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The German parliament has approved a resolution declaring that the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War One was a "genocide".

Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their people died in the atrocities of 1915. Turkey says the toll was much lower and rejects the term "genocide".

"We will do whatever is necessary to resolve this issue,"

Announcing the human rights report, Secretary General of Amnesty International Salil Shetty listed US President Donald Trump alongside world leaders like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and claimed that their "divisive fear-mongering has become a dangerous force in world affairs."

also criticizes former President Barack Obama's record on human rights, saying he "leaves a legacy that includes many grievous failures to uphold human rights" during his eight years in office. It says early indicators suggest that Trump's foreign policy will "usher in a new era of greater instability and mutual suspicion."

Amnesty. As powerful states backtrack on their human rights commitments, other leaders may feel emboldened to do the same, the nongovernmental organization warns

Mr. Russell, a co-founder of Invisible Children, acknowledges that he has not made the most nuanced or academic of films. The video charts his personal odyssey to tell the world about Mr. Kony’s reign of terror and bring it to an end. He may have boiled down the issues, but that is what it takes to captivate so many people, he contends.

Activism in conflict zones has long brought both benefits and unforeseen consequences. It clearly helped make the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region an international issue. But many analysts also argue that the one-sided way activists painted the conflict — highlighting the Sudanese government’s crimes against villagers while largely ignoring the atrocities committed by rebels — ultimately made it harder to negotiate an end to the crisis

Some have called the video a pitch-perfect appeal to so-called slacktivism, a pejorative term for armchair activism by a younger generation, often online.

It is often said that caste is to India what race is to America. Yet, the attitudes of the dominant social class in the two countries couldn’t be more different

Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, continues to thrive after calling the Dalits ‘mentally retarded children’ who gain ‘spiritual experience’ from manual scavenging. The media has little interest or insight into Dalit lives, nor hires low-caste journalists.[11] Major atrocities against Dalits still go unreported. Law enforcement is often indifferent or worse. There is no effective prosecution for discrimination in employment and housing. A Dalit politician can’t get a majority of upper-caste votes even in South Mumbai. Even among those few elites who read books, how many have read a single novel or memoir by a Dalit? In what is perhaps the most diverse country in the world, there is no commitment to diversity in the elite institutions that decide what is worthy art, music, and literature, or what is the content of history textbooks. In book after book of stories for children, both the protagonist and the implicit audience are elite and upper-caste.[12] Much the same is true of sitcoms, soap operas, and commercials on TV. Dalits are invisible from all popular culture that gets any airtime. The Indian army still has many upper-caste-only regiments. There is nothing like an Indian ACLU. Or a Dalit history month on public TV, or exhibits in museums, that seek to educate the upper-castes about a long and dark chapter of their past (and present)

Efforts to make education more "relevant" to black people can be both patronising and harmful. The western literary canon should be taught to everyone

Dead white men, the pillars of the western canon, remain supremely relevant to black people in the 21st century, because their concerns are universal. At its best, the canon elucidates the eternal truths at the heart of the human condition

As black people, we cannot change history, and should not try to reject knowledge because of its provenance. It would be far better to focus our attention on understanding the atrocities that have been committed in the name of the canon, or why the humanities have, on the evidence of history, so comprehensively failed to humanise.

All told, some fourteen million people are estimated to have died as a result of these atrocities; to put this number into context, it is two million more than the total number of German and Soviet soldiers killed in battle and over thirteen million more than American losses in all of its foreign wars combined.

The Holocaust was a unique historical event, the causes of which were distinctive. But it’s precisely because it occurred alongside other wide-scale horrors that Snyder is right to “test the proposition that deliberate and direct mass murder by these two regimes in the bloodlands is a distinct phenomenon worthy of separate treatment.”

Both ideologically and practically, Stalinism gave rise to Hitler. This was thanks to Soviet communism’s absolutist and totalitarian nature, which gave Hitler all the evidence he needed that nothing less than the full militarization of society was required to confront the eastern menace. Similarly, Stalin’s paranoid worldview directly contributed to policies which only emboldened Hitler. Stalin instructed German communists to treat their Social Democratic countrymen as “social fascists,” leading to fractures on the German left that ultimately gave way for Hitler’s ascent. This hothouse geopolitical environment created, as Hobsbawm would later put it, an “Age of Extremes.”

The story of the denazification of Germany after 1945 comes in two versions. The one we know best allows us to congratulate ourselves on a job well done. We turned the most powerful and frightening dictatorship in Europe into a stable, peaceable and functioning democracy for the first time in its history. This is the story we grew up with during the cold war, one that justified the partition and occupation of the country over many decades.

there is also a much less self-­congratulatory version of denazification. It dwells on the darker side by exposing once taboo subjects like the expulsion of millions of Germans from Eastern Europe and the apparently countless rapes carried out by the Red Army.

there were then — and remain to this day — two mysteries in the conduct of the German people at the war’s end, mysteries that go to the heart of Taylor’s book. One was the question of why they continued to fight so resolutely, for so long, against obviously overwhelming odds, even after it must have been clear that the war was lost. Taylor stresses two completely counterproductive messages sent by the Allies: the policy of unconditional surrender, and especially the draconian Morgenthau Plan advanced by the American Treasury secretary, which called for the destruction of Germany’s industrial base and the pastoralization of the country. He also highlights the Germans’ sheer terror at the approaching Red Army, a terror that had been fanned, as he notes, by Goebbels’s publicizing of an early Soviet atrocity in an East Prussian village. Finally, there was straightforward Nazi coercion as the regime rounded on its own people, killing more and more of them.

the last decade has seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the past 100 years

Worldwide, deaths caused directly by war-related violence in the new century have averaged about 55,000 per year, just over half of what they were in the 1990s (100,000 a year), a third of what they were during the Cold War (180,000 a year from 1950 to 1989), and a hundredth of what they were in World War II.

the 20 years since the Cold War ended have been an era of rapid progress toward peace.

The UN agency for children says attacks against children have reached new levels of viciousness in the Central African Republic (CAR), where fighting between Muslim Seleka rebels and Christian militias left more than 1,000 people dead and displaced an estimated 400,000 in Bangui, the capital, this month.

According to Unicef, at least at least two children have been beheaded, and one of them mutilated, in the violence that has gripped Bangui since early December

Some 370,000 people – almost half the population of Bangui – have been displaced to dozens of sites across the capital over the past three weeks. About 785,000 people have been internally displaced throughout the country since the outbreak of violence more than a year ago.

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court opened a preliminary examination on Friday into possible war crimes committed in the Palestinian territories,

the first formal step that could lead to charges against Israelis.

to raise the level of antipathy between Israel and the Palestinians

Witold Pilecki, an officer in the Polish resistance to the Nazi regime, deliberately let himself be captured by the Germans in 1940 so that he could gather information about Hitler’s concentration camps. Inside Auschwitz, he set up resistance cells — even as he almost died of starvation, torture and disease.

Then Pilecki helped build a radio transmitter, and, in 1942, he broadcast to the outside world accounts of atrocities inside Auschwitz — as the Nazis frantically searched the camp looking for the transmitter. He worked to expose the Nazi gas chambers, brutal sexual experiments and savage camp punishments, in hopes that the world would act.

Finally, in April 1943, he escaped from Auschwitz, bullets flying after him, and wrote an eyewitness report laying out the horror of the extermination camps. He then campaigned unsuccessfully for an attack on Auschwitz.

Jefferson, to his credit, at least recognized that the slavery in which he participated was “the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.” And the Jefferson Memorial in Washington displays his words that “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Words that should stand in our consciousness alongside of John Quincy Adams’s reflections on the parallel founding crime over centuries, the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty…among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgment.”

The national poet, Walt Whitman, captured the general understanding when he wrote that “The nigger, like the Injun, will be eliminated; it is the law of the races, history… A superior grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out.” It wasn’t until the 1960s that the scale of the atrocities and their character began to enter even scholarship, and to some extent popular consciousness, though there is a long way to go.

Inveighing against the barbarism of ISIS, the president pointed out that it would be foolish to blame Islam, at large, for its atrocities. To make this point he noted that using religion to brutalize other people is neither a Muslim invention nor, in America, a foreign one: Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

The "all too often" could just as well be "almost always." There were a fair number of pretexts given for slavery and Jim Crow, but Christianity provided the moral justification

Stephens went on to argue that the "Christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa" could only be accomplished through enslavement. And enslavement was not made possible through Robert's Rules of Order, but through a 250-year reign of mass torture, industrialized murder, and normalized rape—tactics which ISIS would find familiar. Its moral justification was not "because I said so," it was "Providence," "the curse against Canaan," "the Creator," "and Christianization." In just five years, 750,000 Americans died because of this peculiar mission of "Christianization." Many more died before, and many more died after. In his "Segregation Now" speech, George Wallace invokes God 27 times and calls the federal government opposing him "a system that is the very opposite of Christ."

Let me put this as baldly as I can. The US fought two long, brutal wars in its response to the atrocity of September 11, 2001. We lost both of them – revealing the biggest military machine in the history of the planet as essentially useless in advancing American objectives through war and occupation. Attempts to quash Islamist extremism through democracy were complete failures. The Taliban still has enormous sway in Afghanistan and the only way to prevent the entire Potemkin democracy from imploding is a permanent US troop presence. In Iraq, we are now confronting the very same Sunni insurgency the invasion created in 2003 – just even more murderous. The Jihadism there has only become more extreme under a democratic veneer. And in all this, the U.S. didn’t just lose the wars; it lost the moral high-ground as well. The <img class="alignright wp-image-138319" src="https://sullydish.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/troopsjoeraedlegetty1.jpg?w=398&h=265" alt="" width="398" height="265" />president himself unleashed brutal torture across all theaters of war – effectively ending any moral authority the US has in international human rights.

These are difficult truths to handle. They reveal that so many brave men and women died for nothing. And so we have to construct myths or bury facts to ensure that we maintain face. But these myths and amnesia have a consequence: they only serve to encourage Washington to make exactly the same mistakes again

This is not just a Republican fixation. It’s a function of the hegemony reflexively sought by liberal internationalists as well.

In Guatemala, military stands trial for sexual slavery

According to the prosecution, in August 1982, Guatemalan soldiers responded to a Maya land-rights campaign by raiding valley communities and taking many men — including the husbands of six of the women in the courtroom — to Finca Tinajas, never to be seen again.

During that war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996, battles between the state and Marxist guerrillas often served as impetus and cover for massacres that left an estimated 200,000 people dead and another 45,000 missing — the vast majority of them civilians.

Thousands of refugee children like him find ways to pass the time as they wait to cross the border from Greece into Macedonia.

More than 12,000 people are stranded here in Idomeni, as borders across Europe have slowly been shutting in the face of those most vulnerable and fleeing from atrocities.

They sleep in hundreds of little brightly colored tents that have popped up on fields along the border, now demarcated by a double concertina wire fence.

At a time when nationalist and far-right politics are again ascendant in Europe, a team of German historians presented a new, annotated edition of a symbolic text of that movement on Friday: “Mein Kampf,” by Adolf Hitler.

The Nazi leader’s manifesto, which first appeared as two volumes in 1925 and 1927, was banned in Germany by the Allies in 1945 and has not been officially published in the country since then. A team of scholars and historians spent three years preparing a nearly 2,000-page edition with about 3,500 annotations in anticipation of the expiration on Dec. 31 of a 70-year copyright held by the state of Bavaria.

The effort by the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich to publish the new, critical edition was the subject of debate almost as soon as it was announced, with some seeing it as an important step toward illuminating an unsavory era in Germany,

It’s become a predictable pattern: One act of violence in the world overshadows a similar, concurrent violent act, inviting a backlash against this imbalance in scrutiny, sympathy, and grief. But that predictability doesn’t make the pattern any less distressing. Each time there’s a major terror attack in an American or European city—New York, Madrid, London, Paris, Paris again—it captures the attention and concern of Americans and Europeans in a way that similar atrocities elsewhere don’t seem to do. Seldom do events line up so neatly, offering a clear comparison, as the bombings in Beirut and the rampage in Paris.

Onepotential explanation is simple: There were three times more deaths in Paris than in Beirut. Beyond that are a host of other, intertwined reasons. Perhaps chief among them is familiarity. Americans are much more likely to have been to Paris than to Beirut—or to Cairo, or to Nairobi, or to any number of cities that have experienced bloody attacks. If they haven’t traveled to the French capital themselves, they’ve likely seen a hundred movies and TV shows that take place there, and can reel off the names of landmarks. Paris in particular is a symbol of a sort of high culture.

There is also a troubling tribal, or racial, component to this familiarity factor as well: People tend to perk up when they see themselves in the victims.

One of the most wanted fugitives sought in connection with atrocities committed during the 1994 Rwandan genocide has been arrested after 21 years on the run, the United Nations has announced

Ntaganzwa was indicted by the ICTR for genocide, crimes against humanity and other serious violations of international humanitarian law.

Ntaganzwa was among nine fugitives -- along with Felicien Kabuga, Augustin Bizimana, Protais Mpiranya, Fulgence Kayishema, Pheneas Munyarugarama, Aloys Ndimbati, Ryandikayo, and Charles Sikubwabo -- for which a $5 million reward is offered for information leading to their capture. The rest of the fugitives remain at large.