What's the difference between atrocity and massacre?

Atrocity


Definition:

  • (n.) Enormous wickedness; extreme heinousness or cruelty.
  • (n.) An atrocious or extremely cruel deed.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Their brutality seems to have been fairly even-handed, or if it wasn't, the men surely suffered enough not to be presented as the winners of the atrocity.
  • (2) Senior figures in the Lockerbie case – including Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the attack, and Professor Robert Black, a lawyer and architect of the trial of two Libyans accused of the atrocity – have said they believe Koussa might have significant information about Libya's role.
  • (3) While it is unlikely that Zardari's government had any direct link to the Mumbai attacks, there is every reason to believe that its failure effectively to crack down on the country's jihadi network, and its equivocation with figures such as Hafiz Muhammad Syed, means that atrocities of the kind we saw last week are likely to continue.
  • (4) A Liberal Democrat MP who likened the atrocities against Palestinians by "the Jews" to the Holocaust has made a public apology in the face of widespread anger.
  • (5) German atrocities in the first phase of the war, in France, and the last phase, in the east, were real enough, but you can't generalise from these to say this is how the Germans would have treated the whole of the rest of Europe had they won.
  • (6) It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else.
  • (7) Killings by Palestinians are routinely described as "atrocities" and "murders", while Palestinians deliberately shot by Israeli soldiers have been reported as "caught in the crossfire".
  • (8) The former Bosnian Serb leader was sentenced on Thursday at the international criminal tribunal to 40 years in prison for his role in the atrocities committed during the 1992-95 Balkans war .
  • (9) They have to balance the clear military advice from Kabul, and the data the generals use to support it, against the anger of the Afghan people over recent atrocities, and public demand in Britain and the US for the west to cut its losses and get out sooner rather than later.
  • (10) Speaking after a day of high-level intelligence briefings with British officials in London, Abbott described the unfolding atrocity in northern Iraq as a "humanitarian catastrophe" and said Australia would provide humanitarian aid to Yazidi refugees besieged by Islamic State (Isis) forces on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq.
  • (11) Ministers have insisted that Saudis are conducting inquiries into any errors in their bombing campaign and point out that the military there is operating with the support of the UN in a complex and bloody civil war in which both sides have been accused of atrocities.
  • (12) But these are only the latest of the clashes and atrocities that have engulfed Libya since Nato's "liberation": including bombings, assassinations, the kidnapping of the prime minister, the seizure of oil terminals by warlords, the explusion of 40,000 mainly black Libyans from their homes, and the killing of 46 protesters on the streets of Tripoli in one incident — ignored by the states that supposedly went to war to protect civilians.
  • (13) And I was devastated because I knew the atrocities that were going to occur in Iraq which we knew had occurred in El Salvador."
  • (14) Cinematically, RED SORGHUM achieved a fantastically rich colour palette in its politically less-than-correct depiction of Chinese peasant life – blood and earth predominate – and trod a careful political line by focusing on atrocities by the invading Japanese rather than internal repression.
  • (15) Some analysts interpreted the Kenyan atrocity as a sign of weakness, the thrashings of a dying animal.
  • (16) The atrocities in Paris and Brussels are largely the work of people born and raised in France and Belgium, often from families repulsed by the ideologies of their sons.
  • (17) Wednesday’s atrocities will be set against the backdrop of the anticipated collapse of Isis’s self-declared caliphate, as Iranian-backed Iraqi and Syrian army forces, plus US and British-backed Kurdish militias, close in on its Mosul and Raqqa strongholds.
  • (18) Such an atrocity, had it been committed by any Arab or Iranian, or indeed a Muslim of any persuasion, would have brought down instant punishment, or even war.
  • (19) Donald Trump’s campaign chairman took a “mercenary” approach to lobbying the US government on behalf of international clients accused of killings, rapes and other atrocities, according to one of his former colleagues.
  • (20) Cameron used his strongest language to criticise Sri Lanka's human rights record after watching a Channel 4 documentary about atrocities allegedly committed by state forces in the last months of the war.

Massacre


Definition:

  • (n.) The killing of a considerable number of human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty, or contrary to the usages of civilized people; as, the massacre on St. Bartholomew's Day.
  • (n.) Murder.
  • (n.) To kill in considerable numbers where much resistance can not be made; to kill with indiscriminate violence, without necessity, and contrary to the usages of nations; to butcher; to slaughter; -- limited to the killing of human beings.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Activists said the alleged massacre came a day after 72 were killed at the nearby village of Bayda .
  • (2) The consequences for Syria have been multiple massacres, ethnic cleansing, torture, a humanitarian crisis and the risk of the country's breakup.
  • (3) On hearing the news of Mladic's arrest, I instantly thought of a man I got to know when visiting Sarajevo and the Republika Srpska to write about the Srebrenica massacre.
  • (4) A Yazidi lawmaker, a Kurdish security official and an Iraqi official from the nearby city of Sinjar gave similar accounts, saying Isis fighters had massacred scores of Yazidi men on Friday afternoon after seizing Kocho.
  • (5) Heinz Lammerding, the Waffen SS general in command of the unit that committed the massacre, was captured by allied forces but never extradited to France and was sentenced to death in absentia by a Bordeaux military court in 1951.
  • (6) Assad will massacre the masses if we remain silent.
  • (7) The document is dated 19 days before the alleged massacre.
  • (8) The aim was to supplant the informal militias, known as the " shabiha ", who were often accused of massacres, with a more disciplined and better armed force.
  • (9) It traces his progress of degradation unhampered by constituted authority and concludes with his magnum opus--the greatest massacre of South Sea Islanders in the annals of the South Sea slave trade.
  • (10) Elisabeth Haukeland’s eldest son and daughter both survived the massacre, and they aren’t going back to Utøya.
  • (11) The Libya Quartet, which includes the Africa Union, the European Union and the Arab League, is likely to discuss the massacre of up to 140 civilians and soldiers at an airbase in southern Libya in one of the single most shocking incidents since the civil war started in 2011.
  • (12) Police investigating the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University massacre, which left 33 dead, mainly students, blamed Cho, a fourth-year English student who lived on the campus, for earlier incidents ranging from stalking women to setting fire to a dormitory.
  • (13) The Jedwabne massacre and Kaminski's line that "Jews should say sorry for killing Poles" during the second world war is by far the most important of the many contentious issues on this man.
  • (14) The people were free, the dictator was dead, a mooted massacre had been averted – and all this without any obvious boots on the ground.
  • (15) On Thursday, the attorney general, Loretta Lynch, had described the massacre as a “barbaric crime”, and said it was being looked at as a hate crime.
  • (16) Rory Kinnear is captivating as the journalist covering a massacre.
  • (17) "It is happening at such a pace that it's going to be a massacre here," he said.
  • (18) Even though I might be faced with nothing but a series of tragedies, I will still struggle, still show my opposition,” he said in a 1988 interview, before the Tiananmen Square massacre.
  • (19) Among the most serious charges he faced involved responsibility for the massacre of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in the enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995.
  • (20) The massacre was not committed by "the Poles" against "the Jews", but was a vile crime committed by specific individuals.