Genocide in Modern Times
“Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately”.
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–from Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech
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“I am obsessed with silence because of the silence of the world. I do not understand why the world was silent when we needed its outcry. I always come back to that problem. Where were the humanists, the leaders, the liberals, the spokesmen for mankind? The victims needed them. If they had spoken up, the slaughterer would not have succeeded in his task.”
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While reading Wiesel’s memoir, people often ask: How did Hitler get away with this? How did the world allow it? These are good questions, and ones we must still ask today. We are going to do an eye-opening assignment and perhaps we can keep asking those questions and get some answers.
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For this project, and as part of your “Bridging Text and Content”, you will be asked to research, in pairs, another modern genocide.
Click here and download guidelines for your project
You may choose one or more of the following locations for your project:
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Afghanistan, Bosnia/Yugoslavia, Burundi, Columbia, Darfur, North Korea, Rwanda, Sri Lanka
Here are some helpful sites:
http://genocidewatch.net/ http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/index.html
http://www.un.org/en/sections/what-we-do/deliver-humanitarian-aid/index.html
http://www.ushmm.org/confront-genocide