>>
>> But I don't see that a genocide needs to be a matter of government policy,
>> that if it is not policy, then it is not genocide. What matters is that the
>> conditions necessary for the survival of a people as a people are
>> destroyed.
> ---
>
> At the risk of sounding heartless, if the Moscow police went down one fine
> day and found all the gypsies who sit in the snow begging, with their
> snow-covered infants out in the freezing cold (who don't cry because their
> parents have drugged them), ripped those children out of their hands, put
> them in a school, and stuck their parents in the slammer, I don't think I
> would particularly object. My threshold of cultural toleration has limits.
Look, I can't say that I haven't thought the same way. Who could complain of being taken out of a fly-ridden shithole in the Western Desert and given a nice middle class family where, of course, they would become servants, but have life expectancy 20 years shorter than whites, rather than 40 years? You should come here and do what I did: go talk to these people. People perceive a horrible crime has been done to them and would give it all away to be with their mothers, and 'know who they are.' They often tell the most heart-rending stories you could possibly imagine. The motivations of the people who took the children away were not unlike those expressed in your paragraph, though they were of a racist rather than culturalist cast. They were often, however, pristinely benevolent, which makes the problem so much harder to deal with now. People really thought that exterminating Aboriginal culture and diluting their genes away was the most moral of a host of bad options. Yet what started off with good intentions led to systematic sexual abuse, horrifying conditions, endemic health problems, child labour and didn't reduce racism by one iota. My guess is that there is a very simple reason why this was the case. If you try to help people out because you think they are inhuman, you will treat them subhumanly.
At any rate, perhaps there are instances where severe intervention in a culture is justifiable, though I think that most culture is plastic enough to adapt to our high standards of morality...
Thiago