• Typhoon@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    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:

    1. Killing members of the group;
    2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
    3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
    4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
    5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

    https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition

    • JensSpahnpasta@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • Mulligrubs@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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)

      • TronBronson@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        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.

    • 73ms@sopuli.xyz
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      2 months ago

      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.