Humanicide

Humanicide. I cannot find this word in any dictionary. As I don’t have any very recently published dictionaries it may appear in one somewhere. The term is fairly widespread these days, especially as there are bands that go by that name, and many lyrics and albums have been produced by those who use the name. As far as I can tell most of these lyrics have to do with using drugs or other means of destroying lives. As I have never heard any of these lyrics I obviously cannot speak with expertise on the matter. If you are interested in such stuff you might want to look up on the web, Humanicide 666 Lyrics.

The other main use of humanicide comes from those who see it as essentially the suicide of the species. That is, humans may do things to the environment and each other, and/or with technology, that the species simply will not survive. That is, it would have committed humanicide – suicide on a grand scale, if you will. At least one person has claimed that the combined effects of environmentalism, multiculturalism, and feminism will bring about humanicide. Someone in Melbourne, Australia is writing a book about humanicide that has as its theme the potential destruction of the species, with perhaps a few survivors here and there.

One other context in which you might come across the term has to do with the controversy over abortion. Anti-abortionists sometimes use the term synonymously with abortion.

Once in a while you might encounter the term in discussions of genocide but as far as I can see it is rarely if ever actually defined in terms that distinguish it from genocide.

I submit there is another, perfectly obvious and logical use for such a term. What, for example, would you call the Oklahoma City bombing or the destruction of the twin towers, if not humanicide? Humanicide is clearly not the same as genocide. The people who are killed are not of the same race or ethnic background. They are not even of the same nationality or religion. They are just random numbers of human beings that happen to be present when the bomb explodes or the planes crash and burn. Nor are the victims simply a bunch of mass suicides. They clearly did not intend to kill themselves. The victims were not even enemies of those who wished to kill them. They were just innocents who happened for whatever multiple reasons to be in the same vicinity of each other.

Humanicide is quite different from other forms of mass murder in that there is no motive other than the destruction of large numbers of human beings simply for its own sake. There is no attempt to rob the victims or steal their land or women or anything else. They were not killed because they were resisting. They were not taken prisoner, raped, tortured or otherwise abused. They were simply killed for no reason other than for some perverted idea that had nothing whatsoever to do with them.

The bombing of Dresden during WW II, for example, was not an act of humanicide because, technically at least, we were at war. True, we weren’t really at war with Dresden, but we were at war with Germany and Dresden was a German city. There may well have been large numbers of non-Germans in Dresden at the time. The same thing can be said for Hiroshima. I do not mean to excuse these examples of mass murder, merely to point out that by the twisted minds of people at war they became part of the enemy. Personally, I don’t believe either Dresden or Hiroshima should have been bombed off the face of the earth, nor do I believe it was necessary. Although I am not a historian I think it is most unlikely that until WW II innocent civilians were either targeted or killed in large numbers.

But what about the hordes of Genghis Khan, you might ask. Certainly he was known to capture whole cities and murder all of the inhabitants. But again, I think that was standard operating procedure back then. You conquered a town or city, overcame the resistance, looted and raped, and took whatever you wanted. The killing was not unrelated to the event itself. There was mass murder but there was no humanicide. Another factor to be considered is that all of this killing was on a very personal face-to-face level. It was not totally depersonalized, a development that required a technology that was not available at that time.

The terrible instances of genocide are also not examples of humanicide. Here specific targets were killed, not just people in general. The Germans wanted to rid the earth specifically of Jews and Gypsies and the dimwitted or grotesque, not just humans in general. The same has been true of all genocides, there is always a specific group identified for removal and in most or all cases there is a reason for why it is occurring. In the United States the whites wanted Indian land and the resources that were found there. The same was true in Colonial Africa and India. In these cases there was still a different rationale – the people being killed were not regarded as human, or certainly not fully human. It was not humanicide because they were not humans. They were not humans because someone wanted to steal their land and resources. The Europeans might have used indiscriminate killing whenever they could but it was always related to beliefs about who was human and who was not, conquest and greed, and rarely, if ever, merely for its own sake.

For true humanicide you must have an innocent group of human beings for victims. The victims must have nothing in common other than being present at the time. The attackers must have no specific knowledge of who will be present. You must have a motive that has nothing whatsoever to do with those you are about to murder. It must be impersonal and involve some form of relatively modern technology.

Humanicide is a 20th century phenomenon. By the above definition the Oklahoma bombing and the destruction of the twin towers were acts of humanicide. As such, they may ultimately be related to that greater humanicide that others have warned about, the disappearance of the species through its own acts of greed, short-sightedness, and stupidity.