Let us remember that
genocide isn't only the elimination of a given
racial group, but can also be the
elimination of a given
nation.
Genocides of the twentieth century:
- The Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey): From 1915 to 1923, the rebellious Ottoman Young Turk government ruthlessly slaughtered 1.5 million Armenians and deported over 1 million others. The Christian Armenians were seen as an obstacle for Muslim Turks who wanted to expand the Empire eastward in hopes of creating a pan-Turkic state. Known as the Armenian Genocide.
- Soviet Union: Soon after Lenin's death, from 1929 to 1953, the Communist government of present-day Russia, controlled by Stalin, cracked down on a whopping total of 20 million supposed anti-Communist and anti-Stalinists living in the Union.
- Germany: Probably the most famous incident of genocide, Hitler-ruled Nazi Germany massacred an estimated total of 13 million Jews, Gypsies, Anti-Nazis, homosexuals, and others, over the period of 1933 to 1945. The Holocaust, as it came to be known, was the tragic implementation of Hitler's proposed "Final Solution".
- China: Mao-ruled Communist China has had 3 time periods of genocide: From 1949 to 1952, the victims were anti-Communists; from 1957 to 1960, the rural population became the target; finally, from 1966 to 1976, the pro-Reform groups were annihilated. Total dead: 20 million.
- Guatemala: About 100,000 Maya Indians were killed from 1960 to 1981 by the racist Guatamalan government.
- Cambodia: During the Khmer Rouge regime of 1975 to 1979 led by Pol Pot, over 1 million Cambodians, mostly educated people, were tortured and/or executed in what some have called a campaign of "auto genocide".
- Rwanda: Between April and July, 1994, more than 800,000 Tutsi civilians were slaughtered in a genocidal campaign organized by Hutu hardliners.