A Quote by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The term "genocide" is often incorrectly assumed to mean extreme examples of mass murder associated with war, with the death of millions of individuals, as, for instance in Cambodia. Although clearly the Holocaust was the most extreme of all genocides, the bar set by the Nazis is not the bar required to be considered genocide. Most importantly, genocide does not have to be complete to be considered genocide.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Quote Topics

Although Associated Assumed Bar Cambodia Clearly Complete Considered Death Does Examples Extreme Genocide Holocaust Importantly Individuals Instance Mass Mean Millions Most Murder Often Required Set Term War

Quote Author

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
American - Historian
Born: September 10, 1939

We're living in an age of genocide. ...And we do believe that there is not only the genocide of war, and the genocide that took place with the extermination of the Jews, but the whole program....of birth control and abortion is another form of genocide.... [T]hey claim the poor are bringing forth tremendous numbers of children and so the solution is to kill them off.

Dorothy Day

It was commonplace to hear it said, after the Bosnian genocide kicked off in 1992 and the Rwandan genocide erupted in 1994 and the Darfur genocide began in 2003, that the 'international community' had learned nothing since the Holocaust.

Terry Glavin

A genocide in Africa has not received the same attention that genocide in Europe or genocide in Turkey or genocide in other part of the world. There is still this kind of basic discrimination against the African people and the African problems.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Armenians, as a people that have survived the Genocide, have a moral duty towards mankind and history in the prevention of genocides. We have done and will continue to do our best to support the persistent implementation of the Genocide Convention. Genocide cannot concern only one people, because it is a crime against humanity.

Serzh Sargsyan

Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it ... the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten.

Ronald Reagan

Not only did waging war against Hitler fail to save the Jews, it may be that the war itself brought on the Final Solution of genocide. This is not to remove the responsibility from Hitler and the Nazis, but there is much evidence that Germany's anti-Semitic actions, cruel as they were, would not have turned to mass murder were it not for the psychic distortions of war, acting on already distorted minds. Hitler's early aim was forced emigration, not extermination, but the frenzy of it created an atmosphere in which the policy turned to genocide.

Howard Zinn

I make a difference between genocide and Holocaust. Holocaust was mainly Jewish, that was the only people, to the last Jew, sentenced to die for one reason, for being Jewish, that's all. Genocide is something else. Genocide has been actually codified by the United Nations. It's the intent of killing, the intent of killing people, a community in this culture so forth, but no other people has been really interested.

Elie Wiesel

So let us call genocide, genocide. Let us not minimize the deliberate murder of 1.5 million people. Let us have a moral victory that can shine as a light to all nations.

Adam Schiff

For us, genocide was the gas chamber - what happened in Germany. We were not able to realize that with the machete you can create a genocide.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Holocaust Museum said ISIS has carried out genocide against the Yazidis, but its investigation did not cover Christian persecution. Now there's concern the U.S. State Department might do the same, limiting any genocide pronouncement to Yazidis without mentioning Christians.

Tom Gjelten

One of the world’s great religions — which has more than 1.4 billion adherents — somehow sanctions genocide, planned genocide, as part of its religious doctrine.

Steven Emerson

Syria is a civil war. Syria began as a popular uprising, just like the other experiences in the Arab Spring, with a repressive government that responded by basically killing the protesters. It's not a genocide, it's a war, and there's a difference. Genocide is a preplanned attack on people because of who they are. This is a interstate conflict.

Susan Rice

The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen.

Samantha Power

The history of the genocide perpetrated during the Second World War does not belong to the past only. It is a ‘living history’ that concerns us all, regardless of our background, culture, or religion. Other genocides have occurred after the Holocaust, on several continents. How can we draw better lessons from the past?

Irina Bokova

Nearly 60 years ago, the international community made a commitment to put an end to the crime of genocide by ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.