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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

So the “-cide” root of the word which means “kill” no longer means that?

It's never meant only that, but that's not the argument. We decided that a long time ago.

Genocide refers to a People (race, kind, tribe, family, etc.), not individual people. The group is a concept, and 'killing' it doesn't have to involve the biological death of the group members. That's part of what the linked resolution is trying to say.

For example, you could go sterilize every member of an ethnic group, without killing - causing the biological death of - any of them. None of them will be able to have children, and as they die of old age, the group disappears. That's genocide.

Another example would be to forcibly separate all the members of the group and prevent them from engaging in the lifestyle associated with membership in the group (e.g. style of dress, music, food, language, worship, etc.). Over time, perhaps generations, the people basically give up trying to do any of these things if they even remember what they were. They have no group cohesion, so the group has essentially disappeared. No need to directly cause any biological death. The argument is that if this is done intentionally, it is also genocide.

Genocide as a concept is about ending the group, not specifically the individual members. It's definitely true that you can end a group by killing all its members, though.

Ok but none of those things came even close to happening in this case. The arguments are all, like, it was in pursuit of genocide, because I say so, so if one guy died in detention then it's a genocide.

Well there are allegations of mass detentions, forced labor, destruction of religious sites, suppression of language, separation of children into Chinese-controlled boarding schools, coercive birth control, and sterilization.

You agreed with me that genocide is more expansive than "we're directly killing people". For the sake of argument, let's assume the allegations are true: what would you call that?

But the allegations aren't true for the most part. Some are out-of-context true, like if you have too many kids they sterilize you, that was true across China for decades and going away now. But then the limit on kids for minorities was HIGHER than it was for Han Chinese until recently. So were they self genociding?

Taking an angle like "well, lets assume these things are true, THEN can we accuse China of genocide" is basically what the media did for 5 years on this topic.

Was, yes. That policy ended in 2017 I think, which I don't know if I call that recent. Post-2017 some evidence pieced together by a journalist suggested that IUDs and forced sterilizations were higher in Xinjiang than the rest of the country, and went up when the rest of the country went down. But you're right, their population has not evaporated.

My point about the assumption was to get you to agree that if these things are happening, we know that it constitutes genocide. At this point I don't care if you agree or not.

They stopped being higher because the limit was raised from 2-3 for Han, not because it went down for minorities. It happened in 2021.

And it's very easy for me to believe that rates of childbirth and hence violations are higher for subsistence farmer populations than urban workers, because that's true everywhere. Uyghur population grew a ton between 2010-2020, 3 kids per couple is net growth.

Lastly, no, there's no such thing as a "technical" genocide on a points system without some massive crimes against humanity that would drop anyone's jaw, and those things are hard to hide. It's not like you make a couple of technical errors and, oops, genocide even though the population is substantially fine and economic reforms are working.

So beeing unable to keep up, because your culture holds you back that is a genocide? Like somebody develops machines, that marginalize your existence until you fade away, that is a genocide?

No I believe it requires intent (possibly systemic in nature) on the part of the perpetrator. If the quakers end up disappearing and it turns out to be primarily due to their refusal to adopt modern technology that's not genocide as I understand it so long as everyone else was at worst indifferent to their plight.

So genocide ranges from “murder” to “discrimination, maybe”?

The only thing this does is cheapen the word. In the past genocide was something serious. But now it includes activities that are simply upsetting.

It doesn't cheapen the word. If discrimination is intentional and has the effect of minimizing and eventually eliminating the target ethnic group, then you have the same result as if you lined up everyone in that group and shot them.

The word is attached to the intended outcome, not the specific actions taken to achieve it.

Of course it cheapens it.

Using your example, if some ethnic group changed how they dressed it would be genocide.

That cheapens the word. Change in dress is not as severe an outcome as buried in a ditch with a bullet in your head.

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