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[McTraveller]

I disagree, and I think this is an example of word appropriation to elicit a stronger emotional response, which unfortunately dilutes the meaning of words.

There is a real difference of abhorrence between oppression like outlawing a language or ceremony or type of clothing or abducting people and "reeducating" them versus just outright slaughtering them.

In other words, get off my lawn you young people who keep changing the meaning of things! Invent your own words!

[Ziusudra]

There is a wikipedia page for this argument:

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.

[Egan_BW]

I swear every time I see someone complaining about the kids inventing new definitions for words they're talking about definitions which are like 100 years old.

[McTraveller]

Those 100 year old definitions were good enough for us! 

That said, I have to admit, the "colloquial" definition which I grew up with, which is literal slaughter, does indeed seem to be a special case of the definition from 1944 which (assuming it wasn't fabricated or altered on Wikipedia; I am never 100% certain of anything that is not based on mathematical laws) does seem to be the more general case.

Interestingly the "dictionary" definition of genocide is the more limited case of killing - not the broader case of extinguishing a cultural identity.

[Mathel]

Personally, I always thought of genocide as meaning specifically killing of people based on ethnicity. Similarly to how fratricide means killing one's own brother, regicide means killing of a king, fungicide is something that kills mushrooms, and so on.

Neither of these other "X-cide" words can mean killing of the concept of X (or a specific case of X). So genocide should not mean the killing of the concept of the group, but the actual killing of the group. Which is done by killing it's members.

[Frumple]

I mean, do note that it's vanishingly rare that the systematic destruction of a national or cultural identity doesn't also include quite a lot of murder, even if the primary vehicle of genocide is cultural annihilation. If a nation is banning a language (or stealing an ethnicity's children to put in special schools, or any number of other things of similar intent) you can damn sure bet they're not trying very hard to stop the people that speak it from dying in a ditch somewhere. It pretty much always just "happens" to coincide with a significantly higher fatality rate than less targeted ethnicities.

But yeah, the definition of genocide expanding beyond explicit mass slaughter is a meaning older than every single person on this forum. It's not a new or unusual use case.

[Maximum Spin]

Genocide means the murder of a genos, a people, and does not necessarily involve murdering persons. The most common tactics of genocide, for example, involves outlawing language, because language is a cornerstone of a people.

I agree with the general tenor of the arguments that that's stupid, language isn't that big a deal, and calling outlawing a language "genocide" absolutely trivializes it to the point of — hold on, actually, let me take a sec, you do know that the Ukraine banned the official use of and education in the Russian language in a series of laws starting years ago, right? Are you sure this is how you want to define this?

BUT regardless, that doesn't actually matter because context matters. In context, you said, paraphrasing, that there would be plenty of room in the conquered regions to resettle Roman citizens because of genocide. That clearly implies a functional genocide of removing the actual people, which didn't happen. Now you're retreating into this alternate definition which no longer supports your claim. On top of that, your new definition still doesn't apply in context because we know that the Romans didn't outlaw the languages or customs of conquered people, but allowed them to integrate on their own on the theory (apparently correct) that Roman splendor would convince them that Roman ways were better.

So you don't actually have a point here.

[None]

Weirdly, enough, I don't seem to recall Gaul or Rome being in Ukraine?

[Maximum Spin]

Weirdly, enough, I don't seem to recall Gaul or Rome being in Ukraine?

Uh. What? I think you've misunderstood. The Ukraine legally suppressed Russian culture and language, so by the definition of genocide you and others have advanced, Ukraine has committed genocide against Russians. Separately, Rome didn't legally suppress Gallic culture or language, so even by that definition, Rome didn't commit genocide.

ETA: I mean, I guess you can bite the bullet and call Ukraine a genocidal regime if you want, but... I think it's justified to go to war to prevent a genocide, so, I'd rather not?

[MCreeper]

Everything breaks. Can't log in to my Mediafire account, or do anything else with it, because "This form has been idle for too long. Please reload." Pixiv doesn't load pictures for no visible reason. Tried to make a post on a forum i almost don't visit, to find out that it totally ran out of disk space this morning. Lower left corner of my laptop's keyboard broke seemingly overnight, with shift now working as ctrl.

[None]

I could bite the bullet and call Ukraine a genocidal regime if I want? That's your point to make for conflating the two, and I know you're going to argue against it, because you want to argue against it to begin with.

What I want is not to trifle with contrarians.

[Thorfinn]

Strictly speaking, Ukraine hasn't banned the Russian language. It has just said that it may not be used for any state purposes, which includes schools. There's no reason the people in the eastern Oblasts can't still speak Russian or practice Russian customs among themselves. It's just that for example, when Ukrainian officials speak, you must answer in Ukrainian, even if you don't know the language.

That may be a fine line. I do not believe it should qualify as a genocide. The periodic shelling of ethnic Russian cities in eastern Ukraine starting in 2014 and continuing right up until 2022 is a different matter entirely.

[Maximum Spin]

I could bite the bullet and call Ukraine a genocidal regime if I want? That's your point to make for conflating the two, and I know you're going to argue against it, because you want to argue against it to begin with.

What I want is not to trifle with contrarians.

Okay. This isn't hard. Is a state suppressing a minority culture and language within its boundaries a genocide, or not? Because the Ukraine, confirmably, did that. I say it isn't. You've said that it is. There's no trick question here. You can huff and puff all you like, but you have to choose one of the two options.

Strictly speaking, Ukraine hasn't banned the Russian language. It has just said that it may not be used for any state purposes, which includes schools. There's no reason the people in the eastern Oblasts can't still speak Russian or practice Russian customs among themselves. It's just that for example, when Ukrainian officials speak, you must answer in Ukrainian, even if you don't know the language.

(That's what I said, yes. I'd like to throw in that I know for a fact that people have described proposals to implement English as a state language in the United States, which would have been less stringent than this, as 'cultural genocide'.)

[Thorfinn]

Yes, I know. I was reading through the last few pages wondering if it was going to be mentioned, and noticed you did so. Seemed you were being challenged on it is all.

I suspect you agree that blowing cities up because ethic Russians live there is closer to the "genocide" line, though.

[brewer bob]

Just opened up Wikipedia to check something aaaand...

WTF has happened?

Why? Why did you have to change the layout to that horrible modernish designer bullshit?