Genocide :: essays research papers

Genocide     After Rodney King was beaten, and the white police officers wereaquitted, he said "Why cant we each(prenominal) just get along?" A question asked by manypeople. Rascist and Genocidal acts such as this have been going on for manyyears, and should not be tolerated.     In international law, the crime of destroying, or committing conspiracyto destroy, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group is known as Genocide.It was defined in the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime ofGenocide, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9,1948.     The crime of Genocide has been committed or act many times inrecorded history. The best known example in this century was the attempt by NaziGermany during the 1930s and 1940s to destroy the Jewish world of Europe,known as the Holocaust. By the end of World War II, 6 million Jews had beenkilled in Nazi concentration camps.&n bsp    The known objective of the Nazi decree was Jewish extinction. In November1938, shortly after the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a youngJew, all synagogues in Germany were set on fire, windows of Jewish shops weresmashed, and thousands of Jews were arrested. This "Night of Broken Glass"(Kristallnacht) was a signal to Jews in Germany and Austria to leave as soon aspossible. Several coke thousand people were able to find refuge in othercountries, but a nearly equal number, including many who were old or poor,stayed to calculate an uncertain destiny.     When war began in September 1939, the German army occupied the westernhalf of Poland and added almost 2 million Jews to the German power sphere.Limitations set(p) on Polish Jewry were much worse than those in Germany. ThePolish Jews were forced to move into ghettos surrounded by walls and barbed wire.The ghettos were like jailed cities. Each ghetto had a Jewish counci l that wasresponsible for housing, sanitation, and production. Food and coal were to beshipped in and manufactured products were to be sent out for German use. Thefood supply allowed by the Germans was primarily made up of grains and vegetables,such as turnips, carrots, and beets. In the Warsaw ghetto, the amount of foodgiven provided barely 1200 calories to each inmate. Some black market food, inglorious into the ghettos, was sold at a very high price, and unemployment andpoverty were common. The population was large, and the amount of people reachedsix or seven persons in a room. typhus fever became common, and the death rate roseto roughly 1 percent a month.