I don't think a people who had suffered systematic serious bodily or mental harm on the grounds of their ethnicity to the point it threatened their existence as a people would consider such offences meaningless or legalistic.
If you have a problem with the Geneva Convention, that's fine. It's not sacrosanct. But the ball is in your court to develop a better definition. It's not good to simply say "oh, this could be anything!" when in fact we have a very clear interpretation of what it could be, one that is only muddled by people who want to apologise for certain genocides. I am not so much accusing you of this as telling you that this is how it sounds to me.
It sounds to me as if you are trying to define genocide such that it is the crime that Hitler committed, and basically no one else, ever, certainly no one that could even begin to be compared to us. That's an awfully dangerous idea. People have elevated genocide to the status of ultimate crime, and by associating it with the secular devil himself made it impossible for the hosts of goodness to commit such a crime. That way genocide becomes the atomic bomb of law: the ultimate weapon, utterly destructive and utterly useless. The word becomes huge: that's very convenient for the people who can shield their crimes behind it. I am resigned to having lost the word 'holocaust' to the politicization of human suffering, but at this rate, there will be no words left to call our crimes by.
>
>> What would you say the Australian policies were, when in the 1930s there
>> children were being removed with the explicit intention of eliminating
>> Aboriginal culture and identity? There is no question, I think, that this
>> was the case. So was that a crime? What sort? The only place people have
>> problems seeing this is genocide is Australia and in backwards places like
>> the Northern Hemisphere.
>
> In my opinion the "Stolen Generations" was the same kind of crime that was
> committed against the thousands of British "orphans" sent to settler
> colonies during the very same period and with the very same intent --- to
> make them obedient and capitalist-productive workers, in a society with a
> labour market with a long term, structural dearth of unskilled labour.
There is one huge difference between the Stolen Generations and the British orphans: the British were not transferred with the stated intent to destroy British culture, nor was it done by people who believed that the Caucasian genes should be diluted out of existence. But suppose that the British had in fact set out to exterminate poor people's culture. Could a class be the target of genocide? I think that should be so. If that were the case, then your comparison would not be unwarranted. But I think it is unwarranted. I think you are underplaying the role racist thinking played motivating the policy and the fact that exterminating Aboriginal culture and society was its goal.
Thiago Oppermann