So for my friends who might not be aware: Every year on the 9th of Aug, the city of Nagasaki in Kyushu remembers the killing of hundreds of thousands of people by the atomic bomb. (Hiroshima city's day of remembrance is 6th Aug)
Every year the city will invite foreign dignitaries to the ceremony to give an opportunity to show respect and to remind ourselves we must not do this again to our fellow humans ever.
This year, Nagasaki city did not invite the Israeli ambassador. It's not a political decision, but to "preserve the harmony of the event".
So guess what?
All the so-called G7 countries (except Japan) told Nagasaki city that they find this problematic and they won't attend the event either.
@iqbalabd Japan needs to be reminded from time to time that it was an Axis country. I was recently told that part of the reason for the relatively friendly Germany-China relations is that post-Cold War China was impressed by how Germany doesn't make excuses for its own genocidal history, in contrast with Japan.
So there we have it folks: For reasons I can't understand, guests who have the most bombs in this world to kill us many times over refuse to attend an event to remember people those exact bombs have killed, while currently participating in genocide and still attempting to tell their hosts who they should be inviting to their own home.
So I have a question for my readers: What's the correct adjective to describe these people?
@mihamarkic @iqbalabd I don't think the core Western allies have done any genocide since WW2. The Vietnam War killed 10% of Vietnam, which is bad but not genocide. Postwar genocides have been things like Rwanda, what the Khmer Rouge did to ethnic minorities, etc.
It goes without saying nothing the Jews have done is genocide - Gaza is Iraq War-grade in the destruction, so Palestine writ large is much less than that. And if the Axis doesn't get that, maybe the occupation didn't go far enough.
@mihamarkic @iqbalabd North Korea started a war and then there were bombings on both sides. Estimates are murky but again it's maybe 10% of the civilian population, so no side in that war can be said to have committed genocide.
Nuking Japan in the war was considered a military necessity; there are arguments over whether it really was, but strategic bombings are so far from the Holocaust that the comparison is offensive. But again, parts of the Axis might still relativize what they did.
@mihamarkic @iqbalabd You're on firmer grounds if you want to accuse WW2 Western Allies of prewar and maybe wartime colonial genocide - things like the Congo Free State, Manifest Destiny, the colonial Indian famines, etc. But, a) prewar or at most wartime, not postwar, b) what Japan did to occupied China and Southeast Asia was at least as bad as the Congo Free State, and c) the least contrite colonizers are the ones likeliest to try policing the Jews, like Belgium (or, in the Axis, Japan).
@Alon @mihamarkic @iqbalabd you are insisting that 10% of the population murdered is not genocide. Why is that ? Is genocide defined by the percentage of people killed within a population ? I don't think so.
So how does it work in your opinion ?
@mhz @mihamarkic @iqbalabd Yeah, I am. Because when you're in occupation of a polity and kill that proportion of the population after a while, or when you have fire control and the ability to invade and go full Armenian Genocide but do not go all the way (Algeria, Vietnam, Afghanistan), that in itself is strong evidence of lack of genocidal intent. Polities that actually want to engage in genocide can do so rather rapidly - the Rwandan genocide took three months and killed the majority of Tutsi.
@mhz @mihamarkic @iqbalabd In a bunch of cases you can argue there was genocidal intent but the death toll was limited due to a skill issue on the part of the killers, like Russia in Ukraine or Assad in Syria. But this isn't what happened in Korea, or in the big counterinsurgencies. In a single battle, Russia managed to kill 6% of Mariupol civilians; Israel, far more dominant in Gaza, has killed 2% (and if you charge genocide then you should look at all of Palestine and then it's 0.8%).
@mhz @mihamarkic @iqbalabd (Note: the genocide charge against Russia relies on other things, like programs of cultural erasure and child kidnapping. Against China, it's about Uighur birth rates. But with Israel, it's just pure warfare. If anything, in the history of Israel, its 1948-66 military rule over Arab citizens directly led to higher Arab birthrates, because it empowered clan patriarchs as intermediaries and they in turn kept women barefoot and pregnant to maximize clan political power.)
According to the roots of the word, it's supposed to mean eliminating an entire race, such as was the goal of Nazi Germany. In that case, they mechanized and modernized the systematic rounding up and elimination of an entire people from all the regions they controlled.
Genocide is obviously bad. It has been attempted in a few different scenarios throughout the years. It was common in the premodern world, but in the modern and postmodern world it's considered much worse since we have a much more universalist morality.
The broadening of the term genocide has come to mean "killing a lot of people", which doesn't really pass basic sniff tests -- the soviet repressions weren't really genocide, they were just a hideously murderous, repressive regime. Same with Mao's China. I'd argue that at no point did the Americans intend to destroy the Japanese race in Japan, so the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been horrific acts of war perpetuated against largely civilian populations, but they weren't at all genocide. By definition a war between North Korea and South Korea couldn't really have a genocide since it was the same people fighting -- even if the Koreans totally wiped out the Koreans, the Koreans would still be there.
Not every genocide is intentional. In Canada, there were disputes between indigenous people on one of the islands of the east coast (I believe it was Prince Edward Island), and through those personal disputes one of the only fully successful genocides took place. Similarly in Australia, there was a quite successful genocide against some of the aboriginal populations, but at least judging from the rhetoric of the people at the time, they fully intended to do the right thing and modernize those populations so they could successfully integrate into modern society and they just failed miserably.
The word officially has also come to mean situations where you don't kill anyone, but you try to get rid of the original culture within the people. I think this is a good example of another thing which can be really bad but isn't actually genocide. First, it might not be so bad if the original culture was reprehensible. For example, does anyone lament the "cultural genocide" committed against Nazi culture in Germany following World War 2? Probably nobody worth listening to. However, that's exactly what was successfully done. Even in Japan, arguably the massive overhaul of their culture could be considered cultural genocide, but most people are happy to have the current Japan rather than the militarized, imperialistic Japan that fought in the world wars. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples (such as Canada and Australia) where a group's culture was at least attempted to be destroyed because it was inconvenient. "Kill the Indian, save the child" is in my view a rather progressive viewpoint, but trying to destroy native cultures just because they weren't European and Christian is a pretty bad thing (though I'd argue not genocide by definition, even if that definition was officially changed to fit later)
I have to admit, before I thought more about it, I'm sure I've incorrectly used the term myself.
Whether the situation in the middle east is a genocide, I think what we've seen suggests that while what Israel is doing is distasteful, it isn't a genocide, but the likely goal of Palestine is genocide. Israel has citizens who are Arab Muslims who live in the society, but in Palestine the number of Jews sits at a single digit percentage, and the rhetoric of "from the river to the sea Palestine will be free [of jews]" is genocidal. That being said, I think reasonable people can agree that regardless of what you label it, there's some pretty nasty stuff on both sides of that conflict. Regardless of whether Israel wants to kill *every* Arab Muslim in the region, there can be little doubt the intention is to enter the region and have Israeli Jews largely dominating the west bank and the existing Arab Muslim population become marginalized.
Anyway, energy drink it wearing off now and I think that's more than enough ruminations on the nature of genocide for one morning.
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@mihamarkic @mhz @iqbalabd "In part" is not "literally any part," because single massacres would then count as a part - and no Jew considers the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre to have been genocide, nor do German anti-fascists consider the Hanau massacre to be genocide.
What I think "in part" means is situations like the Armenians - the Turks exterminated the Armenians of Anatolia but not those of Istanbul. It'd count as genocide if Israel killed (say) 50% of Gaza and 0% of the West Bank.
@sj_zero @mihamarkic @iqbalabd A couple points:
1. The Asharshylyk was genocidal by basically every measure. The Holodomor's death toll was lower (10-15% of Ukrainians), but it was accompanied by forced Russification and there's evidence it targeted ethnic Ukrainians preferentially.
2. The proportion of Jews in Palestine is not single digit percent, but far lower if you exclude settlers. Gaza has IIRC 20, all Israelis who converted to marry Gazans.
@sj_zero @mihamarkic @iqbalabd 3. Palestine is not a single polity right now, so it cannot have goals. To the extent it is, its recognized government, and its de facto government over the majority of its population and territory is the PA, whose goal is a two-state solution and whose methods are international diplomacy. Hamas wants genocide or ethnic cleansing, but it's also not Palestine. (That Hamas is popular in the West Bank is immaterial; in Gaza it's unpopular and yet it is in charge.)
@sj_zero @mihamarkic @iqbalabd 4. From the start (i.e. Lemkin), cultural genocide in the mold of Manifest Destiny was considered genocide. What kind of forced assimilation counts is a spectrum, but there's no doubt that the death tolls the US inflicted on indigenous people qualify just by themselves - we're talking ~80% depopulation in some areas - and then the residential schools should be thought of more as concentration camps, with high child mortality, than of anything progressive.
@sj_zero @mihamarkic @iqbalabd 5. Forced conversions count as genocide and have counted since Lemkin. Not relevant to Israel/Palestine, nor to WW2 or (I believe) the Cold War, but it was common in the colonization of the Americas and Australia, and during the medieval expulsions of the Jews and Moors. It's relevant because in 1500 the European norm was that slavery was acceptable only for non-Christians - but as Kongo converted, the slave trade continued, reifying race in the process.
@sj_zero @mihamarkic @iqbalabd 6. Combos of mass internment at concentration camps, suppression of birthrates, and cultural elimination are generally considered to be genocide today - most notably, what the PRC is doing to the Uighurs. Nobody is charging that it's killing most Uighurs, but forced Mandarinization (as opposed to pre-2010s practice of Mandarin-as-second-language instruction), forced deconversions (e.g. mandatory pork), and birthrate suppression together do count.
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@Alon @mihamarkic @iqbalabd so you consider that wanting to kill all Armenian people, but only from one city, is not intent to genocide ?
@mhz @mihamarkic @iqbalabd Hmmm, good question.
In practice, that genocide was not "only from one city" - it was the other way around, i.e. killing all Armenians in Anatolia, but not those in Istanbul, who were more visibly useful for Turkey.
Now, how I'd view massacring a single city depends on, why. The examples I can think of are military compellence, and that includes Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the point was to compel Japanese surrender, evidenced by fair treatment of Japan under occupation.
@mhz @mihamarkic @iqbalabd Of course, in a hypothetical scenario in which starting in September 1945, the US treats Japan the way Japan treated Southeast Asia, the nuclear bombings would be viewed as the beginning of that counterfactual genocide rather than as the end of a war. But that's because genocide requires intent, and intent can be understood from actions; we know the US had no genocidal intent toward Japan, because we know how it treated Japan during the occupation.