# How is genocide defined, with an emphasis on cultural genocide?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-genocide-defined-with-an-emphasis-on-cultural-genocide/944198>\
**Category:** The BBQ Pit\
**Created:** [June 13, 2021, 11:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-genocide-defined-with-an-emphasis-on-cultural-genocide/944198 "2021-06-13T23:23:25Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 48

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**Author:** ![Delayed\_Reflex](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/delayed_reflex/32/3172_2.png) [@Delayed\_Reflex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Delayed_Reflex)\
**Post date:** [June 15, 2021, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-is-genocide-defined-with-an-emphasis-on-cultural-genocide/944198/48 "2021-06-15T17:02:43Z")

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> [@GreenWyvern](#):
>
> > [@slash2k](#):
> >
> > No, I am not arguing that.
> 
> What you are arguing is that destroying cultures that you perceive as inferior, by forcibly abducting the children and putting them into re-education camps, is not ‘real’ genocide, because of good intentions.
> 
> As long as you don’t deliberately set out to kill them it’s fine, because you have the good intention of improving them by making them ‘sort of white’. Of course you may kill a lot of them (purely accidently) by not really caring about the conditions in your re-education camps, and you certainly deserve a slap on the wrist because of that.
> 
> That seems to be your argument.
> 
> So China putting the Uighurs into ‘Vocational Skills Education and Training Centers’ is also not genocide, because they have the good intention of wiping out Uighur culture and indoctrinating them to be good Chinese citizens who toe the line?
> 
> It’s people like you who are enablers of genocide.

This is not at all how I would interpret @slash2k’s posts. I read what he is saying as similar to “Manslaughter and murder are different things. Both are horrible for the victim, but murderers intentionally kill their victim while people who commit manslaughter don’t mean to kill the victim. We should recognize that one is worse than the other.”

Your argument seems to be “if you refuse to call people who commit manslaughter murderers, you are enabling murder.”

> [@MandaJo](#):
>
> Another thing, somewhat off topic: a really subtle type of racism is the belief that non-white people don’t really love their kids. Which is funny, because by the standards of a lot of cultures, white Americans really don’t love their kids. For example, if you read slave narratives, family separation is always talked about more, and with more sadness, than the beatings, as horrific as they were. And that makes perfect sense: I’d take a beating every day and twice on Sundays before I’d lose my son, and I think that’s normal. But when we talk about slavery today, we focus on the lurid beatings. I think it’s because on some level, even now, we think that family separation wasn’t as bad for “them” as it would have been for white people. We have a vague idea that brown people are like cats. They have kittens, they love them, they get over it. When you start paying attention, this particular racist assumption is worked deep into a lot of racist stereotypes. The removal of native children was like that. They would never have done it if they thought Indigenous people loved their kids like “real” people do.

That’s really thought provoking, thanks for sharing that thought. Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s incompatible with the theory of the founders of residential schools believing that indigenous people could be “whitened” or “saved” through forced indoctrination, ala @Martin_Hyde 's [post in the other thread](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/over-200-unmarked-graves-of-indigenous-children-discovered-at-bc-residential-school/943674/133).

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