Edward Kissi is associate professor of Africana Studies at the University of South Florida. Born and raised in Ghana, Africa, Professor Kissi has been a Fellow at the Genocide Studies Program at Yale and the Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark University. Professor Kissi is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Genocide and is the author of a current paper examining the recent genocides in Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Rwanda. Here is his definition of Genocide...
"Genocide is an organized and deliberate attempt often on the part of a state or groups of people acting on behalf of a state to completely wipe out a group of people from the face of the earth.
Genocide happens through a combination of factors: 1) ethnic prejudice, racism, and other forms of hatred; 2) fear of the other; 3) extreme forms of nationalism; 4) radical and absurd ideas of social change; 5) myth-making—just simply the idea of creating mythologies around a group, constructing the group as the embodiment of all evil; and 6) the desire on the part of the state to engage in extreme propaganda against the group that motivates large numbers of people to go out and destroy that particular group.
In many cases, in many instances of genocide, victims are dehumanized. First, the humanity of the victim group has to be withdrawn from it before perpetrators can proceed to destroy the group without remorse. We stop seeing them as other human beings that are embodiment of flesh and blood.
For instance, in Nazi Germany, the Jews were presented to the German public as vermin or lice. In Cambodia, from 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot used to describe western-educated intellectuals as microbes. In Rwanda, in 1994, the Hutus were constructed as cockroaches and snakes.
So very often the victim group is portrayed in animal metaphors that reduce their humanity to a level that allows perpetrators to proceed to destroy them. They are often presented as a threat to the dominant group of perpetrators in the society. They are also presented as a degenerate species of humankind whose elimination is necessary for that society to develop and progress." - Edward Kissi (Born in Ghana - Professor African Studies)
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How can we prevent genocide?
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