In order to understand the phenomenon of genocide, we will consider the question of the political creation of racial difference: Do people kill others because of their belonging to a national, ethnic group, race or religion (regardless of individual guilt)? We shall refer to the two sides of this phenomenon. The first is the historical aspect, trying to understand the various histories within the twentieth-century events that enabled the proliferation of genocide. We will build a comparative discussion about the political, economic and social standing behind the events of “murder”, which is the inner meaning of every genocide, namely, the possibility of looking in the face of someone else, of the “other”, and committing the crime (of murder). How is it possible at all in our age? The second aspect is the philosophical one, the search for the meaning of the special conditions, mental, moral, and aesthetic that created the situation in which genocide was possible at all. We shall explore the relationships between the modern Nation-state and the growth of the phenomenon of genocide, and emergency laws, which created the situation of denial, muting, and blindness in face of genocide, the possibility to "ignore" and to continue daily life as if nothing was happening. We shall also examine the psychological, cultural, and societal roots of human cruelty and mass violence, that enable individuals collectively and separately to perpetrate mass violence and genocide.