Answer:
What does the phrase Never Again mean to you?
Ans; As the Holocaust ended and people in the death camps were liberated, almost immediately survivors began to say: Never again. Never again would there be a systematic attempt to destroy the Jewish people. Never again would genocide devastate any ethnic, national, racial or religious group.
What is one example of genocide or country from the speech that surprised you the most?
Ans; The more popularly understood term for government murder is genocide, but there is a difference between democide and genocide as described in my "Democide versus Genocide: Which is What?", and which must be understood: in short, democide is a government's murder of people for whatever reason; genocide is the murder of people because of their race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, or language. The most infamous example of genocide was Nazi Germany's cold-blooded murder of near 6,000,000 Jews during World War II (see Table 1.1 from my Democide). Men, women, and children died simply because they were ethnic Jews. In Chapter 1, you also have read about the Burmese military genocide of the Karen minority; the Sudanese government's genocide of the Black Southern minority; the Chinese Communist Party's genocide of the Falun Gong; and in Chapter 5 you also read about the Mexican government's genocide of Indians. An example of nongenocidal democide is the Chinese Party and Burma's military murders of pro-democracy demonstrators; the Mexican and, in Chapter 1, the Saudi Arabian government's murders of political opponents; and, in Chapter 3, Stalin's deadly famine he imposed on the Ukraine.
If you have been living in a democracy all your life, you may find it difficult to accept the truth that governments murder people by the thousands and millions. I know that even some of my political science colleagues have resisted the thought. I could see them wince when at a conference or meeting, for example, I would say outright that Kim Il-sung, the deceased dictator of North Korea, is responsible for the murder of something like 1,700,000 people (see Table 15.1 from my Death By Government). You can easily call some person a murderer if they kill people in cold blood, as did London's famous "Jack the Ripper," who killed six or seven people in 1888; or the "Boston Strangler," Albert DeSalvo, who in 1962-1964 killed thirteen people. You may resist, however, calling a dictator a mass murderer, even when speaking of Uganda's Idi Amin, who physically took part in some murders carried out by his government, and was responsible for the violent deaths of some 300,000 of his subjects.
Table 6.1
Part of this reluctance to call a government or its ruler a murderer comes from the fact that to do so is a new and strange thought. Democide is a black hole in our textbooks, college teaching, and social science research. Few people know the extent to which governments murder people. In the twentieth century, the age of great advances in technology, medicine, wealth, and education, governments nonetheless probably murdered over 170,000,000 people, the worst of these murderous governments are listed in Table 6.1 here.1 This is more than four times those killed in combat in all international and national wars, including world wars I and II, Vietnam, Korea, the Mexican Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Civil War. The toll could even be more than 300,000,000. This is as though we had a nuclear war, but with its deaths and destruction spread over a century. Yet few know about this obscene slaughter.
Explanation:
