07-15-2021, 12:04 AM
Let's start by defining what genocide is and is not. Genocide is the deliberate, calculated plot and action to destroy or decimate a culture or ethnic group or reckless mistreatment of people in ways that lead to that group's decimation or annihilation.
This does not apply to voluntary assimilation. An African-American man marrying and having mixed-race (defined within the society as non-white) by a white woman in a consensual relationship is not committing genocide, although vehement racists might see such as the "submergence" of the "white race", as was so with the likes of the racists Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant about a century ago and with neo-Nazi scum today. . .
Obviously, any systematic murders of a 'race', 'ethnicity', or religious group, most infamously the Holocaust, represent the definitive genocide. If you are discussing the Turkish genocides of Greek and Armenian peoples in the Ottoman Empire or the Hutu attempt to exterminate Tutsi people in Rwanda, then you are right.
Note that the definition excluded social classes, perhaps (weasel words!) to avoid offending the Soviet Union, which had just done that. In recent times the United States has come to include such a horror as the extermination of kulaks in the Soviet Union as a part of its legal definition.
Mass rapes would seem to be mental harm. This was not considered in 1948, as it was unthinkable. To be sure the Soviet Army had plenty of 'rape machines" as soldiers... but those, if caught, risked execution. Rape is a violation of every military code. if not for its wrongness, then for its compromise of military discipline. More blatantly, enslavement would be a cause of mental harm for obliteration of an earlier culture (read David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed about the establishment of race-based slavery in the British colonies, and you will find an account of the complete destruction of any African culture in "fresh" slaves. Perhaps blatant treatment of others as so subordinate that their children can be easily diverted from school to 'labor" as a public policy (I think of Apartheid as a prime example, but Jim Crow practice, if more 'moderate' than Apartheid would serve as an example, too.
Forced conversions to the majority religion? That was rarely done in 1948, but the Spanish Inquisition might have qualified. If one reverted to 'old ways', such as by refusing to eat pork (anathemas under Islamic and Jewish dietary laws alike) or performed some distinctive ritual characteristic of the old religion one might be killed for that. ISIS could be in huge trouble for something of that type. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with such behavior that a well-tied rope and the appropriate drop could not solve in the perpetrator.
No culture can survive without economic viability. A farming community must not be compelled to surrender its farms. People who survive due to skilled trades or business ownership must not be denied the right to continue in such roles. Deliberate imposition of economic ruin upon an ethnic or religious group might be one stage of a process that leads to extermination, as with Jews in Nazi Germany. The Trail of Tears, intended to remove First Peoples from the American Southeast to the infertile semidesert of what is now Oklahoma.
Breaking families is one of the most personally-destructive deeds possible to the human psyche. I will spare you some recent drama.
Prevention of births can be done through many means, including sterilization, deliberate separation of people by gender of the same group if of child-bearing age, and prevention of cohabitation. To be sure, simply reducing birth rates (the most effective means is to keep people in school as long as possible; the gigantic families of one time were the norm when the completion of even elementary education was no certainty. But that, one assumes, is even-handed. Having three children instead of ten means a lower birth rate; in a poor country that also means much less likelihood of famines that overpopulation makes a near certainty.
... I see the destructive results of global warming having the potential for much the same effects as genocide.
Quote:The United Nations Genocide Convention, which was established in 1948, defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such" including the killing of its members, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately imposing living conditions that seek to "bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part", preventing births, or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group. Victims have to be deliberately, not randomly, targeted because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups outlined in the above definition.[4][5][6][7]
This does not apply to voluntary assimilation. An African-American man marrying and having mixed-race (defined within the society as non-white) by a white woman in a consensual relationship is not committing genocide, although vehement racists might see such as the "submergence" of the "white race", as was so with the likes of the racists Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant about a century ago and with neo-Nazi scum today. . .
Obviously, any systematic murders of a 'race', 'ethnicity', or religious group, most infamously the Holocaust, represent the definitive genocide. If you are discussing the Turkish genocides of Greek and Armenian peoples in the Ottoman Empire or the Hutu attempt to exterminate Tutsi people in Rwanda, then you are right.
Note that the definition excluded social classes, perhaps (weasel words!) to avoid offending the Soviet Union, which had just done that. In recent times the United States has come to include such a horror as the extermination of kulaks in the Soviet Union as a part of its legal definition.
Mass rapes would seem to be mental harm. This was not considered in 1948, as it was unthinkable. To be sure the Soviet Army had plenty of 'rape machines" as soldiers... but those, if caught, risked execution. Rape is a violation of every military code. if not for its wrongness, then for its compromise of military discipline. More blatantly, enslavement would be a cause of mental harm for obliteration of an earlier culture (read David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed about the establishment of race-based slavery in the British colonies, and you will find an account of the complete destruction of any African culture in "fresh" slaves. Perhaps blatant treatment of others as so subordinate that their children can be easily diverted from school to 'labor" as a public policy (I think of Apartheid as a prime example, but Jim Crow practice, if more 'moderate' than Apartheid would serve as an example, too.
Forced conversions to the majority religion? That was rarely done in 1948, but the Spanish Inquisition might have qualified. If one reverted to 'old ways', such as by refusing to eat pork (anathemas under Islamic and Jewish dietary laws alike) or performed some distinctive ritual characteristic of the old religion one might be killed for that. ISIS could be in huge trouble for something of that type. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with such behavior that a well-tied rope and the appropriate drop could not solve in the perpetrator.
No culture can survive without economic viability. A farming community must not be compelled to surrender its farms. People who survive due to skilled trades or business ownership must not be denied the right to continue in such roles. Deliberate imposition of economic ruin upon an ethnic or religious group might be one stage of a process that leads to extermination, as with Jews in Nazi Germany. The Trail of Tears, intended to remove First Peoples from the American Southeast to the infertile semidesert of what is now Oklahoma.
Breaking families is one of the most personally-destructive deeds possible to the human psyche. I will spare you some recent drama.
Prevention of births can be done through many means, including sterilization, deliberate separation of people by gender of the same group if of child-bearing age, and prevention of cohabitation. To be sure, simply reducing birth rates (the most effective means is to keep people in school as long as possible; the gigantic families of one time were the norm when the completion of even elementary education was no certainty. But that, one assumes, is even-handed. Having three children instead of ten means a lower birth rate; in a poor country that also means much less likelihood of famines that overpopulation makes a near certainty.
... I see the destructive results of global warming having the potential for much the same effects as genocide.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
