Thinking Drives Our Humanity

Thinking: Our Mental Prism (no, not prison)

A Series on Thinking

Leadership Note:

#2125 (26 May 2025) introduces the merits of thinking and the Influential Leadership System’s thinking architecture.
#2225 (02 June 2025) describes types of thinking which prepares us for a practical thinking review of genocide.
#2325 (the current week—09 June 2025) establishes a genocide context.
#2425 (16 June 2025) examines genocide through the Influential Leadership System’s thinking prism.

To obtain the most value from the series it is best to read them sequentially as they build on each other.

Context

Among the many extreme current events, conditions and circumstances that we could tackle as Leadership Activists, genocide is the one that defines the deepest essence of our human consciousness. Furthermore, as another genocide is ongoing right now, there is an urgency in its prosecution and remedy.

Genocide: What is It?

Industrial-scale murder of a people we do not like…

It is straightforward to Influential Leadership.

Even cursory thinking concludes that murdering one person is wrong, unjust, iniquitous, criminal. Surely, slaughtering multitudes is simply an aggregate crime.

So, do we need a law, a legal bit of paper, exhorting us not to kill (en masse)?

Apparently.

We have such laws—in every country’s statutes, in international laws, and even in religious teachings—do not kill.

In the middle of the 20^th century, after a particularly bloody episode of slaughter, humans enacted a law criminalising the industrial scale kill of our fellow humans.

Another law to ignore…

The Legalese…

The term genocide is derived from the Greek genos (‘race,’ ‘tribe’ or ‘nation’) and the Latin cide (‘killing’).

Although the term is of recent origin (1944), what genocide describes has been practiced soon after Human #1 had multiplied.

Genocide is defined in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Article II defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group:

Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Article III of the Convention goes further by including the following as also punishable in law:

Conspiracy to commit genocide;
Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
Attempt to commit genocide;
Complicity in genocide.

Article IV states that Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.

To date, 153 states have ratified the Convention, 41 have not (18 from Africa, 17 from Asia and 6 from the Americas).

Genocide: An Historical Snapshot

Just eight examples of genocide are enough to appreciate that such human behaviour is not an aberration—it happens in the absence of proper Leadership and the presence of misleadership…

The Amalekite Genocide (c. 1020-1000 BCE) perpetrated by the Israelites who slaughtered the entire Amalekite nation and their livestock (although the king and the fattest livestock were spared). This is a particularly interesting case in the context of my opening remarks about laws being illusory. The same god that ordered the extermination of the Amalekites also apparently provided the perpetrators with a set of ten laws, the fifth stated: You shall not kill. So, how does that pan out?
The Genocide of Indigenous American Populations by European It is estimated that 90% (17,000,000 to 30,000,000) of the populations were annihilated between 1492 and 1900, while even in the 20^th century Indigenous children were forcibly placed in boarding schools, aiming to erase their cultural identity.
The Herero Genocide (1904-1907) by Germans in the then German colony of South-West Africa. The estimate is that 80% of the Herero population was annihilated.
The Armenian Genocide (1915-1918) was carried out by the ‘Young Turk’ government of the Ottoman Empire. Records suggest that 50% (1,500,000) of the Armenian population was annihilated.
The Holocaust (1939-1945) was perpetrated by Nazi Germany, consuming the lives of about 17 million people: 7.8 million Soviet / Russian civilians and POWs, 6 million Jews, 1.8 million Poles, 1.5 million Roma, 270,000 disabled people…
The Cambodian Genocide (1975-1979) in which certain ethnic groups and all those considered to be of the ‘old society’—intellectuals, former government officials, and Buddhist monks—were murdered by fellow Cambodians. The estimate is that ‘as many as 3,000,000 people were butchered’.
The Rwandan Genocide (1994) in which Hutu’s used machetes to butcher 800,000 Tutsis in 100 days.
The Palestinian Genocide by Israel that started in 1948 and continues till today. In the past 611 days about 65,000 Palestinians have been killed, many thousands are missing and almost 130,000 have been injured. Over 50,000 children have been killed or injured. The genociding party has even made reference to the first-listed example above—the god-given demand to exterminate the Amalekites (Palestinians).
Next…?

Where Does Influential Leadership Stand?

To give oxygen to your thinking on the matter of genocide, in general, and specifically to what prevails in Palestine-Gaza, and the next genocide, I offer you a position taken by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), the English philosopher, economist, and political thinker.