So. Why exactly is it important to have this category?
Why is it more wrong to kill someone because they are Iraqi, Cherokee,....or just plain in your way? joanna
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Charles answered this pretty well, but it needs more. It's a good question because trying to answer helps illuminate some of the points about genocide I think need more clarification.
First of all, I don't think an individual as such can be accused, tried or convicted of genocide without additional elements. I think they need to be acting in the capacity, or as an agent of the state, an official body, or for a political, religious, cultural or ethnically defined organization or more broadly, a social order---and importantly, the particular individual or individuals do not need to have personally murdered anyone. In other words genocide maybe murder, but it is additionally a socially and quasi-legally constructed act that finds its justification in the also socially constructed definition of its victims---typically a particular people who need to be erased.
In other words the murders (or systematic abuse that leads to significant de-population) have to be committed as part of a social, religious, cultural, or ethnically defined policy by an official body or quasi-official body. If not a government as such, then the highest form of social order that prevails during the activities and over sees the outcome.
This is vague and unclear, but it's the best I can do at the moment.
The larger point is that the cultural, religious, social, and/or political organization of a society must be prohibited from utilizing its conventions and institutions of power for the purpose of killing people who fall under such power. (Some further elaboration of this goes to why I oppose the death penalty. It is simply an abuse of state power that needs to be prohibited on principle. It is irrelevant what the individual has done as an individual. The argument goes to limiting state power...)
In contra-distinction, the purpose of large social orders is to promote the well being of humanity, which depends on such orders of organization in an absolute sense for its survival. Therefore it is a consummate abuse of power to turn those institutions and social orders to the task of erasing whole peoples.
(To a certain extent, Carrol is right to point out that capitalism `as such' is an abuse of such power. It is a crime `against humanity' to take advantage or otherwise systemically dispossess the least organized and most vulnerable, mostly the working classes and minorities of any society, and abuse their powerlessness to advantage an elite few through the indiscriminant application of various economic laws, institutions, and privileges---which taken together in effect constitute the capitalist class. In other words, I agree, capitalism is a crime in principle.)
Historically, it seems to be the case that when a society begins to move toward genocide, it almost always exercises that abuse of power on those most dependent on the state, those who can not escape such abuse and have no sanctioned political means to prevent it.
The final solution to the `Indian problem' of the US west was a case in point. Reservations were in effect federal internment camps where whole peoples disappeared from history. Those who managed to survive were bereft of their land, language, culture, and customs---most of which had to be re-constructed from limited artifact remains. While it was obvious that no living survivor was a victim of murder, since they were still alive, the fact remained they were stripped of all that they could possess that could make them a member of a human community. Their community as such was destroyed, even if individual members survived.
Returning to the 20thC, it is very doubtful that Eichmann ever murdered anyone. He claimed not to be anti-Semitic. Indeed he may have not been. Nevertheless, his personal attitudes and morals were not on trial. He was empowered by the state to design and implement a policy to murder millions, and he did just that. He was an agent acting in an official capacity, and as such he was guilty of crimes against humanity, whatever his personal views on the subject. (In turn, I think it was a mistake of policy or abuse of state power to execute him.)
I think the ultimate Enlightenment meaning (which paradoxically is also the source of modern genocide) to these speculations is that the modern state's primary purpose is to secure and promote the well being of all persons within its power and to extent to them, at a minimum, the fundamental human rights of the UN charter---first and foremost the right to exist, the right to their own language and cultural heritage.
The purpose of the state is not to promote the Aristotelian good as the neoconservatives and neoliberal economic policies would have us believe. Such a purpose is tantamount to the promotion of a hierarchy of most valued to least valued persons or classes. Rather, all persons are to be considered of equal value before the state, and the process of pursuing that equality is the social good.
I am not sure this really answers the question. It probably dodges around it.
I think the ultimate point is that mass killings, de-populating regions, forced conversions with the purpose of stripping people of their cultural, linguistic, and historical heritage, in short their `community' and other activities that are directed under legal authority of the state with the over riding purpose of erasing a people as a people are the highest crimes of state. Those who work under the auspices of state authority to implement and carry such policies are state criminals. Like any crime, judgments are a matter of degree, scope and scale which should be considered in some proportion to punishment, short of the death penalty.
For those who may object to the idea of no death penalty, consider the fate of Sirhan Sirhan. He is still rotting in the California prison system all these years later. He is toward the end of his middle age, having never lived much of a life. California did not have the death penalty when Sirhan was convicted. Also consider that if a state is constitutionally prohibited from carrying out executions, then it makes the job of building a state apparatus for a potential genocide all that more difficult.
Hate crimes and individual acts are different matter. Charles and I disagree on this. As I remember we had several interesting exchanges on this topic a couple of years ago. While I agree that hate crimes can be linked or rather they can point toward genocide, and therefore point to a larger crime than their manifestation as vandalism, arson, assault or murder, these are still crimes and have heavy punishments.
In the context of a much more progressive prison system, in other words in an ideal world, I think `hate' as an element should add a point or two or more to an existing punishment. But California already has such outrageously long sentences, that it is mostly irrelevant.
Where Charles and I disagree comes down to hate speech, as speech. I am not sure that advocating genocide or harranging a group of people as such can surmount the protection of freedom of speech---as long as this is individual speech. But some where along a spectrum of political, social, religious or cultural organization short of elected officials, there is a point where hate speech becomes a threat in and of itself. I am not sure where that point is.
If elected officials or officials of government, or civil service start engaging in such speech, that is a different matter. I would make that a civil offense with termination in public office as the punishment. It might already be so for non-elected officials. I would certainly extend that to elected officials. That is a real no-no because of the history in this country. But the problem is how to define such speech.
The other problem with circumscribing hate speech is that it can be turned around, as we see with people like Horowitz and the Christian fundies. Horowitz et al claim anti-Semiticism where there isn't any, and the fundies claim secular bias where, for example in public education there should be.
CG