Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.

In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as being the intentional destruction of a people by means of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. They listed these as;

1. killing members of the group,
2. causing group members serious bodily or mental harm,
3. imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group,
4. preventing births, and
5. forcibly transferring children out of the group.

Victims of genocide are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a social, ethnic, religious or linguistic group of people.

With such an analysis of its actions and motivations in mind, genocide can be seen as something so unnatural and so repulsive that very few ordinary people would even think of implementing such a spectrum of actions and reactions, let alone be a party to enabling or condoning them. The actual origin of the term Genocide emerged from a case study of the Nazi occupation of Poland during the 1939-45 World War by Raphael Lemkin. The term and definition was adopted by the 1948 Genocide Convention. Lemkin’s case studies identified not merely instances of the above five acts but also those involving the following three categories. These instances were not only carried out by the perpetrators but were also embedded in the policies adopted by the occupying power of the Nazi regime controlled German Army. These policies also included;

i) mass-killings of the particular group or people. (Jews, Slavs and Disabled people.)
ii) inflicting “serious bodily or mental harm (often by medical experiments) to members of the target groups.
iii) the planned deterioration of living conditions “calculated to bring about their destruction”

Therefore, an inevitable conclusion arises with regard to perpetrators and enablers of genocide which can only be avoided by the serial distortion of the actual facts and opinions concerning the earlier noted five acts and the above three categories. The inescapable conclusion is that the instigators, the perpetrators and the enablers of genocide are those human beings who are so far from being ordinary, that they are exceptional with regard to their behaviour toward certain other members of the human species. Indeed, they exhibit abnormal mental or emotionally antagonistic attitudes and behaviours with regard to a whole people even if a majority of those people have done them or others no harm.

To the perpetrators of genocide the simple existence of their victims – as a people – is the primary offence they have committed. In 20th century Germany this was an extreme example of the similar phenomena exhibited by many of the 19th century European settlers in North America who whilst annexing native lands, during the later colonising period, considered the only good indian was a dead one. Hence to the persecuting Nazi elite in 1930’s and 1940’s all Jews were  guilty by virtue of being Jews. The instances of this inhuman treatment of entire peoples by the German occupying force went beyond the confines of Poland and included Germany itself and its extention along their military expansion east toward the then Soviet Union.

One of the most vivid examples I remember having my attention drawn to as a pupil at secondary school in the UK was the Warsaw Ghetto. This was a location in Poland in which thousands of Jewish and other peoples were imprisoned within a pre-determined walled off area of Warsaw. It became a form of open prison. Although they were allowed to regulate themselves within its confines they were nevertheless subjected to German checkpoint entry and exit guards and official policies. These policies, were designed to eradicate the people of the ghetto by hunger and disease, through a deliberate limiting of the supply of food and medical supplies. There were two uprisings within the Warsaw City area against German occupation; the first in 1943 in the Ghetto and the second in 1944; both with huge number of deaths and casualties. The Polish resistance fighters of the Warsaw staged the second uprising in 1944 which was brutally put down by an armed invasion by German Army troops who in a house to house process of annihilation destroyed buildings and eliminated people.

These same policies were later applied to the notorious concentration camps, which later became infamous and later still became a source of shame and regret to many German people. An attempt to understand how an entire nation (the German people) could follow the dictates of the Nazi racial ideology, (which considered Aryan Germans as being a superior people) was made by a Jewish academic, Hannah Arendt. In considering why German people could agree with the Nazi dictats, participate in implementing them or turn a blind eye to the consequent genocide of the Jewish people, she arrived at several conclusions. An important one was that the extensive divisions of labour and responsibilities within hierarchical mass societies created what she characterised as a “banality of evil’.

This concept accounted even for the actions of people who would not normally harm anyone, but by habit and/or fear, would simply follow orders to not only perpetrate crimes against humanity themselves but to look the other way when others did. The hierarchical mass society system also enabled members of the community to carry on working within the integrated economic and social system which was being used to oppress, exploit and to kill without their direct involvement in brutality. In other words, it was the system – as a whole – that enabled the genocidal  policies of a governing elite to be carried through. And it is here we come to the tragic realisation that because of the lack  humanity of elites in control of modern societies – one example of genocide has never been enough to prevent another.

We now witness elites in one country whose mental and intellectual make up is now so abnormal that despite the Nazis committing genocide against their own people, they are not only prepared to initiate yet another form of genocide against another people (in this case the Palestinians) but can quickly justify doing so. We can also witness the way in which a large part of the population of Israel are not able to process the history of cause and effect of their own elites complicity in creating so much anger and desperation. Their countries illegal annexations, provocations and extermination of Palestinian homes, land, villages and people over 70 years are on public record, but the fact that this ‘history’ has driven some of the Palestinian people beyond their previously normal patterns of behaviour is not being considered.

We can also witness abnormally socialised elites in other countries such as USA and UK providing the Israeli government elites with the armaments and along with others, encouragement – without limits – to eliminate Palestinians and do so with deadly force. In this case, lets be real and honest and speak truth to power. Willingly providing a perpetrator with the weapons to intentionally perpetrate murder is to be an accomplice to murder. Willingly providing the means to perpetrate genocidal mass killings to the intentional perpetrators of such genocide is to be an accomplice in genocide.

The unquestioning acceptance by US, UK and Europe et al, of a facile excuse that the Israeli elite are defending the country against murderous violence, deliberately ignores a clear and obvious fact.  The vast majority of those who the Israeli elite are directing to be killed and will continue to kill (Palestinian men, women and children) have not actually  been murderously violent against them.

The banality of those elites who are pretending to be humanitarians by only advocating safe corridors of exodus away from immediate extinction – clearly knowing that Palestinians will simply suffer extinction by ‘other means’ such as deliberate starvation, are by this token an obvious part of the supportive and enabling system. By means of this subterfuge, European, UK and US elites will not be absolved from the guilt of complicity in “inflicting serious bodily or mental harm” or the “planned deterioration of living conditions calculated to bring about there destruction”. Nor does solely focussing on supplying food and medical aid, to a people deliberately trapped in a killing zone by an Israeli elite who are bent upon driving them into extinction – whether their stomachs are full or not.

Speaking out publicly and frequently against the illegal annexation of Palestine by the Israeli elite and their settler supporters is an essential pre-requisite of anyone with an ounce of humanity within them, yet western elites and many in the UN remain silent on this very fundamental problem.

The rational way to deal with actual crimes against humanity atrocities whether by Hamas elites, Israeli elites or any other elites, and their accomplices would not be to eliminate everyone in such nations or communities but to find and arrest the guilty ones and transport them to the international criminal court for humane trial and sentencing.

But that’s not going to happen is it? The reason being that many of those same elites control so much wealth and power within the inter-connected global network of hierarchical mass societies, that their current status and control renders most of them virtually untouchable. It would take a world revolutionary uprising of ordinary people to change the system and then bring about that type of Nuremberg trial result for those giving such orders and those following them and committing crimes against humanity.

In this latest protracted example of colonisation, the Israeli elite, supported by other hierarchical elites have been openly and brutally colonising someone elses country and then blaming the Palestinian victims for continuing to resist that injustice. In effect we are witnessing a recurring theme in history. The same shameless, bloody minded willingness to eliminate everything standing in the way of elite control of wealth and power that has been recorded throughout history is now visually exposed by modern media, despite attempts to silence voices opposed to the elite consensus.

This clearly demonstrates that this characteristic has no signs of disappearing or easing in the 21st century. If the shameless disregard of our global elites for the welfare and well being of other members of their own species, is so clearly evident, then we cannot expect much regard from them for the welfare and well being of the other less visible and inarticulate species of life on planet earth.

If we cannot convince the elites to cease the repeated genocidal extinction of whole sections of humanity then this demonstrates how hopeless the task has been (and will continue to be) of convincing them to cease their systems continuing pollution and ecological destruction of those species which are key to the survival of all life on earth. However, those of us not swallowing the lies and half-truths of the global elites, need to record and publish the alternative realities to the various forms of elite propaganda. We need to keep alive the evolutionary reality that the human species is one species and that without hierarchical mass societies and with care and consideration for all life on earth there is sufficient food and space for continued human and non-human bio-diversity on planet earth.

In this latter regard, I suggest that the hierarchical mass society form is no longer economically, ecologically or morally sustainable and is actually imploding in every location where it has taken root. Repeated genocidal extinction of members of it’s own species, unapologetically orchestrated by hierarchical mass society elites in the 20th and 21st centuries, to me indicates a discordant and protracted finale to what amounts to the systems elite-orchestrated anthem of destruction.

The hierarchical mass society form is an evolutionary adaptation of human living which since its inception has continually self-harmed (slavery, misogyny,  wa) across multiple generations and across  multiple locations. In the 20th and 21st centuries this remorseless self-harming and extreme nature-harming characteristic has introduced to humanity the spectre of the systems own self-destruction. A new form of sustainable social existence for the human species is needed not only for humanities own benefit but for the benefit of all the other remaining species on earth.

Roy Ratcliffe (October 2023)