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Yup, I wrote a letter for a school essay, please read it and give feed back!!


Dear President Bush, 11/16/07

Are you aware of the past/current genocides? Do you plan on doing anything about future atrocities such as these? Hate crimes in both the country we live in and the world around us happen everyday, and these actions need to be stopped. A genocide is defined as an attack on a racial/ethical group. These “attacks” can range from the children in the group being displaced from the others, to a full-out mass murder. These attacks have occurred since the beginning of time, and it needs to stop. The Holocaust helped create the term “genocide”, which didn't exist before 1944, and the term is being used to describe a current event in Darfur. Ideas based off of hate crimes are often what cause genocides, so these must be watched out for as well.
The event which ultimately lead up to the creation of the term, genocide, was the Holocaust. The Holocaust is an example of a horrible genocide, which many deny its existence. There is however substantial evidence to the contrary. The German dictator, Adolf Hitler, created many jobs for his people and pulled his country out of poverty like he promised, but at the expense of the Jewish community. They were driven from their homes and were to live in concentration camps, like Auschwitz and Buchenwald, without rebellion. If they retaliated in any way, they either went into to the gas chambers to suffocate, or they would burn in the crematory. As Russia invaded and bombed the camps, the situation escalated. The prisoners were to run out of the camps and travel to another camp by foot to avoid the invading armies. These travels across the snow were often for miles at a time. If anyone was too slow, the German soldiers would shoot them, as to not slow down the group. Many of the prisoners who went to the Buchenwald concentration camp arrived by train. Eliezer Wiesel said in his novel, Night, that on
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their way to this camp, the train had stopped and, “Twenty bodies were thrown out of our wagon. Then the train resumed the journey, leaving behind it a few hundred naked dead, deprived of burial, in the deep snow of a field in Poland.” These corpses were unfortunately naked because the prisoners were so deprived of warmth and clothing, they immediately stole from the dead to stay alive. When the concentration camps were liberated, the prisoners who survived the genocide either were severely malnourished and in need of medical attention immediately, or extremely lucky that they escaped the Nazis for so long. The Holocaust was a horrible tragedy, and the genocides which have occurred since then should not resemble this event in history in any way.
In Darfur, a genocide is ruining the lives of the citizens. The citizens are being driven from their homes by the government, 2,500,000 people are now homeless. These people are now in unfamiliar territory, and possibly starving and dying from diseases. A rebellious militia, called Janjaweed, started this war by challenging the government. The government is now killing anyone of the same ethnicity as this rebellious militia. These attacks are similar to a hypothetical situation like the United States killing a large number of the Asian population just because a gang of Asians attempted to assassinate you. This is an unacceptable assumption about a race and the government is to blame for this atrocity. The government should not exacerbate a situation such as this, they should instead rectify and prevent such a thing from happening again. This shows an incompetent government, and when the society cannot see this, something horrible does in fact occur, such as a genocide. Another horrible occurrence a genocide can create is that the militia could begin to rape and kill the local women, this is happening right now in Darfur. No person should be violated/killed just because of their gender, position in society, ethnicity, or gender preferences. These kinds of hate crimes can cause huge amounts of deaths, and possibly lead into a genocide.
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Hate crimes, such as a Wyoming hate crime in 1998, are the basis for extreme measures like genocides. This particular crime had a twenty-one year old victim named Mathew Shepard. His two attackers, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, took Shepard to a rural area in town to beat him senseless and rob him because he was gay. Shepard was left tied on a fence to die, but he was found eighteen hours after the attack and then was brought to the closest hospital. He suffered a fracture from the back of his head to his right ear, and severe brain damage. He never regained consciousness, and died at the hospital on October 12, 1998. McKinney and Henderson were sent to prison with two life prisons, but were not charged with a hate crime offense. The attack on Mathew Shepard was however a hate crime. The two decided they were going to go “rob a gay man”, and they chose Mathew Shepard as their victim, because he was openly gay. These kinds of hate crimes are what genocides stem from. Laws are needed to prevent such crimes from happening, and this particular hate crime was especially horrible.
As I stated previously, hate crimes happen everyday, and they are the building blocks of genocides. Our country can do something now to help stop/prevent another from happening. Darfur is a great example of a country in crisis and in need of help. People like the Iranian leader, Mahamoud Ahmadinejad, who describe the Nazi Holocaust as a myth are just as much of a threat to another genocide like the Holocaust. These people need to be watched, our county needs better hate crime protection laws, and Darfur needs help. Only someone of power can do something like this, and that someone is you.