Answer:
As the Genocide Convention of 1948 states, “at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on
humanity” (Kaye and Stråth 2000: 24). Nevertheless, the twentieth century was termed the “century of genocide”
because of the high number of cases of genocide during that time period (Bartrop 2002: 522). For the purpose of this
essay, the definition of genocide will be taken from the Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as “intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. The genocide of the Armenians, the
Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda are the three genocides of the twentieth century that fit that definition
(Destexhe 1994: 4-5). In this essay, the causes of modern genocide will be investigated using these three genocides
as case studies. There are various reasons why genocide may occur and it is often a combination of circumstances
that leads to genocide. The present essay will investigate the underlying conditions that make genocide possible,
while leaving out catalytic events that may trigger genocide. The essay will firstly draw on the works of Horkheimer
and Adorno in examining the relations between Enlightenment ideas and genocide. The correlations between war
and economic crises will be subject to analysis in the second part of the essay. Finally, the creation of out-groups and
in-groups will be explored. While these are certainly not the only causes of genocide, they may be deemed to be preconditions.
Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” in the 1940s with the Holocaust in mind, which for him signified the
return of an enlightened people to barbarism (Freeman 1995: 210). Similarly, Foster (1980: 2) sees the Holocaust as
an aberration of an enlightened and developed nation. However, there are other scholars who argue that genocide is
not an exception of Enlightenment but in fact a result of it. Horkheimer and Adorno (1973: 3-4) argue that the ideals of
Enlightenment, which are human emancipation and rationality, alienate humans from nature and result in men
wanting to control nature and, in turn, other people as well. Bauman (1989: 91), continuing this idea over a decade
later, proposes that since the Enlightenment, the extermination of a people serves to establish a perfect society. The
Enlightenment brought with it the belief in an evolutionary development towards a better society through state
engineering (Bauman 1989: 70; Kaye and Stråth 2000: 11). “Gardening” and “modern medicine” were used as
metaphors for human tasks that would improve a society (Bauman 1989: 70). In the enlightened world, a state can
become a “wonderful utopia” (Hamburg 2008: 44) through “designing, cultivating and weed-poisoning” (Bauman1989: 13). It is a modern idea that everything can be measured and classified, even a “race” and its character
(Bauman 1989: 68). This classification of races, coupled with the modern idea of a constantly improvable society,
leads to Social-Darwinist ideas of the survival of the fittest (Kaye and Stråth 2000: 15).
Armenians (Balakian 2008: 160), Jews (Bauman 1989: 76) and Tutsi (Mullen 2006: 172) were seen as worthless
groups standing between a population and the realisation of such a perfect society. Therefore, in the mind of the
“rational and enlightened” thinker, they were legitimate targets for extermination (Kaye and Stråth 2000: 15). This
“purifying” of the state through genocide is reflected in the language of the genocidaires (Stone 2004: 50).
Armenians were termed “tubercular microbes” and a local politician asked rhetorically “isn’t it the duty of a doctor to
destroy these microbes?” (Balakian 2008: 160). Hitler spoke of the “Jewish virus” and that “by eliminating the pest,
[he would] do humanity a service” (Bauman 1989: 71). Not only medical terms were used to justify the killings.
Gardening metaphors can also be found. In Rwanda, the chopping up of Tutsi men was called “bush clearing” and
slaughtering women and children was labelled as “pulling out the roots of the bad weeds” (Prunier 1997: 142). These
three examples support Bauman’s theory that the Enlightenment brought about the idea of being able to socially
engineer a perfect state. Genocide was consequently justified by the idea of “purifying” the state through tasks that a doctor or a gardener would employ in order to improve an unhealthy body or a garden.
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