7.8 Mass Atrocities

Question 1

What was Armistice Day?

Answer 1

November 11, 1918 is the day when Germany surrendered to the Allies in World War I.

Question 2

What was the Ottoman Empire’s justification of the Armenian Genocide?

Answer 2

Armenian Christians were supposedly cooperating with the Russian Army, an enemy of the Ottoman Empire during WWI.

Question 3

Why was the Armenian Genocide called the 20th century’s first genocide?

Answer 3

It was a mass killing of people based on their race, religion or ethnicity.

Question 4

What continued to cause deaths across the world after WWI ended?

Answer 4

An influenza epidemic.

Question 5

The term Lost Generation was used to describe what?

Answer 5

People suffering from the shock of World War I.

Question 6

How many peasants died as the result of famine as the result of Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture?

Answer 6

7 to 10 million peasants starved to death.

Question 7

What did Heinrich Himmler oversee in the Nazi government?

Answer 7

The SS or Nazi secret police.

Question 8

What were ghettos?

Answer 8

Portions of German cities where Jews were forced to live.

Question 9

What was the “Final Solution”?

Answer 9

A campaign let by the Nazi SS to exterminate all Jews in Europe.

Question 10

How many Jews were killed in the Holocaust?

Answer 10

About six million

Question 11

What was the “Asia for Asiatics” program?

Answer 11

Japans policy of forcing peoples it had conquered into forced labor programs. This included military service, public works projectrs, and prostitution forced on Chinese, Korean and other Asian women.

Question 12

What particularly deadly form of bombing was carried out by the Allies in Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo?

Answer 12

firebombing

Question 13

After the atrocities of World War II, the global community said attempted genocides could never happen again. Were they right?

Answer 13

NO.

Question 14

Yugoslavia was created by the Allies after World War I. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Yugoslavia collapsed with it. What happened next?

Answer 14

The area became “Balkanized” - forming indpendent countries that defined citizenship based on ethnic background and religion.

Question 15

Serbia, one of the new Balkan countries formed after the collapse of Yugoslavia, was led by Slobodan Milosevicc, a dictator with an obsession about “ethnic purity”. Who did Milosevicc and Serbian Nationalist want dead or driven out of their homes?

Answer 15

Muslims from Bosnia and Kosovo and essentially anyone who was not ethnically Serbian.

Question 16

What is ethnic cleansing?

Answer 16

Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making a region ethnically homogeneous.

Question 17

Did Bosniaks, Kosovars and Croats give up peacefully when attacked by Serbian nationals?

Answer 17

No. They retaliated with their own acts of violence.

Question 18

When Rwanda won independence from Belgium in 1962, what happened to ethnic tensions within the country?

Answer 18

The majority Hutus took revenge against the minority Tutsis for years of favor by the Belgians.

Question 19

In 1993, when negotiations for shared power between the Hutus and Tutsis were cut short by Rwanda’s president dying in a plane crash, what happened?

Answer 19

Nearly a million Tutsis and some moderate Hutus were killed, maybe more. Genocide of Tutsis was attempted and horrific acts of violence were commited toward this effort.

Question 20

What did the U.N. do about the attempted genocide in Rwanda?

Answer 20

Nothing. U.N. Peacekeepers were instructed to NOT use force to restore order. The United States and other countries evacuated their personnel.

Question 21

In Darfur, a region of Western Sudan, what happened to non-Arab Muslim Africans in 2003?

Answer 21

The Arab Muslim government unleash the Janjaweed to destroy their villages. More than 200,000 people were killed and another one million were displaced from their homes.l

Question 22

When the International Criminal Court charged Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir of warm crimes, what happened?

Answer 22

He kept directing the Janjaweed to kill non-Arab residents of Darfur or drive them out of their homes.

Question 23

What does the failure of international efforts in the Balkans, Rwanda, and Darfur to intervene and stop attempted genocide tell us about the likelihood of these things happening again?

Answer 23

It’s not unlikely.