The Genocide Loophole

Los Angeles Times ^ | April 8, 2008 | Jonah Goldberg

[Nony]

Last week, Russia's lower house of parliament passed a resolution insisting that Josef Stalin's man-made 1932-33 famine -- called the Holodomor in Ukrainian -- wasn't genocide.

Virtually no one, including the Russians, disputes that the Soviet government was involved in the deliberate forced starving of millions of people. But the Russian resolution indignantly insists: "There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines." It notes that victims included "different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas" of the Soviet Union.

Translation: We didn't kill millions of farmers and their families because they were Ukrainians, we killed millions of Ukrainians because they were farmers.

And that's all it takes to be acquitted of genocide.

[WayneS]

The Russians are correct. It was not genocide. It was just plain old muder.

[wastoute]

How in the world does Jonah keep a job at the LA Times

[wastoute]

How in the world does Jonah keep a job at the LA Times

[bassmaner]

Translation: We didn't kill millions of farmers and their families because they were Ukrainians, we killed millions of Ukrainians because they were farmers.

The central evil of communism: reduced to a single sentence.

I wonder how many Ukrainians starved to death, thinking that 'if only Stalin knew what they were doing to us, he'd step in and stop it'. I've always said that as evil as Hitler and the Nazis were, Stalin and the Communists were worse. They murdered more innocent people, and they did it to fill arbitrary quotas. If that doesn't qualify as genocide, I don't know what does.

[canuck_conservative]

At some point on the metaphysical Scale Of Evil, words become irrelevant - the actions say everything louder and clearer than any labels ever could.

[scan59]

In general, the Soviets and the Red Chinese elude the genocide charge -- and hence the status of ultimate villains -- despite having murdered scores of millions of people in the 20th century, in large part because their victims stood in the way of progress. Kulaks, or independent farmers, opposed Stalin's plan for collectivization, and so they were murdered for that "greater good."

Reminds me of liberals. They want to love us to death.

[WayneS]

Exactly. The term “genocide” has been over-used and mis-used to the point where it has become almost meaningless.

But murder is still murder. It is a word whose meaning has not changed one iota since it was first uttered.