Among the great tragedies through human history, we have the
mass extermination of innocent and marginalized lives, by those ignorant and more
powerful. Popular segmentations of
people are created based upon gender, and over time almost always based upon religion
and race. There is scholarly debate
whether Neanderthals themselves were subject to the first violent genocide,
though the term “genocide” (as opposed to mass murder, extermination,
gendercide, etc.) would only be coined in the last century. Raphael Lemkin’s first application was on the
13th century Albigensian Crusade, ordered by Pope Innocent III. Fast forward to 2017; a toxic and highly
polarized political environment around the world. President Trump’s advisor and former hedge
fund CEO Anthony Scaramucci has established a new media outlet in the past
month,
and one of his first controversies seems to be a social media poll asking the number
of Jews killed in the Holocaust (link,
link). Was this the correct audience for such a
poll? Was it scientifically designed? As an executive member of the Trump campaign,
Scaramucci is aware that I am a polling expert.
He oft-times solicited and shared my polling analysis throughout October
of last year; we proved to millions that all
the mainstream media polls (which all showed Hillary winning) were completely bogus
(link, link). But this article focuses less on his particular polling design, and rather the idea of why we need
to heed close attention to the magnitude of these historic tragedies so that we
can have a more productive life with less chance of repeating these dark tendencies
from our past. We discuss the powerful
impact of genocides on an ocean of mourners, whose size is even larger than
those who paid the ultimate price during these painful butcherings.
Going back thousands of years before Jesus, we have had mass
violence events nearly every decade.
This website had documented many of the mortality actuarial statistics
from the same. For genocides, we think
of them as sizeable killings of innocents based on prejudice and hate. And their statistics are significant, contemporaneously
for the given sub-population of people. The
categorization and census of these deaths are increasingly foggy the further back in time we go, or if we consider regions
where the evidence has been purposefully obfuscated. Statistics become biased and open to
suspicion when we use varying external and secondary sources, presented by
those who may have access to investigative evidence or political agendas. Still, this should be no excuse to subterfuge
that indeed many of these events have occurred, and incredulously have repeatedly reached every continent on
this planet!
In America too. Why
did so many Native Americans die for example, after the Europeans arrived? Explicit killings, war, lack of
immunizations, some combination of all of them.
President Lincoln also authorized mass killings of rebelling, indigenous
natives who wanted to be free.
Now the probability of being killed at a global level is
somewhat stable (at a low yet unacceptable rate) over time.
During World War II however it jumped by nearly ½! The multiplier only becomes a little worse
when we drill into national-level data, through history. Soviets and Poles for example, took a
disproportionate brunt of military and civilian demises during the 1940s. German Nazis of course suffered less. Yet during most genocides from recent
centuries, the Holocaust among them, the mortality rate in the effected region was
a few times greater. That’s a stunning level of hatred indoctrination. And we live in an volatile world where it
doesn’t take much to have another sudden outbreak, which tips the mortality
scales yet again.
While the death rate from genocides have fallen by nearly 90%
(albeit chaotically) since the 1940s, the population has only quadrupled. And so, on a global scale, the number of
people killed in genocides is now annually less than ½ what they were during
the 1940s (Nazi, Soviet and Japanese genocides combined). The violent scars though on the oft-times
tens of millions of victims throughout the world, leave generational impact. For example, while the rest of the world has
been able to grow without these mutilations, simply replacing the number of
Jews lost in the Holocaust (to pre-war Western European levels) has taken
nearly this entire time since then! More
Jews were killed during World War II, then were Germans.
We are on the cusp of our perilous new awakening. Returning to a state of explicit
discrimination (link, link), acceptance of hate symbols, creation
of second-class citizens who some wish an inferior life, and the denial by some
that we were ever capable of abolishing our collective humanity. A slippery slope instead can reverse the flow
of these historical death statistics.
The tail risk is that we have just one of the top dozen, most-populated
countries (many of whom have violent unrest both internally and with neighbors),
execute on this growing hate ideology.
We were always just fortunate to have escaped the genocides we
saw in an awesome way during World War II.
We sometimes hope to be blind that they occurred by our ancestors, just
a couple generations ago. And we ignore
it when it happens right now to the families of minorities, or on a smaller
scale in some nation around the world. All
of us are put on this Earth as a miracle.
We owe it to all of us to live out our full potential and not let things get detached from a
state of fairness and equality. See commonality
and love for our fellow humans, just as you would want towards yourself.
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