Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide, and Exile
Introduction
In her book "The Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power recounts the story of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, who was determined to find a word that would capture the barbarity of the Nazi agenda and also carry the moral implications of targeting a specific ethnic group. Lemkin finally settled on the term we commonly associate with the horrors of the Holocaust: genocide. It is a combination of the Greek geno, which means "race" or "tribe," and the Latin derivative cide, which means "to kill."
Many people consider the term "ethnic cleansing" to be synonymous with genocide. In The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, for example, Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan explain that "'ethnic cleansing' involves the 'purification' of a territory, not necessarily of a population. This means the deportation, usually threatening but not necessarily violent, of an ethnic group from the territory." The less violent result of ethnic cleansing can be exile; the most extreme is genocide. The literature of these horrors serves to bring the world's attention to events the perpetrators want to go unnoticed, to remember the humanity and individuality of the victims, and to improve the outlook for the future by bearing witness to the past.
This page contains 201 words.
Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide, and Exile article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 2,112 words
(approx. 7 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Ethnic cleansing Article
