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

[Martin_Hyde]

This is actually one of the reasons I think this message board has drifted into low quality. The circlejerk aspect is fine and has always been there, but the just deliberate, and extremely tiring, misreading of basic threads of discussion is literally exhausting because to correct it you have to go back post by post and recreate a discussion that people should have been following all along (or refrained from interjecting into, either or.)

So let’s start:

Poster MandaJo posted this:

@MandaJo

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.

To which poster Delayed_Reflex later responded:

@Delayed_Reflex

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.

To which I responded:

@Martin_Hyde

It’s also worth noting AFAIK most of the boarding school separations were not permanent and complete [snip]

To recap, MandaJo brought up slave separations, Delayed_Reflex mentions that was an insightful take, I added in to their comment that it is worth noting slave separations and residential boarding schools were dissimilar in several way.

Note that to this point, there is no antagonistic tone bet ween any of the posters I named and myself, it’s people just discussing a topic.

Then Lance Imbecile weighs in with this insight:

@Lance_Turbo

@Martin_Hyde

It’s also worth noting AFAIK most of the boarding school separations were not permanent and complete, which complicates comparing it directly to the separation of slave families which were generally permanent and complete.

It is not worth noting. You seem to think it’s important for some reason but it isn’t.

From Wikipedia:

The school system was created for the purpose of removing Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and assimilating them into the dominant Canadian culture, “to kill the Indian in the child.”

That’s genocide plain and simple. It doesn’t matter that the genociders took Christmas off.

Genocide denial is an integral part of genocide. People like @DrDeth and @Martin_Hyde who deny the Native American genocide in the US and Canada are not just voicing their (shitty) opinions. They are actively participating in the last stages of genocide. They may be too stupid to realize that that’s what they’re doing, but they are contributing to the genocide nonetheless.

Total human garbage the both of them.

To which there is there a series of back and forth low quality posts, as Lance’s lack of intellect or intelligent analysis afford him no regard in my mind for being treated as a serious conversant in a discussion.

Note quite specifically what I am refuting from Lance–his claim that if you make any factual statements about an event, and if that event involves genocide, and your factual statements refine what another person has claimed about said genocide, that constitutes minimizing it. If you had followed the discussion to this point, it had clearly evolved from Lance claiming my note about slave separations and Indian boarding schools not be the same thing was evidence of genocide denial to me making the analogy that it is akin to someone correcting a luridly incorrect statement about the Holocaust as “holocaust denial”, e.g. refuting a claim that something the Nazis definitely never did (use space lasers) was “holocaust denial.” Because I guess Lance’s argument is the only proper discussion of genocides is to condemn them and not speak to them further, if other people in their condemnations say things that aren’t true, or even more simply say things you wish to refine or clarify, you should not do so–because that is genocide apologism. That’s one of the funnier things is I wasn’t even saying the comparison with slave separations was a bad comparison, I was simply pointing out it was a different set of circumstances. I do actually think on an emotional level for the parents, it was a reasonable comment that just as the separation of slave families was probably the most emotionally traumatizing aspect of American chattle slavery (for the slaves), even the temporary forced separation of Native American families was almost certainly extremely traumatizing as well.

At this point k9bfriender who I think hadn’t followed the discussion, or he if did he did so in a way that rendered him incapable of intelligently discussing it, basically starting foaming at the mouth about the space laser analogy being bad (ignoring the series of escalating stupidities from lance that had lead to that point in the discussion), I think make a post to k9 that references the slavery separations (i.e. what actually set off the entire chain of discussion) and k9 starts acting like he has no idea that discussion had even been going on, that he had not just interjected himself into a conversation (in loosest terms) between me and Lance on that very topic.

So there you have it, me having to recreate a discussion thread that was printed here on the forums in plain text, because people on this site so frequently simply choose to willfully misunderstand or misrepresented what other people say.