What Do You Mean By Genocide?

'Genocide' is a term that originated some time during the early 1940's.
It refers to massive and large scale crimes that are committed against one particular specific human race or kind. Genocide means elimination of the specific race from the very face of the earth.
It was the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin who, in reference to the crimes that were carried out against the Jews by the Nazis under Hitler, coined this descriptive word. Split into two parts, the word means: 'geno' from the Greek word for race or tribe, and 'cide' which means 'killing' in Latin. The two parts in combination mean killing of a tribe or a race, and this is exactly what happened to the Jews at the hands of Nazis during the 1940's.

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The word genocide finds its roots from the Greek words genos (family, tribe or race) and cide which when loosely translated in Latin means to massacre. The word was first coined by Raphael Lemkin a legal scholar of Polish Jewish origin.

Thus genocide can be described as an act or acts involving the systematic killings of a group with the intention of destroying or wiping them out in part or completely. The reason for this mass murder can be because of political, social, religious and or cultural or ethnic differences. Any of the following five actions come under the classification of genocide:

• Killing members of a group.
• Causing harm either mental or physical to a group.
• Imposing rules and conditions of living on a group which can eventually lead to its end or destruction.
• Imposing any methods which can lead to impairment in the birth rate of a group.
• Moving the children of a particular group to another group again with the intention of destroying the targeted group in part or whole.


The Armenian Genocide and the brutal and systematic killings of the Jews carried out by the Nazi's are two of the most horrific acts of genocide known to us in recent times.

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