Genocide.
This morning I had breakfast with the usual Müsli genocide. Then I got dressed, the usual cloth genocide, to go to work, the genocide of my time. Today I will have to deal with a genocide of time, also called "meetings", and I will then have to solve a genocide of problems. Or, I could stop using the word “genocide” inappropriately. That is, a genocide of sentences containing the word “genocide”.
I know well that the word "genocide" today indicates not so much genocide as defined by international laws, but has taken on the meaning of "the worst possible crime", to the point that not even sour cream in carbonara can compete.
The problem, however, is that it is facing the usual phenomenon of disintegration of language, in which the most common symbol becomes empty. and it becomes something like a form of punctuation. Like the "diocan" for the Venetians: it is so frequent that it no longer contains a blasphemy, it is just a symbol without information: in fact, if you put two diocans or a single diocan in the sentence, the meaning does not change. So the symbol “diocan” has no content.
The same is happening, slowly, to the word “genocide”.
There was a time when the word "genocide" had a heavy meaning. You mentioned it in a room, and horror descended. Maybe because everyone had some relative who had died in some genocide, or maybe because it was a recent wound. A person complicit in a genocide was liable to be hunted down, captured and taken to the gallows without passing the green light.
Today, a politician accused of genocide walks whistling through the streets of his capital, and no one finds it scandalous. When Putin was accused of genocide, Trump did not respond (to defend him) that there is no genocide: he responded that the USA is not innocent either (which could be true), and therefore "live with it".
In reality it is not really possible to live with a genocide: what is happening is that you can live with the word “genocide”.
The word "genocide", therefore, has disintegrated.
How do we get to this result? We arrive at the disintegration of language through excessive repetition of the symbol. There was a period in which, for the left, anyone who didn't agree with the words of any guy was a "fascist", and the adjective was applied to anyone who wasn't nice: your wife's lover was a fascist, the girl who was more beautiful than you was a fascist, the one who got a better grade was a fascist, the one who had the wrong recipe for amatriciana was a fascist, etc.
With the result that today "fascist" is a meaningless symbol, we have all been defined as fascists at least a thousand times in our lives, until we reach the level and damn, don't we write it down?
The "small" side effect is that today one can declare oneself a fascist as if one were talking about the color of one's tie, that is, it is a symbol without meaning, or rather a purely aesthetic factor.
The same goes for the word genocide, which is about to become something like "atelier", or "boutique", and then we had the bread boutique or the bathroom furniture atelier, and now we will find "the do-it-yourself genocide tea”, or the “cold genocide ice cream shop”. We are close to it, when "gelicide" is written to indicate a cold day in Italian newspapers.
We had pomi', and spread it, sooner or later we will have food products that will be called genoci'. (Maybe even smoked.)
Now the usual word torturers will raise their hand and say “so what do you call what happens in Palestine/Israel/Narnia?
What happens in Palestine/Israel has a name: “Old Testament”.
If you read the old testament, you will discover the moment in which the Jews entered Canaan (today's Palestine/Israel), killed everyone, broke the skulls of newborns by beating them on stones, and even killed animals, pack or domestic. Now, archaeologically there is no trace of this event, which is also considered "doing what Yahoo says to the end".
It is therefore not a recent invention: this way of doing things has been present in Jewish culture (and then Christian, and then Abrahamic in general, up to Islam) for a long time.
However, I imagine that the answer does not satisfy you, so let's go into details. What is happening in those parts, if not a "strawberry genocide?".
So: if I observe the bombing of Gaza, simply from satellite photos, I see a carpet bombing, that is, a bombing designed with the aim of eliminating from an urban area the essential conditions for human permanence: water, housing, energy, hospitals, spaces and care for children and new mothers, personal safety.
Carrying out carpet bombing is prohibited by war conventions, so it is in itself a war crime. But if 40,000 people die, and half of them are children, then it begins to take on another name, which is the crime against humanity. On this, I am quite sure that no military court will ever have anything to object to.
The correct answer to the question, therefore, is: the IDF's actions in Gaza can be classified with very high confidence into two categories:
- War crimes.
- Crimes against humanity.
Now I know you will start whining because I didn't say "genocide", but on the other hand I would like to point out that in Nuremberg almost no one was convicted of "genocide", but rather for war crimes and crimes against humanity. I can therefore safely say that this is a "maximum" level of sentencing.
On the other side they now stand up and say "but what about Hamas?". It's a bit like "so what about the foibe?" , but the point is that they are two identical things. They are two things the same, it means that, according to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, even non-governmental militias are subject to the laws of war and therefore Hamas and Hetzbollah are. Consequently, what they did is still a war crime, quite serious because we are talking about 1600 civilians, and because of the ferocity against civilians we can also talk about war crimes AND crimes against humanity. I say "we can" because since there hasn't been a trial yet, we don't really know what happened. We don't know if Hamas crossed the border wall with a few men and the rest was done by marauders, for example, who were already beyond the "wall".
It is difficult to think that many people crossed the border wall because we are talking about one of the most heavily guarded borders in the world, but logic allows us to think that many of the participants in the assault were already on the other side. Even the famous gliders, for example, didn't have much chance of crossing the border while Iron Dome was in operation: but perhaps they didn't leave from there, so they didn't cross any border. This would explain why they didn't also go back, using the same gliders.
In any case, both Israeli and Hamas officials would end up on the gallows if a Nuremberg-style trial were to be repeated,
The fact that both would end up on the gallows is obviously disputed by those who do not have a brain developed enough to contain more than one guilty person at a time. Getting used to Marvel comics has taught us that there is only one Evil Faction and only one Good Faction: the idea that they could both be Evil factions, as enemies, escapes most.
What happens then if both are guilty? Who do we put in jail? Well, both. At most we will have to make bigger prisons to accommodate both. But it's not as if Israel's crimes absolve the Palestinians, or Hamas' crimes absolve the Israelis. We can make bigger prisons, that's all. Making bigger brains, capable of imagining TWO criminals instead of one, is much more complicated.
However, you have observed that war crimes and crimes against humanity, which are very serious crimes, and were punished with the maximum sentence in Nuremberg, do not satisfy those who want to torture the word "genocide". How come? And why this political fetishism towards this word? The problem is that it has a loose legal definition.
According to UN:
«Genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) killing members of the group;
(b) serious injury to the physical or mental integrity of members of the group;
© deliberately subjecting the group to conditions of life intended to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part;
(d) measures aimed at preventing births within the group;
(e) forced transfer of children from one group to another."
The problem with this definition is that it is really too loose. If we take point (a), we discover that this was a genocide of Juventus fans. It was certainly a horrible event, but "Juventini genocide" is perhaps not the case.
Point (b), which includes mental integrity (already a very abstract concept in medical terms) would lead us to also call the Maurizio Costanzo Show and any other mass event to which we attribute an imprecise effect of attacking the mental integrity.
Criterion © has the usual problem of containing the word “partial”, so it turns out that a major accident on the motorway would become a genocide of holidaymakers.
Criterion (d) contains the word “aiming,” which requires measuring intentions with certainty, and the word “preventing births” applies to sterilization as much as to the sale of condoms. And denim jackets with metalhead patches don't help reproduction either.
Only the forced transfer of children from one group to another seems unambiguous, perhaps because it was not yet a very widespread phenomenon in the genocides seen at the time.
Why does the UN use such a loose name, which includes things ranging from total extermination to the existence of Raggaeton?
The truth is that the UN needs such a broad consensus to approve something that everyone adds their grain of salt. But above all, it was necessary at all costs to include a population that defines itself as "the Absolute Victim". What does Absolute Victim mean?
Imagine being in Auschwitz. It's you, a homosexual, a communist and a gypsy. You all suffer the same oppression, you are all killed in the same room and with the same gas, you are all burned in the same crematorium, and your ashes mix.
But you say you are the Absolute Victims, while the others who are with you are victims, yes, but not absolute. For those, like me, who believe in the equality of value among human beings, you are just as “Victims” as others. Just like the others, because accepting that there are "Absolute Victims" and NON-absolute victims implies accepting that there are Absolute Human Lives and NON-Absolute Human Lives.
The Jewish mysticism of sacrifice, however, requires us to think that the Jewish people are a victim, but not a normal victim, but an even more victim, that is, an absolute victim .
This was a problem for the UN, but the indignity of saying “no” to the Jews, in the period, would have had a devastating political effect.
So let's get to the topic of genocide. There would have been more rational methods of defining it, starting from the largest. Take for example the Mayan people, or the Aztecs, or the Apaches and other Native Americans. They were certainly victims of genocide, and small groups survive today. These small groups, however, no longer have any historical, political, demographic, cultural or economic relevance. It therefore comes to mind that the word "genocide" should be applied to those peoples who suffer treatment aimed at removing any historical, demographic, political, cultural or economic relevance from them, regardless of whether anyone survives or not.
This definition, however, would describe very well all the genocides in the world, except one: the Shoah. We would not be here talking about Israel if the Jews no longer had any historical, political, demographic, cultural or economic relevance. They sure have it.
If we therefore use the state of a people AFTER the genocide as a criterion, all hell will happen because the Absolute Victims will make a terrible racket in claiming their role as Victims-but-more-victims-than-thou.
If instead we say to base ourselves on BEFORE, that is, observe what was there before and is no longer there today, things do not change. Sure, the Inca civilization was great, and now it's missing. The Aztecs were also a sophisticated civilization (in their own way, I know), and the entire red Indian world was also decidedly abundant. This "before" criterion would allow us to include the long history of absolute victims in the definition, but would exclude the end of the gypsies in the Shoah, or the extermination of the mentally ill and handicapped.
The Germans use “Völkermord” to mean genocide, and the word means “the murder of a people” or a “popolicide”, which has the advantage of being extremely concise, but in case there is a dispute both sides would start to discuss the topic "and what is a people, exactly?".
Here a gigantic discussion would begin, in which we would conclude that a people is a group of people who decide to be a people. All other criteria do not work. But if we use this, then even the Trekkers dressed as Klingons and the Padani of Pontida who call themselves "Po" become "people". I never said "vegans", you thought so.
Even the word "mord", the killing of the people, would lead us to ask ourselves when, exactly, we really "killed" a people: after all, the Apache still exist, in the end. Indeed, in the case of the Absolute Victims, we see that today they are decidedly more influential in international politics than they ever were BEFORE the Shoah. The Palestinians have even grown in number.
With the arrival of ever new candidates for the prestigious position of "victims of genocide", the definition has become so broad as to include such heterogeneous situations that the word is very easy to abuse and reduce to irrelevance.
To better understand the reason for the uselessness of the accusation of genocide, I could close the article by telling a Yiddish joke that I heard a few days ago, which comes from the Absolute Victims.
There is a synagogue and some male members stand up to pray. Every prayer begins the same way. Then a very rich merchant stands up and says
- Oh, Unnamed One, I'm really no one, but please listen to this prayer anyway, and blablabla…
Then a very rich industrialist gets up and prays:
- Oh, Unnamed One, I'm really no one, but please listen to this prayer anyway, and blablabla…
At a certain point, a very poor person gets up and starts praying:
- Oh, Unnamed One, I'm really no one, but please listen to this prayer anyway, and blablabla…
Then the two from before suddenly stand up and say almost in chorus
“Hey, you don't think that guy is as much of a dick as the two of us, do you?”
And now, sorry, I'm going to eat a genocide of pasta with broccoli and sausage.
Happy genocide.
Uriel Fanelli
The blog is visible from Fediverso by following:
Contacts:
- Fediverse: @ uriel@fedi.keinpfusch.net
- MATRIX: @uriel:mtrx.keinpfusch.net
- GNU JAMI: Ufanelli