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Comment by ekjhgkejhgk | Hacker News Reader

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> I say "it's only highly contested by Israel".

There seems to be a few governments, not just Israel, that doesn't consider it a genocide. As far as I can tell, most governments, especially western ones, do consider it a genocide at this point though.

But the mere fact that it's contested probably means Wikipedia shouldn't posit one of the positions as true, even though I personally believe it to be a genocide too.

Per Wiki's own article, there are many countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide#/media/File:Inte...) that disagree with the genocide distinction. Those countries are not just the US - they are large and small nations from all parts of the world. Is that not the definition of highly contested?

The point of the editors is that it is long standing precedent on Wikipedia that the statements of politicians have little factual relevance except for the statement itself, so they are normally not taken into account.

There's also this big list of various professional opinions on the matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Expert_opinions_in_th...

"Highly contested" but not by genocide scholars or international law bodies.

Every genocide is contested by the people doing it and its apologists. Let's imagine someone commented on the holocaust wikipedia page:

> I assume good faith of everyone who has worked on this Holocaust "genocide" article. At present, the lede and the overall presentation state, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Nazi Germany committed genocide, although that claim is highly contested.

This would rightly trigger a lot of outrage. Yes, it's also accurate to say that it's "highly contested". Honestly this really highlights issues with striving for "neutrality", when there is bias in the people defining what neutrality is.

Highly contested by the people committing the genocide, while Jewish figures from across the world are calling for Israel to be sanctioned [1]

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/22/jewish-notable...

It is mentioned in the article, but buried pretty deep:

> The Israeli government ... denying that their military operations constitute genocide.

You have to scroll pretty far to find it.

I think Jimbo is saying, NPOV would have that assertion much higher, even in the lede.

Does NPOV mean emphasizing biased voices on all sides as a sort of balance, like much of journalism? Or is it emphasizing NPOV voices?

It means "representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic"

Exactly. There's another 20th century genocide that is "highly contested" in specific odious circles, but there's no reason to present that opposing viewpoint in an encyclopedic treatment of it, given mounds of evidence of intent and outcomes for both.

Yes, the Holocaust is also "highly contested".

I was referring to the Armenian genocide, whose primary perpetrator refuses to acknowledge it, with the support of Western governments.

But the Holocaust is more ironic in this case.

Here's another one: Holodomor is also contested in many places - only 34 countries recognize it. Crazy world.

Holodomor's an interesting example because unlike the Armenian genocide, Holocaust, or genocide in Gaza, there's no explicit evidence of it being intentional, despite mounds and mounds of evidence of Soviet atrocities that were released over the past century. In the cause of the genocide in Gaza, when you take the statements of those in leadership such as Ben-Gvir, you have clearly articulate plans to eradicate an entire people followed by indiscriminate killing and engineered starvation. In the case of the Holodomor, there's no such articulated plans to eradicate a people, which is why its Wikipedia article has an entire top level heading called "Holodomor genocide question." In the case of Gaza, there are enough explicit quotes of intent that it seems far closer to Armenian genocide denial, which is to say that it's only "questioned" by its perpetrator and allies with a vested interest in placating the perpetrator.

>In the case of the Holodomor, there's no such articulated plans to eradicate a people

You're incorrect. The Holodomor was an implementation of the clearly set policy to subdue peasantry and "clean up" rich peasants (the rich peasant were basically any peasant who wasn't completely destitute) as peasants weren't carriers of proper communist ideology (only dirt poor village laborers who didn't have their own land/horse/etc. were considered to be ideologically close to proletariat).

Where it gets a murky for some people not well knowing history of Russian Empire and USSR is whether Holodomor was a genocide of Ukrainians or genocide of peasants.

As it happens the Ukrainian people and their language were spread far beyond modern Ukraine and well into all those agricultural fertile lands where Holodomor happened: http://iamruss.ru/little-russians-on-the-1897-census/

The peasants in those fertile areas did better because of Nature as well as because of history - those weren't classic Russian territories where peasants had been enslaved for centuries, and thus the peasants there were more close to US/European farmers than to classic Russian poor peasant. Thus they became target.

So while more evidence point to it being genocide of peasants, one can't dismiss that the majority impacted were Ukrainians, and that is especially pronounced in the areas, further from the modern Ukraine, where peasants were mostly Ukrainians while cities, due to cities naturally speaking Imperial language (i.e. Russian in this case) and having recent large influx of Russian speaking population due to industrialization, were mostly Russian.

Can you provide a concrete piece of evidence that the USSR government set out to accomplish this? For example, I can easily pull up correspondence that shows the intent of top brass in the regimes responsible for other 20th century genocides. For example, you can easily find evidence that Lenin and others sought to discipline kulaks, but nowhere are the Holodomor's famines mentioned there.

>easily find evidence that Lenin and others sought to discipline kulaks, but nowhere are the Holodomor's famines mentioned there.

that is what i was talking about - disciplining kulaks, successful peasants, which basically meant destroying significant part of the peasant population there. And if you look at the map i linked - those regions had mostly Ukrainian speaking peasant population.

You probably have different than bolshevik's notion what "disciplining" is. Bolsheviks were outright genociding whole social stratas (and kulaks were one of such a strata) because bolsheviks saw no place for those people in the supposedly beautiful future the bolsheviks were supposedly building. And just for an example - you probably not aware how bolsheviks used chemical weapons against peasant revolt in Tambov region.

Your comment goes against HN Guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . That's it.

Could you please specify which guideline?

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