Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

SATELLITE IMAGES OF GENOCIDE
Sleng. Nearly a quarter of a million Santebal documents were located after the fall of the
Khmer Rouge in 1979, providing important insights into the ideals and operations of the
regime before and during its period in power.
“Sarah.” Compulsory middle name required to be adopted by all female Jews in Germany
midway into the Nazi reign (1933–1945). The designation was made law under the Second
Decree Supplementing the Law Regarding the Change of Family Names and First
Names, dated August 17, 1938. The law became operational as from January 1, 1939.
Henceforth, all Jewish females were required to add the name to their passports, identity
cards, and all other official documents. In like manner, Jewish males were forced to add
the name “Israel” to their own.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–1980). Born in Paris, Sartre received his doctorate in philosophy
and took up a life of writing and teaching. He was captured by the Nazis in 1940 while
serving as an army meteorologist, and ended up a prisoner of war for one year before
returning to his teaching position, during which he began taking part in French resistance
activities against the German occupation. Following the conclusion of World War II,
he devoted himself to his writings and rejected the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature as too
bourgeois. Philosophically, he may be regarded as the prime exponent of existentialism,
a philosophy that focuses on the radical freedom that characterizes the human condition
and all that that entails. It is a philosophy that claims that the meaning of life is not established
before one’s existence, and that one has to create the meaning oneself. At one and
the same time, he took an active part in various social and political struggles. Ever the
rebel, robust and full of energy, Sartre allied himself politically with the left, including his
support for French student radicalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. In addition to his
philosophical and other writings (Being and Nothingness, Anti-Semite and Jew, On Genocide,
The Transcendence of the Ego, Existentialism and Human Emotions), he is also remembered
for his plays The Flies (an antiauthoritarian play that the Germans allowed him to
produce, being unaware of Sartre’s underground activities) and No Exit, as well as his
novel, Nausea. Most relevant to the question of genocide are his involvement with the
Russell Tribunals and his writings on both antisemitism and genocide.
Satellite Images of Genocide. In an age of advanced electronic communications, the
use of space satellites for the purpose of preventing, locating, or tracking genocide is a
development that can play an important role in the future. Even now, satellites are used
in a variety of ways: to monitor crisis situations, such as where ethnic conflicts lead to
large-scale refugee flows or the displacement of vast numbers of civilians; to pinpoint the
location of mass graves, identifying the difference between standard forms of agricultural
activity and the random compacting of land as gravesites; to identify massacre sites prior
to the burial of bodies, often in faraway places out of the public gaze; to identify landforms
that have been deliberately contaminated for the purpose of rendering them uninhabitable;
and to monitor compliance with international agreements in areas of human rights
and other situations involving the well-being of people. Satellite images, obviously, can
be used in numerous ways for the safeguarding of human rights and have a role to play in
both genocide prevention and genocide detection.
That said, there are certain factors that can make satellite imagery prohibitive for governments
(and even more, for private organizations). The first of these is cost; not only is
it expensive to send a satellite into space, it is also expensive to rent time for satellite
usage. Second, satellite images can be difficult to interpret, given that they are images
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