It began when the first human groups formed; the desire of humans to believe that they were, in some way, superior to those other humans around them, and superior to all animals. We apparently need our egos inflated for us to cope with life. Throughout human history, this one weakness has caused us immense suffering and death.
Some 10,000 years ago, humans switched from being hunter-gatherers to an agricultural economy. They figured out that it was better to raise crops than to take whatever grew, wherever it grew. Those who cooperated with each other got higher yields, and people started to congregate into villages, where they worked together, built and planned together. Possessions and land became important factors in survival. Neighbors bonded with other neighbors, and defended themselves against any other humans who threatened to take their possessions. The sense of, “It’s us against them,” formed, as villages and clans formed, and as languages, customs, location and colors differentiated one group of people from another. Land and resources became valuable possessions, worth fighting for, and worth killing those humans who were “other.” If other people had resources which were desirable, killing them was, at that time in history, believed to be the right thing to do in order to get those same resources and have a better life. And so – the genocides began.
It was a savage world during the first millennia of human existence, as well as today. As larger communities formed, there was often competition for the best resources, the best land and water. Peaceful, orderly lives were always temporary. If, for any reason, life became difficult, there was always the urge to move to greener pastures. If those greener pastures were occupied by other people, the brazen invaders believed those occupants should be overcome by force, so that those resources could be used by the invaders, who believed themselves to be a superior people. That savagery is well documented in the Bible. The military leader Joshua, for example, believes his anthropomorphic imaginary God has told him that all the Middle East land from the Euphrates River to the Mediterranean Sea belongs to the Israelites. So he gathers his tribe together, arms them, incites them with promises of riches, and strikes off to the land of Jordan, where town after town is destroyed, its valuable possessions looted, and all touchable living beings murdered. The concept that every human deserved an equal opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness was several millennia in the future, in the human conscience.
Joshua 6:21. And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.
Joshua 6:24. And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only the sliver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the Lord.
Christian children are taught to gleefully sing this song about how Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and “the walls came a-tumblin’ down.” That is a terrible rewrite of history, a whitewash of what was brutal savagery, genocide in its primitive form. Things have not gotten a whole lot better since. History records invasions by Genghis Kahn, invasions by Alexander the Great, in attempts to rule over the entire known world at those times, each with its full share of massacres. The Middle Ages record the Christian crusades and Inquisitions, each with its fair share of genocide murders. World War I started because Serbia wanted to take over Bosnia and Herzegovina. The resulting conflict caused 37 million human deaths, including both military personnel and civilian populations. Approximately 1.2 million Christian Armenians were annihilated by Turks, during that conflict.
During my lifetime, genocides have not only continued but have been rampant. During World War II, 6 million Jews were exterminated by the Nazi regime, and 15.8 million other “subhumans” killed because they showed genetic or cultural difference from the “master” German race. They were, therefore, in the Nazi mind, inferior beings, deserving elimination. In Croatia, 600,000 Serbs were killed to ethnically “cleanse” the population. During the Korean conflict, beginning 1950, Western nations fought the invasion of South Korea by North Korean communist forces, believing that communism represented a dire threat to democracy: 5 million civilian and soldier deaths occurred. In the Viet Nam War, soon to follow, from 1954 to 1975, the United States fought against communist forces, believing that the fall of Viet Nam would create a domino effect in other Southeast Asian nations, causing them to also fall under communist rule; that conflict caused 2 million civilian deaths. Villages were frequently targeted because they were suspected of harboring Viet Cong. In the Cambodian civil war, from 1975 to 1979, the victorious communist Khmer Rouge forced all those who were of other political belief out of their homes and on to the streets. The Phnom Penh hospital was emptied at gunpoint. Those who resisted were immediately killed. Some 2 million of that diaspora died, mostly from starvation. In 1988, Iran and Iraq signed an armistice, ending their brief but bloody war in which no territory changed hands. That respite from war with his neighbor allowed Saddam Hussein to concentrate on his “Kurdish problem.” Kurds occupied a northern section of Iraq, and were fiercely independent. Saddam turned his military against the Kurds, in an ethnic cleansing campaign. Iraqi planes dropped nerve gas on all sizeable villages, burning and suffocating innocent women and children. Some 200,000 men were exterminated. Over 1 million Kurds fled their homes, hoping to find refuge in Turkey. In 1994, Hutu military in Rwanda, using machetes, massacred some 600,000 Tutsi civilians. In their minds, if you had a different culture, you deserved to be killed. Since 2011, in Syria, Bashar Assad has not hesitated to use Russian bombs and nerve gas against his own people, causing so far some 600,000 deaths, displacing 14 million civilians from their homes. In his psychopathic belief system, if people do not submit to his authority, they deserve to die. Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine because he believes that country belongs to Russia. He states that it has been invaded by fascists and Nazis, and must be cleansed of those forces. If any Ukrainians do not immediately submit to Russian rule, they must be killed, in his psychopathic analysis.
It has taken Homo sapiens about 200,000 years to realize that every human has the same needs: each of us, as an individual human being, needs an equal opportunity to pursue his or her own life, liberty and happiness. The first widely known, but primitive expression of that understanding occurred in the United States Declaration of Independence. Yet Thomas Jefferson only dimly understood the extension to which that mutual respect should be taken, to be ethical. His concept was that all aristocratic white men were created equal, and were given that divine right by his imagined Deist God. To his great credit, Jefferson, with eloquent language, headed us in the right direction; but was lost in a cloud of ignorance. Not only is there not a Supreme Being who cares in any way what humans do, but we are absolutely and totally not equal. We are each individual beings, with immune systems that attack any foreign cells from any other individuals as foreign invaders. We are equal only in our needs to obtain fulfillment in life. Thomas Jefferson, in his primitive understanding, thought this equality applied only to aristocratic white men. He did not understand that the opportunity to pursue our own development in life should extend equally to every man, woman, and child, regardless of social status, race, color, creed, indenture, gender or religion.
It was not until 1948, through the heroic efforts of Raphael Lemkin, that the United Nations adopted a resolution banning genocide as a crime against humanity, punishable by any nation in which those crimes occurred. Yet the world community has stood by as other genocides continue unpunished. The United States of America has, in particular, been cowardly in responding to the needs of other citizens of other countries. The usual excuse given is that, “It is not in the interests of the United States to intercede.” Bill Clinton, for example, failed to act while Serbia was carrying out a massive genocide against Muslim Croats and Bosnians. He did so only when, under intense pressure from Bob Dole and Congress, it had become politically damaging to not respond to that crime against humanity.
We are still struggling to realize and achieve the extent to which equal opportunity for humans should reach. We have, up to this time, believed that if there was genocide somewhere else in the world, it was someone else’s problem. What we have not understood is that we are now one world, and that crimes against humanity affect all of us. It becomes our obligation to end genocide, wherever it occurs, then back out and let that country become what it wants to be. There is, in our nation, still strong gender discrimination, racism and white supremacy, which attempts to rewrite history, deny the suffering of slavery, re-establish segregation with charter schools, deny gender discrimination, and isolate our country from the rest of the world. Worldwide respect for all other life seems like an impossible goal, so far away. But at least we now know what our human goal should be: equal opportunity for all humans to obtain their fulfilment in life. Ethical governments will provide those services: universal health care, universal education, equal pay for work done, and equal opportunity for advancement, regardless of social status, race, color, creed, gender, or religion.
We will never get there until we get rid of this strongly expressed superiority complex in our cultures and religions. Human behavior must become egalitarian for it to become ethical, and establish stable, peaceful societies, full of advancements in knowledge and understanding.