The UN defined genocide back in 1946 and was codified in 1948. It’s very clearly laid out.
#Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
I had this discussion on here the other day. Think about the UN in 1948, and who was responsible then. We had Stalin still in power and if you take a closer look at this genocide definition, you will notice that it’s carefully crafted to exclude all the Soviet crimes. Killing “political groups” or “kulaks” or “counterrevolutionaries” is excluded.
And then we have people here on Lemmy going around and telling other people that Lenin and Stalin didn’t commit a genocide because Stalin has meddled with the definition.
Wars involve more discriminate killing and usually combatants doing killing. there’s usually military leadership and objectives. There’s a special word for when an unorganized group of people starts killing another unorganized group of people for using a different dialect. I think for me it’s a genocide when it’s the civilian population doing most of the killing. Versus a civil war where civilians are fighting a military apparatus with leadership. fine line between a civil war and a genocide, much more defined line between a real war and genocide.
it may be defined but applying all the elements to real situations is not at all trivial and I don’t think most people are painstakingly going through all the elements of the legal definition when they decide to use the word.
The problem isn’t that genocide is thrown around everywhere. The problem is that it happens everywhere. They’re all real actual genocides. They are all terrible.
But normal people have never cared about it as long as it doesn’t happen in their proximity. If even then… as long as it doesn’t happen to them.
After WW2 the UN was formed and they swore they would make sure genocide never happened again. And then they just stood by and watched as Rwanda happened. They literally stood on the ground, inside Rwanda. And didn’t do anything.
Removed by mod
The UN defined genocide back in 1946 and was codified in 1948. It’s very clearly laid out.
#Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition
I had this discussion on here the other day. Think about the UN in 1948, and who was responsible then. We had Stalin still in power and if you take a closer look at this genocide definition, you will notice that it’s carefully crafted to exclude all the Soviet crimes. Killing “political groups” or “kulaks” or “counterrevolutionaries” is excluded.
And then we have people here on Lemmy going around and telling other people that Lenin and Stalin didn’t commit a genocide because Stalin has meddled with the definition.
This definition means every war is genocide; 1, 2, and 3 are all a given in any war
So, anyone can use the term accurately when describing war (according to UN)
Wars involve more discriminate killing and usually combatants doing killing. there’s usually military leadership and objectives. There’s a special word for when an unorganized group of people starts killing another unorganized group of people for using a different dialect. I think for me it’s a genocide when it’s the civilian population doing most of the killing. Versus a civil war where civilians are fighting a military apparatus with leadership. fine line between a civil war and a genocide, much more defined line between a real war and genocide.
it may be defined but applying all the elements to real situations is not at all trivial and I don’t think most people are painstakingly going through all the elements of the legal definition when they decide to use the word.
The problem isn’t that genocide is thrown around everywhere. The problem is that it happens everywhere. They’re all real actual genocides. They are all terrible.
But normal people have never cared about it as long as it doesn’t happen in their proximity. If even then… as long as it doesn’t happen to them.
After WW2 the UN was formed and they swore they would make sure genocide never happened again. And then they just stood by and watched as Rwanda happened. They literally stood on the ground, inside Rwanda. And didn’t do anything.
a good read on this and how the hands of peacekeepers were tied by politcans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_Hands_with_the_Devil_(book)
I’m an atheist but his foreword is chilling, from memory it went something like this
“I know god exists because i have seen the devil, sat opposite him and shaken his hand”
Can you give examples of things that were called genocide but actually weren’t and just watered the word down?
You could never know since there isn’t an agreed upon or clear definition of genocide.