Genocide

Love for the party love for the nation
Love for the fix for the fabrication
Love for the corpse for the corporation
Love for the death and for the defecation

Romance and assassination
Give me the love of genocide
Give me love

Fix The Sisters of Mercy

Basic Information

Genocide is the deliberate targeting of an ethnic group for annihilation. Typically genocide is by violent means¹ such as mass murder, starvation or the like.

Normal motives for genocide include the targeted group being a real or perceived threat to the perpetrators or a desire to dispossess them of land or other resources.

Although genocide is a logical consequence of total war doctrine and was, to some degree at least, an accepted part of warfare in previous eras, in the modern day it is generally considered a crime against the whole of humanity.

The related term politicide can be used to refer to the "genocide" of a non-ethnically defined group such as a religion or subculture or a specific social class or caste. This can include eugenic murders, such as those intended to remove a specific trait from a population (or conversely to exterminate those lacking a particular "required" trait).

Sources

Bibliography

1. full source reference

Game and Story Use

• Most fRPGs, and many others expect PCs to at least attempt genocide as part of normal campaign play - species that it is acceptable to target will usually be tagged as Always chaotic evil in order to reduce the values dissonance.
  • The use of extermination camps is usually avoided due to excessive lampshading of the values dissonance, but the use of slum-ghettos and driving "unwanted" species into marginal land² that cannot support their population so that they die off "naturally" is another matter.
• In some settings - especially fantasy ones - some instances of genocide may even be justified.
• Makes a good backstory to a campaign - either ongoing, with the PCs either trying to smuggle victims to safety or hunt down the remaining survivors - or as old history, where the land the PCs live in is full of relics of the previous inhabitants that their ancestors slaughtered.
  • Remember, the world is full of this - in the British Isles, the Celts eradicated or assimilated the Picts (who may or may not have been the aboriginal inhabitants) and, outside Wales and Ireland³, were themselves pretty much wiped out by the Saxons, who were done for in their turn by the Danes in many areas. The Normans, somewhat short handed, opted for conquest rather than colonisation.
• In sci-fi, quite possibly a dark secret of any species that appears to be a single, unified culture - unless they are very different to humans, there are likely to have been a variety of other cultures on their home-world once, which have suffered some combination of genocide, democide or politicide to create the monoculture. Even the end-game, with the relatively peaceful assimilation of the final minorities, is unlikely to have been entire innocent.

Footnotes

1. the term democide is sometimes used to describe destruction of a race or culture by negligence, assimilation or deculturization

2. This, incidentally, is why the orcs live in the badlands and are always raiding farms and villages - they have been driven off more fertile territory and are starving to death, whenever they become too desperate they raid the human lands for food and adventurers are sent to massacre them, which relieves the population pressure for a time.

3. No, I didn't forget Scotland - the Dal Riadha Celts seem to have entered from Ireland at around the same time as the Saxons were moving through England. Before that it seems to have been a Pictish nation.