Last edited Tue Apr 10, 2018, 07:28 PM - Edit history (17)
relatively banal the genocide feels and can be explained as a human instinct to the people engaged in the ethnic cleansing or the persecutory rumours. Because it is. Like hot tempered murder it is instinctive. It is wrong and it is prosecuted and policed. But it builds and builds and may not feel like a big change is happening to a group of people about to create war crimes or persecute or ethnic cleanse. They may not be aware of the changes inside themselves over time leading up to it. Remember the 60 Minutes story of the people all over eastern Europe from small villages whose parents did nothing to stop locals jews from being shot and buried during WWII. Then the parents said nothing after the war. They had done things that made them feel complicit. Their children are only now pointing out the killing fields to authorities. There parents are gone or safe from prosecution by time. The point of the 60 Minutes story was that just about anyone could be complicit in genocide if the conditions are ripe.
Second, if it is under the leadership of a psychopath, then share information on how compelling a psychopath is with his (or her) scenarios. With examples. Only human rights workers or people in the helping professions regularly hear or see something and have a very compelling feeling to do something to a great degree. Here is a clue for the rest.... if something feels more compelling than normal, if the magnitude of the compelling feeling is great and novel, and it involves attacking some 'other', you have a psychopath in your life.
Third, what has happened to the people who have committed genocides over the generations after the genocide? I mean people who participate as part of the public. Not the leaders who get tried in tribunals. Turks are still trying to suppress the information on armenian genocide 100 years later. The Japanese too. The germans and their children were split as a country and were reviled. How does having been part of a genocide affect the relations between parents and their children and for how many generations? What will being part of a genocide or ethnic cleansing mean to a person and their psychology? To their future. Because by the time ethnic cleansing starts the other has already been dehumanized to the genocidal group to a point where there is no way for empathy for mankind to get through to them.
I'm sure Facebook is studying the issue but maybe they should have a partnership with human rights organizations in the event ethnic cleansing or genocide are in the build up phase.
If you could harness the power of amnesty international voices through Facebook to the facebook public during dangerous times somewhere war crimes are building it would be amazing. Nobody should be victims of ethnic cleansing or the victim of a psychopath. I learnt the latter the hard way 23 years ago. Was in the midst of being attacked without knowing it for years. In the end, the participants seem to be immune to the cries of those they target by the time a war crime occurs, so the logic in the three points above should be used too. Emotions are how war crimes roll out. Maybe appealing to the logic of the perpetrators should be some of the brakes.
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