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Comment by eveningcoffee | Hacker News Reader

You can skin a cat in many ways. For one case where the architects of the genocide did not get away with it there are multiple where they did.

I am not implying that what US did was a planned genocide.

I am just pointing out that above is not a rebuttal of it.

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> You can skin a cat in many ways. For one case where the architects of the genocide did not get away with it there are multiple where they did.

Of course. The US genocide of Native Americans did not lead to the Nuremberg trials.

> I am just pointing out that above is not a rebuttal of it.

It is about giving an example of what a policy of genocide lead by a technologically equivalent power looks like, and contrasting it with the actual behaviour of the US in the same area. Shoplifting and murder are both against the law, but there is a marked difference between the two.

No, you are just giving a concrete example of one case of the well documented genocide.

Here is one much more subtle example of genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrian_Finns

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportations_of_the_Ingrian_Fi...

  The deportations led to the rapid ethnic assimilation of
  Ingrian Finns. After 1956, return to Ingria was officially allowed 
  but made unfeasible in practice;

That's not a genocide, that's a deportation followed by forced cultural assimilation. It's bad, too, but it's not the same thing as exterminating a population.

If we take into account how these deportations usually proceeded and what surrounded them then you can count also on murders, including torturing to death and dying due to extremely inhuman conditions. But this is not important because it would still be genocide without all of it.

Genocide is not killing of people but killing a génos (nation, race, religious group etc).

As the author of the term Raphael Lemkin put

>Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members 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. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.

So yes, what happened to the Ingrian Finns was a genocide.

Thanks for taking the time to include the quote. However, please don't use code blocks (indentation) for quoting blocks of text like this as it forces side scrolling, which is particularly difficult on mobile devices. It's common on HN to prefix paragraphs with > to indicate a long quote. I also like to italicize block quotes to further set them off. For example:

> Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify…

Is like this better?

Perhaps it would be possible to display such cases with indentation so that they would stand out more and look more like real quotes?

Thanks! I'm sure those on mobile in particular will appreciate you doing so.

As for indenting block quotes, I agree it would be a nice-to-have, though I think it's unlikely that HN will update the formatting options, at least any time soon. The formatting on HN is limited, though workable.

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