• lennivelkant
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    1 day ago

    Anakin murdered one village, he didn’t prosecute a war of extinction against an entire people.

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      So if someone goes and murders ever Parisian it is not a genocide of Parisians? Or are some people lesser and their cultures dont matter as much?

      • lennivelkant
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        9 hours ago

        It would certainly be an atrocity, if that’s what you’re getting at. There is no less value to Palestinian or Native American lives than to European ones. Genocide, however, is the systematic persecution with the intent to eliminate a certain ethnic group.

        The difficulty in your example arises with defining that “genus” in the modern sense of genocide, since “Parisian” is a very diverse mix of people. What makes them “Parisian”?

        If their common association is, say, having their primary residence in Paris, or having been in Paris during a certain point or stretch in time, I suppose we could coin the term “urbicide”, but I don’t know if there’s a historical precedent for the systematic persecution of a specific city by whatever definition.

        There is the historic phenomenon of soldiers wantonly slaughtering a chunk of the populace of a captured city, but if you wanted to actually use the administrative and productive value of that city you’d want to keep the killing in check. On the other hand, raiding other tribes or villages and killing inhabitants with the purpose of driving them away from your lands also involved the murder of civilians, but the intent was foremost to secure resources and prosperous land for your own people.

        Failing any other classification, it would still be a massacre. We don’t need to slap particularly loaded labels onto everything bad to make it bad. Doing so dilutes the meaning of those terms, watering down both their political weight and their usefulness in classifying events.

        • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          Genocide:

          the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group

          Cultural group means killing any village unless it has an identical twin with the same language, history, principles, beliefs, music, etc, means it will be genocide.

    • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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      20 hours ago

      Partial genocides are still genocides.

      Given how thoroughly the Tusken Raiders are narratively linked to American Indians it’s also pretty fucking weird that you’d insist on this point. How many tribes do you get to wipe out before it’s a genocide iyo?

      • lennivelkant
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        12 hours ago

        Partial genocides are still genocides.

        I’d assume intention makes the difference here: Anakin was lashing out in anger at the ones immediately within reach, like a one-man pogrom, but I don’t know that he commanded an attempt to exterminate their entire kind.

        Given how thoroughly the Tusken Raiders are narratively linked to American Indians it’s also pretty fucking weird that you’d insist on this point. How many tribes do you get to wipe out before it’s a genocide iyo?

        I honestly wasn’t aware of that narrative link, which may be an artifact of my European cultural perception.

        In any case, it wouldn’t change my stance: Massacring one tribe would be a massacre. Done out of racial hatred, it would be a hate crime. The criterion for genocide would be the scale and scope: Is your violence aimed only at a specific tribe?

        Attempting to push a particular group from prosperous land has been a motivator for warfare since forever. That’s not what makes a Genocide in my opinion. A genocide is a systematic attempt to eradicate an entire people, not just displace them.

        That doesn’t mean massacres or wars of displacement aren’t atrocities either, just that we don’t need to slap the label “genocide” on everything, thereby devaluing its gravity when applied to things where it actually fits (like the war of extermination on the Palestinian people).

        Now, if I missed something and Anakin went on to chase down the rest of the Tusken people, that would be genocide too.

      • Darkenfolk@dormi.zone
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        18 hours ago

        Partial genocides are still genocides.

        Completely depends on how big the parts are, otherwise it’s just mass murder. Well I guess intent also plays a role.