Who The Hell Cares If It's A Genocide?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved the subtlety of words. 

I love that “boring” means something slightly different to “tedious.” I love that a smile is similar to, but not the same as, a grin. I love that the fact that “flatulence” and “grandiloquence” are synonyms will bring a grin to all but the most tedious of faces. 

Words don’t just communicate ideas. They transmit, for better or worse, a piece of who we are. That's why so many politicians and grifters use them as distractions.

Would you like to talk about the troubling return of race essentialism and racial segregation in schools? Fine. But first, let’s have a long, pointless debate about what the words “Critical Race Theory” mean.

Were you hoping to have an honest, nuanced conversation about some aspect of trans inclusion? Sure thing. But before we do, let’s go on a meandering, disingenuous search for a definition of the word “woman.”

Do you think it's worth discussing whether a sitting (or perhaps standing) president lied about getting a blowjob in the Oval Office? How can we begin before we've defined “sexual relations”, “that woman” and, of course, “is.”

Instead of working to solve problems, we get dragged into this game where commonly understood words have to be delineated with atomic precision before we can talk about anything. Until, with a bit of luck, we forget what we were trying to talk about. 

If you’ve been paying attention over the past two-hundred and twenty-three days, you’ll know that the latest word to suffer this infuriating pedantry is “genocide.”

Contrary to popular opinion, genocide doesn’t (only) mean wiping out an entire people. Coined in 1944 to describe Nazi atrocities against Jewish and Polish people, “genocide” can include any of the following acts when “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

But because terms like “in whole or in part” and “with intent to” are open to endless interpretation, we waste time playing words games instead of solving problems.