Gendercide--Extra Credit

"Never again" said the Jews (and many others) about the Holocaust. However, there have been many such tragedies in the 20th and 21st centuries, some of them going on right now. Please take a look at the "case studies" on the Gendercide site. Choose one of the studies and comment here on that article/case study. In studying for the final exam, you might find particularly useful the Armenia case study, the Bangladesh case study,  the Nanking (Nanjing) case study, and the Rwanda case study.  In what way does the information on this site help justify the 20th century's nickname "The Age of Violence" or the 21st century's nickname "The Age of Stupidity"?

Harvest of Despair (extra credit)

Communism is one of the three "flavors" of totalitarianism we will be talking about this month. It is the most widespread and, in a certain sense, most successful flavor of totalitarianism--and probably the most important for you to understand.

Normally, I show in class a video called Harvest of Despair.  With fewer teaching days than normal, I've had to leave out a few things, and I'm skipping the video this semester.  It would be great if you could watch the video online.  Unfortunately, the sound quality of the YouTube version is pretty poor.  The best YouTube version is in six parts:

Harvest of Despair, Part I
Harvest of Despair, Part II
Harvest of Despair, Part III
Harvest of Despair, Part IV
Harvest of Despair, Part V
Harvest of Despair, Part VI


There is a better quality DVD version in the NSU library.  A group of you might want to check the DVD out and watch it together.  I'll give you extra credit for your response to the prompt here:

What did the Harvest of Despair video teach you about Soviet Communism that you didn't know before? What insights did you gain on the motivations and methods of those who supported the movement? Did anything here help you understand why this particular flavor of totalitarianism survived longer (and did more damage) than other totalitarian systems?

Yad Vashem

"One death is a tragedy: a million deaths is a statistic," said Joseph Stalin. Unfortunately, this tends to be the truth. Numbers are a useful tool for measuring things that are too big for us to understand in any other way, e.g., how far it is from earth to the sun. But using numbers often blunts the reality of human tragedies.

The Yad Vashem site tries to make the victims of the Holocaust something more than just statistics. Its database is an attempt to preserve a memory of as many individual victims as possible.

Browse through the database, and look through some of the individual pages of testimony. What do you find interesting/memorable in these pages?