Mass Murder By A State
The concept of state-sponsored mass murder covers a range of potential killings. It is defined as the intentional and indiscriminate murder of a large number of people by government agents. Examples are shooting of unarmed protestors, carpet bombing of cities, lobbing of grenades into prison cells and random execution of civilians. Other examples of state-sponsored mass murder include:
- Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, religious or national group. While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, the legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Since the CPPCG went into effect in 1951 there have been two genocides found to be so in international courts: the Srebrenica genocide and the Rwandan Genocide (see International prosecution of genocide. There have been a number of other convictions for genocide under municipal laws, and a number of genocides in history – such as the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust – are widely seen as genocides, but occurred before the universal acceptance of international laws defining and forbidding genocide was achieved in 1948, so those criminals who were convicted of taking part in these historical genocides were found guilty of crimes against humanity and other more specific crimes like murder.
- Political mass murder or the killing of a particular political group within a country, such as the White and Red Terrors, Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, Mao Zedong's Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, Pol Pot's Killing Fields, massacres at the partition of India, or the Hama, Jallianwala Bagh, Tlatelolco massacres, mass executions of civilians in Spanish cities committed by the fascist forces during the Spanish Civil war and the mass killing of communists by Suharto's New Order.
- Deliberate massacres of captives during wartime by a state's military forces, such as these committed by the Empire of Japan, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II: the Nanjing Massacre, the Katyn Forest Massacre of Polish citizens in 1940 and the massacres of political prisoners after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the Three Alls Policy and the massacre of Soviet Jews at Babi Yar.
- Mass killing of civilians during total war, especially via strategic bombing, such as the Bombing of Chongqing, Bombing of Tokyo, the Blitz, the bombing of Dresden and Hamburg, or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- Actions in which the state caused the death of large numbers of people, which political scientist R. J. Rummel calls "democide", which, in addition to the cases above, may include man-made disasters caused by the state, such as the Holodomor in the Soviet Union, and the disastrous effects of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China.
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