What is Genocide?
Genocide is the deliberate killing or severe mistreatment of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group indefinitely.
In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.
What happened before 1948?
The Genocide Convention was conceived largely in response to World War II, which saw atrocities such as the Holocaust that lacked an adequate description or legal definition. Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who had coined the term genocide in 1944 to describe Nazi policies in occupied Europe and the Armenian genocide, campaigned for its recognition as a crime under international law.
In recent years, hatred has dominated headlines and the national conversation unlike anything seen for decades – a chilling wake up call for those that had convinced themselves such days were behind us.
Award-winning production company Eat The Moon Films premiered a powerful, eye-opening documentary THE CURE FOR HATE: BEARING WITNESS TO AUSCHWITZ at Pittsburgh’s 30th annual JFilm Festival this week.
The screening was accompanied by a post-film Q&A with documentary subject Tony McAleer, filmmaker Peter Hutchison (“Healing From Hate”, “Devil Put the Coal in the Ground”, “Requiem For the American Dream”), and the president of the Eradicate Hate Global Summit, Charles H. Moellenberg, Jr., marking the first stop in an extensive screening tour targeting secondary schools & select communities across the country.
“The City of Pittsburgh stands as a testament to the resilience of community in the face of horrific acts of violent extremism, and I can think of no more appropriate city to launch our film & educational campaign”, said Hutchison. “The Cure For Hate brings the all-important lessons of the Holocaust into the present as living history – as a means to inoculate against such senseless violence and provide the seeds for change.”
What can Black Lives Matter, Stop Asian Hate, and Anti-Semitism in America’s current events teach us?
The 1619 Project has been increasingly banned amongst high schools in the nation.
My grandma moved to the United States in the early 1970s from Trinidad and Tobago. Slavery was first recorded in the 1800s and colonization from the English, Spanish, and France created immigration policies that helped a lot of West Indians travel back to Canada, the UK, and the US. She applied for a long term work visa and took a job in New Jersey, raising this white woman’s three children. The children were the same age as the children she left with her mother, my great-grandmother Una. She said it was an opportunity to pull her family out from poverty. The men in her life struggled to find this kind of maternal strength. She took a warehouse / factory job years later after she sent back green cards for all of her children and her mother. Her mother declined. The children now all live in major American cities. When she started at the factory, she says the owners were what made her commit her time. They were two Jewish-American brothers. She said they came from Poland when they were kids. I remember working with her one week during Spring Break when there was no one to watch me and everyone had to work. It was around a time my class was studying World War 2 and the Holocaust.
I bought Anne Frank’s diary from the Scholastic flyer. I also took out another first -account about another woman named Hannah Goslar. She is referenced in Anne’s attic hideaway diary as her friend Hanneli. Hannah is a Holocaust survivor. Her story stayed with me longer than Anne’s all through my teenage years. I also read a book around that time called Zlata’s Diary, it was about a young girl living in Sarajevo during the Bosnian conflict. Her name is Zlata Filipović. I went through my own versions of internal conflict and wrote down everything daily, it is a process. My diaries around September 11th would be the closest version of a wartime account. I still prefer not to return to that Tuesday. It was my second day of high school as a freshmen. I got on the B44 to go up Nostrand Ave around 7:45am. There was a weird buzz on the bus. People were saying their cell signals were shaky. I didn’t notice anything. I was excited to see my friends from Hudde, to be in my honors classes, at this new really big school with kids who were much older than me. It wasn’t until around 7th period, 3ish that I knew something was off. By Saturday September 15th, I learned about the damage a nuclear attack could do if my government wanted to stop further air attacks by international terrorist groups. I kept rereading the timeline of events from the Bush Administration. It was a coordinated attack on freedom. I was 14 years old.
What happens to children who experience war?
The NIH has described it in their National Library of Medicine, under the category world psychiatry. Armed conflicts have a devastating impact on the mental health of affected populations. Post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression are the most common mental disorders in the aftermath of war for both adults and children, occurring in up to one third of the people directly exposed to traumatic war experiences. Exposure to traumatic events is the most important risk factor in this context. However, for children in particular, the detrimental effects of war trauma are not restricted to specific mental health diagnoses, but include a broad and multifaceted set of developmental outcomes that compromise family and peer relations as well as school performance and general life satisfaction.
Among the six million victims of the Holocaust were some 1.5 million Jewish children. Survivors, including tens of thousands of children, were scattered all over Europe. The children were found in the liberated camps, Christian homes, monasteries and convents, as well as wandering the streets and forests.
| Tony spent 15 years in the white supremacist and neo-Nazi movement, starting as a skinhead before evolving to leadership positions. Instrumental in ushering in the use of the internet as a means to disseminate white supremacist propaganda, he was ultimately brought before the Canadian Human Rights Commission for his offenses in a case that captured nationwide attention. Following over a thousand hours of individual & group counseling to understand his own process, Tony was instrumental in helping to foundLife After Hate, an organization that supports those considering exiting hate groups. Tony served as its Executive Director from 2013-2017, andBoard Chair until his departure in 2019. Now a certified Life Coach, Tony works closely with law enforcement and government, from Attorney Generals to senior staff at the Department of Homeland Security. Tony has testified before Congress, and was recently invited to the Paris Summit for the Christchurch Call with the Prime Minister of New Zealand. He also supports Government and Law enforcement in Victoria, Australia helping them grapple with the rising problem of violent white supremacist groups. He is the Author of The Cure For Hate: A Former White Supremacist’s Journey from Violent Extremism to Radical Compassion, published by Arsenal Pulp Press; his TED Talk on “Radical Compassion” is available via TEDx. |
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