genocide

[Joel S. Berson]

At 2/22/2011 07:33 AM, Dave Wilton wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>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."

It seems to me from this that the 1948 Convention does *not* call
eradication of a "culture" genocide.  The acts listed are in a broad
sense violence against *persons*, and that's how I read "group" in
this text --as "persons", not their characteristics.

Joel


>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.

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