Back during World War II a young Polish lawyer of Jewish Extraction by the name of Raphael Lemkin came to the United States, took a position at Duke University and coined a term that signified:
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 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.
Under such a definition, you could certainly disagree with such a statement, but it wouldn't be particularly controversial to assert that Israel's actions vis-a-vis the Palestinians would meet such a definition. You would violently disagree perhaps, but you wouldn't hide rate it. For that matter, you might also apply it to the aspirations of some Arab and Palestinian terror organizations.
But the pickle (and a large radioactive pickle too) comes when we add in the first couple of sentences of the quote I snipped above:
"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 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.
That word - Genocide.
Lemkin was a lawyer who as a young man had spoken to the League of Nations regarding the Armenian Genocide and was formulating a legal minded approach to analyzing such things and felt that such an approach could be used perhaps to help ensure peace and avoid such collective actions. By the time Lemkin came to the United States (he fled Poland after being wounded resisting the Nazi onslaught), the Holocaust or Shoah was well underway. Lemkin attempted to convince people with very mixed success that something bad was going on in fascist controlled Europe (most people thought it was national health care [insert sound of SteveP banging his head against wall]). When Lemkin coined the phrase it wasn't yet loaded in the public consciousness with the weight of the Shoah.
The U.S. Holocaust Museum (warning: Video) has several nice bits on Lemkin.
The definition of "genocide" as Lemkin probably first thought of it, a concerted set of programs aimed collectively at a group and aimed at destroying their national identity, would probably be a very useful one today were it not larded down with the emotional weight that it now carries. I've long argued that we lack a great vocabulary to describe such an anathema that doesn't fall to the depths of the Shoah. What verbiage do we have to describe such collective institutional acts against a collective group that doesn't seem to 'elevate' the one to the level of the holocaust by the association, nor lessen the Shoah by implying some kind of equivalency? A word that described the one without implying equivalency to the other would be very useful..Lemkin would no doubt agree.
Some of the least productive moments in the I-P diaries - in which by the way there is almost always great information - are quibbles about words. White Phosphorus isn't a "war Crime" under the conventions of incendiary arms in one set of circumstances, but might be in another. All the while no one is disputing that White Phosphorus was burning through the bodies of people whom all agree are innocent whether we can use the term "war crimes" or not.
I realize that in a court of law strict definitions are necessary. But here at Kos, shouldn't we as adults be able to figure out ways to be able turn this into a radio dial instead of radio buttons? A continuous dial that goes from OK on the one side to war crimes on the other, rather than one button labeled 'OK' and then a second labeled 'They're going to hell'?
On a broader sense, I think we use language in this negative way throughout Kos - if we can prove something doesn't precisely meet the definition of a term that has a derogatory connotation, we flog that as if somehow that meant that the thing was pure as the driven snow. It's a singularly unproductive way to hold discourse between people who are here, afterall, to learn and interact and try to reach understandings.
This is not a plea to be sloppy, or to accept sloppy language use (although God knows I am guilty of that and would be autobanned were imprecise language made a HRable offense) but for us to accept both ends of the responsibility of communication. It's the writer's obligation to make his point understood to be sure, but it is also a reader's obligation on some level to make an effort to understand what the writer means. Yes you CAN just shut it off because the writer is not clear, but isn't that just shutting the door to a possible experience for yourself (to say nothing of the other people who read these threads)?