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Persecution is persistent mistreatment of an individual or group by another group. The most common forms are religious persecution, ethnic persecution, and political persecution, though there is naturally some overlap between these terms.
The most common scenario is a majority group persecuting a minority group, since the reverse is usually impractical, although Apartheid in South Africa is considered an exception. Majority groups, however, can inspire resentment where they are locally a minority and find themselves persecuted; persons of an ethnic majority who venture within a large minority neighborhood may experience or perceive a hostility towards them. See reverse discrimination.
Causes
There are various possible origins of persecutory behavior. For instance, a movement which is publicly or implicitly identified with a minority group — such as a religion, a genetic heritage, a region, or other traditional distinction — might be successful enough to disrupt the status quo or become associated with violent acts. A reflective persecutory movement might then arise within the majority, not necessarily distinguishing between those who are and are not part of the movement. This persecution might in turn radicalize the minority group, resulting in a feedback cycle.
So-called opportunistic persecution occurs when someone exploits and stirs up an existing current of resentment to enhance his own political power. This opportunism can be applied "in reverse", as where a minority orator provokes persecution in order to unify a minority movement.
Nazism
Perhaps one of the most commonly cited modern-day examples is the persecution of Jews under Nazi Germany. This originated partly from a complex inflammation of racial, ethnic and religious antagonism by white German Christians against the "non-German" "immigrant" Jews. Among the stereotypes and perceptions fostered by the Nazis was that minority Jews had greater influence in society (were "richer") than majority Germans, and that Jews (along with communists) were largely responsible for the bitter loss of Germany during World War I. The popular reasons for World War II, despite the change in government that came with the rise of the Nazis, was to "unify" the German people–a cause that many Germans believed was sabotaged from within by German Jews, Communists, and Socialists, who would not likely be supportive of a highly racialized and nationalist view of German identity.
Persecution and identity
Past persecutions can become important elements of a persecuted group's identity. Members of many ethnic groups and religions can name at least one time when their group was persecuted by others. Periods of persecution may include martyrdom, in which a person killed by the persecutor becomes a powerful cultural symbol for the persecuted group.
The historical memory of persecution may long outlast a group's status as an oppressed minority, becoming a symbol of group membership. For instance, Christianity's two best-known symbols -- the Christian cross and the ichthus -- are relics of persecution: the cross is the means by which Christ was martyred, while the ichthus was (according to one story) a secret symbol used by Christians to identify one another under Roman persecution. Even where Christianity is the majority religion and has had greater power, these symbols of persecution recall the oppressive past.
Contemporary Nazism in Iran
In a recent article, titled the Black Census, in the noted daily "The Iranian" Iqbal Latif compares the reports of Baha'i specified census as reminiscient of Nazi state practises. According to him "This testimony of a "black census" of Bahais can be compared to 'The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third Reich,' a book written by Gtz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth and published in 1984 is amongst the first to commence the discussion about link between Nazi and post-Second World War state practices. "It was neither through the ideology of blood and soil nor through the principle of guns and butter, upheld until the end of 1944, that the National Socialists secured their might or carried out their destructive activities. It was the use of raw numbers, punch cards, statistical expertise and identification cards that made all that possible (p.1)."
Aly and Heim talk about the dominance of an actuarial sensibility in the Reich's scientific and state communities that measured the "value of a human being" in the purely economic terms of cost versus productivity (pp. 94-98). According to their arguments, populations were selected for marginalization and eventual murder based primarily on this criterion. The authors point out that policies of registration and identification, which did not exist before the Nazis, continue to "profoundly affect" the daily relationship between individual and state in post-war Germany (p. 146). The Bahais in Iran are facing similar prospects today; they have been targeted for marginalisation for nearly 140 years. Now this courageous community is being threatened with a renewed scientific form of annihilation, something that Nazis perfected. Will the world's conscience remain hushed?
Counting minorities is an omen of bad prospects and evil designs ahead. According to the wicked plan, each and every Bahai member in Iran was being identified and monitored. Such an action is an impermissible and deplorable interference with the rights of members of religious minorities in Iran. Bahai faith for far too long has been an expunged page from the Iranian official contemporary records; to erase them further and tap their fringe subsistence is a clear-cut program of state-sponsored extinction of an entire community. This new actuarial request and secret state censuses of minorities have a very dangerous precedent. It advances the idea of collusion of silence with the involvement of science."