Is there something worse about Hitler’s intentional killing of the Jews worse than the others he intentionally killed such as communists? Is the 1994 Rwanda slaughter worse because the killers intentionally tried to kill all the Tutsis worse than if the same number of people were killed for a different reason? Are Stalin’s purges not as bad because they were not genocide even though they killed way more people? Also, why are the killings by the Kher Rouge considered genocide? As far I know they did not target a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
I have to say I find genocide worse than the killing of an equal number of people for different reasons, but I am not sure why.
I agree. If you’re killing someone because they’re a communist, at least you’re killing them because of something they consciously chose. It’s still an evil act, but it’s of a lesser magnitude than killing someone because of something beyond their control, such as their race.
Morally I don’t really see a difference. Dead is dead. Maybe we’re just going to end up splitting hairs here. How much more evil is it to kill someone because of their race or religion than it is to kill someone because you raped them and don’t want them to testify against you? I’d really like to know how we can quanify that.
But speaking seriously, I see this as an extension over the more civilized question of what it’s okay to judge someone for. I’m not opposed to judging someone negatively for their political beliefs. I am opposed to judging someone negatively because of their race. Needless to say, I’m also opposed to killing people in general. So, someone who kills communists is only doing one thing I disapprove of: killing people. Someone who kills blacks is doing two things I disapprove of: killing people, and being a racist. So the second murderer is marginally more evil than the first murderer.
I think there’s the implication of the goal, as well. Stalin’s purges were designed to wipe out opposition, cow the public, and generally give delight in the exercise of raw, brutal power. Genocide carries with it an implication not only that you are committing “hate crimes,” as it were, but that your ultimate goal was to completely annihilate every single person in that ethnic group. There’s something especially hideous about that.
One isn’t worse than the other, but maybe on the surface, mass murder seems senseless while genocide seems calculated and more hateful. And genocide of German Jews might resonate with, or feel like a threat to, Jews elsewhere in a way that the indiscriminate slaughter of everyone in a series of towns might not.
Unfortunately I don’t know much about the examples you gave for mass murder, but I strongly suspect if you looked at the details of any mass murder it would actually be a form of genocide. Unless you are talking about a really prolific serial killer.
Stalin mostly murdered his political opponents, or the people he thought were after him somehow. I’ve read that he was an anti-Semite, but I don’t think most of what he did can be considered genocide. You may have a point here, though, in that minority groups or other “outsiders” often get singled lumped into mass murders that aren’t otherwise racial or ethnic.
With genocide you’re not only trying to kill a large group of people, you’re trying to eliminate their entire culture as well. For example if you killed 120,000,000 Americans it would be a huge crime but the other 180,000,000 survivors would be able to rebuild their nation - the American people would still exist. But if you killed 120,000,000 Japanese then the Japanese people would be gone forever - you would have not only killed all of those individuals, you would have destroyed their nation.
Stalinist actions did end up killing about 6 million Ukranians (due to the famine), caused, through deportation and imprisonment in labor camps, the death of about a third of the Volga Germans, internally relocated the Kalmyks, killing from a third to a half, deported the Crimean Tatars, which killed half of them, not to mention the forced movement of a lot of other groups and cultures.
If one wipes out part of the human genome, that is a more persistent destruction than simply killing some ephemeral individuals. Ergo, genocide in a narrow sense, destruction of a gene, is evil in a specific way that mass murder of an ideology is not.
But if one debilitates a cultural meme by decimation, that’s can be harmful too. And some of what we call genocide can do that, by trying to obliterate a culture; & some of what we don’t call genocide would be as harmful.
It’s not any more OK for the hypothetical government of Fredonia to slaughter most of the advocates of redistribution of wealth, who happen to be black, for “colorblind & ideological reasons” than for explicitly racist reasons.