A cool guide to stages of genocide
Wednesday, 12 Mar 2025
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That’s more of an uncool guide
This isn’t any kind of a legal precedant. It’s just a general sense of what a genocide might look like. You cam jump to stage 4 without stages 1 and 2 happening
“This isn’t the same thing at all because our government has only done the first 8 steps.”
This guide and the 14 signs of fascism guide by Lawrence Britt are essential to know.
Copypasta below
Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt wrote an article about fascism (“Fascism Anyone?,” Free Inquiry, Spring 2003, page 20). Studying the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile), Dr. Britt found they all had 14 elements in common. He calls these the identifying characteristics of fascism.
The 14 characteristics are:
1 Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
2 Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
3 Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
4 Supremacy of the Military
Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
5 Rampant Sexism
The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.
6 Controlled Mass Media
Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
7 Obsession with National Security
Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
8 Religion and Government are Intertwined
Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions.
9 Corporate Power is Protected
The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
10 Labor Power is Suppressed
Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed .
11 Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.
12 Obsession with Crime and Punishment
Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
13 Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
14 Fraudulent Elections
Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.
This is an excellent example of what one might call Buzzfeedifcation. There is a complex process that scholars have spent decades examining that is turned into something simple and easily sharable on social media, and in the process it looses all nuance and meaning. This and the “14 signs of fascism” are the prime examples of that.
Science can be divided in many ways, one way is ideographic vs. Nomothetic. Nomothetic sciences are those where you can generalize observations into laws. For example physics is nomothetic. Ideographic sciences are those where phenomena has to be treated as separate and individual occurrences. History is highly ideographic. For instance even if we are talking about the holocaust, the fates of different individuals were radically different depending on a ton of factors.
For instances, while German homosexuals were meant for extermination, the Nazis didn’t really persecute Polish homosexuals unless they were found with German men. The reason for this was that homosexuals were considered German and human, but also defective and dangerous. The Nazis didn’t care about Polish homosexuals, because they thought Polish homosexuals would only further weaken the Polish people. Jews on the other hand were a racial enemy and had to be exterminated wherever they were encountered. Another great example is the Armenian genocide, which was to some degree carried out on the ground by Kurds. The Kurdish tribes would often ignore Armenians that “belonged” to their tribes and instead target Armenians that belonged to different tribes when they got orders to exterminate Armenians. This would lead to a tit for tat situation where the tribes that got their Armenians killed would retaliate by targeting the Armenians of the first tribe.
There are instances like that were only some of these stages are completed in one instance and we still have a genocide and other instances where more stages are completed and there is no genocide.
Some factors which this “list” does not contain are:
Not enough “Anti-Anti’s”. Peter Hayes, a historian of the holocaust, pointed out that one of the factors that in his mind led to the holocaust was the fact that while a lot of Germans weren’t antisemitic, not enough were anti-antisemitic. There weren’t enough people that were willing to actively oppose the German government.
The materialist motivations of perpetrators. Christopher Browning, Peter Hayes and Uğur Ümit Üngör has pointed out that we often see material considerations behind genocide. Uğur Ümit Üngör for instance pointed out the materialist motivations by both the Turkish government and the Kurdish perpetrators during the Armenian genocide, which to a large degree was motivated by acquiring the land that the Armenians possessed.
The nationalist motivations of perpetrators. I think it is Timothy Snyder that pointed out that one of the motivations for national minorities in the Soviet Union, like Lithuanians, Ukrainians and so on was that they often wished to establish their own nations, but in these nations they couldn’t envision a place for the Jews, so “removing” them might enable them in this project. Similarly Uğur Ümit Üngör, points out that with the Armenians gone the Kurds would have a much stronger claim in the region.
Every genocide is different, but none of them can simply be reduced to a list of 10 points.
that’s also why Russian bots don’t want you to know about the [Holodomor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor) man-made famine engineered to eradicate Ukrainians. Or Turks about the Armenian genocide for that matter.
This exact screenshot used to be shared in conspiracy subs about the unvaccinated
I disagree with this list. Stages are something you progress through in an order like the stages of grief or stages of life.
But genocide doesn’t follow the “steps” in order and sometimes some things like the forced identification never even come into play.
We still live this in Bosnia!
Can we maybe not call this “cool”?
Also, the US is on track if that’s what we’re getting at here.
So the US is at stage 7.
Holocaust Remembrance Day tomorrow. And Americans have already forgotten everything.
Reddit is truly fucked in the head.
Uhm…not cool because it’s happening now 😭
Just a light reminder that a tyrannical government attempting genocide CAN AND WILL skip steps on the ladder. Sometimes they start right at step 4 then go to 7 then 10, then back to 3. The “stages” name is very misleading.
RemindMe! 4 years
5 of these were started during Covid lol
So we’re at 7?
We got 8/10 with the COVID vaccine
“showing ID” is step 2 for genocide 😂😂😂
So is the US around step 7 or so?
If you voted Democrat, do yourself a favor and but a gun to protect yourself and you’re family. Learn how to use it, and stay safe.
Stage 11: get offended when they call you a genocidal ass. That’d be Israel now
The US is at stage 7.
A lot of people saying that the US is at stage 7 for removing people who entered a country knowing that they were not given permission to be there.
A country enforcing its laws? Actual genocide!!!!!
Holy fuck we are at number 7 in the US right now.
America seems on it’s way to step 8
Israel is in this picture and doesn’t like it
Like I said, The Holocaust started as a “mass deportation”
Israel is at the final stage already
So from where I’m sitting, it’s looking like the US is somewhere between stages 3 and 7 here, depending on which metrics you use.
So we’re currently at stage 7? 😅
And America is at which stage?
Literally, Serbia.
German AfD is also at stage 7. We all know how it ended the last time Germany had a fascist government
Undocumented people is just the beginning of the hateful agenda of the christian nationalism.
It doesn’t have to be an exact linear progression. Maybe instead of stages it should be more of a bingo card.
We at about Step #7 right now?
Can’t wait to see a cool guide to capitalism, oh wait…