Warfare 205: Genocide
Greetings and semovedly! Well, you usually get a better price if you don’t buy things semovedly. Anyway, welcome to another blogpost of mine! Today's topic is rather heavy, so let’s get it out of the way. But first, the obligatory disclaimer:
Disclaimer: Genocide is an atrocity and should never be considered anything else. It is a gross violation of people’s rights and a great destruction that deprives the world of one of its people. We at Stellima do not support nor condone any such vile acts. Genocide is a tool for story telling like any, and should never be portrayed as something good, for it is never anything good, regardless of any fictitious claim of “gain.” Any jokes in the blogpost are to lighten the mood and not meant to diminish the horror of genocide.
And a bit of a warning: I will do my usual writing style where I put the reader in the position of the people I talk about in order to illustrate my points about why these things happen, the thought processes behind them, etc. In this case, these things are committing genocide. It might be uncomfortable for some readers to be put into the position of a genocider, so proceed with caution.
We’re good now, right? MOVING ON!
Definition
As per tradition, let’s start with a definition, shall we? I would define genocide accordingly:
Genocide is the intentional and systemic erasure/eradication of a culture and/or people.
One thing to notice here is that the definition does not include criteria of it having to be violent, including death, or the like. You can do genocide in a “harmless” manner, which I will explain in a bit and provide a demonstration of
Some might argue that there should be a distinction between genocide as done with violence and cultural erasure, which often lacks violence. And that distinction is very valid to make, and one can make the justification that one shouldn’t overuse “genocide” as a word, as it lessens the impact of the word. I, however, happen to think that whether you use violence or not, the erasure of a culture is a terrible act that makes the world a poorer place and more horrifying. And I think it is better to have the term genocide as an umbrella term to mean eradication in general. Then we can do subtypes.
Types of genocide
I would divide up genocide along 2 axes. The first one is biological vs cultural genocide. This tells if the aggressor is interested in being rid of the culture only and doesn’t care if the people still exist, or if you want the physical people gone, and with that, often the culture also. The second is the level of engagement you do to cause the genocide, as below.
Passive Genocide
In passive genocide, you do, like I said in cultural assimilation, a lot to get people to willingly abandon their own culture and thus destroy it. I use “Passive” because you don’t technically lay a hand on the people or their culture to get rid of them. You just make it very attractive to not be part of your own culture! It is fine, right? (No). Due to it being rather hands-off, it is rarely relevant to biological genocide.
Violent Genocide
Sometimes, just trying to gently encourage people to cease existing in the way you don’t want them to exist doesn’t cut it. So time to bring out the baseball bats with spikes on them to be a little more convincing. If a few eggs get cracked, that happens, and sometimes you just want to see the eggs flow in the rain!
So yeah, you use violence to either encourage people to abandon their culture or to start biologically eradicating them. You don’t necessarily need to kill them to get them to disappear biologically… they just don’t need to have any more children. So you can use violence to castrate people, and then 3 generations later, the people are gone biologically.
Industrial Genocide
Similar to passive, this one is virtually exclusive, but where passive genocide relates to cultural genocide, industrial genocide is biological genocide. You want to do death and terror on an industrial scale in order to get rid of the people as fast as possible. This requires a lot of logistics and technology, so it is not that common historically, but… You can do it anytime! Technically.
Inferiority vs Superiority
Genocide can come about for many reasons, and it is usually a mix of both the genocidee… Is that a word? It is now! Anyway, it’s usually a mix of the genocidee’s perceived cultural inferiority, and the genocider’s perceived cultural superiority. But which one you focus on depends on many factors involved in the genocider’s own culture.
We can take a historical empire: the Roman Empire! They do come up a lot, don’t they? They did so many good things and so many terrible things. Anyway, they had this vast empire, and you can bet all the shiny pennies you have that they engaged in genocide as I define it.
But at the time, making an industrial genocide was not feasible. I will get back to why in the section on problems of genociding. The sheer scale and blood made it not a workable proposition for Romans, but Romans did have one thing: an enormous sense of superiority over everyone else. And in their defence, when you steamroll a huge fraction of the known world in what seems like no time at all, it is difficult to NOT get a sense of superiority. This doesn’t justify anything or say they were right or anyone after, just… It is very human.
So anyway, the Romans stomped out plenty of cultures to replace them with their own, using their sense of superiority. The opposite is when the genocider has a great sense of inferiority of the people they’re genociding. The Holocaust is the most infamous example where the Nazi ideology put Jewish people at the extreme bottom of their hierarchy based on the fictitious concept of “race.” In that case, the attempted genocide–thank Divinum it didn’t succeed despite the enormous damage it caused–was focused on getting rid of those deemed inferior, rather than being based on their own superiority. And yes, I am simplifying things a lot; the reasons of Nazi Germany were complex like everything in life is.
Of course, the two often go hand in hand, as I stated, but one is usually more prevalent than the other.
Problems of violent genociding
Genocides face many problems, primarily that it is people doing it to people. The passive genocide tends to face much less problems because you are not physically harming people… technically. The violent one tends to have more problems, and then the industrial one faces the largest issues.
In my post on killing, I discussed that humans really don’t like to kill each other. You’re hard-wired to not want to kill. But that is where the previous parts can help. If you go the inferiority route hard enough, you can actually–halfly–convince people that another human is not a human. The whole dehumanization of a human is so dangerous because it is disturbingly, incredibly effective in getting people to do extremely cruel things. Studies have shown time and time again that when you dehumanize people, it becomes faaarrrrr too easy to be excessively cruel; they are not “people,” after all. Which is, of course, a horrible thing to think, and why it is important to humanize even those we hate the most, because otherwise we risk falling into this trap.
Another obvious problem for any genocide to happen is that unless extremely depressed, people usually don’t want to cease existing, either biologically or culturally. So they will inevitably resist it, and if you try to use violent or industrial genocide against them, they will react violently. This is why, for example, during WW2, the Germans tried to keep it all under wraps; well, it is one of many reasons. But if people knew they were going off to absolute certain death, they would fight tooth and nail to not go there. And any gain you have of making it impersonal at some camp is lost, as your men have to kill them personally now.
Logistics of industrial genocide
Genocide is an intentional endeavour, so it has a logistical component to it. I will focus primarily on the biological genocide because it is the toughest one and generally the absolutely worst one. Let’s start with the big one.
The killing
This one is the toughest. How do you do it en masse? If you use sharp objects to cut, well, people might fight back then, and let’s be honest, swinging a large sharp object gets tiring quickly. So what about machine guns or guns in general? It’s easier on you, but the victims can still try to attack you, and you still have that whole problem of people being psychologically scarred from killing a metric fuck tonne of people. If you want to do this at an enormous scale, it needs to be quick, be some way for people to not fight back, and be as impersonal as possible.
If we are going for real-life things, gas is a fantastic thing to use. Everyone needs to breathe once every 3 minutes at the best of times, so that means they will get it in, cannot hold out, and once it starts, it's hard to stop for them. There is a reason why it was picked, after all, in real life. But if you go with scifi, I don’t know, maybe you have some wide-angle death ray in a room and you can just zap the victims, and they are–poof!–gone. Or if you do fantasy, maybe an area of effect spell in the middle of the room that blasts them all with 9th-degree burns.
Keeping it under wraps
Another important aspect is to keep it all quiet. How does one do that with large-scale industrial genocide? Step 1 is the most important one: keep as few people in the loop as possible. The less people know, the better. You don’t need to fear that the guard who guards the prisoners is going to run out and tell the entire world that your Nazi-esque regime is doing genocide if all they think they are doing is guarding a bunch of malnourished people. Sure, it might not be a nice prison, but with dehumanization, it can be considered “deserved,” and that will keep the guards quiet, and even if they blather, no one is going to pay attention to malnourished prisoners. I am looking at you 🇺🇸
And this goes for all levels: the less they know, the better, and those who know should be vetted to a very high degree to be certain that they will not blather. Or you could keep hold of them by threats and such. This does have the issue of often leading to suicides to escape the horrors you are pushing onto them, but… You are already genociding people, so what are a few hundred more of your own? Gotta crack a few eggs and all that. If we’re gonna be evil cruel genocidal maniacs, we might as well not discriminate too much!
Getting people there
This is by far the most dangerous for you as the genocider. Because there are a lot of people to be dealt with, and moving a lot of people is difficult. If you have failed at the previous step, you will have the people you’re trying to genocide actively come for you to kill you, instead, which means you will fail at actually killing the right people. This has, in some cases, actually been used to do the killing. You can push them through such harsh environments with so few resources that the people inevitably perish. Essentially, have people walk an incredibly dangerous and difficult path, with barely enough food to survive, or even less. So they have to fight for any chance to survive. It has been used in genocides, and it works, but again, there are a lot of them and not nearly as many of you.
Which is another reason why genocide happened more often after trains came about. Trains make it easier to move lots of people and make it easier to convince them it is somewhere not entirely death-campy. It takes a lot of work to build a railroad, and it is easier to believe no one would put in that amount of effort just to kill people… How naïve some people are, unfortunately.
But for scifi, if you do space and such, lots of people in cramped spaces means you, as the genocider, need to do a lot of work to make sure they don’t know they are certain for death, because once the riot starts, you’re not keeping control of the ship. If you do fantasy, you probably don’t have trains, but you might; if not, spells can help!
Peak Industrial Genocide Rate
My beloved sister Anne had a question about genocides, so I dug up data from history and the Holocaust, and from that data, I coined the term Peak Industrial Genocide rate, which I brought up in my math post. Or just PIG rate, which is the peak rate of killing that happened during the Holocaust. You could go higher or lower in the genocide in your world, depending on circumstances, but I feel having a numerical value helps gauge how bad you make your genocide.
So what was this rate of killing that the bastards did at their peak? Brace yourself–it is a mind-boggling amount of 650 people PER HOUR. Not per day, per HOUR. Every hour, they killed 650 people. That is 11 people per minute, or one person every 6 seconds roughly. That is such a horrifying number that it makes me physically ill just writing about it.
Micro-practicum: Xenomorphing
This name stands until I find a better name. Xenomorphing is a technology in my Stellima universe where you can genetically and biologically change an individual into another species, sex, or anything they want. It is an incredibly powerful technology. It can be used to change someone's species, which is great for espionage! Or maybe you are not too pleased with the biology you are born with; maybe you want to be a different sex–this can fix that, too! How it came to be is, however, not a good tale. I am one for making my world verisimilitude, so I gave it a horrifying origin despite it being used in the present day in my universe.
How did it come about that is related to our topic? Well… It was developed to make a genocide happen. Not in terms of killing people, but to eradicate a species from existence, and with it, suffocate their culture. I won’t go into great details of the tale for now because I haven’t fleshed it out enough, I feel. But one species developed xenomorphing and took it to the planet of the species they were set on exterminating, and they got busy on it. They went full industrial scale and forcefully morphed people into a different species. None of the individuals were meant to be killed; some died because they resisted too much, but their memories and personalities remained; just their species changed.
Horrifying, I know, but life is sadly such, and my universe is not a heaven of good. This was not one of the Concert of Stars species. It was a Farspace species. The Concert noticed what happened and could have stopped it… But they thought the technology used was simply too good not to have, and they were ready to let it happen just to get their hands on the xenomorphing technology. This happened in real life when the Allies let a lot of horrifying, powerful men on the Axis side go free in exchange for technology and knowledge. No technology is worth atrocities, in my opinion, but life and politics are nasty and horrifying, and sometimes, there are no angels.
Summa Summarum
So, as we can see, genocides are terrible, but we always knew that. They can, however, be mindbogglingly horrifying in the sheer scope they can get at. It is an atrocity and cannot be considered anything else. And as I said, it should never be portrayed as good. Even in my example above, it is not a good thing. It is a horrifying thing meant to show that even if you are “nice” by not killing the people, you are still causing massive destruction. And it is also to show that in politics, there rarely are angels, just some better devils.
So if you design a genocide, think about the motivation and what time this is, what they have available, what they want to achieve, and which of the types they can and will use.
PS: The image for the post is AI generated with humans modifying it. It is of a Ginnurak known as “Zhi who Genocides People”—fitting, eh?
Want to dive into a discussion about Stellima or the art of writing on Discord? We’d love to have you! And if you have any topics you struggle with or that you would like to suggest for a future blogpost, we’re open to suggestions!
Interested in supporting our work? Join our Patreon and become a part of Stellima as a citizen of Mjatreonn! Or would you like to give us some caffeine to fuel our writing? Consider buying us a coffee at Ko-fi! Every contribution inspires our creativity and keeps us going. Thank you for your support!
Copyright ©️ 2025 Vivian Sayan. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as types of genocide and the PIG rate are copyrighted under Creative Commons without attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, specific ideas such as xenomorphing and the Concert of Stars, and all language or exact phrasing, are individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
We at Stellima value human creativity but are exploring ways AI can be ethically used. Please read our policy on AI and know that every word in the blog is written and edited by humans or aliens.
