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Comment by jfyi | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, Gregory Stanton has had the US listed as problematic for awhile now and he's considered a top authority on the topic. Of course his reports are based on the definition from the UN Genocide Convention which you don't seem to hold in high regard.

https://www.genocidewatch.com/country-pages/united-states-of...

I would suggest that the strict etymology of a word doesn't really matter much in geopolitics, at least not as much as legal definitions arrived at via international consensus.

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I mean, I wouldn't consider him a top authority. It's an overly lawyerly approach to US treatment of groups that are clearly not actually being genocided (presently, native americans were). So I disagree on the same grounds as China, you need some mass casualties at minimum before getting into the legal nitty gritty. Maybe mass sterilization could also suffice.

I actually restrained myself from pointing out that the standards used against China in this thread would fit just fine against US treatment of minorities, it seemed too facile.

Now, western actions in the middle east on the other hand, we have mass casualties so legal arguments are on the table. I wonder if they said anything incensed and dumb that would indicate genocidal intent.

I agree that scale is often overlooked in these discussions. The real value of current legal definitions isn't just in identifying the industrialized murder of a population, but in recognizing the warning behaviors that precede it. It's crucial to identify when a situation starts moving in that direction.

Ok but this case is over and moving in the other direction.

The middle east on the other hand.. there are a whole group of US establishment natsec people who hold that obviously China committed genocide to the tune of hundreds while obviously Israel did not to the tune of nearly 100,000 and millions displaced. Because we have all of these lawyerly definitions, you see.

As human beings we have got to have a sniff test here.

The middle east is a mess and I can't disagree. The warning signs were there, and they were ignored, mostly.

You don't like my choice in appeal to authority, sure I get that. That doesn't preclude from there being authoritative views on the topic though.

We probably should have something to stand on other than vibes. Maybe we can come to consensus on who is an authority. How about the IAGS? https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Fina...

Now, if it has moved in the other direction since 2022, I don't see anything countering that either and I certainly can't speak to the current state of things and will believe you (mostly because I have no intention of looking deeper currently). I will say that's a strong indicator that the process of being called out on the international stage worked though.

I'll definitely grant that international pressure helped. Even if there were never any possible chance of genocide, internment camps are still bad! It's good that they are over.

I feel like genocide legal debates skip over the human harm into some binary "is it genocide" thing, like detention or the first 90k deaths were ok but now you're really a bad guy.

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