miz [any, any]

only the Polytron reduces an entire mouse to a soup-like homogenate in 30 seconds

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Joined 11 months ago
Cake day: July 24th, 2024
  • miz [any, any]@hexbear.nettoaskchapo@hexbear.net•What are your sources for debunking Genocide in Xinjiang?English
    21·
    13 days ago

    on the whole I agree with your post but I have to ask you to reconsider the point about genocide requiring deaths due to it being in the name

    When Raphael Lemkin first coined the term “genocide,” it was a word for what he was against. But the direct, programmatic, and industrial murder of an ethnic group—as has come to be exemplified by the Holocaust’s trains, gas chambers, and crematoriums—was not the only, or even the primary meaning of the term; it was not the only thing he was against. Today, for better or for worse, most people understand a genocide to be mass killing, organized and state-sponsored, with the Holocaust the original for all the other holocausts which must Never Again. Genocide is mass-killing, full stop. But Lemkin had begun thinking about legal protections for sub-national groups well before the second world war—starting with the Armenian genocide—and the crime to which he would eventually give a name was something more broad and expansive: any systematic and organized destruction of a collectivity’s ability to exist as a collective.

    In 1944, for example, he wrote that “genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation”: “It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.”

    A people’s plurality could be destroyed in many different ways, and Lemkin’s great unfinished work was to be a general history of world genocide, with dozens of different and variant examples. For Lemkin, then, settler colonialism was clearly genocide: his general world history would have included chapters on “the indigenous people of North and South America, the Aboriginal Tasmanians, and the Herero of German Southwest Africa.” Organized mass-killing was only one way to end a people, and far from the only one: individuals could survive a genocide, for example, but if the basis for their collective life had been destroyed, then a genocide had still occurred. When settler colonialism makes it impossible for survivors to live indigenous life-ways—as when the Australian government removed Aboriginal children from their parents, for example, or when US policy towards natives was to “Kill the Indian, save the man”—then assimilation becomes a vector of annihilation. The survival of bloodlines is precisely not the point; with the possibility of living in a native sovereignty destroyed—the impossibility of living the collectivity that had made them as such—genocide was only the word for what had happened.

    Settlers always know what they are doing, of course; it was why they worked so hard to slaughter the buffalo: they wanted to kill indigeneity, not just individual indigenous people. A people who marked time and history by the buffalo could not survive in their collectivity without it. And so, as “Plenty Coups” of the Crow nation put it,

    “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”

    His point was that without the buffalo—the object on and through which his people existed and made collective meaning—their history could not continue. Individuals could survive, as he had, but the people had (arguably) come to an end.

    from https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/buffalo-skulls/