Definition of the day: Genocide

 Today seems like a good day to provide the correct definition of one of the most intentionally misused words in the English language.  Genocide.  I might blather about some non-events yesterday, or the decisions of some morally misguided people, but instead I shall intellectualize about the core.  "Geno-" and "-cide."  The suffix indicates the murder of, and the prefix is derived from the general, the category, rather than the specific.  You are undoubtedly familiar with genus species as taxonomic nomenclature.  The nomenclature predates anything like modern, biological taxonomy by thousands of years.  It is the division between the general and the specific.  See the derivation?  As I scan my desk for examples, consider pens.  Pens are the general.  The specific may be the Graf von Faber-Castell E-Motion fountain pen.  To kill the genus of people, then, is to kill a category.  A group.  A race or ethnicity, by etymology.  Genocide is the targeted killing of a race or ethnicity in order to kill off, not one person, but an entire race or ethnicity.  It is different from killing more than one person.  It is different from killing whatever arbitrary number you consider to be "large," even if they share an ethnicity, because genocide must have two characteristics.  First, it must target the ethnicity, and second, the goal must be to destroy or at least dramatically reduce the population of that ethnicity as a population.  If we did not draw that distinction, what would happen?  All war-- literally all war-- would be genocide.  If you fight a war, you commit genocide.  Why?  People die in war.  Civilians die in war, and they will be from an ethnicity.  America is diverse, and there are some diverse countries, although most are diverse in the sense of combining states with different ethnicities (like India).  Yet without the targeting and goal distinctions, the act of fighting a war-- even in self-defense-- would be committing genocide because you would be killing large numbers of an ethnicity.  Even a random serial killer would meet a genocide definition that did not add the conditions we apply.  Words matter. Definitions matter.

Consider the Hi Merima in Brazil.  There are probably about 1000 of them.  One thousand deaths would constitute total genocide of the Hi Merima.  In contrast, Russia has killed probably around 10,000 Ukrainian civilians and another 30,000 soldiers.  Ukraine, one may note, is not very densely populated, and does not use human shields.  Also, they did not attack Russia.  Other way around, for anyone looking for consistency.  Anyway, though, consider that it would take a death toll of 1K for a total genocide of the Hi Merima, but the larger death toll in Ukraine is not, and is not being called genocide by anyone.  Why not?  Russia is not targeting the Ukrainian ethnicity to reduce or eliminate the Ukrainian ethnicity.  Mass death is not genocide.  Genocide has a definition, such that a much larger number of deaths fails to meet the definition, that definition being dependent on the targeting and the goal.

Immediately after October 7, I performed some simple calculations.  How much ordnance would be required to conduct actual, literal genocide given the population density and size of Gaza.  Why?  To demonstrate 1) how much restraint Israel has always shown in fighting, and 2) the suicidal stupidity of the October 7 attack.  45 or so MOABs would kill literally everyone in Gaza.  That would be genocide.

True genocide.

The ease of the task shows just how careful Israel was before October 7, and continues to be to minimize civilian casualties.  See, for example, my chart of death tolls.  When you drop leaflets telling civilians where you are going to bomb, to get them out of the way so that they don't die, only someone acting in bad faith can call it genocide.  Hamas, however, tells the civilians to stay put, so that they die, to manipulate useful idiots around the world, openly admitting what they are doing.  Hamas does not merely say in its charter that it fights for the genocide of the Jews, its own actions meet the definition of Palestinian genocide.  They are actively trying to get as many Palestinians as possible killed.  By their own admission.

So why blame Israel?  "Holocaust inversion."  The largest scale genocide in history was against the Jews, and that has political implications.  Accusing the Jews of genocide does several things.  First, it intentionally diminishes the actual Holocaust, and to those who hate the Jews, that is itself a goal.  Holocaust denial is always the tactic of those who wished Hitler had finished the job.  Always.  Second, because the Holocaust shows the historical persecution of Jews, anti-Semites need to turn that around and portray Jews, not as victims of persecution, but as persecutors.  Indeed, Mahmoud Abbas wrote his "doctoral dissertation," if we can call it that, about a conspiracy theory that "Zionists" (that word) collaborated with Nazi Germany on a Holocaust hoax as an excuse to create the state of Israel.  Yes, really.  Abbas is what passes for a "moderate" among the Palestinians.  Finally, the Holocaust matters for Jews.  Imagine saying to African-Americans, no, really, your ancestors were never slaves.  They were the slavers.  You have it backwards.  The point is to inflame.  To wound.  While Israel drops leaflets telling civilians to get out of the way, trying to save their lives.  This gets under Jews' skin, like Dr. Mengele's knife.  Or the knives they stuck into Jewish women's genitals on October 7.  That's why they do it.

No one wearing a cultural appropriation scarf truly cares about Palestinian civilians.  The ones dropping leaflets warning them to get out of the way are the ones who care.