Eliticide: The Main Examples

Abstract

The issue of the annihilation of the elite and the intelligentsia plays an important role in the context of genocides, massacres, as well as the deprivation and control of the intellectual potential of a given nation or state. There have been cases throughout history, when elites have been deliberately targeted in order to exterminate different racial, ethnic, religious groups or commit cultural genocide. Due to this circumstance the topic received the attention of the author of the term “Genocide” Raphael Lemkin, who considered the destruction of the intelligentsia and the elite from the social, physical and cultural aspects of genocide. However, it is interesting, that the destruction of the intelligentsia and the elite did not receive a specific definition for a long time until the term “eliticide” or “elitocide” was introduced in 1992. And since the phenomenon of eliticide is comparatively little studied, in this article we tried to present and to analyze its most obvious examples – the destruction of the elite of the Armenian intelligentsia during the Armenian Genocide, the eliticide carried out by Nazi Germany in Poland, as well as cases of eliticide in Tibet, Cambodia, Burundi, Bangladesh, Bosnia. The extermination of the elite during the Armenian Genocide was widespread, although the most famous is the arrest and murder of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople on April 24 1915. And the peculiarity of this genocide is that the eliticide was an integral part of the extermination of Armenians on the territory of the Ottoman Empire, therefore it is considered as a separate stage of the genocide. And unlike the eliticide committed during the Armenian Genocide, the extermination of the elite in Poland, Tibet, Burundi, Bangladesh and Bosnia was not in the context of the complete annihilation of the targeted ethnic or religious group, but in the context of erasing the identity of the group and cultural genocide. And the extermination of the intelligentsia during the Cambodian genocide was more in the context of the anti-intellectual campaign.