Has There Ever Been a Successful Genocide?

[Kuciwalker]

Re: Has There Ever Been a Successful Genocide?

I've done it dozens, maybe hundreds of times. Goddamn Aztecs

[Traianvs]

In ancient times genocides were not that uncommon. Entire tribes could be wiped out, for example the Nervii iirc were exterminated after leading an army against Caesar. Or when Gauls or Germans went on the move looking for a new place to live, but got asskicked by Romans or others, were usually massacred and the rest sold into slavery.

Life was different back then

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Brachy-Pride
Is it a genocide if a group disappears due to intermarriage with an invading group?

What if the invading group kills the adult men but takes the women and the kids?

I think it is only genocide if group A says lets kill every single member of group B, but maybe my definition is wrong.

any deliberate mass murder of a religious, cultural, racial or ethnic group is genocide, per the Genocide Convention, if it destroys a significant part of the group. So killing all the adult males would certainly qualify. Whether it would be "successful" by the standards of the OP, I dont know.

"genocide" by forced pressure to assimilate, including intermarriage, rather than murder, is a controversial question. I prefer to keep the definition to murder, myself.

[lord of the mark]

The OP refers to success, but as everyone ought to know, thats an ambiguous standard.

What is success? As GePap pointed out, the Rwandan genocidaires werent killing Tutsis outside of Rwanda, and AFAIK, they never intended to. If their GOAL was to kill all Rwandan Tutsis, wouldnt they have been successful if all Rwandan Tutsis had been killed. Similarly those who appear to have masterminded the destruction of the Armenians, had as a goal cleansing Turkish Armenia of Armenians, and drastically reducing the numbers of Armenians in the Ottoman empire. They apparently didnt expect or even particularly desire the death of the last Armenian on earth. Why would the survival of some Armenians make them "unsuccessful"?

Because we see the Nazi genocide of the Jews as the paradigmatic case of genocide, we tend to forget how atypical it was (I will avoid the hot button "unique") The goal of 100% destruction of a group, more or less globally, is in fact NOT the norm for historic genocides. In fact I doubt theres one other example thats quite like that. Even the Nazis, for example, apparently didnt intend to destroy all Poles. Yet they certainly commited genocide against the Poles.

[Elok]

Do archaeologists currently believe we exterminated the other hominids, e.g. neanderthals, australopithecines? Or was there supposedly some intermarriage? And do hominids count as people for the sake of this argument? So many questions...

[Dis]

neanderthals most likely just got pushed further and further back until they could not survive any longer.

[Traianvs]

Originally posted by Elok
Do archaeologists currently believe we exterminated the other hominids, e.g. neanderthals, australopithecines? Or was there supposedly some intermarriage? And do hominids count as people for the sake of this argument? So many questions...

No, we didn't exterminate other homonids. That would require organized action. They were simply outcompeted. Intermarriage between neanderthals and sapiens is impossible, although some archaeologists have tried to prove otherwise. It's been a while so I've forgotten most about it, but I believe the intermarriage thesis is a load of bull****

[trev]

There are no longer any full blood indigenous people of Tasmania alive anywhere in the world, the last of that tribal group died in the 1950's if my memory is correct. They are racially different from the indigenous people of mainland Australia, who presumably had earlier eradicated them from the mainland. As no people have been prosecuted for their roles in this annihilation of a race, this must rate as one of the most successful genocides of recent time.

[molly bloom]

The Manchu Dynasty became rather fed up with the Dzungars after several raids and rebellions, and seem to have annihilated them.

They are racially different from the indigenous people of mainland Australia, who presumably had earlier eradicated them from the mainland.

trev


Or, alternatively, water levels rose and isolated Tasmania from the rest of Australia. Which is why there weren't any dingos in Tassie, for instance.