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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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... I happen to think that genocide apologia is bad regardless of where it happens.
Radical, it would seem.
It's not 'lightly'. Actions taken with the intent to exterminate an ethnic group, in whole or in part, is literally the definition of genocide, or attempted genocide.
You think that the total suppression of Uyghur culture and the mass sterilization of Uyghur women, resulting in a drop of birth rates by a third combined with the rampant detainment of Uyghur people in concentration camps with high excess death rates compared to the general population couldn't bring about the destruction of an ethnicity in a region?
Or, for the other side of the coin, the mass impoverishment of Palestinians with an eye towards creating abhorrent and high-mortality living standards in the occupied territories, combined with regular mass imprisonment of Palestinians and direct military action against Palestinian civilians and the openly expressed desire to annex and literally colonize Palestinian land with ethnically Jewish settlers, displacing and expelling the Palestinians of the region in the process, couldn't bring about the destruction of the Palestinian ethnicity in Palestine?
Back in 20 fucking 14 I was watching Palestinian children get blown to pieces by Israeli artillery.
Shit's fucked. Shit's been a genocide for a long time. The Holocaust didn't start with gas chambers. It escalated until gas chambers were where it ended.
Could those things lead to genocide? Yes, absolutely. But It depends completely on the scale of such activities. It’s not clear to me that this is the case here. The most recent census data shows Uighur population growth continues in China.
Now, as you correctly pointed out, genocide can also occur when a part of an ethnic group is being exterminated. Is there some definable part of the population that is being more severely affected, such that their extermination seems imminently possible? Is there some town or region where the violence, sterilization, etc. is much more severe? I have not heard such a claim but I’m open to it.
But my broader point is this: Is it genocide apologia to acknowledge the events that are happening, condemn them, but question whether they meet the definition? That seems like a stretch. This is a semantic discussion, not a moral one. But this question of what is or isn’t a genocide has become a litmus test for whether you belong to the good tribe or the bad one, so people react so emotionally that it’s hard to have this conversation. And, I think the looseness with which we use this word opens up its use in situations that it clearly shouldn’t be, like allegations of white or Christian genocide in the US.
Dropping birth rates by a third by forced sterilization is a pretty big fucking scale. What do you call it when policies are pursued to aggressively drop birth rates whilst simultanously spiking the death rate of a native ethnicity, whilst moving in settlers of a different ethnicity into the region and suppressing the native ethnicity's culture?
It would be like arguing that there was no genocide of Native Americans in the USA because the Native American population grew over the course of the USA's existence.
If someone denied the current stage of the genocide in Palestine, would you question whether that was genocide apologia? If they said, like some mealy-mouthed mainstream Dem, that what Israel was doing was bad but refused to append any label to the ongoing murder of Palestinian civilians (including the label of 'murder' or 'civilian'), would you regard that as just a 'semantic discussion', and not a moral one?
What words we use matter. Words have power. Words have meaning.
The reason it's become a 'litmus test' is because we generally agree in the modern day that genocide is bad. Thus, campists of either side must deny genocide when it's 'their side', but can freely celebrate 'bad camp' performing genocide as proof of their badness.
It's no different than accusations of authoritarianism. The issue is not that authoritarianism is more widely recognized; the issue is that authoritarianism continues to be denied when it is convenient for campists to do so.
Sure, it's a big scale in most contexts, but not in the way that I mean here. It's not big enough to cause the extermination of the group in question. Which is what matters in terms of whether it is genocide. It is certainly ethnic cleansing, human rights violations, mass murder, concentration camps, I think all of these labels fit. But genocide is the most abhorrent crime imaginable and it requests a similarly extreme level of violence. If events continues to worsen in severity, then it could qualify in the future certainly. I'm not sure what that trend line looks like.
The atrocities done to the Native Americans constituted genocide because they were widely exterminated. Their populations increased mainly after the genocide, so I don't see that example as too relevant.
Regarding Palestine, earlier in the conflict I think it was a bit more ambiguous but with the starvation campaign and the dwindling list of excuses to continue bombing, combined with open statements of genocidal intent by members of the ruling coalition, it's hard to argue against at this point. Still, I think it being an active and ongoing event and the belligerent having an active propaganda campaign and blocking independent fact-finding on the ground, I would not condemn apologia as harshly as, say, the holocaust, where the facts have been well-understood for decades now.
If I felt they were deliberately using different words to obfuscate the severity of the situation then maybe, so I see your point. But I don't think that applies here since the facts don't match the definition. But no matter where we want to draw the line or define these concepts, there is always going to be a gray area, and there needs to be a level of discussion allowed around that. And I feel like this debate has become so toxic that this is no longer possible.
So, I would only use the term apologia when someone's statements greatly and obviously diverge from the known facts. Certainly there are plenty of people who have engaged in such on this topic on .ml, but I don't agree it's fair to level this accusation at the users in question here.
This is not a position that would be taken seriously by most scholars of genocide, including the man who coined the very term genocide, and would exclude the vast majority of genocides, including the Native American genocides, from the term. Ethnic cleansing itself is, by definition, genocide.
In the sense that you are using 'exterminated', no, they generally were not. Most Native polities were reduced by restriction of movement, impoverishment, and destruction of their way of life. All the massacres performed by white genocidaires in Native American history, horrific and repulsive as they are, are only a tiny percentage of the reduction and elimination of Native peoples in the vast majority of the USA.
Obviously we're talking about a huge range of events both geographically and temporally here, so it's hard to make any concise statement that applies to the whole process. But I feel there was an extensive effort both through direct killings and other violent policies to eliminate (or at least dramatically reduce) many native tribes. So to me that goes beyond the situation in Xinjiang and meets my standard.
I'm not a genocide scholar so maybe you're right that my definition is too specific. However, my impression is that Lemkin had a much broader definition of genocide than how the term has come to be used by most people, including experts. As you said, words are powerful, but they are also used slightly differently by different people. There needs to be space for some good-faith disagreement without immediately jumping to "you're basically a nazi if you don't agree on my classification of every violent event in history" which seems to be the de facto opinion of everyone on Lemmy--including all sides of this debate.
No, the litmus test is whether you call something a genocide, even if it doesn't meet the definition.
A proper argument:
But instead, what we get is something that vaguely resembles genocide if taken out of context because normal people hate genocide and will likely not look too closely into the details if they don't like the group that's being accused.
For example, is the current focus on deportation from the US a genocide? Most reasonable people would say no, but if you dislike the US enough, you could be convinced that it is.
From what I've read of the Uyghur situation, it's close enough, but perhaps "forced assimilation" or even "cultural genocide" is more appropriate. It's difficult to know the full extent given how tightly the CCP controls information, so maybe it qualities for the UN definition of genocide.
But pretty much every discussion online gets shut down if someone fails the litmus test. I get that a lot of people aren't arguing in good faith, but it's important to remember that it goes both ways.
The same is true for "fascism" just as it was for "communism" during the "red scare."
We shouldn't jump to extreme terminology to try to scare people into agreeing with us. Use accurate terminology and defend your points with facts, not emotional language.