Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

Kosovar Albanian population being conducted by Milosevic’s forces. The stated goal of
this NATO operation (a humanitarian intervention that, in reality, was a full-scale war
that was not sanctioned by the United Nations) was “Serbs out, peacekeepers in,
refugees back.”
Ironically, because NATO did not wish to place troops on the ground and instead chose
to conduct the war from the air, it allowed the Serbs to continue their ethnic cleansing of
the province. More specifically, the Serbs redoubled their efforts to cleanse the area of
Kosovar Albanians and within a week of the start of the war an estimated three hundred
thousand Kosovar Albanians either were chased from their villages and homes or fled out
of fear of being killed. Thus, although NATO’s bombing likely prevented genocide from
being perpetrated, within a month’s time an estimated eight hundred thousand Albanians
had been forced out of Kosovo.
Racial Antisemitism. Racial antisemitism is a pseudoscientific biological determinant
that assesses both persons and communities in terms of physical characteristics as being
central to their identities, and in which physical identity is automatically and definitively
reflected in social, political, economic, religious, military, and other behavioral activities.
Such false thinking was applied with both energy and genocidal intensity on the part of
the Nazis and their collaborators against the Jews.
In reality, racial antisemitism is a transposition of the British naturalist Charles
Darwin’s (1809–1882) theories of biological evolution onto the plane of history, which
its proponents believe is a battleground where the “survival of the fittest” is to be taken
literally; that is, those who are the strongest and most worthy survive, and those who are
not strong enough do not survive (i.e., German “Aryans” versus Jews). As such, these socalled
racial characteristics, which can never be changed, became the pseudointellectual
underpinnings for Hitler’s and others’ rationales for the extermination of European
Jewry. Theoretical support for these false conclusions can be found in Frenchman Comte
Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau’s (1816–1882) Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
(1850), German Wilhelm Marr’s (1819–1904) The Victory of Judaism over Germanism
(1867), and the British Germanophile Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s (1855–1927)
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899). Paralleling the development of this racial
antisemitic ideology was the rise, in both Europe and the United States, of the so-called
science of eugenics, whereby members of the scientific, intellectual, and lay communities
vigorously discussed and debated ways to improve the human species and wholeheartedly
supported either the termination or prevention of the births of those perceived as either
unwanted, liable to be a burden to the larger community, or apt to do criminal, economic,
or other damage to society. The Nazi Nuremberg Racial Laws of 1935 defining Jews,
Aryans, and Mischlinge (“half-breeds”) became the concrete convergence of both racial
antisemitism and eugenic thinking and legally enabled the Nazis to proceed with their
agenda of annihilation.
Racial Hygiene (German, Rassenhygiene). Designation introduced and developed in
1894 by German medical doctor Alfred Ploetz (1860–1940) and adopted by many others
in the early part of the twentieth century. It was a concept that had at its base the notion
of eugenics, the branch of knowledge dealing with the production of genetically superior
human beings through improvements in their inherited qualities. Some translated this
into proposals calling for the compulsory sterilization of physically and psychologically
“inferior” humans; others called for additional measures designed to control the breeding
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