this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
117 points (85.9% liked)
World News
36982 readers
546 users here now
News from around the world!
Rules:
-
Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
-
No NSFW content
-
No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What is a pogrom?
I thought its a typo for program or something, turns out it's a real word:
The irony is that original pogroms targeted jewish people
an organized massacre of helpless people
It is a state-backed massacre of helpless people.
Well, at least the State looking away, as is the case in Indian pogroms (eg Gujarat)
Essentially, (if my high school history had it correct) it's an extreme form of violence designed to force a targeted people to leave the land they are living on. People used to use this term a lot more in older days (back in the 80s), but now we just use the term genocide since pogroms usually are an aspect of genocide - the Armenian Genocide, for instance, had a lot of pogroms going on. They are also a key aspect of settler-colonialism - which is how Palestinians ended up being one of the largest refugee populations in the world.
@shasta technically speaking it's organized violent persecution of an ethnic group. Historically has a more specific meaning as it originates in Russia.
When the Russian Empire expanded and in the 19th century began to colonize /occupy territory that contained significant ethnic Jewish populations, they undertook a lot of rioting to lynch/massacre/expell them. These were known as "pogroms".
In modern English it means this kind of systematic attack against any ethnic group. It is also sometimes used informally/metaphorically for other things e.g. political or corporate "pogroms" against a particular group or class of people.