Cambodian genocide

The causes of genocide have varied throughout history with different genocides being motivated by different reasons and alternative instigating factors.

The actions and speeches of senior Nazi officials such as Heinrich Himmler leading up to the Holocaust, in addition to the views held by the soldiers of the Khmer Rouge, prove that the perpetrators of genocide all having various racial and historical factors they believe justifies their actions.

This they affirm differentiates genocide from all other forms of state crime and many mass atrocities in earlier historical periods, including the transatlantic slave trade.

The Holocaust is an example of a genocide which was founded on the idea of racial superiority.

Adolf Hitler and his group of Nazis proclaimed Germans as the 'Master Race' with the 'lesser races' and the 'lowest of the lows' (which he believed included Poles, as well as Jews) deserving extermination. This shows that there are definitely racial undertones to genocides.

Such strong and racist stereotyping are important aspects in understanding why genocides occur. In categorizing the Jews as an 'inferior racial' and 'ethnic' group, the Nazis created a racist 'mind set' on their part as perpetrators.

This 'mind set' led the perpetrators to act in a way which seemed to justify their racist stereotypes and later on, their actions towards innocent Jews.

The nature of prejudice was further explored by the social psychologist G.W. Allport in 1954.

Allport saw firsthand the horrors of the Holocaust and studied the link between the attitudes of mind in Nazi Germany and the forms of behaviour which occurred from it, again within Nazi Germany.

He used a table to measure his findings which describe the levels of aggression in relation to acting out held prejudices.

Firstly the avoidance phase. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour (1935), otherwise known as the Nuremburg Laws (1935) forbade persons of German blood to marry or have sexual relations with Jews, gypsies or Negroes, or anyone who might have 'offspring likely to be prejudicial to the purity of German blood'.

Then came the defamation phase where all Jews were forced to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes and were held responsible for many of Germany's problems.

There followed long periods of acts against property and assaults. For example, Kristallnacht 1938 - the Night of the Broken Glass where thousands of Jewish shops were attacked, looted and smashed, and thousands more Jews were arrested.

The aggression took its most virulent form when millions of Jews were sent to concentration camps to be slaughtered.

It was the notion of racial purification (and the necessity of it) which ultimately led to the persecution, internment, and extermination of millions and millions of Jewish people and others identified as 'racially inferior' or 'impure'.

Forms of genocide has been a part of the growing pains of man since the early times of power and opression. The causes of genocide are what has driven man since time immemorial, the roots of evil, enveloped in a collage of imperialism, decolonization, wars and inevitably the struggle for power. The world has witnessed ...