I wrote this in January 2009...and it's just repeated itself.
When does a genocide become a genocide?
By popular consensus, the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe was a genocide; in fact, so much so that it has become the exemplar of genocide, the yardstick as it were, against which all other genocides have to be measured. By a much more belated consensus, the Hutu attempt to destroy the Tutsi population of Rwanda in 1991 also qualifies as “genocide”.
Of course the actual facts of those two “genocides” is a bit different from the usually accepted script: the Nazi genocide of Jews was only a part of a much larger genocide of Slavic peoples, particularly the Russians, but that bit of history was (probably deliberately) suppressed as a requirement of the Cold War exigencies in popular memory. And as for the Hutu genocide of Tutsis, large numbers of moderate Hutus died as well, including Rwanda’s Prime Minister Agathe ; and Lt General Romeo Dallaire, in his excellent on the spot reporting of the massacre, Shake Hands With The Devil, puts forth good reasons to believe that the (Tutsi) Rwandan Patriotic Front of Paul Kagame (now President of Rwanda, “strong Western ally”, and complicit in major war crimes in Congo) – which had troops in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, and was far superior militarily to the rag-tag Hutu militias – deliberately allowed the massacre to take place in order to get international sympathy and assistance. But these points are by the way; in either case, the Nazi genocide of Jews was genocide, and the Hutu genocide of Tutsis was genocide. For the moment I will set aside the Japanese genocide against the people of China between 1931 and 1945 - something for another day, as was the Holdomor in Ukraine.
Fine. So just what is genocide, legally?
According to the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2, of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." (taken from Wikipedia)
So what do you do in order to defend your actions when those actions fall completely within those legal boundaries? Suppose you have turned a strip of land into a giant concentration camp confining one and a half million people, surrounded them with barbed wire, imposed a crushing economic blockade on them; suppose you ignore the results of a democratic election in that territory because the results didn’t go your way; suppose you then use a few harmless rocket attacks (made in retaliation for your actions) to launch a long-planned full scale invasion of that concentration camp, bombing schools, mosques, hospitals and whatever else comes in your way, killing children, women, old men, everyone; how do you explain it away?
When in another territory you occupy, you cut off people from their lands with a wall that is called by all thinking persons an Apartheid Wall, when you impose collective punishments, destroy villages and uproot olive groves, turn people into prisoners in their own lands, you “impose serious bodily and mental harm on them”; you even, shall we say, deliberately inflict on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Isn’t that genocide?
Why, so it is.
So just how do you wriggle out of that one? How do you claim that genocide is not genocide? You may try and claim supreme national necessity; but the problem is that the majority of the world’s population may not be convinced by the notion that supreme national necessity requires the bombing of food depots and hospitals and forcing children to spend days with the decomposing corpse of their mother. Their governments may play along with your lies, but governments may change. Ultimately, the people matter more than the governments who claim to speak for them. So what do you do in order to pretend what you’re doing isn’t genocide?
You say: Genocide, what genocide? How can we commit the genocide of people who aren’t there! There is no such entity as a Palestinian people! As the so-called Prime Minister of the Zionazi pseudostate of “Israel”, Golda Meir, said, “Israel is a land without a people for a people without a land”. And a recurrent theme song of Zionazis, is that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people. You can't wipe out people who don't exist.
Of course, unfortunately for the Zionazis, they do; and however much they might try to deny it, what they have done and are doing constitutes genocide; and the world has now come to see it as such.
You can’t fool all the people all of the time.
When does a genocide become a genocide?By popular consensus, the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe was a genocide; in fact, so much so that it has become the exemplar of genocide, the yardstick as it were, against which all other genocides have to be measured. By a much more belated consensus, the Hutu attempt to destroy the Tutsi population of Rwanda in 1991 also qualifies as “genocide”.
Of course the actual facts of those two “genocides” is a bit different from the usually accepted script: the Nazi genocide of Jews was only a part of a much larger genocide of Slavic peoples, particularly the Russians, but that bit of history was (probably deliberately) suppressed as a requirement of the Cold War exigencies in popular memory. And as for the Hutu genocide of Tutsis, large numbers of moderate Hutus died as well, including Rwanda’s Prime Minister Agathe ; and Lt General Romeo Dallaire, in his excellent on the spot reporting of the massacre, Shake Hands With The Devil, puts forth good reasons to believe that the (Tutsi) Rwandan Patriotic Front of Paul Kagame (now President of Rwanda, “strong Western ally”, and complicit in major war crimes in Congo) – which had troops in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, and was far superior militarily to the rag-tag Hutu militias – deliberately allowed the massacre to take place in order to get international sympathy and assistance. But these points are by the way; in either case, the Nazi genocide of Jews was genocide, and the Hutu genocide of Tutsis was genocide. For the moment I will set aside the Japanese genocide against the people of China between 1931 and 1945 - something for another day, as was the Holdomor in Ukraine.
Fine. So just what is genocide, legally?
According to the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2, of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." (taken from Wikipedia)
So what do you do in order to defend your actions when those actions fall completely within those legal boundaries? Suppose you have turned a strip of land into a giant concentration camp confining one and a half million people, surrounded them with barbed wire, imposed a crushing economic blockade on them; suppose you ignore the results of a democratic election in that territory because the results didn’t go your way; suppose you then use a few harmless rocket attacks (made in retaliation for your actions) to launch a long-planned full scale invasion of that concentration camp, bombing schools, mosques, hospitals and whatever else comes in your way, killing children, women, old men, everyone; how do you explain it away?
When in another territory you occupy, you cut off people from their lands with a wall that is called by all thinking persons an Apartheid Wall, when you impose collective punishments, destroy villages and uproot olive groves, turn people into prisoners in their own lands, you “impose serious bodily and mental harm on them”; you even, shall we say, deliberately inflict on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Isn’t that genocide?
Why, so it is.
So just how do you wriggle out of that one? How do you claim that genocide is not genocide? You may try and claim supreme national necessity; but the problem is that the majority of the world’s population may not be convinced by the notion that supreme national necessity requires the bombing of food depots and hospitals and forcing children to spend days with the decomposing corpse of their mother. Their governments may play along with your lies, but governments may change. Ultimately, the people matter more than the governments who claim to speak for them. So what do you do in order to pretend what you’re doing isn’t genocide?
You say: Genocide, what genocide? How can we commit the genocide of people who aren’t there! There is no such entity as a Palestinian people! As the so-called Prime Minister of the Zionazi pseudostate of “Israel”, Golda Meir, said, “Israel is a land without a people for a people without a land”. And a recurrent theme song of Zionazis, is that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people. You can't wipe out people who don't exist.
Of course, unfortunately for the Zionazis, they do; and however much they might try to deny it, what they have done and are doing constitutes genocide; and the world has now come to see it as such.
You can’t fool all the people all of the time.
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