Posting in the pit because this topic is somewhat political, but i prefer the more open discussion style of the pit to the narrower, more focused style of p&e.
I feel like the word “pogrom” had been used a lot on this board recently for events that i might have called “race riots”. Maybe the terms are actually synonyms, or “Jews are attacked in a race riot” makes it a pogrom. But i think of a pogrom as more intentional and more brutal than a race riot. So i thought the October 7th attack on Israel was a pogrom, but it bothered me that the riot following a soccer match was called a pogrom. And also, the altercation in crown heights in 1991, which was mostly a protest with some violence, rather than mostly violence, didn’t feel like it should be described as a pogrom. (I had Jewish friends living in Crown Heights at the time, and even lent them my apartment keys when i went on vacation during the event, in case they wanted a haven. They remained in their home, and did their shopping in the morning, before the protests started each day.)
But maybe I’m using the words wrong. What do others think?
A pogrom is a more deliberate, often tacitly (or sometimes openly) sanctioned attack against an ethnic minority with the specific intent to kill or drive them out. A ‘race riot’ is an uncoordinated (or at least minimally) coordinated riot in which conflict over ethnic identity or ‘race’ is the ostensible reason for instigating the conflict.
The October 7 Hamas attacks upon Israel were not either; they were straight-up highly coordinated terrorist attacks that were specifically intended to prompt exactly the kind of overreaction by the Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Force that they responded with in brutally attack Gaza and do disproportionate harm to non-combatants, hurting Israel’s global standing and support.
For it to be called a Pogrom, you’d need at least implicit approval of the authorities.
Historically they were fully sanctioned and organized by those in power.
I admit I did a double take when @Babale labeled the Amsterdam thing a pogrom. In my mind a pogrom is a coordinated persecution of a minority, originally Jews in Russia in the 19th century, hence the term.; it’s mob rule, persecuting a minority violently. It’s incited, authorized or at the very least condoned by the regime.
However…
After some googling, wikipedia-ing and so on, I came to the conclusion that the connotation has changed. It is now (2024) any organized violence against a minority, often (but not limited) to Jews. Why the change? I’m not even an amateur linguist, but a WAG is that the term has been used hyperbolically for long enough to lose its original meaning.
Partly because the pogroms of the Russian empire drove my ancestors on my father’s side to the US, I dislike the popular slovening of the word. I believe it still must refer to state-sanctioned violence against a minority, unarmed, ethnic or religious group. The Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians does in my opinion count as a pogrom. The violence against Jews in Amsterdam does not. That’s more like a race riot.
But the definitions blur, because plenty of civilian violence against unarmed minorities is publically deplored but privately condoned by the authorities concerned. “Race riot” is associated mainly with black people in the US, while pogrom is of course a Russian word. Maybe we need another word entirely.
Historically, pogroms have been antisemetic outbreaks. I was surprised therefore to see this in the Wikipedia article.
In 2008, two attacks in the Occupied West Bank by Israeli Jewish settlers on Palestinian Arabs were labeled as pogroms by then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The Huwara pogrom was a common name for the 2023 Israeli settler attack on the Palestinian town of Huwara in February 2023.
The table titled List of events named pogroms is incredibly long and varied. Indeed, the Tulsa massacre of 1921 is included. I even found a mention in a contemporary newspaper that labeled it a pogrom.
It appears that a long history of applying the term widely exists, even though it was mainly associated with Jews. In modern usage, though, it’s sliding toward being handy slur for whatever you’re against, with a loss of precision similar to that of fascism.
My impression is race riot → pogrom → genocide; Tulsa → Russia → Armenia, Rwanda, aspirationally the Holocaust. But I claim no special expertise in defining these terms.
The language people use to describe actions they find offensive or even horrific needs to be toned down, for accuracy and more importantly to avoid grievous insult to those who lost their lives as a result of the real thing.
Historic pogroms were mass killing events, generally “popular” outbreaks/frenzies (see not only Russia but ones dating back to the Middle Ages) that weren’t necessarily planned by authorities, but certainly not stopped by them. Nothing in recent times, however bigoted at its core, qualifies.
Similarly, those who fling around terms like “genocide” or even “Holocaust” to describe actions in Gaza are both wrong, and guilty of cheapening those terms and insulting actual genocide victims. Feel as strongly as you want about modern events, use terms like “war crimes” if you believe it’s justified. but use labels with care and accuracy.
I don’t know if it qualifies as a pogrom–but unless the rule is “pogroms are specifically attacks against Jews,” it seems a lot more pogrom-like than the nasty shit that went down in Amsterdam. An attack can be overtly antisemitic and not be a pogrom, right? Whereas attacking an oppressed ethnic group and driving them into intolerable conditions in overcrowded, disease-ridden urban areas, where civilians die because of continuous attacks approved by the government can be a pogrom without being antisemitic, right?
They’re less distinct, more a continuum, and I think the destruction and death in Gaza is far enough along that continuum to be genocidal. The stated intentions of some Israelis is certainly so.
Nazis built huge facilities (and more than one) dedicated to exterminating the Jews. They packed Jews on boxcars on trains to ship to those places and exterminate them at industrial levels of efficiency.
That’s not happening in Gaza. Nothing close to that sort of ruthless extermination.
Gaza is the camp - no need for boxcars. White phosphorous is the Zyklon B of Gaza. Sure, it’s not as efficient as an oven - but even the Nazis got to their most efficient methods incrementally. Give the IOF time, it’s only been a year. They’re clearly still only at the Einsatzgruppen stage.