“It wasn’t a genocide. It was a war crime. The goal wasn’t to eradicate the Poles as a people — that would have been genocide. The goal was to eliminate military officers, the intelligentsia, all the obvious candidates to lead Poland”
OK, then how would you call what Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia - killing more than 2 millions of their compatriots within 3 years.
Cambodians were killing other Cambodians. Then was that an act of genocide, or not?
If not - what was that?
I don't think it would be technically correct to classify it as a genocide. To make it a genocide there would have to be an attempt to completely wipe out some defineable ethnic or tribal group. I don't believe that was what was going on.
Stalin's manufactured famines in the Ukraine could be fairly classified as genocides, however.
If not - what was that?
Mass murder. Not all mass murders are genocides. That doesn't make them any better, though. IMHO, all willful mass killings of the innocent are equally bad; the only objective manner of comparison ought to be in the number murdered.
I don't buy the argument that some forms of willful killing of the innocent are morally worse than others. There is no moral distrinction, in my book, between someone who kills 3 million because he's trying to wipe out some ethnic group or he because they refuse to accept his ideology. Both are equally bad.
I'd call it mass murder on an epic scale, and a crime against humanity -- a charge recognized in international law since Nuremberg.
Genocide has a specific definition -- the attempt to completely wipe out an identifiable group, either in a specific area or worldwide. "Identifiable group" can mean an ethnicity, a culture, a religion, or even a language; I'd be inclined to define it broadly.
I am not aware that the Cambodians slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge belonged to an identifiable group other than suspected political opponents. Please note that this is a narrow semantic point -- I do not mean to diminish the magnitude of the crime.