How to Commit Genocide (2023)

An important part of carrying out genocide is quieting the voices of those opposing the genocide.

This is done by the social and cultural institutions of the nation in addition to its government. The media, education system, legal system, and economic system all play a role.

And it starts before the genocide begins. Humans are not naturally prone to genocide, it takes a little conniving and convincing (too often, too little) before we become passive bystanders or active supporters in genocide. The conditions are set in place well before the genocide begins, and othering and dehumanization are the key. It is what Utah Phillips calls controlling the blame pattern, “the public schools build in automatic responses. Levers and Buttons. …Then the government reaches out through its media, in every home, and pushes those buttons and pulls those levers and elicits massive response for or against anything it chooses.” Once those mechanisms are in place, the power of the government to commit genocide or other egregious acts is greatly enhanced.

Active genocide often begins with an event in which one group is actually or theoretically harmed by the actions of another group. At that point the harmed group may have reached a breaking point, or may find it a crisis of convenience to move forward with plans that it has been developing for decades. Settler colonial genocides typically are aligned with the second path. Oppressed people will rebel, which is their right and settler colonial projects will use these rebellions in every manner possible to further dispossess and to commit genocide.

Before the genocide, or before the latest round of ongoing genocide, the nation or group enacting the genocide will dehumanize the victim. An event of rebellion is invariably an opportunity to increase the dehumanization. The event will be exaggerated to the point that it will become unacceptable to believe that the rebelling people have any humanity. This will be claimed directly by the government with the willing alignment of corporate media (they have never aligned otherwise).

Media will feature government spokespersons pushing forward the government stories and lies, and some “ordinary people” that agree with them. Anyone simply trying to put the acts of rebellion in context will be slammed by the government and the media as repugnant and disgraceful. Anyone with any power that opposes the genocide will be maligned and discredited.

If anyone opposing the government version of the truth is heard from in the commercial media at all they will be forced to agree with the primary narrative or will be publicly ridiculed and dismissed. The price of entry into media spaces that will primarily oppose your perspective in relation to the genocide in Gaza is the condemnation of Hamas. Often you will not be allowed to share any other point of view until you have convincingly agreed that Hamas is evil and unredeemable.

College students will be reprimanded, expelled, and recognized student groups disbanded for opposing the genocide as we have already seen at Columbia, Brandeis, Harvard, and in Florida. Media will denounce campus activism against genocide and support the punishment of activists. People will be fired from their jobs for supporting Palestine or opposing genocide, and offers of jobs will be revoked. New laws against freedom will be enacted and individuals will be arrested for reading and sharing information. Private organizations, and Lobbies that exist to support the settler colonialists will focus significant attention on the oppression of the denunciation of genocide.

Many of the actions taken to oppose the genocide will be demonized. Rallies will be called “hate marches” and participants “pro-Palestinian mobs” by pundits and government officials. The very language used to support freedom for Palestinian Arabs will be condemned as a call for genocide of the Jewish people. All as part of the ultimate goal to paint the opposition as hateful and aligned with the rebels that you have painted as savages.

Another intertwined element of committing genocide is incessantly repeating certain beliefs to attempt to make them undeniable.

Promoting falsehoods and biased perspectives reinforces the atmosphere that promotes genocide and denigrates the opposition to genocide. Details related to the Hamas attack of October 7 are still coming to light and the initial disinformation is slowly becoming unsustainable. Those original stories of atrocities have already done their job. They have already whipped up the hatred of all Gazans and of Palestinian Arabs to extreme levels within Israel and have promoted Islamophobia in the US and other nations.

No matter that it is now becoming clear that not only were there no mass beheadings of babies but no babies were beheaded, and only 1 baby has been identified as being killed during the Oct 7 attack according to data published by Haaretz. That baby was named Mila Cohen. According to reporting by Jewish News Syndicate (JNS), Mila was killed when Hamas gunmen fired through the door of the family’s safe room while the family was hiding inside. Despite this the baby murder myth persists. The data published by Haaretz lists 29 children between age 4 and 17 killed on Oct 7 out of 1152 identified individuals.

After claiming the death toll of Israelis on October 7 to be 1405 for some time (a figure many news outlets erroneously labeled 1400 civilians despite the clear evidence of there being hundreds of military and police casualties in that number), Israel has lowered the number of killed to “roughly 1200 people,” according to Haaretz. There is evidence that reveals that some of the civilian deaths that occurred on October 7, and possibly some of the military deaths, were at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces as they tried to defeat the Hamas gunmen. Members of the IDF admitted to media that both from the air and the ground, buildings, vehicles and individuals were targeted without knowing clearly who they were. A helicopter pilot was quoted by Mako (translated from Hebrew), “And I choose such targets that I tell myself that the chances of me shooting at abductees here are low." But it's not one hundred percent. "To tell you one hundred percent, it's not.“ The report by JNS that describes the killing of Mila Cohen also describes her mother Sandra’s death, “In the ensuing shootout (between IDF and Hamas gunmen) Sandra Cohen was hit four times in the lung and once each in the arm and leg, but called on her two kids to escape together to a neighboring house.”

In addition to inflating the crimes of Hamas in order to increase support for the Israeli assault on Gaza, additional falsehoods must be spread through rabid repetition. One of these is that Israel has a right, and a duty, to self defense. When a spokesperson for the US state department was asked if the US recognized that the Geneva Conventions apply to the Palestinian Territories, his only response was “we believe wholeheartedly that Israel has every right to defend itself…”

The reality is, that due to Israel’s crime of occupying the Palestinian Territories, it does not have the legal right to self defense related to this attack, and even if it did retain that right under these circumstances, very little of what it is currently doing in Gaza can be described as self defense. This is similar to arguing that the US had a right to invade Afghanistan after 9/11 in self defense. Both Israel and the US commonly refer to attacks on other nations and targets as “self defense,” when no reasonable rules of self defense apply.

Another of these incessantly repeated stories is that Hamas protects itself by using civilians as human shields. This serves the twofold purpose of dehumanizing Hamas and absolving Israel of its blame when civilians are killed. This story allows Israel to kill more civilians. It allows Israel to bomb schools and hospitals and mosques and claim “human shields’ are the reason that non-combatants are dying in such huge numbers.

In investigating the deaths of 11 civilians in 7 incidents in 2009, Human Rights Watch found, “no evidence that the civilian victims were used by Palestinian fighters as human shields or were shot in the crossfire between opposing forces.” In these cases the investigation found that the civilians were directly attacked by the IDF while waving white flags. The HRW investigation did document cases in which, “Israeli soldiers stood behind a Palestinian man who was forced to search a home.  Deliberately using civilians to deter attacks on a military target is considered “human shielding.”  The use of civilians as human shields or to engage in work for military purposes violates international humanitarian law.”

In 2010, an Israeli military court found two IDF soldiers guilty of using a 9 year old boy as a human shield during the 2008-9 ‘Operation Cast Lead in Gaza’ after forcing the boy to open bags suspected to be booby trapped.

If you want to slow down the independent reporting of your genocide, it is a useful tactic to prevent international media from entering the war zone unless embedded with your troops and under your supervision of their reporting. Where it is impractical to exert full control over certain stories or news outlets then your tactic can shift to murdering the media.

As it has done in previous military operations such as during the Great March of Return, and in the well publicized assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh, Israel is deliberately targeting reporters and photographers in Gaza. At least 36 journalists have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli attacks, as have many family members of journalists. Several more journalists have been injured and several have been detained or are missing.

If you want reporting on the death toll to stop and accurate death toll numbers are reported by hospitals to the ministry of health, you incapacitate the hospitals. Deny them power, water, supplies. Bomb them. This is a war crime, but with your savvy public relations expertise you can just blame Hamas for operating from within or under the hospitals. No mater that there is little evidence that it is true.

To convince people that extensive tunnels underly the hospitals, create a computer simulation of what these tunnels might look like and distribute to friendly media. Show aerial footage of a concrete bordered opening in the ground outside the hospital as proof of the tunnels, jut be careful it can’t be easily debunked by a moderate level of investigation. Claim that a video proves Hamas is working in the hospitals by showing a crowds of people inside with one person holding up what might be a rifle (but make sure there are’s any clear images of the scene proving that it is a police style baton). So far, the Hamas headquarters in hospitals story has less evidence than the Iraqi WMDs.

If there is an agency that has been providing life saving aid to your genocide victims for decades and has produced reams of reports on your previous human rights violations, be sure to claim they are allied with your opponents and just kill them.

How do we battle the genocide deniers tactics? Recognize them, debunk them, expose them, ridicule them. Stop letting them have any power to diminish the efforts to stop the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine.