Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello, Kim Neely here.
[00:00:03] So I'm both re releasing the emotional processing episode, but also this 10 Stages of Genocide episode. I did this on my YouTube channel and I think I intended to re edit it and put it on my podcast, but I never actually did. So here it is. And the link to the original YouTube video is in the show notes. If you would like to see screen grabs of the articles. I'm talking about things like that, any sort of visuals that might help you or if you'd like to just read along to quotes that I read off during this, I also put those on the screen during the episode. So feel free to check that out if you feel that will help you.
[00:00:42] I'm putting this out here. Listen, listen. I know, I know my personality, you know, being a 45 year old, late diagnosed neurodivergent who's also queer, life has taught me, listen, I have the personality of effectively cilantro, okay? Like, this is my cilantro theory of my own, particularly brand of, of human. All right?
[00:01:08] What I mean by that is I myself am one of those people.
[00:01:13] This is an extrapolation. So don't, you know, don't, don't, don't take this as a total sign that I completely hate myself. But genetically I, I can only taste cilantro as like, essentially like pine sol and soap had a baby and it was like a thousand times strong than pine Sal and Soap combined. Like that would be my, that, my, that's, that's my experience of cilantro, you know, and then my spouse loves cilantro. Cilantro is fine. Cilantro tastes great. Apparently it's somewhat akin to basil, which sounds amazing, but I can never experience cilantro that way because it's just to me. So I think that's the thing with like neurodivergence especially. Right? Especially us like those of us who, you know, the thoughts in our head tend to come out of our mouth holes. Like without a whole lot of, you know, inhibition behind that, you know, I mean, we, you know, we can pretty easily rub people the wrong way. We can, we can kind of be human cilantro to that person. You know what I mean? And I get that. So I strongly suspect my listeners are out there given what occurred in November 2024. This is, this is November 7, 2024, when I'm recording this. And yeah, I highly suspect you guys are probably the ones who are not so happy with how things went here in the United states during this 2024 election cycle. And so, yeah, so I'M just kind of being straightforward with you right here, you know. But this is, this is essentially an episode on the signs, the, the stages that, that head toward genocide.
[00:02:50] I also want to acknowledge though, that there can be cultural genocides, there can be genocides that are very subtle, there can be genocides that are very well hidden in the media. And I know we've got a whole echo chamber thing going on with media these days and all of this, but if there's a chance that this information could help people, just be more on the lookout so that hopefully more people can be protected in the future, that would be great. That's my, that's my. That's why I'm re releasing this essentially. I, I want people to feel, remember, I'm hoping at least anyway, that for anyone who's in that, like, ah, it's probably not actually gonna get that bad if you're in that camp and it actually does start to get that bad. I want you to be able to see those signs and I want you to be able to hopefully take some action to protect those in danger if you happen to have the power and the privilege to do so. Right.
[00:03:49] But we're often not taught the signs. So that's what this episode is for, is to teach the signs. And I think I actually originally recorded it at the time of the Israel, Palestine, Gaza stuff was ramping up and it was really tough to listen to.
[00:04:12] But the fact still stands that the rhetoric around genocide, honestly never has left humanity. It's always been around across the globe in pretty much every civilization, or at least every civilization that got to the feudal stage of things. They seem to lean on this kind of hierarchical stuff that leads to dehumanization and all that. Right. And all this rhetoric is ongoing and constant. It's just how, how much momentum it gains and how much power it gains and how complacent people are with it that I think is really what makes the difference of whether or not genocide is actually realized.
[00:04:54] So yeah, hopefully this will help somebody out there or if you're just somebody who knows somebody, maybe this can become a reference in the future if you just like bookmark it and save it for, for later. If I am their, their form of cilantro and therefore they will not listen to me, then maybe they'll, you know, maybe they'll listen to you sharing the information. And information's good, you know, especially in times like this. Information can be good, can be a weapon, right? Can be honestly the best weapon we have sometimes for those of us who you know, are relatively otherwise fairly powerless in society.
[00:05:33] All right?
[00:05:34] Anyway, I don't, I want, I don't want to say I hope you enjoy because it's a pretty dark topic, but, you know, take breaks as needed, do what you need to do, take some breaths, you know, go over those bottom up processing strategies from the episode I re released there as needed and like, you know, just use this as a reference, just a tool of reference for you. All right?
[00:05:58] And I guess the most hopeful thing I can share is you're not alone. You're not alone. If you're scared right now, you're not alone. And I can't guarantee safety, but I could guarantee community. Okay? Because you're not alone. I'm here too. And I'll be here for as long as I can be. All right?
[00:06:23] Hello, I'm Kim Neely, the Trauma Informed slp. And I have been wanting to film this video, slash produce this podcast episode for a while, but in light of the news these days, I think it's a very pertinent topic that I definitely need to get to.
[00:06:45] So this is a content warning. We're going to be talking about the 10 stages of genocide. And I want to do this in light of what's currently happening, especially in Gaza. But there also are other areas of the world where different stages of genocide is occurring.
[00:07:08] And for those of you out there who are speech language pathologists, as most of the people who follow me are, you might be thinking, well, what does this have to do with us? And the truth is we're human, we live in the world, and we also live, we work with clients and students and patients who are dealing with all of this world news as well. So I think it's really good and very important for us to understand the studies that have been done to help see what these stages are, something we can maybe teach students perhaps if they have questions about why things are happening.
[00:07:46] And honestly, nobody really wants to face the worst that humanity can do. It's always very uncomfortable to face that, but it's very important to face it. First things first, though, the news is very traumatic. You can definitely develop secondary trauma responses from watching the news.
[00:08:11] It's super traumatic on so many fronts right now, at least for me. I can only take so much of it in a day. And I just want to say that if you're like me and you are having these overwhelming feelings of helplessness or hopelessness around it, if it is just really emotionally dysregulating or challenging or just generally incredibly upsetting, and if you're like me. And your empathy leads you to seeing flashes of images in your head of trying to imagine what things might be like when there's massive violence being incited against a group of people. I want you to know it's okay to take a break. It's okay to only be able to listen to it like five minutes a day, maybe less. That's okay. All right. And I also want to let you know that in preparing for this video, I did find that there is a disaster distress helpline through SAMHSA and I'll post a link, but they do offer counseling service specifically for natural disasters, but also human made disasters and violence and mass violence. And it says on their webpage that the counseling services they provide are crisis counseling. If you're in extreme emotional and mental distress over the news, the information on how to recognize your own distress, referrals to local crisis centers and things for follow up support if you need it. And they also will provide you with healthy coping tips just to help you digest all of that. So I just want to let you know if anything I'm saying here gets so upsetting. I haven't called this distress helpline before. I'm doing pretty good using my own strategies from my previous experiences with mental health support and counseling.
[00:09:58] But if I ever need it, I will call. And if you are in that place, this might be a very great place to, to call, see how it goes and hopefully get some tips, techniques, referrals, resources to help. Because I am strongly of the belief our human brains are really not made to try to digest the vast amount of really atrocious things going on globally.
[00:10:28] Our brains never really had access to global news like this, you know, for millennia. It's been fairly recent in our, in the whole history of humanity. It's been fairly that we've had this kind of access and it can, it can get incredibly overwhelming and very distressing. So there is a helpline, hopefully that will be a good resource if you're like me. And this is just incredibly distressing.
[00:10:56] So let's talk about genocide.
[00:11:02] As the quote at the bottom of this poster says that you're seeing on the screen here. Genocide never just happens. There is always a set of circumstances which occur or which are created to build the climate in which genocide can take place. And that's why I want to talk about the 10 stages of genocide that were developed by Gregory Stanton, who was a research professor in the area. He originally had an 8 stage model and then updated it to 10 stages to discuss how genocides take place and how they continue to happen, even though so many people want to think the human race has somehow evolved beyond it. And history shows us time and time again we have, not that these things continue to occur.
[00:11:52] So first, I feel like I should be a good academic. I should probably define genocide. I think everybody has some sense of what it means. But I'm pulling this from an article. I'll show you the title here that's called the 10 stages of American Indian Genocide by Chavez, Cameron and Fan, I believe. Fun. Hopefully I pronounced that correctly. I'm so sorry if I didn't, but it was published in 2018.
[00:12:16] And their definition from this article, I actually like it a lot because it includes a lot of aspects that we don't tend to think about when we think about genocide. So they say in this article, and I quote, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group the conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part. So basically oppressing.
[00:13:01] Very deliberately oppressing. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. Hello, eugenics program.
[00:13:10] Forcibly transferring children to another group. Hello to the residential school systems that were enacted in Canada and the United States.
[00:13:20] So these are all different aspects of genocide. And to be clear, academically speaking, genocide can occur over a very long period of time, and it also can occur over a very short period of time, such as with the Holocaust or what's currently happening in Gaza, but also Cambodia, Pol Pot.
[00:13:42] So the first two stages in Stanton's 10 stages of genocide, the first is classification, where cultures develop categories that distinguish people into kind of an us versus them. And then there's symbolization, which is giving names or symbols to those classifications.
[00:14:02] A lot of times those first two, when you see the stages written out, they talk about those first two in reference to how it feeds into the discrimination and oppression and things that come in other stages. But I do like in that 10 stages of American Genocide paper, how they discuss these first two stages as actually just being universally human qualities. Classification and symbolization, like un unto themselves, they don't really result in genocide, but they're both necessary to start the other stages toward genocide. Does that make sense? So when you couple. It's when you take classification and symbolization and you couple them with discrimination and dehumanization that you're on your way toward some type of Genocide occurring. It makes sense to me because this.
[00:14:54] Okay, I'm gonna do a little info dump here, but this is, like, my own personal thing. I got really into this archeology TV show from the BBC called Time Team. They're great. It's on YouTube. I encourage you if you like it. So because of getting into this show, I always try to think back to, like, Neolithic times. Okay. I think back to, like, tribal Neolithic. You're chilling out in your little, like, circular hut, Neolithic house thing, which is a common thing in the British Isles. Because I'm. I got way too into Time Team, like I said. Okay.
[00:15:29] But, you know, it makes sense that there would be some level of classification or symbolization toward. Like, if you see this other group, this other tribe approaching your land, and it's like you have to determine, are these friends or foes? Are they here to trade? Are they here to steal? Right. It kind of makes sense when you think way back in human history that we do naturally want to classify. I mean, we even probably wanted to classify, like, plants and animals into, like, dangerous animals that'll kill us versus, like, animals that are good for meat or for their hide to keep warm, or plants that are very dangerous versus plants that help us to survive. It makes sense that our brains want to classify and kind of create a symbol to help us remember that classification. Right. The danger is, is when we take those symbols, those classifications, and we add onto it this hierarchical.
[00:16:20] We're. They're different, therefore they're less than, therefore they're worse than us, therefore we're much better. Right? They're uncivilized. They're savages, versus we're great and wonderful. Okay? That's where we start to get. It starts to get very dangerous. Okay?
[00:16:40] So when we get into stage three, and these are not linear stages, by the way, Stanton said many times they are not linear. But the preceding stages do need to happen for later stages to occur. But especially in the context of when genocide is occurring, they can all be kind of meshed together. And especially, like, the news cycle can move a lot between all these different stages.
[00:17:04] So discrimination is when the dominant or more powerful group uses laws and customs and things to deny the rights of other people. There's dehumanization, where members become equated with animals or vermin or insects or some sort of disease or something. Right. You know, people start to get like, we got to get rid of them, or, we're better off without them, or this group is destroying our culture or they're destroying our society or they're here to steal your jobs. Like, that's a very common one in the United States. And what is really dangerous about dehumanization is that it breaks down people's barriers against their kind of the natural revulsion against inciting violence against fellow humans. That natural, empathetic. A lot of humans have it. Not all, but a lot of humans have that. Like, I don't actually want to cause violence toward other people, but by dehumanizing people, it sort of starts to separate that person in other people's brains. That group of people become not human essentially in their brain so that they don't mind treating them badly.
[00:18:12] You know, it. It, like, is a.
[00:18:15] It's like it protects them ethically. It's like if you. If you start to really believe in the dehumanization of a whole group of people, you can still feel like you're a good person, even though you actually have this opinion that you are better and. Or more human than these other people. Right? So dehumanization, in my mind, is one of the. Probably the most dangerous and also the most insidious because it just sinks into everything, which I believe I talked about when I got into dehumanization and science. So you can listen to my podcast episode on that if you want to hear a little more of what I say about that. But that is probably one of the most insidious and dangerous stages in my mind, and I'm not a scholar in this, but that's what I'm thinking. So the fifth stage is organization. So genocides always end up becoming organized, usually by the state or by somebody with a lot of power, Basically some group with a lot of power, whether it's military or economic or social power, they provide this deniability in terms of their own responsibility, but they start to organize things against the targeted group for the genocide. Okay? So this is where organization is where people in charge might give people of their group permission essentially, to spy on people of that other group or to call them out or to incite some level of violence, scare them or whatever, right? That's like, where they start to organize. Okay? The sixth stage is polarization.
[00:19:54] This is where the propaganda really comes into play on the news nowadays on Twitter, places. Well, formerly known as Twitter X, I guess. Now this is where extremists start to really separate groups, okay, and drive them apart. And, you know, you get into the mass media thing of, like, we're justified in seeing these people as less than human and in doing these things to harm them because they're going to harm us. Right. It becomes that like polarized, like we have to defend ourselves against this evil or whatever it is, this threat. Okay. That's like the polarization narrative that starts to sort of sink in and lots of propaganda starts to build around that and the motivations for targeting them starts to get indoctrinated essentially in people. So the seventh stage is preparation. This is when the group, the dominant group or whoever is the group leader starts to plan what they're going to do to the targeted group.
[00:21:01] Oftentimes they'll start to use euphemisms like in the case of the Nazis, it was called the Final Solution. Right. They started saying the Final Solution for Jewish people in concentration camps. They also might use other euphemisms like ethnic cleansing. It's a really big one. That comes out a lot. Purification, purification of our culture. Right. Counter terrorism. That comes out a lot too, right. Of. Yeah, we're, it's, it's. The euphemisms are usually built around that, like we're protecting ourselves against something worse. Right. But that's preparing people. They start to create these like use euphemisms and then they start to sort of create a plan around, you know, if you're part of this group and you're on board with this plan of ours, this is the next step. Right. We start to prep that. Okay.
[00:21:58] Number eight is persecution. This is where victims start to be identified and separated out.
[00:22:07] Concentration camps, internment camps of the Japanese Americans in World War II. And also quite frankly in more recent news as well, when, when immigrant children, particularly from Mexico and other Central and South American countries were being separated from their families. Forceful, forceful, forcibly. That's part of the persecution, part of removing people and setting them, setting that group in a separate place, essentially not allowing them to be around everybody else.
[00:22:39] In state sponsored genocide, they have lists that start to be drawn up. They start to keep track of who's in these groups and where they should be.
[00:22:48] They might start to force them to wear something that identifies them like the Star of David in concentration camps during World War II, during the Holocaust.
[00:22:58] And they also just might be placed in places where they're forced to be so impoverished and starved and have famines and lack of water, lack of resources for survival.
[00:23:07] That can happen there as well. So that also counts with like the Middle Ages. In a lot of European cities, Jewish people were put in ghettos in the sense of they just created blocks where it's like the entire, the buildings either created a wall or it was actually walled off and it was like part of separating Jewish people and would usually do their best to keep them persecuted there, essentially. Right. The ninth stage is extermination.
[00:23:32] And it is what it sounds like.
[00:23:36] This is usually what's called the genocide is when they start to kill people en masse. Right.
[00:23:44] And this is also when not just the deaths, but horrendous atrocities and torture occur. And this is because the killers and the perpetrators don't believe their targets to be fully human.
[00:23:58] Usually psychologically, they've been convinced that what they're doing is right at good. Typically thanks to all those other previous stages. If they've really bought into the propaganda and they truly believe it, that's when they start to.
[00:24:11] They will essentially unleash whatever horrific thing they want to do to these targets, essentially. That's where they start to do the killing and the torturing is the extermination. And then the tenth stage is denial.
[00:24:26] And this stage is incredibly important and always occurs at some point in history, but it follows the genocide. It usually lasts throughout the genocide. Usually there's deniability, I would say nowadays, actually less so. There's. I know in the United States there are politicians who are saying the, this, this like denial or like secret parts out loud. Like they're not even denying that that's what they want to do. Which is very disturbing to me that it's become this normal thing to just say that sort of stuff. But typically at some point, at some point when the winds have changed and when history is now looking at that genocide and vilifying it and saying, oh my gosh, that's horrible, and how, how atrocious and, and start to kind of honestly dehumanize the people who did the killing. It's usually happens around there. There's that deniability of, you know, we didn't know what was happening. This is where the group that perpetrated all the deaths try to get rid of the bodies. They try to get rid of evidence of it happening. They start to intimidate witnesses that want to speak up against it.
[00:25:34] They might blame it on the victims of the genocide and say that they deserved it and if they just had been more human, then it wouldn't have happened. That that can happen as well with the deniability.
[00:25:46] And denial is the stage that occurs that allows for more genocides to occur.
[00:25:55] And like I said, a lot of denial, I think, comes from us, you know, in general, in the general population, those of us who are completely separated from these situations, like if we're not of those Groups being targeted and we're not, you know, there for the violence if we're somewhere else in the globe. Denial is such an easy thing to go to in the sense of maybe not denying it's happening, but denying that we all have the potential to be just as horrific and horrible toward our fellow man as anyone else. We just as easily succumb to dehumanizing messages, right?
[00:26:33] And it's really tempting, right? It's really tempting to dehumanize people. When you look at their behavior and you think that is so abhorrent. And we can't, like, there's no way I would do that. I would never be that person, right? It's so easy and so tempting to do that.
[00:26:50] So let me test you a little bit on this. This is a little dehumanization quiz, okay?
[00:26:55] I'm going to say some names and I want you to think about what your thoughts are about those names that I say. Ready? Here we go.
[00:27:06] The Zodiac Killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy.
[00:27:14] What pops into your head when I say those?
[00:27:17] If you know who they are?
[00:27:19] For those who don't know, those are lists. There's just a handful of incredibly prolific serial killers in the United States.
[00:27:28] So what comes to mind a lot of times, evil, demonic, non human evil particularly, that usually comes across, right? So what about if I say like Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot, if you know about the Cambodian genocide that the US Government was very complicit in as well, inhuman might pop into mind, right? Once again, evil. So the thing about that little test is the reason I wanted to say that is because, see, as much as we like to say to ourselves, these serial killers aren't human and these genocidal leaders are not human.
[00:28:09] They were human. That's the point, okay? They are just as much a human as you or I or as any of the greatest saints in history. Any greatest, like Good Samaritan, any of the most like kind and compassionate and empathetic people out there.
[00:28:28] They're just as human as those serial killers I mentioned as the genocidists.
[00:28:34] Because humanity is that complex. We have that broad of a spectrum of the type of humans that exist in this world. So humans are capable of just absolute overflowing good and compassion and caring. And humans are equally as capable of just inexplainably atrocious, abhorrent acts toward each other. And one of the things about becoming trauma informed and one of the things particularly trauma sensitive and cultural humility and social awareness and decolonization and all of this aspect of it. Because if it's not racially just, it's not trauma informed, if we don't get to a place where we can look at what humanity is capable of and we can stare it in the face and we can manage to not flinch, if we can manage to just look at it, even if it's only for like a minute, right, and say, yes, humans are capable of this and yes, I am part of the human race that is capable of this. But then saying, I will not take part in it, I will not be that person.
[00:29:44] And then you have to be so dedicated to choosing that over and over again throughout life and throughout different news cycles. You have to choose empathy and compassion. That has to be an active choice you make. You have to choose to think what happened to the people on both sides that led to this atrocity and not to justify it, but to be able to understand it enough that you can learn how not to be part of it. Does that make sense?
[00:30:13] Because I think that's what being truly trauma informed really means. And so I'm actually going to wrap this up with a quote from James Baldwin, because quite frankly, he said it far better than I could ever say it. Love has never been a popular movement and no one's ever wanted really to be free.
[00:30:30] The world is held together, really. It is held together by the love and the passion of a very few people.
[00:30:39] Otherwise, of course, you can despair.
[00:30:43] Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon and look around you.
[00:30:48] What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you.
[00:30:53] Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person, you could be that monster, you could be that copy. And you have to decide in yourself not to be.
[00:31:11] So that's what I charge you all with.
[00:31:16] Just decide not to be. Decide on compassion and empathy. And you have to make it a habit. Over time, it becomes a habit to see the world through that light. And the more people can do that, the less of a chance we have of these kind of atrocities occurring again and again and again.
