Unit 7 Mass atrocities

Genocide

Deliberate extermination of a racial or cultural group

Ethnic Cleansing

Process in which more powerful ethnic group forcibly removes a less powerful one in order to create an ethnically homogeneous region

AntiSemitism

hostility to or prejudice against Jews.

Eugenics

the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics

Social Darwinism

The application of ideas about evolution and "survival of the fittest" to human societies - particularly as a justification for their imperialist expansion.

Scientific Revolution

A major change in European thought, starting in the mid-1500s, in which the study of the natural world began to be characterized by careful observation and the questioning of accepted beliefs.

Holocaust

A methodical plan orchestrated by Hitler to ensure German supremacy. It called for the elimination of Jews, non-conformists, homosexuals, non-Aryans, and mentally and physically disabled.

T4 Program

This domestic euthanasia program was lead by the Nazi party to exterminate the handicapped and those with generic diseases. It used before World War I to purge non-Aryan people to save Germany from its past disgraces and poor economic status. This forced sterilization was not yet racial persecution that would later characterize the Nazi Party's dealings with the Jews.

Euthanasia

The painless administration of a death agent to a patient

Einsatzgruppen (SS)

Were special German killing squads who rounded up Jews and shot them. By the end of 1941, they had killed around 600,000 Jews.

Final Solution

Final solution of the Jewish question-murder of every single Jew-had begun-mass arresting, and trafficking of Jews to the concentration camps-mass killings occurred as well in the gas chambers

Concentration Camps

prison camps used under the rule of Hitler in Nazi Germany. Conditions were inhuman, and prisoners, mostly Jewish people, were generally starved or worked to death, or killed immediately.

Auschwitz

Nazi extermination camp in Poland, the largest center of mass murder during the Holocaust. Close to a million Jews, Gypsies, Communists, and others were killed there. (p. 800)

Human Rights

the basic rights to which all people are entitled as human beings

Cambodian Genocide

The four-year period saw the deaths of approximately two million Cambodians through the combined result of political executions, starvation, and forced labour by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

Pol Pot

Leader of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who terrorized the people of Cambodia throughout the 1970's

Khmer Rouge

communist party in Cambodia that imposed a reign of terror on Cambodian citizens

Rwandan Genocide

The killing of more than 500,000 ethnic Tutsis by rival Hutu militias in Rwanda in 1994. The conflict between the dominant Tutsis and the majority Hutus had gone on for centuries, but the suddenness and savagery of the massacres caught the United Nations off-guard. U.N. peacekeepers did not enter the country until after much of the damage had been done.

Tutsis

Minority group targeted in Rwanda genocide.

Hutus

majority group in rwanda;massacred tutsis

Holodomor

a man-made famine-genocide in which the USSR starved the people of Ukraine; killed millions

Ukraine

country located in eastern Europe, the second largest on the continent after Russia. The capital is Kyiv.

Saddam Hussien

Iraqi leader who waged war against Iran; his invasion of Kuwait led to the Gulf War

Kurds

A minority group in Turkey and neighboring countries

Bosnia

Southern Slavic nation seeking independence; annexation by Austria-Hungary creates war in the Balkans; housed parade that killed Ferdinand

Serbia

The Ottoman province in the Balkans that rose up against Janissary control in the early 1800s. Terrorists from here triggered WWI. After World War II it became the central province of Yugoslavia.

Darfur

a region in western Sudan where ethnic conflict threatened to lead to genocide

Sudan

From the Arabic term for "land of black people," a large region of West Africa that became part of a major exchange circuit.

Rohingya

group of minority muslims in Myanmar that are being persecuted and are being pushed out to Bangladesh and other refugee areas