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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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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.