GENOCIDE - Cultural Genocide

Cultural genocide is the complete destruction of a culture for political, racial, or military reasons. That includes language, art, music, traditions, religions and anything else unique to that specific culture. While it can include the murder of people of a certain ethnicity, the phrases is usually used to describe when a group of people is forced or coerced to change who they are and so they lose their original culture. It often includes the destruction of religious or traditional objects or buildings.This type of genocide is the one most overlooked or ignored. The destruction of a culture however is the same as the destruction of a people, a civilization, a way of life. Our world is full of differences, ones that we may not see every day but ones that we should embrace rather than fear.

Although genocide is recognised as a crime under international law, cultural genocide is not. Genocide, the actual murder or eradication of numbers of people because of their ethnic, religious or national identity at least results in physical evidence in the form of actual bodies and falling populations, but cultural genocide is far more difficult to proscribe.



The cultural genocide is a way to cancel a people in a more subtle and less visible way, without massacres, deportations and assassinations, but eliminating their culture, language and religion.Various authoritarian and nationalist regimes have choosen this system when they wanted to resolve the problems created by ethnical minorities within their borders without making too many mess, arousing the horror and blame of international public opinion, for image and diplomacy reasons.

The term 'cultural genocide' comes from the word ‘gens’, meaning a clan or community of people related by common descent.

The idea of cultural genocide implies the process of undermining, suppressing, and ultimately eliminating, native cultures.

The deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage of a people or nation for political or military reasons is also termed as cultural genocide.