Secular ideologies carried out most twentieth-century genocides

Evidence

Critics of secularization have two answers to this charge. One, they offer counterexamples of violent conflicts motivated by secular ideologies that lack a religious dimension: the two World Wars in the twentieth century (including the carnage caused by Fascism and the Nazis), Stalin’s and Mao’s purges, and the genocidal Pol Pot regime, to name a few. Earlier, starting in 1915, the Committee for Union and Progress, known as the Young Turk Regime, Westernizers who wanted to reform and secularize the ailing (religiously organized) Ottoman Empire, carried out the first genocide of the twentieth century by annihilating most of the Armenian population as well as depopulating the rest of the Ottoman Christians from their ancestral lands. Many of the individual Kurds, Turks, and Arabs who saved some Armenians were pious Muslims. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 509

Categorization

• XREF: Armenian genocide details connect to the reader’s general pattern of secular-ideology violence; useful for the analytical need to separate religion-signaled conflict from true religious causation. — connects to: Superordinate-subordinate conflicts have driven most post-WWII genocides — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 86; Genocide is a recurring feature of human history with a uniquely bloody twentieth century. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 302; Twentieth-century war and genocide killed over 270 million people (+7 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Superordinate-subordinate conflicts have driven most post-WWII genocides — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 86; Genocide is a recurring feature of human history with a uniquely bloody twentieth century. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 302; Twentieth-century war and genocide killed over 270 million people (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern genocide undermines linear narratives of progress and democracy #complicates (0.76)
• Late-century genocides became the arena for questioning narratives of progress #complicates (0.74) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 254
• Colonial genocide in the Congo preceded and prefigured Nazi genocide #complicates (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 898