Comparing the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust

<table> <thead> <tr> <th>Aspect</th> <th>Armenian Genocide (1915-1923)</th> <th>Holocaust (1933-1945)</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Perpetrators</td> <td>Young Turk Ottoman government</td> <td>Nazi Germany</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Victims</td> <td>Armenian Christians (also Assyrians, Greeks)</td> <td>Jews (also Roma, Slavs, disabled, others)</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Approximate deaths</td> <td>1 to 1.5 million Armenians</td> <td>6 million Jews; 11 million total under Nazi policies</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Methods</td> <td>Mass arrests of leaders, deportations, death marches, massacres, concentration camps</td> <td>Legal discrimination, ghettos, mobile killing squads, industrial extermination camps</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Context</td> <td>WWI; perceived collaboration with Russia</td> <td>WWII; Nazi racial ideology</td> </tr> <tr> <td>International response at the time</td> <td>Limited; some Allied protests but no effective action</td> <td>Limited until late in the war; postwar Nuremberg Trials and UN framework</td> </tr> </tbody> </table>

V. The Cambodian Genocide (1975-1979)

The Cambodian Genocide is one of the most extreme examples of revolutionary mass murder. The Khmer Rouge regime under Pol Pot killed approximately 1.5 to 2 million people, about a quarter of Cambodia's population, in less than four years. The killing was not directed at a single ethnic or religious group (though it included specific persecutions of minorities) but at much of Cambodian society as the regime understood it. Maria should treat this case as the canonical example of revolutionary genocide.

Cambodia, a small kingdom in Southeast Asia, had been a French colony from 1863 to 1953. After independence, the country was led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who tried to maintain neutrality during the Vietnam War. The United States bombed Cambodia heavily from 1969 to 1973 in attempts to disrupt North Vietnamese supply routes through Cambodian territory. The bombing killed tens of thousands of Cambodians and destabilized the country. A 1970 coup overthrew Sihanouk and installed a pro-American military government. The Khmer Rouge, a small communist guerrilla movement, gained strength during the civil war that followed.