Is History full of genocide?

Is history full of empires and powerful states conquering other people, who then assimilate the conquered by brainwashing them while extinguishing their language, art and culture?

I was watching a video about Latin and learned it was just one of many languages called the Italics which pre-dated the Roman empire.

After the ancient Romans conquered the surrounding areas, there was an apparent push to have everyone switch to Latin. Non-Italic languages were extinguished as well.

“The other Italic languages became extinct in the first centuries AD as their speakers were assimilated into the Roman Empire and shifted to some form of Latin.”

-Wikipedia page on “Italics”

Something similar happened in Ancient Greece when Macedonia took over. After Alexander the Great conquered lands as far as India, there was an overwhelming drive to spread Greek culture, beliefs and style which became known as Hellenistic.

This bothers me on moral grounds, because I cannot help but thank of this as cultural genocide. More specifically, it’s language genocide.

And when I think of cultural genocide, my mind snaps to videos and photographs I’ve seen of Uighurs in Xinjiang forced into re-education camps by the Chinese Communist Party controlled Chinese government; and in these camps, they are brainwashed.

The Uighurs are forced to study what the Chinese Communist Party wants- the propagandized history of China, the language, how they are expected to serve the Chinese state. They are severely punished for practicing their own Muslim culture, spealing their language, or criticizing how the Chinese government treats them.

To my mind, what’s happening to Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang is a prime example of not only cultural genocide, but also crimes against humanity and an insult to human life itself.

But history is full of cultural genocide, as far back as Ancient Greece and Rome. The holocaust of the Jewish people was genocide- not just genocide of their people, but of their culture; genocide of everything that made them Jewish.

Even the lauded United States government has been guilty of genocide and attemping to wipe out cultures alien to European ancestry. One example would be the mass slavery of Africans and then assimilating them into American society- by brainwashing them to believe in Christianity and believe slavery was natural; and that they were naturally slaves. They were taught that being a slave and manual labor was their God given destiny.

Another example of genocide by the United States government would be the decimation of the Indigenous Peoples that were here before Jamestown was built. Native Americans who survived were usually assimilated into American society; forced to wear American style clothing, speak English, and learn American history while being to told to forget their own. The American government didn’t just want to kill Natives and use Africans for manual labor- it wanted to destroy all their roots, and replace them with roots covered in red, white, and blue.

Is history full of genocide?

Yes.

But do we have to continue allowing genocide?

No.

-Juno