Not that I needed the reinforcement of how evil people are, but right now I am taking a class on genocide. I cannot tell you how draining mentally this class is. Each week there is a new book of 300-400 pages to read on a different genocide or multiple genocides. Some are the well known ones that took place in the 1930’s under Stalin’s rule. Those were horrific enough. Then of course you have the Nazis and the genocides they undertook. The one that will stick with me though is the colonial German army in Southwest Africa (SWA) and the genocides of two different peoples in the Herero and Nama. As a Christian I think of the absence any ethics or morals displayed by General Lothar von Trotha against these two people in particular. His goal with them was racial annihilation and eradication. Now we’d just simply term it a genocidal action. Chasing them into the Omaheke Desert and leaving them there to die knowing there was no oasis for them. The Nama were heavily dependent upon milk as a people and they were deprived of that by the Germans in charge. Not all, but enough looked at these two groups of people in Africa as being below Europeans. It led to wholesale slaughter in what is now modern day Namibia. Their populations were decimated between 1904-1908. The Herero lost an estimated 80 percent of their total population while the Nama lost 50 percent. That is an incredible loss of people to both of those cultures. This class has been a mentally exhausting one that even the professor says is “onerous” and difficult to make it through because of the subject matter. It just leaves me as a Christian and human being thinking how do human beings do this to others on a basis of race, skin color, religion? It really leaves me asking some deeply philosophical questions about humanity or the lack thereof. Now we’d have some of these same maniacs in positions of power here and abroad that would love to do such things all over again. I never get mad at or fault anyone that questions where God is at or if they just don’t believe in anything at all. People can just be outright horrible to one another just because they can be and no one stops them.