Genocide

When Haman saw that Mordecai would not kneel down or pay him honor, he was enraged.  Yet having learned who Mordecai’s people were, he scorned the idea of killing only Mordecai. Instead, Haman looked for a way to destroy all Mordecai’s people, the Jews, throughout the whole kingdom of Xerxes. Then Haman said to King Xerxes, “There is a certain people dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom who keep themselves separate. Their customs are different from those of all other people, and they do not obey the king’s laws; it is not in the king’s best interest to tolerate them. If it pleases the king, let a decree be issued to destroy them, and I will give ten thousand talents of silver to the king’s administrators for the royal treasury.”                                                                       Esther 3:5-8

Did you know that April is “Genocide Awareness Month”? I didn’t know that until recently, and it made me think about the need for such a month. What an indictment of humanity! The fact is, there have been genocides in existence since the earliest recorded times. Many times, the Jewish people have been the targets of such an abhorrence.

We read early on in the Bible, in the book of Esther, about the plans that Haman had to destroy the Jewish people. Haman’s plot was reportedly fueled by the fact that “those people” were different, and they did not obey the king’s law. Actually, Haman hated the idea that “those people” had their own beliefs and customs, and he hated that he was being diminished and disrespected by them- at least in his own mind.

I read about the genocide in Rwanda where the Hutu people tried to destroy the Tutsi people. Some 800,000 Tutsi were murdered, and 2 million were displaced. All this transpired in roughly a four-month period in April, 1994- almost 30 years ago to this day. The tensions between the tribal peoples had been brewing over generations, but when it broke open, savage killing ruled the land.

How do such atrocities build? They start with the fostering of the idea that differences in people should not be tolerated. That those who are not part of our “tribe” are inferior, and indeed, do not even have personhood.

We need not look far into our own history to see that Americans too, of course, are capable of genocide. Many Native Americans were slaughtered with the justification that they were “savages”.

I discuss this not to impose guilt, although we are certainly guilty of such past sins. Rather, I bring this up to warn that we are all capable of dismissing and labeling other people, which can gradually lead to deciding that they are not really people at all.   

Prayer: Lord, forgive us trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us… Amen