Facism Page 6
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America is undergoing a massive experiment:
it is moving, in fits and starts, toward a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever done. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of our political system. Why is democracy under assault here, and not in other wealthy, diversifying nations? And what can we do to save it?
At the end of the Second World War, with the establishment of the United Nations, the holding of the Nuremberg Trials and the adoption of the Genocide Convention, the international community assured itself that genocide would never happen again. But never again has become a meaningless phrase.This book asks why. It also asks, what is genocide? Where has it happened in the past?
"Brute." "Cockroach." "Lice." "Vermin." "Dog." "Beast." People often regard other members of humankind as less than human, and use terms like these for those whom they wish to harm, enslave, or exterminate. Dehumanization has made atrocities like the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda, and the slave trade possible. But it isn't just a relic of the past. We still find it in war, genocide, xenophobia, and racism.
Levitsky, Steven; Ziblatt, Daniel. Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (p. 4). Crown. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
On January 5, 2021, an extraordinary event took place in Georgia. In a state where politics had long been stained by white supremacy, voters turned out in record numbers to elect their first African American senator, the Reverend Raphael Warnock, and their first Jewish American senator. Warnock was only the second Black senator to be elected in the South since Reconstruction, joining the Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina. That night, he introduced supporters to his mother, a former sharecropper, noting that “the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton picked her youngest son to be a United States senator.” For many, the election presaged a brighter, more democratic future. “There’s a new South rising,” declared LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter. “It’s younger, it’s more diverse…and it’s more inclusive.” This was the democratic future that generations of civil rights activists had been working to build. The next day, January 6, Americans witnessed something that seemed unimaginable: a violent insurrection, incited by the president of the United States. Four years of democratic decline had culminated in an attempted coup. The fear, confusion, and indignation that many Americans felt as they watched these events unfold echo the way people in other countries have described feeling as their own democracies unraveled.
Springer, Jane. Genocide: Revised and Expanded Edition (Groundwork Guides) (p. 10). Groundwood Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
The genocide in Darfur, Sudan, that began in 2003 flared up again in early 2023, forcing the United Nations and individual countries to revisit their failures to stop mass atrocities. The war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the former Janjaweed militia who were instrumental in the early years of the genocide, generated a new outbreak of violence in Sudan’s western province of Darfur, killing 9,000 people. Once again, ethnic Masalit boys and men were ripped from their homes and gunned down, and Masalit women brutally raped and killed. Six million people in Darfur were displaced. But Darfur is not the only place where there’s a genocide taking place or a serious risk of one occurring. In October 2023, Hamas, a militant Palestinian group that has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007, crossed the Israeli border and brutally murdered nearly 1,200 Israeli civilians, taking 240 hostages. Israel called it the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Israel’s retaliation, in the form of punishing aerial bombardments and a ground invasion, killed over 39,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and almost half of them children, by July 2024. Both the initial Hamas attack and Israel’s response have been called genocidal. The war in Gaza triggered a mass movement worldwide against the killing of Palestinian civilians. It brought out huge divisions between those who upheld the idea of Israel’s “right to defend itself” and those who called for an immediate ceasefire to protect Palestinian civilians who had no safe place to escape the Israeli military. Jews and Muslims in many countries joined together to protest the siege of Gaza.
Smith, David Livingstone. Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others (p. 12). St. Martin's Press. Kindle Edition.
Introduction
“COME ON DOGS. Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Son of a bitch! Son of a whore! Your mother’s cunt!” Degrading taunts in Arabic rang out from behind the fence that divided the Palestinian side of the Khan Younis refugee camp from the Israeli side. Located near the southern tip of the Gaza Strip, just outside the ancient town of Khan Younis, the camp was established to house 35,000 of the nearly one million Arabs who had been displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. By the beginning of the twenty-first century its population had swelled to over 60,000 souls housed in thirteen squalid cement blocks. The torrent of invective did not come from the mouth of an angry Muslim; it was broadcast from a loudspeaker mounted on an armored Israeli Jeep. New York Times journalist Chris Hedges was in the camp that day, and watched as Palestinian boys began to lob stones at the Jeep in a futile gesture of defiance. Hedges recounts: There was the boom of a percussion grenade. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scattered, running clumsily through the heavy sand. They descended out of sight behind the dune in front of me. There were no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shot with silencers. The bullets from M-16 rifles, unseen by me, tumbled end-over-end through their slight bodies. I would see the destruction, the way their stomachs were to get chocolate and money,” he said. “Then they cursed us. Then they fired a grenade. We started to run. They shot Ali in the back.”