Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: lizol
Cambodians were killing other Cambodians. Then was that an act of genocide, or not?

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.

24 posted on 02/06/2008 5:55:41 PM PST by curiosity
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 21 | View Replies ]


To: curiosity
I know that Curiosity's been only making a remark about proper terminology, but..

Legal definition of genocide from the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is:

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

Since Soviets goal was to eliminate the Polish officers corps and the intelligentsia, I think it does qualify as a genocide.

29 posted on 02/14/2008 7:22:07 PM PST by Konrad_PL (prouder than ever...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 24 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson