Difference between holocaust and genocide.
Answers
Both holocaust and genocide are mass killings of people due to ethnic, racial, religious reasons with a view to exterminating that entire group of people.
• Genocide is the common term for this kind of mass murders, yet holocaust especially refers to the extermination of the Jews by Nazis during the ruling of Adolf Hitler.
The systematic murder of Jews during WWII was not commonly referred to as the Holocaust until the 1970s when a TV mini-series called "The Holocaust" was shown on American network TV. The mini-series was widely viewed and discussed. For many, especially younger people, it was their first real education about the topic. The word 'holocaust' actually means a conflagration, a huge all-consuming fire like you would see inside a big furnace or an out-of-control wildfire in a forest. It was used metaphorically in the title of the series. But the association was so strong that people started using the word to describe the Nazi "Final Solution."
Holocaust (miniseries)
The word 'genocide' has a specific meaning. As defined by the UN genocide convention, it includes any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
- Deliberate infliction on the group the 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
For a party to be found guilty of genocide, it had to carry out one of the aforementioned acts with the intent to destroy all or part of one of the groups protected.
The law does not require the extermination of an entire group, only acts committed with the intent to destroy a substantial part. Hussein did not set out to eliminate every Kurd in Iraq. But he set out to destroy the Kurdish insurgency, and the way he chose to accomplish this was to destroy Iraq’s rural Kurdish population.
If the perpetrator does not target a national, ethnic, or religious group as such, then killings would constitute mass homicide, not genocide.
The perpetrator’s motives are irrelevant.
The convention requires action, even when it means interfering in another nation’s internal affairs.
So to commit genocide, it's not enough to oppress a minority. There must be systematic steps taken with the intent of wiping out the group as a whole.
“Holocaust” is used to refer to homicide on an enormous scale. “Genocide” means the targeted killing of a specific race (hence the “geno” prefix). It has been corrupted to mean the targeted killing of a group with a certain characteristic, whether that’s religion, nationality, race, or whatever. The Holocaust, with reference to WWII isn’t, in the most technical sense, “genocide” per se since Judaism is a religion, not an ethnic group. Still, not many will quibble about the intent, and “theocide” seems a picayune distinction in the face of 6 million murders.
Genocide refers to a systematic campaign designed to completely wipe out a certain ethnic, nationalist, or religious group from a certain area, by completely killing them off.
The Holocaust refers to a specific genocide that took place from 1933-1945 in Europe, that was organized by Nazi Germany and carried out with the aid of other european collaborators, and was targeted against european Jews.
Holocaust is an older word. The Armenian Genocide was originally referred to as a Holocaust by many people, including Hovannes Kajaznuni, first Prime Minister of the old Armenian Republic. It means destruction or slaughter on a mass scale. The word Genocide was made later, to describe what had happened to Armenians and Jews during World War 1 and 2 Respectively. It means the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.
Holocaust is general, Genocide is specific. For example, you could call wild fire a holocaust of flame if you wanted to be flowery and poetic, but you couldn’t call it Genocide.