Genocide Watch, a nonprofit created to “prevent, stop, and punish genocide and other forms of mass murder,” has classified the United States of America as a country with an alert status of a “Genocide Warning.” A “Genocide Warning” is more severe than a “Genocide Watch,” but less severe than a “Genocide Emergency.” According to their website, the United States has reached the stages of “classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, polarization, and denial.” The targeted groups, according to Genocide Watch, include “Native Americans, Black Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latinx Americans, Jews, and Muslims.”
According to their country overview, Genocide Watch details the United States as follows:
“Since its founding, the United States has systematically oppressed both Native American and Black American minority populations. While over the last century the U.S. has adopted and codified numerous civil rights laws, covert policies still undermine these minorities, rendering both groups as underrepresented and second-class members of American society. As growing hate develops in the US, Asian Americans, Latinx People, Jews, and Muslims also suffer from discrimination and violent attacks for being themselves.”
Who are the perpetrators? Genocide Watch asserts that they are the United States government and its individual citizens.
The “current situation” is described with a list referencing “threatened elites; growing white supremacist activity and speech against women, people of color and minority religious groups; growing hostility towards undocumented and immigrants populations; discriminatory state policies towards sexual and gender minorities; violence at public rallies; racial disparities in policing; [and] unacknowledged genocides in the past against Native Americans and African slaves.”
“The Logic of the Ten Stages of Genocide” is explained by Dr. Gregory Stanton, Founding President of Genocide Watch. Although stages are not necessarily reached in order, some are interrelated. The stages of genocide that that United States has reached, according to Genocide Watch, are described as follows:
“The first process is Classification, when we classify the world into us versus them.”
“The second is Symbolization, when we give names to those classifications like Jew and Aryan, Hutu and Tutsi, Turk and Armenian, Bengali and Pashtun. Sometimes the symbols are physical, like the Nazi yellow star.”
“The third is Discrimination, when laws and customs prevent groups of people from exercising their full rights as citizens or as human beings.”
“The fourth is Dehumanization, when perpetrators call their victims rats, or cockroaches, cancer, or disease. Portraying them as non-human makes eliminating them a ‘cleansing’ of the society, rather than murder.”
“The sixth is Polarization, when moderates are targeted who could stop the process of division, especially moderates from the perpetrators’ group.”
The tenth stage is Denial. “Denial is a continuation of a genocide, because it is a continuing attempt to destroy the victim group psychologically and culturally, to deny its members even the memory of the murders of their relatives.”
In their report focusing on Native Americans and black Americans, Genocide Watch states, “White Americans have subjected both groups to Genocide.” According to the report, both Native Americans and black Americans “fear for their own safety” while being subjected to “discrimination” today.
The scathing report released by Genocide Watch takes a hit at President Donald Trump, suggesting a connection between him and the activity of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) by falsely tying him to “far-right white supremacist” groups. Genocide Watch writes, “While KKK membership has dwindled since the 1980s due to FBI infiltration and Southern Poverty Law Center lawsuits, since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2016, there has been an alarming 55% spike in far-right white supremacist group memberships.”
Genocide Watch has even released a special statement on President Donald Trump titled, “The ‘Stolen Election’: Trump’s Big Lie.” In their statement, Genocide Watch writes, “Donald Trump has promoted all of these processes.” The processes listed include all ten of the stages of genocide which include “classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination, and denial.”
They assert that “restraints in the American Constitution have checked the process at Polarization, Preparation, and Persecution.”
Between President Donald Trump and the Nazis, Genocide Watch horrifically and inaccurately writes, “The parallels are ominous.”
“The parallels to Nazism should make your blood run cold,” Genocide Watch writes. “Trump has promoted policies that are chillingly similar to Nazi policies. He is supported by neo-Nazis and Congressmen and Senators too cowardly to oppose him. Trump himself suffers from the same Narcissistic Personality Disorder that deranged Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and other tyrants [sic]. He is most at home with murderous dictators like Kim Jong-un, Putin, Xi Jinping, Erdoğan, and Mohammed bin Salman.”
Genocide Watch also takes a swipe at white police officers in their overall report on the United States writing, “throughout American history, white police officers have murdered thousands of Black Americans with impunity.”
Regarding black Americans living in the United States today, Genocide Watch writes, “Since Black Americans continue to experience mass incarceration, are barred from voting through felony convictions, are vilified as criminals by racist political leaders and by the media, are brutalized by racist police, and the history of Black Americans’ persecution is denied, Genocide Watch asserts that the United States is in Stage 3: Discrimination, Stage 4: Dehumanization and Stage 10: Denial.”
Regarding Native Americans, Genocide Watch states, “Since colonization in the 1600s, the white majority in the United States has systematically oppressed Native Americans through forced assimilation, forced displacement, cultural genocide and mass killings.” The phrasing of this sentence suggests that such actions are still going on today.
They also write suggestively that “Between 1492 and 1900, as many as ten million Native Americans died from diseases like smallpox,” adding, “Thousands more were murdered in genocidal extermination campaigns.”
In their report, Genocide Watch also criticizes the United States for denying that “genocide occurred against Native Americans.”
Concerning high school textbooks, the report continues, “They justify the massacres perpetrated by the US Army as defending the ‘manifest destiny’ of whites to possess America.”
According to Genocide Watch, the United States “continues to illegally occupy Native American land in violation of treaties…”
Genocide Watch makes the following recommendations for the United States in its effort to stop its “genocide” activity:
- “K-12 education should be required about Native American and African American history and current affairs.”
- “The United States government should acknowledge that it is still in violation of its treaties with Native Americans.”
- “Affirmative action should continue to support Black and Native American success in academia and the workforce.”
- Police departments should be purged of racist police officers after intensive investigation and vetting under new federal law.”
The United States is not the only free world listed on Genocide Watch’s site with a “warning,” but Israel and the Israeli Defense Forces are listed as well alongside Hamas.
In their overview of Israel, the IDF, and Hamas, Genocide Watch writes, “On the one hand, Palestinians have faced discrimination, dispossession, persecution, and the erasure of their cultural heritage, and 5.7 million refugees cannot access their homelands after the exodus of Palestinians in 1948. In the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), Israel has subjected Palestinians to military occupation in the West Bank and a blockade in Gaza. On the other hand, many Jewish people sought protection in Israel’s creation following centuries of persecution and genocide in Europe. Hamas, a terrorist group whose charter expresses the aim to destroy Israel, now controls Gaza. Both Hamas and Israel have committed war crimes in recent conflicts, with Palestinians suffering overwhelmingly.”
More details about Genocide Watch’s report on Israel can be found at Genocide Warning: Israel, July 2024.
Genocide Watch has expanded its work into a global coalition called the ‘Alliance Against Genocide,’ which has 125 member organizations from 31 countries. The Alliance is defined as an organization that “concentrates on predicting, preventing, stopping, and punishing genocide and other forms of mass murder. It brings an analytic understanding of the genocidal process to specific situations.”
The Alliance defines genocide as “the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Genocide Watch offers more details in their definition of the term on their page, ‘What is Genocide?’
Genocide Watch has found its place among the resources many people, including teachers, deem reliable because of its name and purpose. Although they highlight what is happening in places like China and Sudan, adding places like the United States and Israel to the map of countries on the genocide scale is severely wrong and misleading.
Unfortunately, as long as radicals who agree with this evaluation continue dominating K-12 education, these reports could become solid knowledge that students will recall, if taught. Conservative and moderate teachers in the field are much less likely to have students navigate the website and discover the absurdity of listing the USA or Israel on the scale of a genocide watch. In order to stop the degradation of America by educators across the country, conservative and moderate teachers must be the ones in the classrooms as they will recognize when politicized content tries to get snuck in and be able to do something to stop it.
