man, admitting that you’re ignorant about something then saying something ignorant about that same thing is TIGHT
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"For the benefit of the court, please define genocide.’
“… … … Just because I don’t know what it means … doesn’t mean I’m lying.”
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So do MAGA just have a vocabulary of maybe 100 simple words, and assume any other words in the English language are just fancier versions of saying the same things, which liberals use to be pretentious?
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Because ‘genocide’ is just a hyperbolic term for 'perfunctory local massacre; rather than having a distinct definition, right?
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“Well, we genocided them, so they genocided us back. And then we genocided them again, and they tried to genocide us back too, but we genocided 'em back even harder, and this time they stayed genocided. But we wouldna had to genocide 'em if they hadn’t tried to genocide us for genociding 'em in the first place. So, far as I’m concerned, it’s about equal. Not saying it was the right thing to do, but our ancestors weren’t the kinda people’d put up with being genocided by anyone. No, sir.”
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“I’m not a historian of Minnesota, which I will now demonstrate…”
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Maybe if you let teachers do their job, 30 years from now someone wont say something equally as stupid as you just did.
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Especially if one of your day jobs is representing a part of Minnesota.
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The authoritarians tried to dictionary lawyer people who talked about the Kurdish/Ukrainian/Uyghur/transgender* genocide (and seemed to use the same copypasta for all of them), but that doesn’t work when the organisations who actually watch for genocide consider all of them to be real or at risk of happening.
- Claim that what is going on doesn’t fit the definition of genocide.
“Definitionalist” denial is most common among lawyers and policy makers who want to avoid intervention beyond provision of humanitarian aid. It results in “analysis paralysis.” It is what the State Department investigation and report brilliantly overcame. At the time of writing (September 2004), the European Union, the Secretary General of the United Nations and even Amnesty International still avoid calling the crimes in Darfur by their proper name. It is a pity. There are three reasons for such reluctance:
A. Among journalists, the general public, diplomats, and lawyers who haven’t read the Genocide Convention, there is a common misconception that a finding of genocide would legally require action to suppress it. Under this misconception, having been informed that the U.S. would take no action in Rwanda in 1994, State Department lawyers ordered avoidance of the word. They made their legal conclusion fit the Procrustean bed of U.S. policy. They committed legal malpractice.
Unfortunately, the Genocide Convention carries no such legal compulsion to act. It legally requires only that states-parties pass national laws against genocide and then prosecute or extradite those who commit the crime. Article VIII of the Convention says they also “may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide.” But they aren’t legally required to do so. Article I of the Genocide Convention creates a moral obligation to prevent genocide, but it does not dictate military intervention or any other particular measures.
B. Another misconception is the “all or none” concept of genocide. The all-or-none school considers killings to be genocide only if their intent is to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group “in whole.” Their model is the Holocaust. They ignore the “in part” in the definition in the Genocide Convention, which they often haven’t read.
C. Since the 1990’s, a new obstacle to calling genocide by its proper name has been the distinction between genocide and “ethnic cleansing,” a term originally invented as a euphemism for genocide in the Balkans. Genocide and “ethnic cleansing” are sometimes portrayed as mutually exclusive crimes, but they are not. Prof. Schabas, for example, says that the intent of “ethnic cleansing” is expulsion of a group, whereas the intent of “genocide” is its destruction, in whole or in part. He illustrates with a simplistic distinction: in “ethnic cleansing,” borders are left open and a group is driven out; in “genocide,” borders are closed and a group is killed. The fallacy of the distinction is evident in Darfur, where the intent of the Sudanese government and their Janjaweed militias is to drive Fur, Massaleit, and Zaghawa black African farmers off of their ancestral lands (ethnic cleansing,) using terror caused by systematic acts of genocide, including mass murder, mass rape, mass starvation, and concentration camps run by Janjaweed and Sudanese army guards, where murder and rape are standing orders. Both ethnic cleansing and genocide are underway in Darfur.
D. Claim that the “intent” of the perpetrator is merely “ethnic cleansing” not “genocide,” which requires the specific intent todestroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. The U.N. Commission of Experts report of 2005 took this way out. It confused motive with intent. (Ironically, the U.N. Commission report even included a paragraph saying motive and intent should not be confused, an exhortation the Commission promptly violated, itself.) Even if the motive of a perpetrator is to drive a group off its land (“ethnic cleansing”), killing members of the group and other acts enumerated in the Genocide Convention may still have the specific intent to destroy the group, in whole or in part. That’s genocide.
“They are doing it too” is an old fallback tactic.
- Blame the victims.
Claim that the Sudanese government is simply fighting an insurrection by a rebel movement comprised of bandits who themselves commit war crimes. By portraying the situation as civil war rather than genocide, the Sudanese appeal to the common misunderstanding that the two are mutually exclusive, when in fact, as Robert Melson, Barbara Harff, Helen Fein, and others have shown, civil war is very often a predictor and correlate of genocide. Genocide occurs especially during civil wars because war is legalized killing, when even women and children of an adversary group may be seen as enemies of the state.
* this is not an complete list, just the ones that I come across regularly
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I’m also not a historian of Minnesota or Wisconsin, but…
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I don’t know what I’m talking about but I’m sure I’m right!
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Maybe he did get a good education, and has made the choice to ignore it. Sometimes, people choose ideology over factual knowledge. They know what they are saying is bullshit, but they say it anyway, because they are furthering a cause. In this case, the cause is denying the genocide of Native Americans by Europeans and Americans.
Just look at the justifications that Putin has come up with for his invasion of Ukraine.
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Accurate! Most of these dill weeds went to ivy League schools. Though over the decades I have begun to question the quality of an ivy League education because of this
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People know that the shit they say is not historically accurate, but they view history as a terrain of cultural struggle, where you must establish your world view as the dominant one. For them, it’s not about getting at the truth of the matter, it’s about promoting a particular ideology of white supremacy.
These are calculated statements, not out of ignorance. We need to stop thinking these folks are just “dumb” and start to understand what they are doing here… I mean, maybe people believing that these are made out of ignorance just need to read a book about fascism and how it works with regards to how it views and uses history?
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Oh absolutely! It’s disingenuous and purely in pursuit of power. They know exactly what they are doing and what they are distorting.
My comment was meant more as a support of your saying that it’s not an issue of knowing the facts, it’s an issue of ignoring them for ideological reasons in the pursuit of power
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I know! I was just using your comment to dig a little deeper!
We’re in violent agreement!
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Oh, I knew that you knew. Sometimes I’m talking to the room!
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