980s, most of which were ironically led by or included masses of workers. After 1985, the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tried to implement market and democratic reforms under policies like perestroika (“restructuring”) and glasnost (“transparency”). His reforms sharpened internal conflicts in the Communist regimes and quickly led to the Revolutions of 1989 and a total collapse of European Communist regimes outside of the Soviet Union, which itself dissolved two years later (1991). Some Communist regimes outside of Europe have survived to this day, the most important of them being the People’s Republic of China, whose Socialism with Chinese characteristics attempts to introduce market reforms without western style democratisation and with the introduction of new capitalist and middle classes. …”
“…Socialism refers to various theories of economic organization advocating state, public or common worker (e.g. through cooperatives) ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with an egalitarian method of compensation.[1][2][3] Modern socialism originated in the late 18th-century intellectual and working class political movement that criticized the effects of industrialization and private ownership on society, however, socialism itself is not a political system; it is instead an economic system distinct from capitalism. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the terms “socialism” and “communism” interchangeably, and posited that it would be achieved via class struggle and a proletarian revolution.[4] Vladimir Lenin, perhaps influenced by Marx’s ideas of “lower” and “upper” stages of socialism[5], later used the word “socialism” as a transitional stage between capitalism and communism.
The utopian socialists, including Robert Owen (1771–1858), tried to found self-sustaining communes by secession from a capitalist society. Henri de Saint Simon (1760–1825), the first individual to coin the term socialism, was the original thinker who advocated technocracy and industrial planning. The first socialists predicted a world improved by harnessing technology and combining it with better social organization, and many contemporary socialists share this belief. Early socialist thinkers tended to favor an authentic meritocracy combined with rational social planning, while many modern socialists have a more egalitarian approach.
Socialists mainly share the belief that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth among a small segment of society that controls capital, creates an unequal society, does not provide equal opportunities for everyone to maximize their potentialities and does not utilize technology and resources to their maximum potential nor in the interests of the public. Therefore socialists advocate the creation of a society that allows for the widespread application of modern technology to rationalize the economy by eliminating the anarchy in production of capitalism[6], allowing for wealth and power to be distributed more evenly based on the amount of work expended in production, although there is considerable disagreement among socialists over how and to what extent this could be achieved.
Socialism is not a concrete philosophy of fixed doctrine and program; its branches advocate a degree of social interventionism and economic rationalization, usually in the form of economic planning, sometimes opposing each other. Another dividing feature of the socialist movement is the split between reformists and the revolutionaries on how a socialist economy should be established. Some socialists advocate complete nationalization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange; others advocate state control of capital within the framework of a market economy. Socialists inspired by the Soviet model of economic development have advocated the creation of centrally planned economies directed by a state that owns all the means of production. Others, including Yugoslavian, Hungarian, German and Chinese Communists in the 1970s and 1980s, instituted various forms of market socialism, combining co-operative and state ownership models with the free market exchange and free price system (but not free prices for the means of production).[7]
Social democrats propose selective nationalization of key national industries in mixed economies, while maintaining private ownership of capital and private business enterprise. Social democrats also promote tax-funded welfare programs and regulation of markets. Many social democrats, particularly in European welfare states, refer to themselves as “socialists”, introducing a degree of ambiguity to the understanding of what the term means.
Libertarian socialism (including social anarchism and libertarian Marxism) rejects state control and ownership of the economy altogether and advocates direct collective ownership of the means of production via co-operative workers’ councils and workplace democracy.
“…Communism was the bloodiest ideology that caused more than 120 million innocent deaths in the 20th century. It was a nightmare which promised equality and justice, but which brought only bloodshed, death, torture and fear. This three-volume documentary displays the terrible savagery of communism and its underlying philosophy. From Marx to Lenin, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, discover how the materialist philosophy transforms humans into theorists of violence and masters of cruelty. …”
“These socialists writers look upon people in the same manner that the gardener views his trees. Just as the gardener capriciously shapes the trees into pyramids, parasols, cubes, vases, fans, and other forms, just so does the socialist writer whimsically shape human beings into groups, series, centers, sub-centers, honeycombs, and other variations. And just as the gardener needs axes, pruning hooks, saws, and shears to shape his trees, just so does the socialist writer need the force that he can find only in law to shape human beings. For this purpose, he devises tariff laws, tax laws, relief laws, and school laws.”
“The State is the great fiction by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”
~Frédéric Bastiat
New Data: Top 1% Pay Greater Dollar Amount in Income Taxes to Federal Government than Bottom 90%
“…Washington, DC, October 4, 2007 – New data released by the IRS today offers interesting insights into the distributional spread of the federal income tax burden, new analysis by the Tax Foundation shows.
Summary of Federal Individual Income Tax Data, 2005 (updated October 2007)
Once you get Obama and Biden away from their script and teleprompter, they reveal what they are all about:
Obama the Socialist wants to spread YOUR money around
Joe Biden: Wealthy Paying Higher Taxes Patriotic Thing To Do
Obama – Taxes, Capital Gains
Obama Tax Plan
Tax Cutter
O’ Hail the Messiah Lord Obama
OBAMA ANTHEM LYRICS
messiah Obama,
All hail the
Obama The path to the new socialist motherland
Our savior, our savior Obama,
Obama The leader more famous than Lindsay Lohan
Bow down and praise the one Give him your money and your guns
Give us a country That makes your wife proud
Lord Barry heal the bitter ones White and Clinging to faith and to guns
Hope for the change of the hope of the change!
Obama Flag
Obama Salute
Hail Messiah Obama
Obama, Obama, Obama
The proposed tax increases of Senator Barack Obama would put the economy into a severe recession and result in high unemployment rates as small businesses cut jobs to pay higher income and social security taxes.
Barack Obama does not know how to create wealth nor how to create jobs. All he knows how to do is increase your taxes and reduce your income.
This enables Barack Obama to payoff his deadbeat friends and supporters with government handouts and funding.
When it comes to economics, creating wealth, jobs, prosperity, and running a business, Barack Obama is an economic illiterate.
Obama would wreck the US economy.
If you value your business and your job, whatever you do, do not vote for Barack Obama.
Only you can prevent socialism in America.
SBA on Small Business Job Creation
“The SBA recently updated their small business statistics recently. The update again highligths the importance of small business employment to the US economy. Small businesses (less than 500 employees) employ 50.9% of nations private non-farm workforce in 2004. Net new job creation is even more slanted towards small business. From 2003 to 2004 companies with less than 20 employees created roughly 1.6 million net new jobs. Companies with 20 to 499 employees created around 275,000 net new jobs. Meanwhile, employment at companies with more than 500 employees shrank by 214,000. The SBA is also reporting that over the last 20 years small businesses have created roughly 3 out of 4 net new private non-farm US jobs. …”
Listen closely to Obama’s words and you will hear the Socialist agenda of his friends. His words of CHANGE are taken straight from the manifesto of the Weather Underground. His speeches and the speeches of Michelle Obama are identical to the ranting of William Ayers and Rev. Wright – and George Soros. …”
“We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice. “
“We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish. “
~Friedrich August von Hayek
Background Articles and Videos
Obama’s Tax Plan: Welcome to 1929
by Peter Ferrara
“…Barack Obama doesn’t just promise a tax increase; he suggests raising almost every federal tax.
Obama proposes to sharply increase the marginal tax rates for almost every federal tax, just the opposite of President Reagan’s hugely successful supply-side economics that created the historic economic boom of the 1980s. It is the increase in these marginal tax rates that greatly harms the economy, because the incentives are turned against savings, investment, entrepreneurship, business expansion, job creation, work, and economic growth. — Obama proposes to increase the top individual income tax rate by 13% and the second individual income tax rate by 10%.
— Obama proposes to increase the capital gains tax rate by 33%.
— Obama proposes to increase the tax rate on dividends by 33%. — Obama proposes to raise the top payroll tax rate by between 16%-32%. — Obama proposes a new payroll tax on employers to help pay for national health insurance. — Obama proposes to reinstate the death tax, which is being phased out under current law, with a new top marginal tax rate of 45%. — Obama proposes tax increases for corporations as well, such as the windfall profits tax on oil companies. — Obama’s protectionist trade policies even suggest higher tariff taxes. The Tax Policy Center estimates that Obama’s tax plan would raise taxes by $627 billion over 10 years. Herbert Hoover Obama With the credit crisis threatening our economy, there couldn’t be a worse time for these comprehensive marginal tax rate increases. Obama falsely says these tax increases would affect only higher income workers. The problem is that these higher marginal tax rates affect the incentives for savings, investment, entrepreneurship, business expansion, job creation, work, and economic growth and consequently add up to a devastating overall economic effect. …”
“…A terrorist bomber, what may be the largest vote-fraud operation in history, and a political party calling for a socialist revolution in the United States. Obama has certainly been a busy little bee — though not too busy, it seems, to cover his tracks in all three cases. As well he might — anybody with such a history has a few questions to answer. And Obama knows this full well, considering the effort he’s put into ducking those exact questions since his campaign began.
But those questions must be asked and answered before November 4th. Which, needless to say, is a job for Superwoman. Sarah Palin’s relentless hammering brought the Ayers story back to the surface. She must now tie the three strands together: Ayers, ACORN, the New Party, and pound at it until it can no longer be ignored. (Of course, this will be an extremely upsetting experience for Kathleen Parker and David Brooks, but that can’t be helped.)
If the three can be bundled, and the resulting package adequately presented to the American people, Barack Obama is through. American voters have made it clear time and again that they have no use for the political extremes of either left or right. Obama plainly suffers, at best, from a weakness for crackpot left-wing politics, and at worst from a yearning to create a revolutionary situation in American society. The first reveals an immature personality, one easily led and given to romantic concepts of how the world works. The second is evidence of serious maliciousness.
Plumber to Obama: “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more. Isn’t it?” Obama: “It’s not that I want to punish your success, I just want to make sure that everybody that is behind you, that they have a chance for success too. I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” Crap Sandwiches: It’s what’s for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. …”
“I received several e-mails today from readers complaining about Barack Obama’s backdrop in Toledo today. Apparently, some talk show hosts have also gone ballistic over what they think is an “Obama flag:
Employment dynamics: small and large firms over the business cycle: the use of the dynamic-sizing approach to measuring employment growth by size of firm provides information useful in the debate on small firm versus large firm job creation
Monthly Labor Review, March, 2007 by Jessica Helfand, Akbar Sadeghi, David Talan
IN SUM, THE FOLLOWING FINDINGS result from analysis of BLS firm size class data:
* Small firms, those with 1 to 499 employees, create about 64 percent of new jobs.
* The share of growth of small firms is larger than their base share of employment. This growth, however, causes small firms to become large, increasing the employment share of large firms over time.
* Firms of different size classes behave differently throughout the phases of the business cycle. The contribution of large firms to the net job gains during the current economic recovery appears to have come from a fall in the level of gross job losses, rather than increased job creation, The share of gross job gains for this group has not yet reached its pre-recession levels.
* The bulk of net job losses in the 1991 recession occurred in small firms, while large firms have generated the majority of job losses during the economic slowdown of 2001.
Senator Obama on the stump at Iowa Ethanol Plant Opening
Barack Obama on Offshore Oil Drilling
George Carlin – Saving the Planet
Ethanol is great!
Something Scientific: Ethanol
The Price of Ethanol…
The truth is Comrade Barack Obama is a socialist and thinks he knows better than you do how to spend your hard earned money and how to run your business.
This from a lawyer who has never started nor run a business nor met a payroll.
Senator Obama, if you want to run a command and control economy, planes are leaving for China and Russia daily.
Both countries tried socialism and their economies were wrecked in the process and millions died from starvation from forced collectivation of agriculture.
In China during the Great Leap Forward under Mao an estimated 20 million to over 43 million starved to death.
In Ukraine during the Holodomor engineered by Stalin an estimated 2.2 million to 3.5 million starved to death.
Both outcomes were the direct result of socialist government intervention into the agricultural sector. So much for the socialist command and control economy.
Now both China and Russia are trying capitalism and thriving.
Federal government intervention in the agriculture sector with subsidies going for the production of ethanol has resulted in both rising food and gasoline prices.
Using the American people’s tax dollars to subsidy a small group of businesses that benefit from ethanol subsidies is criminal behaviour.
Your are stealing from all the American people just so you can get campaign contributions from the owners that benefit from the subsidies. Any politician of either party that supports this should be voted out of office.
This is a government failure, not a market failure.
Still you persist with this arrogant meddling and want to expand its scope to save the planet from global warming.
American businesses do not need you to tell them how to produce goods and services nor what to produce.
Senator Obama you have absolutely no business experience nor expertise in the industries you want to dictate poliicies to using government coercion.
Expect businesses to push back hard and often.
Senator Obama your arrogance is both condescending and transparent.
You seem to have forgotten that the most important position in America is that of citizen and not office holder.
Who do you think you are? How dare you?
Obama on high gas prices
obama Says- Americans Want Higher Gas Prices
McConnell on Obama Preferring High Gas Prices
Senator Obama invest you own damn money wherever you like.
Stop trying to invest other people’s money in the form of taxes where you think is best.
You do not know what is best for me, my family, nor the American people.
Let the American people decide whether they prefer a car or truck to a bus or subway.
Senator Obama if you are so brillant, open your own business and supply the goods and services that the American people want to buy, instead of what you think they want to buy using the American people’s tax dollars.
More and more Senator Obama appears as a confident bully that attempts to intimidate his opponents using the politics of resentment.
Threats of massive government intervention into the affairs of private enterprise will be vigorously opposed.
Trying to shut people up will not work in America.
Your arrogant meddling in the affairs of others is not appreciated.
Karl Rove: “Yes I Do Think Barack Obama is Arrogant”
Is Obama Arrogant? Analysis By Karl Rove
It is none of your business.
The American people are not easily intimidated.
Global warming is a hoax based on government junk science of climate models used to justify massive tax increases.
If you cannot see this you are incompetent.
If you do, you are a liar. Either way you cannot be trusted.
The vast majority of the American people know when they are being hustled with a tax scam.
Glenn Beck: Cap & Trade SCAM
The American people are not buying into this elitist arrogance and massive government intervention with the US economy.
The arrogance of ignorance and identiy politics are alive and well in the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party favors higher electric and gas prices by banning with government regulations the building of nuclear power plants, oil refineries and drilling for oil and natural gas in ANWR and off the US coasts.
Glenn Beck: Are we the last ones to seek energy independece?
The Democratic Party uses your tax dollars to pay for subsidies for ethanol production that is in turn raising your food and gas prices. Those businesses who seek these subsidies contribute to their political campaigns, including Senators Obama and Clinton.
The Democratic Party favors a new cap and trade tax that would further increase the cost of all goods and services as well as electricity and gas.
The Democratic Party does not feel you pain, they are the cause of your pain in terms of higher gas, food, and electrical prices and more and higher taxes.
The Democratic Party would wreck the US economy and in the process millions of American would lose their jobs.
If you value your family, job, home, retirement and life, just vote no for Comarade Barrack Obama as President in November.
Time to throw the corrupt arrogant meddlers out on their collective asses!
Do not let Senator Obama destroy US jobs and wreck the economy.
Defeat Senator Obama and radical socialism.
Vote for anybody but Obama in November!
Background Artilces and Videos
Congress Fiddled With Warming While Earth Cooled
By Marc Sheppard
“…Last week Democrats tried to kill the economy in the name of solving a problem that doesn’t exist. Republicans should hang this bill around their necks in every district where an incumbent voted for thewoefully misnamed and deservedly DOA Climate Security Act, technically S.3036.
Asking Americans to pony up even more at the pump with already record gasoline prices creeping higher almost daily seems offensive enough. But compelling such burden under the guise of moral imperative to curb global warming at a time when the planet is actually cooling rings downright obscene.
Don’t get me wrong — the fiscal arguments against the bill’s draconian business regulations were inexorable — its massive consequent spike in energy costs would be nothing short of ruinous to the nation. An April EPA analysis of the bill estimated a 53 cents per gallon increase in the price of gasoline and a 44% jump in electricity costs by 2030 should it become law. Even those figures precariously assumed a 150% increase in nuclear and “significant use of biomass” for electricity generation; otherwise costs will be “significantly higher.” Add a projected net loss of almost a trillion dollars in GDP by that very same year and this blatantly socialistic power-grab attempt deserved the pauper’s funeral it received on financial grounds alone. …”
“Ethanol is one area in which Mr. Obama strongly disagrees with his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona. While both presidential candidates emphasize the need for the United States to achieve “energy security” while also slowing down the carbon emissions that are believed to contribute to global warming, they offer sharply different visions of the role that ethanol, which can be made from a variety of organic materials, should play in those efforts.
Mr. McCain advocates eliminating the multibillion-dollar annual government subsidies that domestic ethanol has long enjoyed. As a free trade advocate, he also opposes the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff that the United States slaps on imports of ethanol made from sugar cane, which packs more of an energy punch than corn-based ethanol and is cheaper to produce. …”
“…Mr. Obama, in contrast, favors the subsidies, some of which end up in the hands of the same oil companies he says should be subjected to a windfall profits tax. In the name of helping the United States build “energy independence,” he also supports the tariff, which some economists say may well be illegal under the World Trade Organization’s rules but which his advisers say is not.
“The Great Leap Forward (simplified Chinese: 大跃进; traditional Chinese: 大躍進; pinyin: Dàyuèjìn) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was an economic and social plan used from 1958 to 1960 which aimed to use China’s vast population to rapidly transform mainland China from a primarily agrarian economy dominated by peasant farmers into a modern, industrialized communist society. Mao Zedong based this program on the Theory of Productive Forces.
The Great Leap Forward is now widely seen – both within China and outside – as a major economic failure and great humanitarian disaster with estimates of the number of people who starved to death during this period ranging from 14 to 43 million.[1] ….”
HOLODOMOR; Ukraine’s Genocide of 1932-33 SHORT FILM
Holodomor
“The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомор) is a great famine which occurred in 1932-33 on a territory of Ukrainian SSR[1][2]. Modern estimates for the total number of victims of the famine range between 2.2 million (demographers’ estimates)[3][4] and 3-3.5 million (historians’ estimate).[5] although much higher numbers are sometimes published in the media and cited in political debates.[6]
The reasons of the famine are the subject of intense scholarly and political debate. Some historians claim the famine was purposely engineered by the Soviet authorities as an attack on the Ukrainian nationalism, while others view it as an unintended consequence of the economic problems associated with radical economic changes implemented during the period of Soviet industrialization.[7] It is sometimes argued that natural causes may have been the primary reason for the disaster.
There is no international consensus among scholars or politicians on whether the Soviet policies that caused the famine fall under the legal definition of genocide.[8][9][10][11][6] However, as of March 2008, the parliament of Ukraine and the governments of several other countries have recognized the actions causing Holodomor as an act of genocide.[12] …”
Obama and Gore: Leaders to deal with Global Warming
Lord Al Gore The Global Warming Fascist
More Scientists don’t see CO2 as temperature driver
What is your stance on nuclear power?
The Nuclear Industry’s Golden Child
That Obama Glow
By JOSHUA FRANK
“…Obama’s campaign wallet, while rich with millions from small online donations, is also bulging from $227,000 in contributions given by employees of Exelon. Two of Obama’s largest campaign fundraisers include Frank M. Clark and John W. Rogers Jr., both top Exelon officials. Even Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, has done consulting work for the company.
During a Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works hearing in 2005, Obama, who serves on the committee, asserted that since Congress was debating the negative impact of CO2 emissions “on the global ecosystem, it is reasonable — and realistic — for nuclear power to remain on the table for consideration.” Shortly thereafter, Nuclear Notes, the industry’s top trade publication, praised the senator. “Back during his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2004, [Obama] said that he rejected both liberal and conservative labels in favor of ‘common sense solutions’. And when it comes to nuclear energy, it seems like the Senator is keeping an open mind.”
The rising star of the Democratic Party’s ties to the nuclear industry run deep indeed, but Obama may not only be loyal to Exelon and friends. The Senator is also cozy with Big Coal. …”
Selective Precaution How does the third world insure itself against Lieberman-Warner?
By Lawrence Solomon
“…There is no consensus of 2,500 scientist-endorsers. Moreover, many of those 2,500 reviewers turned thumbs down on the studies that they reviewed — I know this from my own interviews with them, conducted in the course of writing a book about scientists who dispute the conventional wisdom on climate change.
From my interviews, it also became clear to me that, if a consensus exists, it exists on the other side. For instance Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, a former peer reviewer for the IPCC’s work on the spread of malaria and other diseases due to warming says, “I know of no major scientist with any long record in this field who agrees with the pronouncements of the alarmists at the IPCC.” Other scientists also told me that, in their particular discipline, the IPCC’s position was the outlier, far from the mainstream. …”“…“So what?” many say. “Even if there is great uncertainty about the science of climate change, what harm will come of reducing our emissions of carbon dioxide? If it turns out that global warming is a natural phenomenon, we will have gained for ourselves cleaner air and less dependence on foreign oil.” As Sen. Lieberman put it in a PBS interview, “we ought to buy an insurance policy to deal with it. You know, I buy an insurance policy on my house. I don’t know there’s going to be a fire or a pipe is going to break, but I spend the money on it because the consequences of not having insurance are worse. And that’s what we’re doing here.”
This view finds favor with people across the ideological spectrum. Environmentalists, public-health advocates, and planners recognize an opportunity to lower emissions while promoting lifestyle changes; security hawks seize on the prospect of energy self-sufficiency; others see an opportunity to make common cause with Europe. All justify the expense of meeting Kyoto’s emissions targets as an insurance policy of sorts.
The problem is that far from being an insurance policy, Kyoto represents the single greatest threat to the global environment today and its scheme for using carbon credits and carbon offsets to reduce CO2 emissions comes with horrible human costs.
When we in the West purchase carbon offsets, typically someone, or some government, in the third world is paid for providing a “sink” for the carbon we’re emitting. Often that sink will be an industrial eucalyptus plantation, planted on what had been farmland or old-growth forest. Apart from the environmental amenities lost, personal tragedies abound. The former inhabitants of that land — either peasant farmers or forest peoples — will have been evicted from their lands, generally without fair compensation. Mass evictions are also the rule with new large-scale hydro dams, which can appear to become economically feasible only because of carbon credit schemes. China’s Three Gorges Dam, touted for being carbon-free, is uprooting some two million peasants and townsfolk. Nuclear power, too, is enjoying a renaissance due to carbon pricing — nuclear reactors have never been commercially viable without subsidies, and coming back now only because of a perceived carbon crisis. …”
“…Barack Obama is against lifting the ban on drilling for oil offshore because it would not reduce gas prices “this year, next year, five years from now,” according to CNN .
“John McCain’s proposal, George Bush’s proposal to drill offshore here in Florida, and other places around the country, would not provide families with any relief, this year, next year, five years from now… Believe me, if I thought there was any evidence at all that drilling could save people money who are struggling to fill up their gas tanks by this summer or the next few years, I would consider it, but it won’t.”
This sure looks like Obama, the great problem solver according to Al Gore , is not interested in solving any problems that show up only beyond “this summer or the next few years” or that take more than a few years to fix (5 tops, apparently). Not very forward-looking, is he? In fact, his time window of interest seems to coincide rather perfectly with what would be his first term as President. Any problem that won’t show up during his term is not a problem he would try to solve. So much for the vision thing. Then where does that put global warming, by the way? I was not aware that global warming would have dire consequences this summer or the next few years or that it could be solved within 5 years. According to Senator Obama’s logic then, why try to solve it? This would be especially so since even global warmists believe the next decade will involve little or no warming. I also did not know that all the alternative energy sources Senator Obama advocates could be brought on line “this summer”. Wow, those windmill guys are good. …”
Barack Obama: Global Poverty Act = World tax = Socialism
Barack Obama’s Hidden Agenda, More Taxes, Socialism….
How Ethanol is a really bad idea
Heritage In Focus: Farm Subsidies: Too Much of a Bad Thing
The Farm Bill Ethanol For Everyone!
Brian Wingfield
“…”Now that the ethanol industry has matured, it is appropriate to curb the tax subsidy provided to ethanol,” says a Senate Finance Committee report on the tax provisions of the bill.
That’s a politically popular statement to make: Corn-based ethanol production has taken much of the blame for the recent run-up in world food prices. In 2007, President Bush famously called for a nearly 500% increase in ethanol production to reduce the country’s reliance on oil. Congress granted his wish at the end of last year by mandating 36 billion gallons of production by 2022–far beyond the 9 billion gallon goal for 2008. Not only is ethanol production mandated and subsidized, the industry is protected by a 54-cent import tariff.
That tariff, which serves largely to keep Brazilian sugar-based ethanol out of U.S. markets, would be extended by two years under the Farm Bill. “This would effectively raise the barrier to marginal ethanol gallons from Brazil,” says FBR Capital Markets analyst Kevin Book in a research note.
Former Congressman Charles Stenholm, D-Texas, who now lobbies on agriculture and energy policy for law firm Olsson, Frank, Weeda, says the tax-credit reductions for corn-based ethanol are “a step in the right direction.” But he wants Congress to adopt a market-based approach in which subsidies are discontinued when they’re no longer necessary.
“There’s no valid reason for maintaining a subsidy for ethanol with oil at $120 a barrel,” he says. …”
“Simple morality dictates that unless and until someone can prove the unborn human is not alive, we must give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it is (alive). And, thus, it should be entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Obama Vote-Infanticide-living babies thrown into waste bins
Obama & ‘Live Birth Abortion’
Mad World of Barack Obama
“…Barack Obama opposed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. This would provide basic medical care to infants that survive abortion. This is a mad world….”
Senator Barrack Obama has a new video ad where he speaks about his Kansas family values.
This from a man who supports selective infanticide, the killing of live babies in cold blood.
This from a man who supports late term partial birth abortions.
This from a man who considers having a baby a punishment.
I seriously doubt that these are the strong family values he learned from his grandparents and mother in Kansas.
These are not the values of the vast majority of American people who consider both infanticide and late term partial birth abortion morally repugnant, a mortal sin and a crime that should be punished.
Senator Obama real values are not the values appearing in his video ad.
If they were, he would never be elected President of The United States of America.
Senator Obama’s socialist values on infanticide and late term partial birth abortion are the values of a state socialist with little respect for the individual and human life.
Supporting infanticide and late term partial birth abortion are more the values of such noted socialist leaders as Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler.
State socialists first take the property and lives of those least able to defend themselves–babies, children, disabled, woman, and the elderly.
Mao, Stalin and Hitler were all very clear how they valued the individual and human life:
“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”
“Every Communist must grasp the truth, “Political power rows out of the barrel of a gun.” “
~Mao Zedong
“Death solves all problems – no man, no problem.”
“A single death is a tragedy, are million deaths is a statistic.”
~Jospeh Stalin
“Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.”
~Adolf Hitler
State socialism from the left or right leads invariably down the road to serfdom and totalitarianism:
“Totalitarianism of the Left bred totalitarianism of the Right; Communism and fascism were the hammer and the anvil on which liberalism was broken to pieces. The emergence of Stalin’s autocracy changed the dynamic of corruption not in kind but in degree. For Stalin “was but old Lenin writ large.” The change is degree nonetheless was important because of its sheer scale. The arrests, the prisons, the camps, the scope, the brutality and violence of the social engineering – nothing like it had ever been seen or even imagined before. So the counter-model became more monstrously ambitious; and the fear which energized its construction more intense. If Leninism begot the fascism of Mussolini, it was Stalinism which made possible the Nazi Leviathan.”
Paul Johnson
“Modern Times”
These leaders of state governments killed tens of millions of human beings in a reign of terror.
These socialist leaders are the bloodiest dictators of this millennium and they give real meaning to the term democide.
Democide
Democide is a term coined by political scientist R. J. Rummel for “the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder”. Rummel created the term as an extended concept to include forms of government murder that are not covered by the legal definition of genocide, and it has found currency among other scholars.
Democide
Bloodiest dictators for the millennium.Rummel, [2][3][4].
Once the American people learn just how radical Senator Obama position is on both abortion, especially late term partial birth abortions, and his support for infanticide, his election run for the presidency will be over.
Not even the entire fortune of his leading campaign donor, George Soros, whose agenda Senator Obama is promoting, will be able to save his candidacy.
The American people will never knowingly elect a radical socialist–no matter how charming and likeable.
Elections matter.
Despite many serious reservations about Senator McCain, especially about illegal immigration and the need for a cap and trade tax, I will vote for him.
“Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. There may be legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not… with regard to abortion and euthanasia.” ~Pope Benedict XVI
Background Articles and Videos
CNN: Barack Obama’s opposition to Born Alive Act
“…CNN fairly reported then-state Sen. Barack Obama’s opposition to the IL Born Alive Infants Protection Act, a bill to protect abortion survivors from being shelved to die in hospital soiled utility rooms.
Obama not only voted against Born Alive, he was the sole senator to speak against it on the senate floor – 2 years in a row.
The federal version of Born Alive passed unanimously 98-0 in the US Senate with Sens. Kennedy and Boxer speaking in support on the senate floor. It passed overwhelmingly by voice vote in the US House. President Bush signed it into law on August 5, 2002.
As chairman of the IL Senate Health & Human Services Committee, Obama singlehandedly stopped the identical wording of the federal bill from being introduced in IL in 2003.
Barack Obama is so radical in his support of abortion, he supports infanticide. …”
“…There’s a newly uncovered paper trail demonstrating Barack Obama’s abortion militancy you can believe in (hat tip – Jill Stanek):
Newly obtained documents prove that in 2003, Barack Obama, as chairman of an IL state Senate committee, voted down a bill to protect live-born survivors of abortion – even after the panel had amended the bill to contain verbatim language, copied from a federal bill passed by Congress without objection in 2002, explicitly foreclosing any impact on abortion. Obama’s legislative actions in 2003 – denying effective protection even to babies born alive during abortions – were contrary to the position taken on the same language by even the most liberal members of Congress. The bill Obama killed was virtually identical to the federal bill that even NARAL ultimately did not oppose.
“Barack Obama has a Catholic problem. If he doesn’t do better than John Kerry did in 2004 with this quintessential swing voting bloc, he won’t be elected president. …”
“…Catholics are by no means a single-issue voting group. But for observant Catholics, those who attend Mass regularly and follow the Church’s teachings, a candidate’s position on abortion matters. Even among more broadly identified Catholics — those who call themselves Catholic, regardless of whether they are observant — 59 percent oppose abortion, according to a recent Time magazine poll. And Barack Obama’s record on this issue will cause pause for many of them.
Like most Democratic politicians, Barack Obama favors abortion rights for women, with few exceptions. He has recently said that he might support some limits on very late-term abortions, those that occur in the last trimester of pregnancy. But when it comes to actual legislative limits, he’s never found one yet he can vote for. …”
“On Jan. 10, 2005, newly elected U.S. Sen. Barack Obama visited former colleagues and staffers at the Illinois state Capitol, where he had served seven years as state senator. I happened to be at the Capitol that day, too, and a friend and I took the opportunity to speak to Obama, who had not yet achieved rock-star status and was still approachable.
We were in Springfield to lobby for passage of the state Born Alive Infant Protection Act, legislation that would require hospitals to care for infants who survive an abortion. Obama spoke against the legislation in 2001 and 2002 and single-handedly defeated it in committee in 2003.
My friend stood in Obama’s path and said, “Senator, we are going to pass Born Alive here in Illinois this year.”
Obama smiled smoothly and agreed, “I think you will,” adding, “I would have voted for the Born Alive Infant Protection Act in Illinois had it been worded the same as the federal bill. I think that’s the position the Democrats should take.”
There’s just one thing he forgot to mention: Obama had stopped his committee from adding the federal wording.
With Obama no longer in the state Senate, the Born Alive legislation passed in 2005. …”
“…But Obama’s record on abortion is extreme. He opposed the ban on partial-birth abortion — a practice a fellow Democrat, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once called “too close to infanticide.” Obama strongly criticized the Supreme Court decision upholding the partial-birth ban. In the Illinois state Senate, he opposed a bill similar to the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which prevents the killing of infants mistakenly left alive by abortion. And now Obama has oddly claimed that he would not want his daughters to be “punished with a baby” because of a crisis pregnancy — hardly a welcoming attitude toward new life.
For decades, most Democrats and many Republicans have hoped the political debate on abortion would simply go away. But it is the issue that does not die. Recent polls have shown that young people are more likely than their elders to support abortion restrictions. Few Americans oppose abortion under every circumstance, but a majority oppose most of the abortions that actually take place — generally supporting the procedure only in the case of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother.
Perhaps this is a revolt against a culture of disposability. Perhaps it reflects the continuing revolution of ultrasound technology — what might be called the “Juno” effect. In the delightful movie by that name, the protagonist, a pregnant teen seeking an abortion, is confronted by a classmate who informs her that the unborn child already has fingernails — which causes second thoughts. A worthless part of its mother’s body — a clump of protoplasmic rubbish — doesn’t have fingernails. …”
Obama is no moderate: His radical position on ‘abortion’ after birth
By ABRAHAM KATSMAN
“…Reasonable people may differ in their opinions regarding abortion and thorny questions of precisely when life begins. Jewish doctrine, with its focus on the health of the mother, may differ from Christian or other religious positions over the circumstances under which abortion may be permitted. But once a baby is born, even prematurely, there is across-the-board agreement that a new human life exists. Certainly, there is no longer any threat to the health of the mother. Abortion is no longer an option, as there is no longer a pregnancy to terminate.
So, what are we to make of Obama’s votes against protecting the right to life for living babies who have survived attempted abortions? Such babies are sometimes born alive as a result of late-term induced labor abortions, often sought when babies are believed (sometimes in error) to have genetic defects such as Down syndrome.
Earlier this decade, such living, breathing, babies who survived labor were “shelved” – left to die and disposed of with other medical waste, or were “aborted” – killed outside the womb. The practice was ultimately banned by unanimous Congressional votes, as even the most pro-abortion Senate Democrats – including every defender of partial-birth abortion – recognized that killing these breathing babies is no longer abortion in any real sense. It crosses the line; it is infanticide. Yet, incredibly, Obama repeatedly worked to deny these living babies any right to life. …”
“The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act (Public Law 108-105, HR 760, S 3, 18 U.S. Code 1531)[1] (or “PBA Ban”) is a United States law prohibiting a form of late-term abortion that the Act calls partial-birth abortion. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the term “partial-birth abortion” in the act pertains to a procedure that is scientifically called intact dilation and extraction.[2] Under this law, “Any physician who, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, knowingly performs a partial-birth abortion and thereby kills a human fetus shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.” The law was enacted in 2003, and in 2007 its constitutionality was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Gonzales v. Carhart. …”
Most Who Know of Decision Agree With Supreme Court on Partial Birth Abortion
“…Overall, among all adults, 53% believe that abortion is morally wrong most of the time. Thirty-two percent (32%) disagree. Those numbers have changed little over the past year and there is virtually no difference of opinion between men and women. Upper-income Americans are the least likely to see abortion as morally wrong. Last year’s survey found that 61% of Americans know someone who has had an abortion.
By a 71% to 22% margin, Republicans believe that abortion is morally wrong most of the time. Democrats are evenly divided on that question.
Forty-five percent (45%) of American adults believe that it is too easy for a woman to get an abortion in the United States. Twenty-two percent (22%) say it is too hard while 21% say the balance is about right. Those numbers are little changed from a year ago.
Sixty-one percent (61%) of Republicans believe it is too easy for a woman to get an abortion. Just 14% of the GOP faithful believe it is too hard. Among Democrats, 36% believe it is too easy and 30% believe it is too hard. …”
“…In response to a Pennsylvania voter’s question about elementary school sex education, Obama said:
“Look, I got two daughters – nine years old and six years old. I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”
This makes two things clear. First, Senator Obama supports abortion on demand — even “convenience” abortions — for minors, including his own daughters; and second, Obama considers babies a “punishment” he’d rather spare his daughters, even if those daughters have to abort Obama’s own unborn grandchildren to avoid that particular “punishment.”
That unguardedly candid public statement is political dynamite — or it would be, if the media had reported on it. Instead, four weeks later, America remains widely unaware of Senator Obama’s explosive position favoring on-demand convenience abortions for minors, or his equally explosive view of babies as a “punishment.” …”
“…On the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Gonzalez vs. Carhart banning intact dilation and extraction (“partial birth abortion”) as an acceptable method of “ending fetal life,” the Democratic Party blanketed the state of South Carolina for the week preceding its first nationally-televised presidential debate of the season. All the candidates criticized the Court’s decision in Carhart and several denounced it from the stage during the debate.
Polls, however, demonstrate that two-thirds of Americans oppose late term abortions, as apparently did 63 Congressional Democrats and 17 Senate Democrats when they voted for the federal ban in 2003 – perhaps, before pandering to the deep-pocket Leftist ilk of George Soros and MoveOn.org became de rigueur for the emblematic donkeys. …”
“Infanticide is the practice of someone intentionally causing the death of an infant. Often it is the mother who commits the act, but criminology recognises various forms of non-maternal child murder. In many past societies, certain forms of infanticide were considered permissible, whereas in most modern societies the practice is considered immoral and criminal. Nonetheless, it still takes place — in the Western world usually because of the parent’s mental illness or violent behavior, and in some poor countries as a form of population control, sometimes with tacit societal acceptance. Female infanticide is more common than the killing of male babies due to sex-selective infanticide. …”
“Abortion in the United States is a highly-charged issue involving significant political and ethical debate. In medical terms, the word abortion refers to any pregnancy that does not end in a live birth and therefore can refer to a miscarriage or a premature birth that does not result in a live infant. Such events are often called spontaneous abortions if they occur before 20 weeks of gestation. In common parlance, however, abortion is used to mean “induced abortion” of an embryo or fetus at any point in pregnancy, and this is also how the term is used in a legal sense.[1] …”
“…According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), there were 854,122 legal induced abortions in the US in 2003.[6]
Abortions and ethnicity
Abortions are much more common among minority women in the U.S. In 2000-2001, the rates among black and Hispanic women were 49 per 1,000 and 33 per 1,000, respectively, vs. 13 per 1,000 among non-Hispanic white women.[7]
“…Abortion Surveillance Reports Abortion Surveillance—United States, 2004 | View PDF 479KB
In 2004, 839,226 legal induced abortions were reported to CDC from 49 reporting areas. This total represents a 1.1 percent decrease from the 848,163 abortions reported for 2003. The abortion ratio for 2004 decreased since 2003. The ratio was 238 legal induced abortions per 1,000 live births in 2004. In 2004, the abortion rate was 16 per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years of age, the same since 2000. For the same 47 reporting areas, the abortion rate remained relatively constant during 1998–2004. As in the past, a higher number of abortions were obtained by white women, unmarried women, and women under 25 years of age. More than half (61%) of the reported legal induced abortions were performed during the first 8 weeks of gestation; 88% were performed within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Source: MMWR 2007;56(SS-9);1–33.
Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion.[1] Twenty-two percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion.[2]
• In 2005, 1.21 million abortions were performed, down from 1.31 million in 2000. From 1973 through 2005, more than 45 million legal abortions occurred.[2]
• Each year, about two out of every 100 women aged 15–44 have an abortion; 47% of them have had at least one previous abortion.[3]
• At least half of American women will experience an unintended pregnancy by age 45[4], and, at current rates, about one-third will have had an abortion.[5,6]
U.S. Abortion Total Hits Lowest Mark Since Year After Roe v. Wade
By Lawrence Jones
“The number of abortions nationwide has dropped to their lowest levels since the year following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision Roe v. Wade, according to the latest annual Abortion Surveillance report by the Center for Disease Control.
The documented number is the lowest since 1974, the year following the Supreme Court ruling that gave women the right to have an abortion. In that year, the CDC reported the total number of abortions to be 763,476.
There were 238 abortions per 1,000 live births in 2004, a decrease from 241 the year before. The abortion ratio peaked at 364 per 1,000 in 1984, according to the report, and since then has demonstrated a generally steady decline. …”
“…The Roman Catholics for Obama Web site has no mention of his opposition to the Born Alive Infant’s Protection Act. Look under its section “Life and Dignity of the Human Person,” and you will find statements on the death penalty, the Iraq War, gun control, and the promise to nurture “a socio-economic environment” that will provide “a safety net that will make abortion increasingly unnecessary and rare.”
Some of Obama’s infanticide apologists argue that since the declared intention of Obama in voting against the BAIP Act was to uphold Roe v. Wade then it was not evidence of “support for infanticide.” Such poor logic completely detaches Obama’s act of voting against the bill from its consequences. Without the passage of the bill, infants born in Illinois remained vulnerable to the lack of treatment witnessed first-hand in Christ Hospital by Jill Stanek.
It would be like a senator arguing that his vote to approve Iraq War funding was just to “support the troops” but not the war. How can you put a gun in a soldier’s hand without taking responsibility for what happens when he shoots it?
Democratic pundits don’t want to talk about Obama on abortion or infanticide, either. On a recent CNN broadcast, Wolf Blitzer asked Bill Bennett what he would ask Obama, if given the chance.
Bennett said he would ask Obama about his abortion extremism and why he “doesn’t see a problem with killing a baby after it’s been born after eight months.” …”
“Planned Parenthood is the collective name of organizations worldwide who are members of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) is the U.S. affiliate of IPPF and one of its larger members. PPFA provides reproductive health and maternal and child health services. The organization’s status as the United States’ leading provider of surgical abortions has put it in the forefront of national debate over that issue. Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Inc. (PPAF) is a related organization that lobbies the U.S. political system for pro-choice legislation, comprehensive sex education, and access to affordable health care.[1] …” “…Planned Parenthood describes itself as “the nation’s leading sexual and reproductive health care advocate and provider.” In 2006, Planned Parenthood provided 289,750 surgical and medical abortions, about 3% of its total services.[2]
“…Planned Parenthood receives almost a third of its money in government grants and contracts ($336.7 million in FY 2007). Clinic income that same year totaled $356.1 million and miscellaneous operating revenues $56 million. Planned Parenthood is also heavily sponsored by private individuals, with over 900,000 active individual contributors.[2] Large foundations, such as the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, contribute a substantial part of the organization’s budget, and other wealthy businessmen, such as Bill Gates are also known to contribute money and time to the organization. …”
“Margaret Higgins Sanger (September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966) was an Americanbirth control activist, an advocate of negative eugenics, and the founder of the American Birth Control League (which eventually became Planned Parenthood). Initially met with fierce opposition to her ideas, Sanger gradually won some support, both in the public as well as the courts, for a woman’s choice to decide how and when, if ever, she will bear children. In her drive to open the way to universal access to birth control, Sanger was ahead of her time. However, her racist ideology and advocacy for eugenics are positions which have tarnished her reputation. …”
“Eugenics is a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention.[2] Throughout history, eugenics has been regarded by its various advocates as a social responsibility, an altruistic stance of a society, meant to create healthier and more intelligent people, to save resources, and lessen human suffering.
Earlier proposed means of achieving these goals focused on selective breeding, while modern ones focus on prenatal testing and screening, genetic counseling, birth control, in vitro fertilization, and genetic engineering. Opponents argue that eugenics is immoral. Historically, a minority of eugenics advocates have used it as a justification for state-sponsored discrimination, forced sterilization of persons deemed genetically defective, and the killing of institutionalized populations. Eugenics was also used to rationalize certain aspects of the Holocaust. The modern field and term were first formulated by Sir Francis Galton in 1883,[3] drawing on the recent work of his cousin Charles Darwin. From its inception eugenics was supported by prominent people, including H.G. Wells, Emile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, William Keith Kellogg and Margaret Sanger.[4][5][6] G. K. Chesterton was an early critic of the philosophy of eugenics, expressing this opinion in his book, Eugenics and Other Evils. Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities. Funding was provided by prestigious sources such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and the Harriman family.[7] Three International Eugenics Conferences presented a global venue for eugenicists with meetings in 1912 in London, and in 1921 and 1932 in New York. Eugenics’ scientific reputation started to tumble in the 1930s, a time when Ernst Rüdin began incorporating eugenic rhetoric into the racial policies of Nazi Germany. …”
“…During the 20th century, many countries enacted various eugenics policies and programs, including:
Genetic screening
Birth control
Promoting differential birth rates
Marriage restrictions
Segregation (both racial segregation as well as segregation of the mentally ill from the normal)
Obama’s Twisted Mind – Obama’s sick voting record”
Networks Ignore Revealing Obama ‘Baby’ Gaffe
Candidate doesn’t want daughters “punished with a baby.”
By Brian Fitzpatrick
“…Speaking off the cuff to a Johnstown, Pennsylvania audience, Obama said:
When it comes specifically to HIV/AIDS, the most important prevention is education, which should include abstinence education and teaching children that sex is not something casual.But it should also include other information about contraception because, look, I’ve got two daughters, nine years old and six years old.I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals.But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.I don’t want them punished with an STD at the age of 16.
Despite intensive coverage of the fight for the Democratic nomination, and condemnations of the remark from growing numbers of religious and pro-life organizations, we haven’t found a word about Obama’s colossal gaffe on ABC, NBC or CBS’s morning and evening news broadcasts as of the afternoon of April 2. …”
“…In December of 2006, Soros met with Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama in his New York office. Soros had previously hosted a fund-raiser for Obama during the latter’s 2004 campaign for the Senate. On January 16, 2007, Obama announced the creation of a presidential exploratory committee, and within hours Soros sent the senator a contribution of $2,100, the maximum amount allowable under campaign finance laws. Later that week the New York Daily News reported that Soros would back Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton, whom he had also supported in the past. Soros’s announcement was seen as a repudiation of Clinton’s presidential aspirations, though Soros said he would support the New York senator were she to win the Democratic nomination. …”
“…To support his belief that the human mind cannot fathom ultimate truth and reality, Soros apparently advocates the deconstruction of nations by educating the masses in open-society jargon.
His open society comes off as a bastardization of socialism and libertarianism. This mixed brew includes more taxes (but not on the Soros fortune), increased government spending, open borders, immigration entitlements for legal and illegal aliens, devaluing citizenship but promoting feminism, free abortions, affirmative action, and sex and gender rights. Incongruously he would lessen government intrusion while eliminating “excessive individualism.” Essential to an open society is destruction of the nation-state authority, family structure, and religious beliefs, thus rendering national culture, heritage, and ethos meaningless. …”
“…Organizations that receive Soros funding, directly or indirectly, include Human Rights Watch, the Center for American Progress, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and the New Democrat Network (NDN). As an example of what these organizations do, the NDN operates the Hispanic Strategy Center to assist immigrants, legal and illegal. The goal is to extend the vote to all non-citizens and to assure that they vote the Democratic ticket.
The old bromides–environmental degradation, abortion, anti-war, poverty, human rights, justice for all, health care for all, and peace at any price are being doled out to a new generation in the hope that enough naïve, poorly educated U.S. citizens will support the open-society agenda. …”
“…Why is Soros so interested in promoting more abortions in Eastern Europe? Overpopulation cannot be the reason: The region is experiencing a colossal demographic collapse and has some of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Unavailability of abortion cannot be the answer either: According to a recent U.N. report, five European countries had more abortions than live births in 2000-the Russian Federation, Bulgaria, Belarus, Rumania, and Ukraine. Overall, the report said, abortion rates are “substantially higher in central and eastern Europe and the CIS countries than in western Europe and North America.” The only logical answer is that Soros wants as few Russians and others born into this world as possible. …”
“…That polity will not be “American” in any recognizable sense if Soros has his way, however. Here, he supports increased government spending and tax increases, drug legalization, euthanasia, open borders and immigration, immigrant entitlements, feminism, free abortion on demand, affirmative action, and “gay” rights. He opposes the death penalty in any circumstance. …”
“…George Soros absolves himself constantly. He calls himself a “spectator” when he was an active collaborator. His only reply is that, well, he could have been “on the other side” — a victim rather than a perp. His is an instrumental morality.
Now we don’t know exactly what happened sixty years ago in the life of György Schwartz during the Nazi Holocaust. According to Robert Slater, “George Soros later said that he ‘grew up in a Jewish, anti-semitic home,’ and that his parents were ‘uncomfortable with their religious roots.'” We don’t know if his parents’ anti-semitism influenced his willingness to cart off the property of his Jewish neighbors. But by 1944, Hitler’s plans for the Jews could not be denied. Soros himself escaped persecution by being adopted as a Christian. He must have known what he was doing therefore, even as a teenager. Two years later, when Auschwitz and the other death camps made headlines all over the Western world, not even the young Soros could have denied his role in what happened. But George Soros felt free of guilt. …”
“…Soros seems to think of capitalism as a kind of piracy, and personal morality does not seem to play a conspicuous role in his life. Instead, he seems to like to be the supreme manipulator.
It makes an interesting psychological profile, doesn’t it? On the one side, calm denial about his Holocaust role in Hungary, and decades later, about his part in manipulating currencies from Britain to Asia, benefiting himself but impoverishing others. On the other hand, his funding of very aggressive political mudslinging teams in the United States, openly trying to bring down a twice-elected president of the United States. Add to that his animosity toward Israel, a home for Jewish refugees from the same European Holocaust that saw him collaborating with the Nazis.
We live in a time of steady public decline in civilized values. The Left shamelessly peddles the idea that real patriotism means leaking national security secrets when our soldiers are risking their lives in combat. The national media have become so vulgarized that scapegoating GOP presidents has become the open aim of the “profession” of journalism. Opportunistic demagogues like Al Gore jump on the phony Global Warming bandwagon, and are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, thus raising his public image while debasing the Nobel Prize.
We have seen immense vulgarization in one generation, a loss of simple decency in public life. Much of that decline has been deliberately pushed by the Left and the tabloid press, which is no longer separate from the “mainstream” press. Sociopathy is flying high. …”
“Paul Johnson (born Paul Bede Johnson on 2 November 1928 in Manchester, England) is a British Roman Catholic journalist, historian, speechwriter and author. He was educated at Stonyhurst College, and Magdalen College, Oxford. Johnson first came to prominence in the 1950s as a journalist writing for, and later editing, the New Statesman magazine. A prolific writer, he has written over 40 books and contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers. Whilst associated with the left in his early career, he is now a prominent conservative popular historian. …”
“Friedrich August von Hayek, CH (May 8, 1899 – March 23, 1992) was an Austrian-British economist and political philosopher known for his defence of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought in the mid-20th century. He is considered to be one of the most important economists and political philosophers of the twentieth century.[1] One of the most influential members of the Austrian School of economics, he also made significant contributions in the fields of jurisprudence and cognitive science. He shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics with ideological rival Gunnar Myrdal “for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.”[2] He also received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991.[3] He is considered to be one of the major forces of change from the dominant interventionist and Keynesian policies of the first part of the 20th century to the more market friendly, less state controlled and liberal policies after the 1980s. …”
“The Road to Serfdom is a book written by Friedrich Hayek (recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974) and originally published by Routledge Press in March 1944 in the UK and then by the University of Chicago in September 1944. In April, 1945, Reader’s Digest published a slightly shortened version of the book (still in print from the Institute of Economic Affairs), which eventually reached more than 600,000 readers. Around 1950 a picture-book version was published in Look Magazine, later made into a pamphlet and distributed by General Motors. The book has been translated into approximately 20 languages and is dedicated to “The socialists of all parties”. The introduction to the 50th anniversary edition is written by Milton Friedman (another recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics [1976]). In 2007, the University of Chicago Press put out a “Definitive Edition”. The Road to Serfdom is among the most influential and popular expositions of classical liberalism and libertarianism.
This single book has significantly shaped the political ideologies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the concepts of ‘Reagonomics’ and ‘Thatcherism’. It also led to the revival of Neoclassical economics in the West and lessening the Keynesian influence.
“…Reason: Are you optimistic about the future of freedom?
Hayek: Yes. A qualified optimism. I think there is an intellectual reversion on the way, and there is a good chance it may come in time before the movement in the opposite direction becomes irreversible. I am more optimistic than I was 20 years ago, when nearly all the leaders of opinion wanted to move in the socialist direction. This has particularly changed in the younger generation. So, if the change comes in time, there still is hope.”
Action T4 (German: Aktion T4) was a program in Nazi Germany officially between 1939 and 1941, during which the regime of Adolf Hitler systematically killed between 200,000 to 250,000[1] people with intellectual or physical disabilities. Performed unofficially after 1941, the killing became less systematic.[2] The codename T4 was an abbreviation of “Tiergartenstraße 4”, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten which was the headquarters of the General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care (Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil- und Anstaltspflege).[3] This body operated under the direction of Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler’s private chancellery,[4] and Dr Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician. This villa no longer exists, but a plaque set in the pavement on Tiergartenstraße marks its location.
The T4 program developed from the Nazi Party’s policy of “racial hygiene,” the belief that the German people needed to be “cleansed” of “racially unsound” elements, which included people with disabilities. The program set important precedents for the later Holocaust of the Jews of Europe: the historian Ian Kershaw has called it “a vital step in the descent into modern barbarism.”[5]
“Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.
While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article 2, of this convention defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”[1]
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Trump Targets Terrorist Control vs. Clinton and Obama Talk Gun Control — Lying Lunatic Left Losers — Americans Armed Against Gun Grabbing Government Tyrants — Defend The Second Amendment — Videos
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Story 1: Trump Targets Terrorist Control vs. Clinton and Obama Talk Gun Control — Lying Lunatic Left Losers — Americans Armed Against Gun Grabbing Government Tyrants — Defend The Second Amendment — Videos
Oath of office of the President of the United States
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”[1]
ARTICLE II, SECTION 3, United States Constitution
[The President] shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed….
http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/2/essays/98/take-care-clause
No Fly List, No Guns?
Tom McClintock Trashes Leftist No Fly List Gun Control
Ted Cruz Destroys Senate Dems for Gun Control Filibuster
Ted Cruz: ‘Offensive’ That Democrats Are Calling For Gun Control After Orlando | NBC News
[youtube-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2YkqTSTZDY]
Best 7 minutes on gun control I have ever seen!
John Lott on gun control: “The background check system itself is basically racist”
John Lott: Why More Guns Equal Less Crime
John Stossel -The Gun Violence Myth
Mark Levin discusses the gun control issue with John Lott (audio from 11-30-2015)
Trump threatens to run apart from GOP on gun control
Obama Calls for Assault Weapons Ban, New ‘No Fly, No Buy’ Law
Trump: People using PC terms against us to not report terror
Trump renews calls for Muslim ban, surveillance of mosques
Donald Trump Jr.: Extremists only understand force
Obama Criticises Donald Trump Over His Calls To Ban Muslims From US!!!!
CIA Director Warns of ISIS Using Refugee Streams to Move Operatives
Ben Shapiro: The Myth of the Tiny Radical Muslim Minority
CIA DIRECTOR TESTIFIES AT SENATE HEARING ON NATIONAL SECURITY
Obama goes on tirade against Trump over ‘radical Isl…
Former intel chair rips Pres. Obama’s anti-Trump speech
The 2nd Amendment Explained
Donald Trump Rally Speech 6/15/16: Atlanta, GA: Trump Blasts Hillary
Second Amendment of United States Constitution
Trump vs. Clinton: Two views on Orlando terror
Paul Ryan Interview Bill O’Reilly Factor Fox News Regarding Donald Trump
FULL: Donald Trump Orlando Terrorism Speech 6/13/16
LGBT Nightclub Orlando Trump ISLAMIC terrorism VS Obama Clinton HomeGrown Hate CRIME
Background Checks? Shooter Had Them in Spades
Why restrict ‘good’ gun owners, resident asks President Obama at town hall
Gunning For Hillary – Trump Says Clinton Will Abolish 2nd Amendment – Fox & Friends
Hillary Clinton on Second Amendment Gun Rights – June 5, 2016 – ABC This Week
The Clintons Are Coming For Your Guns
Hillary Clinton, If President, Vows To ‘Get Those Guns’ Out Of People’s Hands
Hillary Clinton Outlines Plan to Abolish the Second Amendment
Ginny Simone Reporting | S7 E1: “Obama: Our Biggest Threat To National Security”
Judge Napolitano: Obama Doesn’t Believe in the 2nd Amendment
Judge Napolitano Reacts to NY Times Criticism “Either We Have a 2nd Amendment or We Don’t”
Barack Obama On 2nd Amendment Rights
Trump: We need strong surveillance, we need intelligence
AK47 versus M16 – R. Lee Ermey
EDUCATE YOURSELF ~ Semi-Auto Firearms vs Fully-Automatic Firearms
The Truth About AK-47 Firepower
Lock n’ Load with R. Lee Ermey – Machine Guns
MG42 Machine Gun – “Hitler’s Buzz Saw”
CIA chief: IS working to send operatives to the West
CIA Director John Brennan will tell Congress on Thursday that Islamic State militants are training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks on the West and will rely more on guerrilla-style tactics to compensate for their territorial losses.
CIA Director John Brennan will tell Congress on Thursday that Islamic State militants are training and attempting to deploy operatives for further attacks on the West and will rely more on guerrilla-style tactics to compensate for their territorial losses.
In remarks prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee, Brennan says IS has been working to build an apparatus to direct and inspire attacks against its foreign enemies, as in the recent attacks in Paris and Brussels — ones the CIA believes were directed by IS leaders.
“ISIL has a large cadre of Western fighters who could potentially serve as operatives for attacks in the West,” Brennan said, using another acronym for the group. He said IS probably is working to smuggle them into countries, perhaps among refugee flows or through legitimate means of travel.
Brennan also noted the group’s call for followers to conduct so-called lone-wolf attacks in their home countries. He called last week’s attack in Orlando a “heinous act of wanton violence” and an “assault on the values of openness and tolerance” that define the United States as a nation.
He said IS is gradually cultivating its various branches into an interconnected network. The branch in Libya is likely the most advanced and most dangerous, but IS is trying to increase its influence in Africa, he said. The IS branch in the Sinai has become the “most active and capable terrorist group in Egypt,” attacking the Egyptian military and government targets in addition to foreigners and tourists, such as the downing of a Russian passenger jet last October.
Other branches have struggled to gain traction, he says. “The Yemen branch, for instance, has been riven with factionalism. And the Afghanistan-Pakistan branch has struggled to maintain its cohesion, in part because of competition with the Taliban.”
He called IS a “formidable adversary,” but said the U.S.-led coalition has made progress combatting the group, which has had to surrender large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and has lost some of its leaders in airstrikes. IS has struggled to replenish its ranks of fighters, Brennan said, because fewer of them are traveling to Syria and others have defected.
“The group appears to be a long way from realizing the vision that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi laid out when he declared the caliphate two years ago in Mosul,” Iraq, Brennan said.
He said the group’s ability to raise money has also been curtailed, although the group still continues to generate at least tens of millions of dollars in revenue each month, mostly from taxation and from sales of crude oil.
“Unfortunately, despite all our progress against ISIL on the battlefield and in the financial realm, our efforts have not reduced the group’s terrorism capability and global reach,” he said.
“In fact, as the pressure mounts on ISIL, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.”
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