Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

Russia and thus necessitated a rapid reindustrialization under the Marshall Plan, the U.S.
program of rebuilding Europe to act as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism.
Slavery and Genocide. A slave is a person who is the legal property of another party (who
could be an individual, a family, a corporation or the state), in which the relationship is
unequal and established on a principle of total obedience to total authority. Slavery almost
always implies severe manual labor, for little or no reward on the part of the slave laborer.
Slavery has a history dating back to ancient times, and slaves have routinely been taken as a
spoil of war. Sometimes, men would be separated from women after the conquest of a city or
territory, and both sexes would be sent on as slaves to separate destinations. Although this
could have the effect of destroying the basis for family or group identity, the reasons behind
such separation and slavery were less likely due to ideology than for pragmatic reasons such
as a need for labor or to generate wealth through selling the slaves as property. According to
one author, M. I. Finley, despite the existence of slaves throughout the ages, there have only
been five instances where we can genuinely speak of a slave society: classical Greece and classical
Rome; the Confederate States of America between 1861 and 1865 (and the decades preceding
this, while these states still formed part of the United States); various colonial islands
in the Caribbean; and colonial, then independent, Brazil. In such situations, where both the
ownership of slaves and the slave system itself required that slaves stay alive, a genocidal
impulse was suppressed on the part of the slave owners in favor of profit maximization. This
should not suggest, however, that the operation of slave societies passed without massive
brutality and death (to say nothing of the violation of individual natural and human rights).
Indeed, the initial capturing of slaves has almost always been accompanied by killing (sometimes,
such as on the Middle Passage between Africa and the Americas, on an enormous
scale). As a rule, only those who survived capture and transport were transformed into
slaves—and the latter constituted a minority of all who were captured.
In the twentieth century, slavery took on a new guise, within an overall global environment,
as brutal regimes transformed local occupied populations (e.g., the Congolese at
the hands of the Belgians), various minority populations (e.g., Jews under Hitler’s Nazis),
some dominant populations (e.g., the Cambodians under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge), and
populations isolated for political reasons (e.g., in the Soviet Union during the period
between the 1930s and 1960s) into slave communities.
Despite all international efforts to the contrary, illegal slavery still exists, most notably in
several north African countries located in the Sahara and in some Middle Eastern states.
Smart Sanctions. “Smart sanctions” (also referred to as targeted sanctions) are those
sanctions that are developed and imposed with the aim of being more precise and selective
than general sanctions (e.g., those that are so comprehensive in scope that they result
in unintended and harmful consequences to either the most vulnerable population within
the country being sanctioned and/or those actors within the country that are in line with
international norms). The efficacy of smart sanctions is still being debated, and theorists
and practitioners are continuing to work on ways to make a sanctions regime more effective
(e.g., “smarter”).
Smith, Bradley (b. 1930). Bradley Smith, a California-based Holocaust denier, is best
known for his founding of CODOH (Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust).
According to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, for more than four decades Smith
has served as the “chief propagandist and outreach director” of the denialist movement, successfully
placing paid advertisements in college and university newspapers that seemingly
SMITH, BRADLEY
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