Self-inflicted Genocide
Dr. Michel E. Abs
Secretary General of the Middle East Council of Churches
I do not think that anyone has adopted or used this concept before, as when we speak of somebody taking away his own life, we usually call it suicide.
Self-inflicted genocide is not suicide, because the one who commits suicide only commits his act conscious of the consequences of his actions and decides to end his life of his own free will, because he decided that he does not want to continue to exist anymore for many reasons that cannot be discussed in this article.
Self-inflicted genocide is first of all a collective action, carried out by a people towards themselves, and it is the result of ignorance, greed, and corruption.
In Self-inflicted genocide, you do not have an enemy that attacks you, nor an invader who is greedy for your land or your resources that assaults you. In Self-inflicted genocide, the people lose consciousness, their values collapse, their greed escalates, and their corruption is so rampant that they become blinded to, and not sure of, the impact of the collective harm they cause , primarily to themselves but also to their society. In this case it is the actual nature of society that withers away.
In Self-inflicted genocide, people deviate from the rule of legislation as well as from the controlling impact of values, thus overthrowing society and generalizing weariness until it reaches the depths of the roots of social life.
In Self-inflicted genocide, individualism escalates to the point that it destroys the whole, so that people come to a situation where “no voice is louder than the voice” of the individual's interest at the expense of society. The search of individuals for their own interests is essential to progress, but when individual interests overwhelm societal interest society collapses. Is this not an evangelical truth proclaimed by our Lord as He exclaimed: “ Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand” (Matthew 12 :25 )
This is what usually happens in societies that have not resolved the problem of their national identity, so their members live in scattered or even mutually exclusive groups and do not realize what the interest of the homeland is or what the interest of their partner in the homeland may be, and they overlook the fact that their interests depend on the boundaries of the interests of others as well as on those of the interests of the group, whether it is called society, homeland or nation.
Leaders have a role in fostering or reversing the culture of self-preservation, thus promoting, or preventing the culture of Self-inflicted genocide.
Corrupt leaders are the ones who corrupt their people and train them to secure their interests at the expense of the interests of the group, or rather on the ruins of the interests of the group or even its existence. Here the corrupt is equal to the traitor in his values, practices as well as in the impacts of his actions.
Corruption, the nucleus of the phenomenon of Self-inflicted genocide, is a pattern of thinking that grows with authority and spreads from top to bottom, not because whoever is at the bottom of the social ladder is not corrupt, but because he has no authority that allows him to dare to practice corruption. It is an interactive process that takes the form of a snowball that penetrates into the structures of society and gnaws them, as mites gnaw on the bodies in which they live.
When corruption prevails, treason becomes a generalized culture, that is, when it gradually seeps out of the ruling group towards the lower strata of the social stratum, we can consider that society has entered into a spiral of self-destruction that eventually leads to Self-inflicted genocide.
Corruption may take the form of jumping above the law, altering texts, nepotism, or clientelism, as they call it, monopolizing or smuggling vital goods to society, selling information, forging documents, taking royalties, or forging facts, and the list goes on. All of these practices and their offshoots and derivatives together constitute an integrated mass of practices that lead to the destruction of society as a prelude to its annihilation.
The problem with all this, which results from the loss of insight and from the collapse of values, is that those who plead these methods think that they thus secure their own interests. However, they are unaware that it does not benefit a person to hide in his cabin while the whole boat is sinking. If one realizes what this means, we would term what these people are doing as suicide. It is the well-known example of somebody who is getting his licks in.
If there are no apostolic societal elites whose vocation is to fight against treachery engrained by corruption, and born of unbridled selfishness that knows no restrictions, then consider that such a society has no place under the sun.