As in wiping out 100% of the targeted group. No survivors.
I don’t know if this counts as an “effort at genocide”, but the Beothuk Indians became extinct in 1829. Some were killed by settlers, some were killed by other (non-indigenous) tribes, some succumbed to disease.
The last Tasmanian died in 1876.
Dozens, if not hundreds, of tribal groups throughout the Americas have been wiped out since Columbus. It may be a bit difficult to determine whose genetic base was wiped out 100% and who was wiped out as an identifiable ethnic group (language, culture gone), but who passed some genes on in an assimilated manner. What do you mean by “wiped out?”
Some people think that modern Homo sapiens came along and wiped out Neanderthals and Homo erectus. I’m sure that’s an oversimplification, but there sure aren’t any Neanderthals or Homo erectus that survived.
Also, there are plenty of stories from ancient history about the old Greeks or Romans or Phoenicians going out and colonizing some island or coast in the Mediterranean. As far as I know, those places were occupied by stone age people who didn’t survive the colonization. I think that kind of thing was common in the ancient world.
Not entirely true. The last full-blooded Tasmanian actually died in 1888 (the 1876 date was due to a well-publicized death of one of the group), and, according to Lyndall Ryan’s The Aboriginal Tasmanians (mentioned in See Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore*, there are still surviving Tasmanian aborigines (about 2500 is the figure Hughes uses), descendents of the original Tasmanians and whites.
Ryan criticized the treatment of these people. Since everyone had a vested interest in believing them extinct (conservatives so they wouldn’t have to give them control of their ancestral homes; liberals because the sad story of the death of the tribe was a useful object lesson), they do not get any recognition.
*Read it. It’s one of the great history books.
Currently, one of the best known Tasmanian aborigines is Michael Mansell, who is frequently seen on television or in the press arguing on behalf of the Tasmanian aboriginal community. In this piece he states that the Tasmanian aboriginal population numbers 6,000
To the OP–It depends on how you define “genocide”. Many ethnic groups have gone extinct, but usually as a byproduct of disease, military defeat, dispossession, expulsion, and enslavement–rather than as the result of a stated policy by Ethnic Group X that they would hunt down and kill every last member of Ethnic Group Y. I can’t think of any example of the latter being “successful”. Other than the Holocaust, and perhaps some of the recent bloodletting in Africa, I can’t think of too many attempts, period.
Is supplantation the same thing as genocide? I haven’t seen anything thus far in this thread that constitutes genocide.
I am not one of those quibblers who says 100% of an ethnic group must be killed off before the word “genocide” is used. But I do think there are criteria for using that word, criteria that should be observed in order to avoid diluting its meaning. There must be an intent to kill people of certain ethnicity and no other, taking place in a relatively short period of time, with the ultimate goal being the elimination of that ethnic group either from their only place of inhabitance or from a country or region as large as a country.
That being the case, there have been many situations of populations disappearing due to effects of other populations, but most of them are not cases of genocide in my opinion. In my reckoning, the only instances of true genocide were the Jewish Holocaust, the Muslim purges of Bosnia and Kosovo, and the mass slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda. There may be more in antiquity that I’m not aware of.
I don’t count the supplantation of indigenous peoples or political purges as genocide. Political purges are not ethnically targeted and supplantation of cultures is unfortunately the natural mechanism for the succession of civilizations. Every culture will be supplanted at some point in time including yours and mine.
I doubt it, since people are even more adept at fucking as they are at killing.
Historically, conquests have been a matter of enslaving populations as much as exterminating them; subjugated males may have been forbidden to marry, but the conquerors would still take wives from the native population.
When we think of the Prussians, we usualy imagine Germans with upturned moustaches and pointy helmets, but the original Prussians were Baltics, like their cousins the Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians. The Germans launched crusades against them starting in the 9th C., and by the 17th C. there were no more native-speaking Prussians left. However, their DNA probably survives.
It’s just my conjecture that it’s unlikely to commit genocide without out-and-out rape; or also without the victimized women offering themselves to the invading soldiers in hopes of survival; and at least some of the soldiers, now paid off with confiscated land to become farmers, taking these women as wives. (I say this as a descendant of a French mercenary soldier who came ashore on Ireland as a bachelor with Oliver Cromwell’s invasion.)
The Lucayan Indians of the Bahamas were encountered by Columbus in 1492, and had disappeared from the islands by not long after 1513. Although the Spanish wiped them out very effectively, that was not their deliberate intent. Many died of disease, and the survivors were captured and taken as slaves to Hispaniola and the other islands of the West Indies. Certainly many people today are descended from the Lucayans, although culturally they have been utterly eradicated.
On the Tasmanian issue, I’ll admit I have no special knowledge or insight. But I was under the impression that many (including most other Australian aborigines) regard the claims of the present self-declared Tasmanian aborigines as tenuous. As I understand the situation the Tasmanian aborigines died off in the 1870’s at a time when aborigines all over Australia were suffering. A hundred years later, in the 1970’s, aborigine rights had become big and no aborigine need fear being oppressed by the government. In fact, in recognition of their past suffering, recompense was being offered to the surviving aborigines. It was at this point that some people in Tasmania came forward and said that they had some aborigine ancestors (as well as a majority of European ancestors). They declared themselves to be authentic Tasmanian aborigines and asked for the benefits they were entitled to. Call me cynical, but I feel these people are Tasmanian aborigines in the same sense that everybody’s Irish on St Patrick’s Day. But as I said, I may be wrong.
Bosnia, yes. Kosovo, no. The number of Kosovo Albanians killed was greatly exaggerated in order to build support for NATO’s campaign against Belgrade. Milosevic is currently (and justifiably) on trial for a number of war crimes, but genocide in Kosovo is not one of them, because there simply aren’t the bodies to back up the charge.
The only difference between Bosnia and Kosovo is that the genocide was stopped before it got very far (but some killing was done in Kosovo, let there be no mistake about that).
It beggars belief to suppose that the same Serbian nationalists under the same leadership exhibiting the same pattern of behavior would not have once again carried the killing to the same conclusion. In that light, Kosovo is nothing but a continuation of the anti-Muslim effort started in Bosnia.
Like I said in my OP, I am not a stickler about the numbers on genocide… it is more about an unmistakable intent and pattern of actions.
There’s no argument about that. But some killing is done in every war. And there were significant differences between the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts, which are probably not relevant to this thread. But if Kosovo was genocide because there was intent to ethnically cleanse the ethnic Albanians, what about the cleansing of Serbs in the Croatian Krajina, Catholics in Northern Ireland, Muslims in northern Sri Lanka, etc? It seems to me that you are allowing an awfully broad definition of “genocide” to then turn around and say that it’s only happened in four conflicts in modern times.
How big does a group have to be to qualify for genocide? In the ancient world when a rival city or state or village was conquered it was common to slaughter all the males and enslave or slaughter the women.
I remember someone telling me years ago that Stalin had wiped out entire ethnic groups, but since he chose groups that were entirely within the USSR he did not get the reputation for evil that Hitler got, even though he killed more civilians.
Well, obviously not human, but does Smallpox count? Except for a few scattered vials it’s gone.
That is what most people think. And there are probably no full-blooded Tasmanian aborigines. But there are some descendants – great great granchildren of Tasmanians who lived in islands near Tasmania.
The argument you give is used to justify ignoring the claims of these descendants. At the same time, many of the people who would be happy to support their claims use the “fact” that they are “extinct” as an argument in support of better treatment (e.g., “We don’t want these people to go extinct like the Tasmanians.”) and are reluctant to acknowledge that some do exist.
The story can be found here.
And the dodo is an even better example, but I think the question is about genocide, not extinction.