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Prof. Saulius SužIedelis: "Cruel History Of Genocide Still Plagues

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  • Prof. Saulius SužIedelis: "Cruel History Of Genocide Still Plagues

    PROF. SAULIUS SUžIEELIS: "CRUEL HISTORY OF GENOCIDE STILL PLAGUES US IN 2011"

    Baltic Review
    http://baltic-review.com/2011/05/16/prof-saulius-suziedelis-%E2%80%9Ccruel-history-of-genocide-still-plagues-us-in-2011%E2%80%9D/
    May 16 2011

    Kaunas, May 16, 2011 -- From 23 March to 12 May, Millersville
    University (Pennsylvania, USA) Professor Emeritus Saulius SužiedÄ-lis
    held a series of public lectures at VMU on genocide and mass murder
    in the 20th century. His last lecture focused on genocide from the
    perspective of global history and politics, the concept of genocide
    today and in the context of Communism and Nazism.

    The professor began the final lecture by reminding the definition of
    genocide coined by Raphael Lemkin, who claimed that it is destruction
    of a national pattern. Attempts to define genocide and its role in
    history became louder in 1995, when the greatest genocide researchers
    gathered at a conference in Yerevan (Armenia), commemorating the
    80th anniversary since the mass murder of Armenians carried out by
    the Ottoman Empire. One of conference's participants, Steven Katz,
    opposed such a broad definition of genocide and claimed only the
    Holocaust can be described by that term.

    Prof. SužiedÄ-lis talked about the distinctions and similarities
    between genocide and the Holocaust pointed out by various researchers
    and the discussions they sparked. For instance, some theorists
    said the mass murder of Jews was global, purely ideological and
    bureaucratically organised, as opposed to all other genocides. Broader
    definitions approach genocide as any repression a nation is subjected
    to; Lithuanian author Izidorius IgnataviÄ~Mius has used the word
    to describe the mass murder and other oppressive acts committed to
    Lithuanians by the Communist and Nazi regimes.

    Many other examples were remembered in the professor's lecture. David
    E. Stannard, Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii
    System, criticised Katz's theory by saying that the exclusion of all
    other cases but the Jews from the definition of genocide is akin to
    the denial of the Holocaust by anti-Semites, as all other genocides
    and massacres are trivialized in such a way.

    Horrors of Genocide - All Over the World

    Prof. Stannard has researched the massacres of Native Americans,
    in which entire tribes were wiped out and some 20 million natives died.

    What was controversial, according to Prof. SužiedÄ-lis, is that many
    of the American Indians died from diseases they caught, e.g. from the
    colonists' bed sheets, due to lack of immunity to fight the bacteria
    with antibodies. Nevertheless, it was murder on a massive scale;
    in 1851, the Governor of the then recently founded California signed
    a document that said all American Indians must be fought until they
    are completely extinct. In ten years that followed, more than two
    thirds of all Native Americans in California were murdered or died,
    which was typical of those times.

    Later on, Prof. SužiedÄ-lis demonstrated Yale University's world map
    showing cases of colonial and indigenous genocide, and highlighted
    the more interesting cases. Congo, which is one of the rare countries
    in Africa with an abundance of various resources, was the place where
    some 2 million slaves died, mostly from work in mines. In Southeast
    Africa (currently Namibia), German soldiers killed 100 to 200 thousand
    Africans; some of those shooters became Nazi generals later on. The
    professor also talked of similar horrific acts in Eastern Timor,
    the Caribbean islands and Guatemala. The latter case involved a 1950s
    conflict between Spanish-born people, which were higher on the racial
    hierarchy at the time, and native Indians of Guatemala, which were
    placed at the bottom but were the majority; their revolts ended with
    hundreds of thousands of casualties. "This is just one example showing
    how the concept of genocide is semi-politicized, used to represent
    a certain point of view, i.e. colonial genocide", explained Prof.

    SužiedÄ-lis.

    The professor then took a closer look at the Genocide Studies Program
    offered at Yale and the particular cases this university offers to
    analyse, remarking that it uses expanded definition of genocide and
    includes not just racial but social and political cases of mass murder
    as well. While the program was complimented for focusing on varied
    examples, such as the especially cruel social-based genocide carried
    out by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, Prof. SužiedÄ-lis noted
    the absence of the USSR in the program's syllabus.

    Still No United Assessment of History

    Turning to recent realities, Prof. SužiedÄ-lis spoke of the Prague
    Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, signed in 2008,
    which attracted attention to the issue of "double genocide" and sought
    to make the past horrors of Communism and Nazism equally recognized
    in Europe. The declaration caused an opposition among politicians
    and scientists in Israel and Western Europe, accusations were made
    against Ukraine, Lithuania and other countries for trivializing the
    significance of the Holocaust by comparing it to Communist crimes.

    There were plans to hold Nuremberg-like trials and sentence the
    leaders of the Communist regime, but they did not materialize.

    "Many people in the West have a certain image of the Soviet Union
    in their heads because it contributed in a major way to the fight
    against fascism, thus somehow in their eyes the USSR is not as evil
    as Nazi Germany", Prof. SužiedÄ-lis said. "It is 2011 now, but this
    cruel history, all these genocides and -isms are still plaguing us,
    because, it seems, we cannot settle for a united assessment of history,
    which is the root of all conflicts", he concluded.

    Thanking the audience for coming to his lectures, Prof. SužiedÄ-lis
    expressed hope that his outline of general, historical facts and
    background related to genocide will have provided enough understanding
    to more easily grasp these issues and find reliable material without
    getting lost in the bottomless pile of information on the Internet.

    Prof. Saulius SužiedÄ-lis, born in 1945 in Gotha, Germany, spent his
    early years in the Brockton's Lithuanian community in Massachusetts,
    served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Ethiopia in 1967-1969. He acquired
    Ph.D. in Russian and Eastern European history at the University of
    Kansas in 1977. SužiedÄ-lis has worked at the U.S. Department of
    Justice (1982-1987), he has also published many scientific books and
    articles on Lithuanian history. Since 1998 he has been a member of
    the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the
    Soviet and the Nazi Regimes in Lithuania. From 2006 to 2010 he chaired
    the Annual Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide at Millersville
    University, in which he also was a history professor.

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