Ethnic Cleansing Quotes

“Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism... neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the worlds greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy.”
― Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany

“Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings.

I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest—if they were lucky—or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin muktar to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, and in the mid-nineteenth century, on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“I am not perfect, but if I looked perfect to everyone I must have been rocking imperfect perfectly to a few imperfect souls that seek imperfection vs. perfection, in an imperfect world where God asks us to seek perfection for our imperfect souls.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“That war [Bosnian war] in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland. I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Bosnia's war had its visual hallmarks. Parks that were turned into cemeteries, refugee families piled onto horse-drawn carts, stop-or-die checkpoints with mines across the road. The most hideous hallmark of all was the blackened patch of ground in the center of town. It always meant the same thing, a destroyed mosque. The goal of ethnic cleansing was not simply to get rid of Muslims; it was to destroy all traces that they had ever lived in Bosnia. The goal was to kill history. If you want to do that, then you must rip out history's heart, which in the case of Bosnia's Muslim community meant the destruction of its mosques. Once that was done, you could reinvent the past in whatever distorted form you wanted, like Frankenstein.

p. 85”
― Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War

“The organization of the camps in the east revealed a contempt for life, the life of Slavs and Asians and Jews anyway, that made such mass starvation thinkable. In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5 percent. In the first eight months after Operation Barbarossa, it must have been far higher. In German prisoner-of-war camps for soldiers of the western Allies, the death rate was less than five percent. As many Soviet prisoners of war died on a single given day in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War.

pp. 181-182”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“The UN took a strong stand against apartheid; and over the years, an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system. But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
― Nelson Mandela

“It is incredible that this must be said, but the obvious seems to escape politicized academics, so we must state the obvious: Genocide is deliberate; it is premeditated. There is no genocide without premeditation. The murders are not unfortunate coincidences. This is why it is called "mass MURDER" and not "mass MANSLAUGHTER.”
― A.E. Samaan

“There are no worse oppressors than those who have been oppressed themselves. For they will justify all means of self-preservation, including the persecution and oppression of others to the extent of, and worse than that they had endured. This will weigh heavily on the souls of future generations.”
― H. N. Ellessy

“The weakening of the state and the emergence of failed states contribute to a fourth image of a world in anarchy. This paradigm emphasises the decline of governmental authority, the disintegration of states, the intensification of ethnic, religious and tribal conflicts, the rise of international criminal organisations, refugee numbers growing into the tens of millions, the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, the spread of terrorism and the prevalence of mass murder and ethnic cleansing.”
― Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

“Matansa. It means massacre in the Chamorro language, and is a nickname for the village of San Roque in the northern part of the island of Saipan that endured the most brutal slaughtering as a punishment for Chamorro resistance by Imperial Japan in WWII, which was part of an ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign that almost completely wiped out the Chamorro population from the face of the earth. San Roque is my family’s village.”
― M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior

“The Moslem people had brought an extraordinarily rich mixture of knowledge, beauty, and bloodshed to the Iberian peninsula; in the process Spain had been permanently transformed.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart

“The conversos were thus both a troubled and troublesome population in late fifteenth century Castile.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Isabella of Castile: The First Renaissance Queen

“In general, forced migration study reveals the stunning and gradually increasing adherence of the Soviet system to ethnically rather than socially determined repression criteria (the policy in question reached its apogee during Stalin’s rule). In other words, the state declares its loyalty to international and class awareness publicly, while in practice gravitates towards essentially nationalistic goals and methods.
The deportation of so-called punished peoples can provide a most prominent example of this approach, the deportation itself serving as the punishment. All such peoples were deported not merely from their historical homeland, but also from other cities and districts, as well as demobilized from the army, which shows that such ethnic deportations embraced the entire country (we term this type of repression “total deportation”). Apart from their homeland, the “punished people” were deprived of their autonomy if they had any before, in other words, of their relative sovereignty.

In essence, ten peoples in the USSR were subjected to total deportation. Seven of them—Germans, Karachais, Kalmyks, Ingushetians, Chechens, Balkars, and Crimean Tatars—lost their national autonomy too (their total number amounted to 2 million, and the land populated by them before the deportation exceeded 150,000 square kilometers). According to the criteria formulated above, another three peoples—namely Finns, Koreans, and Meskhetian Turks—fall under the category of “totally deported peoples.”
― Pavel Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR

“The worst case scenario, long feared but never realized, is ethnic cleansing against occupied Palestinians or population transfer, forcible expulsion under the guise of national security.”
― Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World

“For Palestinians, and anyone else who refused to buy into the Zionist narrative, it was clear long before this book was written that these people were perpetrators of crimes, but that they had successfully evaded justice and would probably never be brought to trial for what they had done.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Besides their trauma, the deepest form of frustration for Palestinians has been that the criminal act these men were responsible for has been so thoroughly denied, and that Palestinian suffering has been so totally ignored, ever since 1948.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“The general definition of what ethnic cleansing consists of applies almost verbatim to the case of Palestine.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“But beyond numbers, it is the deep chasm between reality and representation that is most bewildering in the case of Palestine. It is indeed hard to understand, and for that matter to explain, why a crime that was perpetrated in modern times and at a juncture in history that called for foreign reporters and UN observers to be present, should have been so totally ignored.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Imagine that not so long ago, in any given country you are familiar with, half of the entire population had been forcibly expelled within a year, half of its villages and towns wiped out, leaving behind only rubble and stones. Imagine now the possibility that somehow this act will never make it into the history books and that all diplomatic efforts to solve the conflict that erupted in that country will totally sideline, if not ignore, this catastrophic event.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Ben-Gurion himself, writing to his son in 1937, appeared convinced that this was the only course of action open to Zionism: ‘The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.’ The opportune moment came in 1948. Ben-Gurion is in many ways the founder of the State of Israel and was its first prime minister. He also masterminded the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“Had the UN decided to make the territory the Jews had settled on in Palestine correspond with the size of their future state, they would have entitled them to no more than ten per cent of the land.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

“For both Christians and Jews, therefore, the colonization of Palestine was seen as an act of return and redemption. The coincidence of the two impulses produced a powerful alliance that turned the anti-Semitic and millenarian idea of transferring the Jews from Europe to Palestine into a real project of settlement at the expense of the native people of Palestine.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“People are entitled to invent themselves, as so many national movements have done in their moment of inception. But the problem becomes acute if the genesis narrative leads to political projects such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, and oppression.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Zionism was a settler colonial movement, similar to the movements of Europeans who had colonized the two Americas, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“The translation of these European notions of racial superiority into the Israeli context became evident as soon as the interviewer asked him about the government’s plans for the remaining Palestinian leaders. Interviewer and interviewee giggled as they agreed that the policy should involve the assassination or expulsion of the entire current leadership, that is all the members of the Palestinian Authority—about 40,000 people.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“when you found a state—even one with a thriving culture, a successful high-tech industry, and a powerful military—on the basis of dispossessing another people, your moral legitimacy will always be questioned.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Black, white, brown or martian - at the end of the day, you'll find good and evil in every corner of the world. You'll find apes peddling segregation in the name of preserving heritage and purity, in every corner of the world, just like you'll find humans standing up for love and oneness, in every corner of the world. It has nothing to do with ethnicity of a person, and everything to do with humanity of the person.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets