[lbo-talk] What is genocide?

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Fri May 5 07:38:51 PDT 2006


I definitely believe that both Clinton and Bush and their associates intended to slaughter Iraqis as Iraqis. For you to believe their cover lies is outrageous... CB

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Yes, I certainly agree. But there is also a problem with the term geneocide that needs to be firmed up.

To use the word to characterize a war sets up a conceptual conflict over terminology that involves race and ethnic group. If we (or I) believe that there is no such thing as race or ethnic group from a biological point of view, that these are socially or culturally defined groups, then the term genocide becomes problematic. For example is a national identity distinguishable in more than the formality of citizenship?

In other words, historically one of the key concepts required to make genocide possible, was the concept of race, ethnicity, possibly lanuage, religion and culture. The obvious example here is the historical identification of German Jews as Jews and not Germans. In the US case, the obvious parallel is the identification of African Americans, as a race, therefore not really Americans. In a related way, Native Americans were identified as a race.

Anyway, part of the problem is that to enable genocide, it seems to me that the subjects must be delimited in some addition way, in order to become a `non-people'.

A more careful analysis than this, leads to distinguishing genocide as a different sort of crime from the crimes of most wars. The Romans for example were essentially genocidial manics. On the other hand, perhaps ancient societies were much more coherently grouped and made most Roman wars, equivalent to genocide.

Morning thoughts. I think it is worth going into further...

CG



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