2018 - 2019

0662-2099-01
  The Philosophical Structure of Genocide                                                              
FACULTY OF HUMANITIES
Aim Deuelle LuskiGilman-humanities326Mon1600-1800 Sem  1
 
 
University credit hours:  2.0

Course description

In our attempt to understand the phenomenon of genocide (in its basic definition - racial genocide in which other people are murdered because of their national, ethnic, racial or religious), we wish to relate to both aspects of the phenomenon: we will discusses the history of twentieth century that enabled the new phenomenon of genocide that characterizes the modern era. Since genocide crosses the political borders, and it produces its own map, we seek to build comparative discussions of the political, economic, and social conditions that stood behind the events.

The second aspect is the philosophical aspect, which seeks to present the conditions of mental and moral possibilities that created the idea of “other” and “otherness”, which enables the situations within which the genocide was made possible. For example, the connections between the modern nation-state, the phenomenon of exclusion, the definition of the laws of emergency, the creation of situations of denial, silencing, and blindness, that enable the people to stand aside, to live with the events taking place in front of them. The people that managed to "ignore" it and to be able to continue their routine as though nothing is happening.

We will learn about the Armenian genocide, about the genocide committed in Nazi Germany and in Soviet Russia, in Cambodia and in the American Indians, as in Gypsies and in the victims of the body and soul in Europe of World War II, the Rwanda. We will ask questions about proportionality and quantity: When does the deliberate murder of a population turn into "genocide"? What is the space for maneuvering and flexibility of the concept, what it contains and what it does not contain, and where and how the divisions and definitions are carried out, and mainly - whom do they serve?  

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