I can get behind murder.

LMAO I was not ready for that. Anyway, genocide is usually the result of a group of people being blamed for another’s problems. Once the blaming starts, it’s easy to dehumanize them to the point where it makes sense to get rid of them.

A prerequisite is ceasing to see others as individuals but rather groups. Then the (possibly fictional) crimes of one become the crimes of all. Thusly it is justifiable to punish all.

The important lesson here is to treat others as individuals, not as representatives of a group.

Usually one of the first steps is dehumanization - make your targets “less than human” in the eyes of the population. Nazis famously did it by comparing Jews to rats. You’ll notice in a lot of recent Israeli press releases and media Palestinians are referred to as “inhuman animals” or some variation of that. By creating that disconnect between your targets and “normal, healthy” humans you reduce empathy and make harsher treatment seem acceptable.

Another step is to make your audience disgusted or angry. Studies show there’s a link between those two emotions and harsher judgments (although degree/method is still very much an area of research). To invoke disgust you may use words like “filthy, wretched, diseased, mindless” etc. Using the Nazi example again, they made cartoons that showed Jews as dirty, greasy and generally disgusting. To make people angry convince them your targets are “immoral, violent, bloodthirsty” and so on. Nazis leaned heavily into blaming Jews for society’s ills and calling them thieves. Both effects can be made greater if your audience is conditioned to be sensitive to anger/disgust, i.e. being raised to believe in strict definitions of purity and so on. For Nazis it was the idea that Aryans were racially superior. For Zionism it often involves teaching people they are “God’s chosen” with other races not having the same rights (like rights to dwell in territory claimed by Israel) because of religion.

So if you can make your victims seem less than human and enrage or disgust your audience you convince people to do horrible things. They won’t feel like they are doing it to valuable humans and often think it’s a form of justice or necessary cleansing. Using the above psychological “levers” can shift perceptions so large populations view some other group as different to relatable, valid people.

You ever drown or wipe out an ant colony? Take down a wasps nest? Swat away the hoards of mosquitos annoying you?

That’s genocide but they aren’t what you would consider equals as a human. I’m aware some super vegan froo froos, do. But anyways. Your ability to genocide an entire village of beings you don’t consider equal is where most of these feelings come from.

It’s also why the playbook, heavily updated by Hitler in the past, and Israel today, say that’s an important step. Dehumanize your enemy. Then wiping them off the face of the earth is a casual comment much like calling an exterminator to genocide those pesky wasps under your front porch. And I’m not being snarky when I say Israeli playbook. They have published and public books on exactly how to do this, how to wage a propaganda war, etc. It is not a secret. The US, and other 5 eye countries also follows the same aided by their intelligence agencies because it’s so powerful on the majority of low intellect people. Remember half the people are below average intelligence… Many that are above average aren’t interested. So you always have a minority that can critically think for themselves. The rest want it spoonfed.

Edit: Also if you want a laugh, Eddie Izzard somewhat explains it in his Dressed To Kill tour.

Genocide is just murder on an industrial scale intended to solve some social problem (at least that’s a modern way of looking at it). The justification for a single murder is extended to a whole group and those people become history.

Imagine that you know someone who intends to kill you. You can run and hide, or you can can kill them instead. Genocide is that on a large scale.

Or at least that’s the version of genocide thar is easiest to understand. There is also the Nazi version where you kill an entire people just because you hate them, not because they threaten you or have a resource that you desperately need for survival.

There is also the type of genocide that was committed against the indigenous people of the Americas. That happened over a long period of time and over two continents. It involved every type of genocide noted above at different times and places, plus the initial accidental genocide by disease (probably influenza) that killed off about 90% of the population prior to the colonizing that came later.

And just because you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t do it in the right circumstances. There is nothing more human than genocide. The only other animal that does it is chimps, if I remember correctly.

Sorry, that is a depressing note to end this comment on. Humans are scary.

Kraut I believe provides a good step by step of it using the Armenian Genocide as the case study. It’s in part 1 of his series on the history of Turkey.

Try watching The Wave (German “Die Welle”) from 2008. It’s based on a true story. Might enlighten you how these things can occur.

This YouTube video from Sprouts explains it very well.

Read itt get a summary Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning. It details how these police officers were dragged into being part of the WW2 genocide. Now have the government have the same thing happen in every city and it effects millions.

Someone who is quite persuasive gets wedded to an idea quite thoroughly. Others disagree with the idea but only after the first person gains enough supporters to make it happen.

Fascism

Imagine the stone age. Your tribe is running out of food, but there’s a nearby tribe with plenty of it. You group up, visit them during the night, murder them all and steal their food. This is pretty much a genocide. And it’s part of our nature. Always was, always will be.

Enough people accepting it and not resisting.

Like we’re seeing right now from all the liberals saying that they will vote for Biden anyways.