Amassacre is an event of killing people who are not engaged in hostilities or are defenseless.[1] It is generally used to describe a targeted mass killing ofcivilians by an armed group or person.
The word is aloan of a French term for "butchery" or "carnage".[2][3] Other terms with overlapping scope includewar crime,pogrom,mass killing,mass murder, andextrajudicial killing.
Massacre derives from late 16th century Middle French wordmacacre meaning "slaughterhouse" or "butchery". Further origins are dubious, though the word may be related to Latinmacellum "provisions store, butcher shop".[4][5][6]
TheMiddle French wordmacecr "butchery, carnage" is first recorded in the late 11th century. Its primary use remained the context of animal slaughter (in hunting terminology referring to the head of a stag) well into the 18th century.The use ofmacecre "butchery" of the mass killing of people dates to the 12th century, implying people being "slaughtered like animals".[7]The term did not necessarily imply a multitude of victims, e.g.Fénelon inDialogue des Morts (1712) usesl'horride massacre deBlois ("the horridmassacre at [the chateau of] Blois") of the assassination ofHenry I, Duke of Guise (1588), whileBoileau,Satires XI (1698) hasL'Europe fut un champ de massacre et d'horreur "Europe was a field ofmassacre and horror" of theEuropean wars of religion.
The French word was loaned into English in the 1580s, specifically in the sense "indiscriminate slaughter of a large number of people". It is used in reference to theSt. Bartholomew's Day massacre inThe Massacre at Paris byChristopher Marlowe. The term is again used in 1695 for theSicilian Vespers of 1281, called "that famous Massacre of the French in Sicily" in the English translation ofDe quattuor monarchiis byJohannes Sleidanus (1556),[8]translatingilla memorabilis Gallorum clades per Siciliam, i.e.massacre is here used as the translation of Latinclades "hammering, breaking; destruction".[9]The term's use in historiography was popularized by Gibbon'sHistory of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1781–1789), which used e.g. "massacre of the Latins" for the killing of Roman Catholics in Constantinople in 1182. TheÅbo Bloodbath has also been described as a kind of massacre; this was a mass punishment carried out on theOld Great Square inTurku on November 10, 1599, in which 14 opponents of the Duke Charles (laterKing Charles IX) inFinland weredecapitated; in theBattle between Duke Charles and Sigismund, Duke Charles defeatedKing Sigismund's troops in theBattle of Stångebro inSweden in 1598 and then made an expedition to Finland, where he defeated the resistance during theCudgel War and executed theestates in Turku without consulting Finland's leadingnobles.[10]
An early use in the propagandistic portrayal of current events was the "Boston Massacre" of 1770, which was employed to build support for theAmerican Revolution. A pamphlet with the titleA short narrative of the horrid massacre in Boston, perpetrated in the evening of the fifth day of March, 1770, by soldiers of the 29th regiment was printed in Boston still in 1770.[a]
The termmassacre began to see inflationary use in journalism in the first half of the 20th century. By the 1970s, it could also be used purely metaphorically,of events that do not involve deaths, such as theSaturday Night Massacre—the dismissals and resignations of political appointees duringRichard Nixon'sWatergate scandal.
Robert Melson (1982) in the context of the "Hamidian massacres" used a "basic working definition" of "by massacre we shall mean the intentional killing by political actors of a significant number of relatively defenseless people... the motives for massacre need not be rational in order for the killings to be intentional... Mass killings can be carried out for various reasons, including a response to false rumors... political massacre... should be distinguished from criminal or pathological mass killings... as political bodies we of course include the state and its agencies, but also nonstate actors..."[11]
Similarly, Levene (1999) attempts an objective classification of "massacres" throughout history, taking the term to refer to killings carried out by groups using overwhelming force against defenseless victims. He is excepting certain cases ofmass executions, requiring that massacres must have the quality of beingmorally unacceptable.[b]
The term "fractal massacre" has been used to refer to two different types of event:
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