Genocide and Slavery Should Not Exist in 2024

These issues seem big but, as a species, we are bigger.

Many people assume genocide started and ended with the Holocaust but there are genocides all around us. Right now. Since 1945, millions of people have been killed in a genocide. Tens of millions more have been displaced.

Samantha Power once called genocide, “a problem from hell.” That makes sense because not a section of the earth has been spared. Maybe Antarctica. Here are a few of the genocides since the end of World War II (not meant to be all exclusive).

• Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution: When Mao took over China, his goal was to destroy the traditional systems in that country. His rule ended with 27 million dead Chinese people.
• Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge: A full quarter of the population was killed outright or starved.
• Bosnia, Slobodan Milosovic: When Yugoslavia split up, Bosnia announced its independence. Milosovic responded with a war against Bosnia. About 200,000 people were killed and another two million were forced to flee.
• Rwanda: The official tally is about 800,000 dead after the 1994 genocide but things I have read put that number at at least one million. Even better, Rwanda has been run by a brutal dictator (Paul Kagame) for decades. If…