First the Nazis came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the social democrats, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a social democrat.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.
- Martin Niemöller
Original quote in German
„Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist.
Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.
Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.
Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.“
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. - Tacitus
(Translation: Where they create desolation, they call it peace.)
The bad guys (or the good guys) are currently in the process of executing a Final Solutionor similar process. Alternatively, they are simply going about their business, and some pesky population happened to get in the way and got exterminated as a side effect. In either case, let's not be rude!
The operation may not be called "genocide" or otherwise truly be made to sound bad. There are three basic ways in which this can come into play.
Type A: Call it Victory, call it Justice. The people who got slaughtered were surely Always Chaotic Evil, and anyway A Million is a Statistic. You might want to put narrative focus on how happy and relieved the people of the good races are that the evil race no longer exists to pose a threat. You might also bring more focus to how many members of the good races were killed while the evil race was defending itself and inflate the number to hide who the real victim was. Later, you can claim that it was just an icky time for everyone involved and it should be left at that.
Type B: Downplay it. Be polite about it, and maybe politely imply that murdering a population is not a very nice thing to do. For bonus brownie points, either use some fancy euphemism or aggressively play the "It's offensive to mention this" card.
Of course, these three ways can easily blend into each other. And as the page quote shows, Type A and Type B easily become Type C.
Simply letting a genocide go noticed only by Fridge Logic is not this trope, that's Inferred Holocaust. Also, a villain using his Propaganda Machine to claim Type A or B is not in itself this trope. However, people conforming and buying into the propaganda can be this trope. Would Be Rude to Say "Genocide" is not about a genocide or similar being claimed to be no big deal, it's about a genocide or similar being treated as no big deal. Treated by the main characters, by the story itself, or by the general population in the society in which the story takes place.
Characters who play out this trope without having their author behind them are likely to regret it later. However, the author is often in on it - slaughter tends to be more fun than ethics & angst.
As for using euphemisms as a way of doing Type B, this is likely to backfire. In Real Life, words like "Final Solution" and "Ethnic Cleansing" were originally euphemisms intended to sound softer and less frightening. Today, however, these words are perhaps more horrific than the word Genocide. In a fictional setting, this mechanism can pop up with people reacting with fear and disgust to whatever neat phrase that the Evil Empire currently use as their euphemism of choice for genocide.
The option to play insulted is an interesting one.
- How dare you accuse me, my country, or my Lord of genocide? - But it's true! - That's not the point. The point is that I get offended when you say such horrible things!
In Code Geass Princess Euphemia is accidentally Brainwashed into wanting to kill all Japanese people, and the Brittanian military follows her orders to slaughter them. While the genocide is eventually called off, the Brittanians seem to consider the Japanese "a dangerous, belligerent race" because they dared to fight back when faced with annihilation.
After Frieza single-handedly exterminated the saiyan race in Dragon Ball Z, he came up with a fake story about their home planet being destroyed by meteors that even his henchmen who were there stuck with, probably to avoid Genocide Backfire from the few surviving saiyans left. It didn't work, of course. He was none too secretive about his other genocides, however, which just went to show how afraid of the saiyans he was.
Comicbooks
In the Lucifer volume Mansions of the Silence, Lucifer annihilates billions of souls as a side effect of saving the life of one single person. (That one person was someone he owed a favor, his billions of victims were not.) Of all the people who witness this tragedy, only Bergelmir says anything about this action being immoral, and even he is quite polite about it. Even so, everyone else simply ignores him as they would a person who's being generally rude, impolite and socially inappropriate.
Those present know that annoying Lucifer is really not the best course of action if your plans involve seeing another day, so they're probably staying quiet out of simple self-preservation. But in any case, elsewhere in the comic it is mentioned that it's impossible to destroy a soul - it simply unravels and then rewinds itself over millennia. And considering that the Mansions of Silence are in some ways worse than Hell, it could just as well be said that Lucifer granted their inhabitants a break from their usual torment.
In the Strontium Dog arc "The Final Solution", The New Church publicly claims that they're moving the mutant population in New Britain to new homes in another dimension where they can live in peace away from normal human beings. What they're really doing, however, is rounding up mutants from their ghettos and dumping them in a dimensional wasteland to be stranded and killed by an Eldritch Abomination, but they know that nobody would make much fuss if they make it sound like a peaceful relocation program.
Magneto: I require a more...definitive solution [than having a single mutant country, Genosha].
Xavier: I think the word you were looking for was "final".
Magneto: *takes offense*
A particularly nice bit of calling-out, given that Magneto is, famously, a Holocaust survivor.
Fan Fiction
The Conversion Bureau has ponykind forcing mankind to "convert" en masse into ponies. If they don't, they're killed. That this is genocide is ignored by both the ponies and the authors, who see it as the best possible thing that can be done.
The fact that the authors gleefully ignore this and in fact treat it as a good thing (sometimes going so far as to vehemently defend it) is actually frightening.
Film
Star Wars: A New Hope uses a Type C: The Evil Empire regime removes the galactic senate just before they destroy the populated planet Alderaan. Thus, there is no Senate that can protest against this atrocity. While they don't say outright that the upcoming demonstration of the Death Star's firepower is the reason why they removed the senate, it sure is convenient timing.
The Expanded Universe explains events a bit more. The Emperor wanted to disband the Senate for quite some time before the events of A New Hope. He used the outing of Princess Leia, a member of the Imperial Senate, as a Rebel agent as a pretext to finally disband it. It was one of the last symbols of the Old Republic (something he wanted to be rid of entirely) and potentially filled with Rebel sympathizers.
Never Let Me Go: People "are completed" on an industrial scale. And "completed" actually equals harvested for their organs. The main characters are clones who have been created specifically for this task.
Speaker: This cure is voluntary. Nobody's talking about extermination.
Magneto: No one ever talks about it; they just do it. And you go on with your lives, ignoring the signs all around you. And then one day, when the air is still and the night is fallen, they come for you.
Speaker:[interrupts] Excuse me-
Magneto: Only then do you realize that while you're talking about organizing and committees, the extermination has already begun.
Magneto is exploiting this trope, however: he is using fear of genocide to widen the divide between mutants and humans and perpetuate his war against humanity, ostensibly to protect the mutants from just such an extermination.
Magneto is himself Justified in mentioning it, in that he has lived through it. He may be planning to strike preemptively against the normal humans to stop the genocide of mutants, but he always has been He Who Fights Monsters.
Played straight to the very end of the Critters quadrilogy. Even in the last movie, where they hint at this trope being in place, when the crites have almost completely been annihilated but cannot be completely made extinct because galactic law prevents doing this, those trying to protect the last of the critters assume the role of the 'bad' guys, even though one of them, the shapeshifter 'Ug', was a returning 'good guy' from all the previous movies. In the end, the 'bad guys' are defeated and the last of the crites are destroyed and that evil bastard Ug who was trying to save them from extinction is killed as well, and there is much rejoicing. Ug had the upper hand in the situation, but the 'good guys' took him down by pointing their guns at the last of the crite eggs, and he had to make a fatal mistake trying to protect them. Isn't it nice when the 'good guys' use sleazy bad guy tactics to kill the virtuous bad guy?
R. A. Salvatore's novels about Drizzt feature Type C as a social institution for the dark elves of Menzoberranzan, although usually conducted on a smaller scale then genocidal: Killing a group of people is a crime, but only members of that group can make the official complaint. Thus: If you successfully kill everyone, so no one is left to protest, no crime can be said to have been committed. Ironically, this institution is also a part of how they maintain social order: If one of the royal houses falls out of favor with their evil Goddess, then other houses will use this system to gang up on them.
Type B is played with in The Illuminatus! Trilogy. In one of the many versions of the backstory, Gruad has just destroyed Atlantis, wiping out its entire population: "But deep inside, he knows that what he has done isn't nice".
In the Animorphs series, the Andalites plan to "quarantine" planet Earth to keep the Yeerks from using the resources (especially the Human Resources) of Earth to conquer the galaxy. But it's not actually militarily possible to enforce this quarantine—so everyone treats this as a Type B euphemism for genocide.
Ender's Game used Type A. Throughout the book Child Soldiers are being trained to fight in case an alien race known as the Buggers invade like they'd done twice before, the last time being 70 years prior. It turns out in the end that the Child Soldiers were actually being trained to launch an invasion against the Buggers, resulting in the extermination of their species via Earth-Shattering Kaboom while tricking the children into thinking they were only playing a game. The Buggers themselves, thought to be Always Chaotic Evil by most Earthlings and portrayed as such in propaganda, were actually peaceful, having ended their hostilities against mankind generations ago. And the initial hostilities were an honest misunderstanding. They didn't mean to start a war, they were just saying "hello" by introducing their drone-soldiers to our territory and having them fight a bit. Drone-soldiers killing each other is roughly analogous to a hand-shake because each individual drone has no mind of its own. They had no idea that ALL of our drone-soldiers were actually individual Queens. How insane is that, an entire race of Queens and nothing but Queens? Who could possibly have predicted such a form of intelligent life existed? They became passive when they realized this, in the sense of only now fighting a defensive war. They made no further attacks and merely tried their best to not be wiped out by the vengeful hand of humans, who they were trying desperately to communicate their apology to. (It nearly worked.)
In the children's book The Inventors, the two main characters Nate and Cat have won a scholarship with the world's greatest inventor Ebenezer Saint, who they discover is planning to destroy humanity and start rebuilding society from scratch. At one point, Saint begins rolling out a list of euphemisms for what he's about to do, before asking for suggestions for more. He accepts Nate's suggestion of "Begin the genocide", but calls him a drama queen for it.
In Harry Harrison's Deathworld, their world has gotten really too deathy, so they decide to emigrate. There is a nice planet with a nice plateau BUT the plateau is inhabited. The Deathworlders suggest simply eliminating this population. 'Oh no' says the hero, 'that would be wrong'. Instead they lead this war-like race off the plateau to rich farmlands where they can cut a swath through the native population, enjoy their luxuries, get seduced by the lifestyle and never return to the plateau. This wholesale slaughter is 'oh well you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs'.
Likely the largest genocide ever imagined is at the conclusion of the Skylark of Space series. The protagonists have before tanagled with the "ameboid" Chlorans, who attack, enslave and exploit humans (but do not exterminate them). In the earlier encounter there was just one Chloran planet; the option of genocide (called explicitly by that name) was considered, but due to pleadings of "soft-hearted" women the milder option of sending the planet far away was taken. But when discovering a faraway galaxy with millions of Chloran planets, the protagonist Seaton decides that the Chlorans are "a cancer" and a danger to the entire universe, and that nothing would do but to kill every single one of them - empatically rejecting any other option. He and his arch-enemy turned ally Du Quesne proceed to do just that, causing all the Chloran suns to go nova. "The Chlorans died in their uncounted trillions. The greeny-yellow soup that served them for air boiled away. Their halogenous flesh was charred, baked and dessicated in the split-second of the passing of the front wave from each exploding double star, moments before their planets themselves started to seethe and boil. Many died unaware. Most died fighting. Most died in terrible, frantic effort to escape... But they all died." Immediately afterwards, Du Quesne - feeling not the slightest remorse at having just killed uncounted trillions of sentient beings and destroyed an entire galaxy, proposes to his long-cherished lady love and is thrilled to hear that she truly loves him.
Of course, one might note that as the Chlorans are being killed, trillions of Chloran slaves are being liberated.
One might also note that the Chlorans initiated hostilities without warning; Du Quesne was just travelling along through interGALACTIC space (i.e., many millions of lightyears distant) and as soon as they detected him they tried to incinerate his ship — and damn near succeeded. The Chlorans are Absolute Xenophobe types, only keeping humans alive as long as they're useful and killing them off as convenient.
And it's also important to note that Du Quesne himself was a Magnificent Bastard villian who just happened to be working with the good guys because the Chlorans would punch HIS ticket too.
Live-Action TV
If you consider allowing a race you could have effortlessly saved to die because of a non-interference policy to count as genocide, Captains Picard, Janeway, and Archer from Star Trek all committed Type A, in this case calling it principle (they justify it as not interfering with evolution).
While people are getting slaughtered by the thousand in Equatorial Kundu on The West Wing, C.J. Cregg is not allowed by the White House legal counsel to say the word "genocide" in front of the press.
This was in reference to the Clinton Administration standing by with the Rwandan Genocide going on, which they referred to as "genocide-type acts" because acknowledging it was genocide would mean under the Genocide Convention they were required to intervene. Unlike the fictional administration on The West Wing, they never did.
In The Event, when the only possible refuge left for the aliens is Earth and its resources clearly won't suffice for both them and the humans, Sophia concludes that "we need to make room". One of her henchmen, who had until recently acted as The Mole inside U.S. government and gradually grew to sympathize with the humans, immediately calls her out on it: "You mean GENOCIDE!"
When the human fleet of Battlestar Galactica discover a disease that could wipe out the entire Cylon race, Helo seems to be the only one willing to publicly describe using it as genocide. Adama does admit in private that he views it as genocide, however.
Odd example though as the humans were survivors of the very recent genocide committed by the Cylons and were still being hunted down. It's unlikely the majority would object to the concept.
Uther Pendragon in Merlin views his slaughter of magic users and all dragons except one as completely justified, making it a type A. His son, Arthur, goes along with it to please him, but it's repeatedly shown that he will not kill harmless magic users if he isn't forced into it.
In Black Adder The Second, Edmund briefly becomes Lord High Executioner, or as he calls it: "The Minister of Religious Genocide". It's his responsibility to execute "traitors" and closeted Catholics by command of Elizabeth the First. Notably the episode never moralises on genocide, and Edmund regards it as nothing but a tedious and very deadly chore he has to do.
In The Vampire Diaries, Elena causes the slaughter of tens of thousands of vampires without blinking, justifying it because it brings her closer to a cure.
Videogames
In StarCraft, Mengsk crosses a Moral Event Horizon by having the entire civilian population of the planet Tarsonis slaughtered by the alien Zerg so that he can crown himself emperor. In StarCraft II, he starts out as a Villain with Good Publicity who have managed to erase all traces of his crime. His loyal lackeys all shut up about it (or did he have them all assassinated?), and in the public social life of the empire it's out of line to point out that the Zerg invasion of Tarsonis was convenient for Mengsk's powergrab. To imply that the emperor was actually behind the attack is surely out of the question. Of course, there is one single exception to this dreadfully polite silence: Our hero, the main character, the "Traitor & Terrorist" Jim Raynor. Oh, and the genocide really backfires on Mengsk once the hero's forces have taken over the television network so the truth can no longer be suppressed.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 had a planned-but-deleted zone called Genocide City, which was renamed to Cyber City, then replaced by the third act of Metropolis Zone after the Japanese developers bothered to look up what the word meant.
In Halo 2, after the changing of the guard, the remaining Prophets initiate an Order 66-style genocide of the Elites, disguised as a Brute uprising.
Yggdra Union has lots of Type A when you get to the part where Yggdra has finally forced the Empire out of her country, then decides to invade Bronquia and destroy it. Even after Kylier tries to get her to realize that she's going to become the new 'evil invader', Yggdra tells her "This is Justice." Then the game forces you to mow through the 'Bronquian Militia', which is a basically a bunch of level 1 units trying to defend their homeland, and makes you feel very bad about it. "What is Justice?" is a question that a lot of people are asking throughout the game.
A gameplay mechanic in Age of Wonders. When you take over a town, you have the option to "migrate" the race currently inhabiting the town, replacing it with a race that's friendly to you. It's a very useful option - say you're a good-aligned race but just took over an undead town and want to replace it with another good-aligned race - but you're still basically committing mass deportation and resettlement...
World of Warcraft surprisingly goes into this, but not overtly, such that many players aren't aware of it, but if you read the quest text, you realize what's going on. In short, the Black Dragons are a genocidal breed of dragons that have been corrupted by the Old Gods, and now serve their insane master on his quest to kill everything. In the face of this universal genocidal threat, the Red Dragons, Protectors of Life, after many attempts and years of conflict, decide the only thing to do is to declare every single Black Dragon corrupted and beyond redemption, and to exterminate every last one of them. That's every Black Dragon, Drake, Whelp, and Egg. And the player helps them do this, even personally dispatching the last fertile Black Dragon female and smashing her eggs. There is obviously a moral question here, and the irony of the Protectors of Life declaring indiscriminate oblivion on an entire species, down to their unborn young, is not lost. However in a far distant and unrelated quest, there are signs that the Red Dragons have taken steps to purify a Black Dragon egg and to restart the flight anew. With one member: Wrathion.
Titan A.E. uses a Type A at the end, with the Drej being annihilated and recycled as fuel for a great project. And never mind the demise of the Drej, just look how useful their life energy turned out to be for the humans!
In defense of the humans, genocide was an act of self-defense.
Bitterly ironic as well, as their prophecy wound up becoming self-fulfilling due to their paranoia. If the Drej hadn't chased the humans to Titan, then it would have been just a very large derelict within an asteroid field, as there wouldn't be nearly enough power to activate it.
The film starts with the Drej committing genocide against humans by destroying Earth. Only a few thousand humans are left, scattered among the stars and treated as scum.
Real Life
The term "Genocide" originated in the mid 1940s, so it would be impossible for anything predating that to be called such by contemporary sources, though debates on ascribing the term to certain historical atrocities are still waged between the descendants of those involved.
The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide compels all nations that have signed it to act with full force to stop and prevent any acts of genocide in the world. Most modern versions of this trope are usually countries trying to cop out of this agreement since they do not have the resources to/have the desire to get involved in a long, drawn-out conflict with little apparent gain to the intervening countries ("It's a civil war, not a genocide!"):
During the genocide in Rwanda and the slaughter of a large chunk of the population for being the Tutsi and not Hutu, the UN and major nations insisted on calling the events genocide-like acts as a way of loopholing out of doing anything. The USA was a particular abuser of this – since the Somalian intervention in 1993 blew up in their face, they didn't want to risk another failure. It got to the point that, shortly after leaving the presidency, Bill Clinton travelled to Rwanda to apologize for the horrible mishandling of the situation. Probably the best account of this is Michael Barnett's Eyewitness to a Genocide, which documents it from the perspective of someone who actually worked at the UN at the time (it isn't pretty).
During the genocide in Darfur, European authorities were very reluctant to call it a genocide, instead repeating the cop-out from Rwanda and calling it "Genocide-like acts". In this particular case, intervening would make them look bad, as intervention has become a very dirty word in light of recent events. Thus it was not a genocide. This didn't prevent the International Criminal Court from issuing a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir specifically indicting him for three counts of genocide (as well as five counts of crimes against humanity and three counts of war crimes). The arrest warrant has not been served, as al-Bashir has made a point of not visiting any country that might arrest him.
During World War II, most Germans and a lot of people in the allied nations as well refused to acknowledge that the concentration camps were really death camps – even if they knew the truth for certain, it was so much easier to pretend it wasn't happening. To this day, there are still people who cling to the fantasy that the Holocaust didn't happen at all, or that it "only" happened to the Jews – thus retconning away the other victims: the gays, the intellectuals, the Romani, the mentally disabled, and so on.note Although the exact numbers will never be known, it's pretty likely that the majority of those killed by the Nazis weren't Jews, although Jews were still the single largest group killed by them (outside of combat anyway; far more Russians died during the war).
The Armenian Genocide, which was a Trope Codifier for 20th century genocides to come. The Republic of Turkey passionately denies it was a genocide to this day, mainly to protect their reputation and dodge having to pay reparations. There are citizens in Turkey who want the government to acknowledge the genocide, though they may not be the majority since the country is very nationalistic, and in fact people have been prosecuted saying genocide occurred under a law criminalizing "insulting Turkishness". This gets tied into international politics because Azerbaijan, an avowed enemy of Armenia and close ally of Turkey, demands that Turkey refuse to acknowledge the genocide. Not that Turkey's government is in a particular rush to do so anyway.
The situation is similar with what happened to the Pontic Greeks, considered a Genocide in Greece and of course not in Turkey. The Assyrians suffered a similar fate as well at around the same time.
This particular one has repercussions elsewhere. A major controversy ensued when Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, urged the U.S. Congress not to recognize the Armenian Genocide; unsurprisingly this was not considered becoming of one of America's most respected civil rights organizations. The internal conflict proved to be too much and the ADL has since downplayed the issue, though they're still against recognition.
This also extends to many of Turkey's allies. The US President for example must avoid using the "G" word when addressing Armenian-Americans on the Day of Remembrance for the genocide, using instead the Armenian term Medz Yeghern (The Great Calamity), which predates the creation of the word 'genocide' and has since gained Unfortunate Implications due to its use as a way to dance around having to say it was a genocide.
Older Than Feudalism: The Roman destruction of Carthage and its entire population was widely lauded by Romans of its time as both just and necessary, with the worst aspects of Punic culture used as added justification for their annihilation. For years before it actually happened, Cato the Elder, a famous Senator, ended each speech he made with the demand "Carthago delenda est," Latin for "Carthage must be destroyed."
According to Azerbaijan's propaganda, Armenia is an evil nation at least in part because the Armenian army deliberately killed civilians during the Nagorno-Karabakh War.*
Nagorno-Karabakh is a part of the Caucasus that is majority Armenian, but lies within the current borders of Azerbaijan (at one point, the distance between N-K and the Armenian border is only a few miles). Because of the linguistic and religious differences between Azeris and Armenians, this became a problem very quickly after the Soviet Union collapsed.
In particular, the Khojaly Massacre was the most infamous one, which was seen as completely uncalled for in the international community. The Armenian government continues to deny the massacres committed by the Armenian army on Azerbaijan's citizens. There were pogroms on both sides of the conflict too, such as the massacres of Armenians in Baku and Sumgait, though Khojaly was still worse in terms of casualties. Hence the Azeris demand for Turkey not to recognize the past crimes, in retaliation.
French historians still have been known to debate whether or not the "intent" to exterminate a population is the clear and absolute objective: when people are killed so their neighbours will flee the country (Darfur, Bosnia...), it's not considered to be a genocide. When civilians are starved or indiscriminately killed in order to stave off a rebellion (Ukraine's famine, War of Algeria...), it's not considered to be a genocide. When a population is destroyed as a result of uncaring colonization or outright incompetence (Native Americans, Easter Islanders...), it is not considered to be a genocide. While intent is a main component of the definition of genocide it's hard to debate that the intent wasn't there for a lot of these examples.
To get around these sorts of quibbles, R.J. Rummel proposed the term democide which includes any killing by a government that would be considered murder if an individual did it. (Note that accidental deaths are considered to be "murder" if the perpetrator demonstrated a lack of respect for human life - say, by firing a gun at random into a crowd – and so all of the above situations might be considered to be democides). The point being: whether you're killed for being a "non-Aryan" or for being a "kulak" or "subversive", you're just as dead.
The disappearance of Muslims from Greece and (most of) the Balkans in general – though to be fair, a lot of them left in exchange for even more Christians leaving Turkey*
the best-guess numbers are that over three times as many Greeks were expelled from Turkey as vice-versa
– can be described as this, with some national movements killing or expelling many Muslims upon victory, though there are still many more Muslims in the Balkans than there are Christians in Turkey (over a hundred times more, to be exact). This is one of the reasons the Armenian genocide is a Berserk Button issue in Turkey, being seen by many as a Double Standard.
The systematic extermination and/or relocation of indigenous people in the United States was generally depicted by contemporary writers and newspapers as justifiable, necessary, and inevitable, with few exceptions, and they were mythologized as a Dying Race to more or less cover up the fact that it was largely being done on purpose. In fact, this was a common way of excusing a lot of murderous colonial regimes.
Colonial 'settler' regimes, which were surprisingly few and far between*
less than one percent of the population of British Kenya was ethnically British, and the proportion was even smaller for those parts of India governed by the East India Company and its replacement, the Raj
: Algeria, Argentina, Qing-Chinese Central Asia, Imperial-Russian Central Asia, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the USA were all of them.
In Israel, it's a case of "Would be rude to say 'Holocaust'". You see, the term actually means a ritual burned offering or sacrifice to God – the implication being that the Jews murdered by the Nazis were martyrs for the Jewish faith. Because of the Unfortunate Implications, even non-Israeli Jews prefer to use the Hebrew term current in Israel, Ha-Shoah*
Most non-Hebrew speakers use the article from their own languages with the word, e.g. "The Shoah", "Die Shoah", "La Shoah" etc.
(The Catastrophe).
Ironically (or perhaps not), the Palestinian name for their loss and expulsion in the first Arab-Israeli war means "The Catastrophe" as well – Al Nakba.
The colonization of Australia has overtones of this, although there seems to have been a fair bit of Assimilation involved as well. Calls to have the 'Stolen Generation' labelled as Attempted Genocide were, however, rejected on the grounds that it was nothing like Genocide at all, but only a misguided attempt to stop the perceived widespread abuse of half-white Aboriginal children and bring them into White Australian society and save their souls by ensuring they were brought up Christian. Other historians disagree, and argue that there is clear evidence for assimilation and thus accelerated destruction of what was seen as the Indigenous Dying Race (through assimilating any "salvageable individuals) being an actual goal of the policy. In practical terms, it gave us thousands of dysfunctional people with psych problems. *
To be fair, psychology was kind of a new thing and a popular belief at the time was that since suffering made you tougher, the best way to prepare children for life was to be as harsh to them as possible. Hence the culture of bullying encouraged at Public Schools, the administration of beatings, etc.
Peru has a similar story with Alberto Fujimori's "ligation days", but it's not Peru that denies it. Like Iran and a few of Israel's other neighbors with the Holocaust, this one involves countries unrelated to the actual perpetrator: The United States (mostly because of some American companies who supported Fujimori) and Japan (because Fujimori currently resides there).
In East and South-East Asia the Japanese are considered notoriously cavalier about their Army's war crimes during the 1930sand 40s. Part of this comes from genuine ignorance, as Japan's right-wing has been partially succesful in preventing this from being covered in schools and school textbooks; they fear that acknowledging the 5-20 million dead, as well as the specifics of the various war crimes and crimes against humanity (biological weapons testing on hundreds of thousands, human medical experimentation on tens of thousands, mass-rape of hundreds of thousands, torture of hundreds of thousands, forced prostitution of tens of thousands, POW deaths from preventable causes*
like starvation-related disease
and heavy-handedness*
like being bayoneted, or being beaten to death
in the hundreds of thousands, POW-beheading contests, etcetc) would harm the patriotism and national pride of Japan's youth. Interestingly enough, some surveys of national pride would appear to indicate that the advent of the internet has resulted in a dramatic decrease in Japanese patriotism.
There is a new book co-authored by Edward Herman called The Politics of Genocide. It details a whole bunch of these types of cases. One major example is the Indonesian dictator Suharto. Even to this day, he still has many fans in media and academics, domestic and abroad (particularly in the West), who suspiciously do not refer to his mass killings of his own people and his devastating invasion of East Timor as a genocide in the slightest. In fact, many often act as if these atrocities never happened. This is beginning to change slightly now that East Timor has gained its independence, forcing the rest of the world to acknowledge it.
Matthew White, a self-described "atrocitologist", has taken it upon himself to be a scholar of the absolute nadirs of evil human beings have committed. He coined the term hemoclysm ("blood flood") to describe the worst atrocities of history. While World War II tops the list in raw numbers with an estimated 55M deaths, when the ranks are adjusted for the world's population at the time, it drops to ninth. The Mongol conquests killed 40M in the 13th century (#3 in raw numbers, #2 in adjusted rank), and the An Lushan Revolt in the 8th century claimed 36M (#4 in raw numbers, #1 adjusted). None call these "genocides". Stephen Pinker, who used Matthew White's work as a tiny fraction of his research for The Better Angels of Our Nature, points out just how frequent the hemoclysms and genocides of history have been, and worse, how ordinary they were in the minds of the people of that era. Even more troubling is that despite the much lower world population at the time and lack of industry, numbers close to that done in the entire Second World War were achieved by pre-industrial societies.
Countless tribes were exterminated in tribal fighting, their names never recorded and the crimes lost to history.
The standard outcome of a defeated city was to be subject to massacre for much of history. For example, the 1258 Siege of Baghdad ended with roughly two million exterminated. This would be called genocide by most modern scholars.
The Bible chronicles the extermination of many peoples, in some case directly commanded by God. In one of the more famous examples, Numbers 31 states all male Midianites were killed by Israel, down to newborn infants, as were all women who were not virgins. The virgins were taken as slaves. The tone of the book does not indicate that this act should be condemned as genocide. The theological implications are not a good topic for discussion, but the tone does hint at how societies of the era viewed such horrors.
However, please do not get stuck in semantics on the definition of the word "genocide": This trope is not limited to any certain definition - note that it says "Final Solution or similar" and "genocide or otherwise", not just "Final Solution" and "genocide".
