To piggyback onto this, I think it's important to clarify that this can happen to anyone's political side, and when it does, it is tempting to turn a blind eye to it. For extremists on the right, it's blatant when they hate or hold prejudices against minorities, religions, etc. But if you're on the left, it's easier to rationalize and ignore prejudices or hatred from left extremists against "all white people" or "all men", etc, because, well, that attitude may just be a means to the end that you support. The only difference between the two, though, is one is easier for you to rationalize.

That commonality of demonizing an individual person based on physical traits or "otherness" knows no ideology and emerges whenever individuals are willing to sacrifice their own personal decency to achieve tribal goals. If we don't squash that specific kind of behavior whenever and wherever we see it, we'll be repeating it forever. It's not enough to crush one manifestation of tribalism if it means creating a new and just-as-potent version of it.

Isn't that what most Police espouse? That there is a 'blue line' and they judge who is good and who is less than good?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line

Obviously the main problem I'm talking about is more about when you decide a priori that whole groups of people will definitely do bad things and are therefore worthy of bad treatment regardless of whether they have actually done anything, but I think there are lots of police entities out there that carry out their duties professionally and compassionately.

Not really. It's more convincing people that there are other people who are an existential threat to you and your society. While heated rhetoric about immigrants is certainly bad, real atrocities start when you spread the message that "it's us or them", if we'd let them have their way they'd kill us all. And this is something I've heard in the West a lot recently, especially coming from Israel and its supporters when referring to Palestinians.

Wars might be caused by disputes about borders, or by greed. They don't require the elimination of the enemy, just its defeat. But at least some of the better known genocides and mass murders are caused by the perception in the mind of the perpetrators that the very existence of the victims is an existential threat to them.

Killing women and children could only ever seem appropriate if one thought that the women and children deserved as much consideration as a wild animal. I think it's the same with slaves in a lot of time periods. They didn't kill them for fun, but they also didn't get charged with murder when they did kill them.

Between killing enemy combatants and killing pests, genocide tends to look a lot more like killing pests.

So once you've set a narrative of the "it's us or them" type, it's easy to place the blame of your necessary defensive action on the enemy: because the enemy has already renounced its humanity when it set itself on enslaving or destroying you.

In Rwanda, the divisions were constructed by the people running the colonies and hadn't actually been divisions recognized by the people prior to that. That happened over a period of decades, sure, but they were also complete fabrications that turned into reasons to kill people who were called "cockroaches" over the state run radio.

I agree that dehumanization isn't the only factor, but it's also not cartoonish. People kill each other all the time for all sorts of terrible reasons, but what causes them to crowd a bunch of women and children into a building and set it on fire is a belief that those people are less than human.

Once again, I'm not talking about war, I'm talking about genocide.

Edit for clarification: a lot of the things you mentioned are very often present, but in that class we read about the genocides in Turkey/Armenia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia and Germany, and it was striking how similar the language was from place to place. Despite the different cultural, economic, and historical circumstances, the one thing they all had in common was really brutal language about the targeted group. We've all seen the propaganda targeted at Jews in Germany, and I mentioned above the Rwandan radio calling people cockroaches. This attitude toward the opponent is necessary but not sufficient.

"Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror."

You're right, it's not literally saying they're subhuman, but it seems pretty close. Actions are irrelevant, only identity matters. That doesn't have anything to do with perceived threats. Only a crazy person would think that someone of a certain class was a threat regardless of their actions unless they believed that there were implicit differences that basically amounted to those of different class not deserving life. And yeah I think it's definitely a genocide.

It's very similar to the genocide in Cambodia where they killed people who wore glasses (in addition to all the others) because they assumed that if they wore glasses it must be because they were literate, and all intellectuals were the enemies of the working class. We read an account of a man who had been a leftist but was sent to a camp because of his glasses. Once again, they didn't literally say people were subhuman, but they sought to attribute fundamental differences to something as superficial as eyesight.

In my first comment, I was mostly talking about people coming to believe that a group of people was fundamentally different in a way that common decency no longer applies, that you no longer give them even the consideration you would give criminals, you just send them off to die because they are irredeemable for something as stupid as what family they were born into or whether or not they wore glasses.

So, no, it wasn't about any kind of a fundamental difference. That ideology didn't believe that there was any group of people to which common decency no longer applies. They believed that common decency no longer applies to anyone, because revolutionary necessity requires it. People who were deemed dangerous to that necessity were killed not because they were deemed subhuman, but solely because they were deemed to be a danger. They even reflected it in the criminal code - it didn't speak of "punishment", but rather of "means of social protection", and death penalty was euphemistically referred to as "the highest measure of social protection".

The Stalinist regime was plenty violent and systematically kills millions of people, but calling it genocide doesn't make sense because that wasn't what it was by definition unless you want to compare it to Nazi germany which killed millions more.

But anyway, originally we were talking about "the worst atrocities in the history of the world", not genocide specifically. So it's reasonable to assume that genocide in this context is used in a colloquial meaning - i.e. any kind of intentional mass murder by some group metric, not necessarily ethnicity.

I too took a class on the Holocaust, even if it was more broad, looking first at the industrialisation of society which enabled the industrialisation of a genocide: by killing at industrial scale, you don't need many executionners, but you'll need a lot of good paper-pusher making sure that the trains run on time and that the camps are well-supplied in fuel, bullets and gas.

> I try to remember that they are a human and deserve decency

That's a good idea.