genocide

[Dave Wilton]

I notice that no one has actually posted the relevant definitions. It's kind of difficult to discuss the meaning of a specific definition when the definition has not been stated.

The OED has: "The deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group."

Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide has a more specific definition, but one that is compatible with the OED definition:

"Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

The key is that any specific act must be within the context of a larger campaign to eradicate a national or ethnic group. Gunning down Vietnamese civilians from a helicopter or killing Libyan protesters in a square in Tripoli, horrendous though those acts may be, are not genocide because they are not part of a larger campaign of eradication.


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Wilson Gray
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2011 12:56 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: genocide

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 11:57 PM, Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:

> genocide

Sorry, Victor. I'm still stuck in the past, I guess. Certainly, the
destruction even of an abstract like "culture," in a real sense,
erases the bearers of the extinguished culture from the face of the
earth. And the point of the thread is the *legal definition* of
genocide, regardless of the exact manner in which it has been or may
be carried out. However, even if the extinction "only" of a culture is
the end, that extinction often begins with the physical extinction,
often in the process of the propagation and imposition of some "one,
true faith" - after all, *peoples* were destroyed in order to "save"
them, long before any villages were - of those most able to pass on
that culture.
--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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