Yes, I agree with you, as to definition and initial post.
I am recognizing, for better or worse, there has become a usage of “genocide” to mean “[everybody] dead”, not “[everybody] murdered” which I take issue with.
But many people throughout the world have appropriated the word wildly (hey, search “genocide of Palestinians” or of “US Blacks” for an example), while others–not OP–have been uncareful, one of whom posted in this thread, to whom (and anyone else perhaps unremarking of it) I was responding:
I understand that he not only killed all the people in the city (except probably a number of women kept as slaves), but also decapitated them and stacked their heads in a large hill. Didn’t hear about the diverting the river part, though. Don’t remember which city, but somewhere in the Middle East, I think.
This may be apocryphal, since doing all that would take a lot of work for no real purpose. While they may have wiped out most of a city’s population, the hill of heads and diverting the river parts may have just been a story told to terrorize other cities into submission.
Actually I was using genocide because it did involve deliberate killing, manslaughter and mutilation on a huge scale.
While it’s true that the majority probably perished due to smallpox, that doesn’t make colonialists’ deliberate actions not count. All indications are that the life expectancy was significantly curtailed whether or not a person survived the new infectious diseases. It should be noted that many Spanish contemporaries considered it genocide.
Well, since it all wraps nicely at this point In the discussion, and since I first brought up etymology only, not what’s being predominantly kicked around here,
…Genocide has become an official term used in international relations. Before 1944, various terms, including “massacre” and “crimes against humanity” were used to describe intentional, systematic killings (and in 1941, Winston Churchill described the mass killing of Russian POWs and civilians by the German army as “a crime without a name.”[4] In 1944, a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin created the term genocide to describe policies of systematic murder, in particular those being carried out by the Nazis, and the word was quickly adopted by many in the international community.
As DrDeth noted, these aren’t what the OP was asking about. The question isn’t “what’s the largest number of people killed in genocide”, but rather “what’s the largest group of modern humans that was actually completely eradicated”?
World War II and the Holocaust didn’t actually “wipe out” either German or Polish Jews. Even if you ignore the fact that many German and Polish Jews survived via emigration, there still remain small Jewish communities in both Germany and Poland, some of whom are descended from pre-WWII Jewish inhabitants.
I would suggest genocide was extremely rare in the Ancient Near East, if it ever actually happened. Occasionally, a ruler claimed to have killed everyone but I would suggest that was more likely to be propaganda. While entire cities were leveled at times, that doesn’t mean all the people were killed. Indeed, it would be counterproductive. When a ruler got the bug to expand, he (or even the occasional she) had a primary goal to get tribute in the form of resources and slaves. He needed the locals to produce those resources in whatever dominion he deigned to conquer.
I agree with that, and as mentioned that true even of the Neanderthal. If we’re really going to say that hominids other than modern humans still exist now because there’s some Neanderthal DNA in modern humans, then perhaps no significant group of ‘people’, not even limited to modern humans, has ever disappeared.
I’m assuming differing connotations of ‘wiped out’ v ‘absorbed’ aren’t the key either. Some native tribes in the America’s have clearly been neither, but plenty one or the other to where they don’t exist as clearly differentiated groups now. And that was presumably true throughout history, but some of the larger groups to which it applies might be native peoples in the America’s, including the possibility that the pre-Columbian population was at the higher rather than lower end of a very wide range of ostensibly credible estimates, and the effect of disease brought by Europeans in cases decades before they actually settled in particular areas. It’s still unclear how populous the natives once were.
Current estimates hover around 90 to 95% of the population. Some experts estimate that Cahokia is likely to have been bigger than London in the XVIth century - a huge sprawling metropolis. All vanished by the time the first waves of settlers landed up there.
It’s actually grimly amusing to read accounts of those early settlers thanking God for having provided them with such perfect and pristine lands, with groves of fruit trees one could just go and pick ; nice, flat fields without any rocks ; rivers with naturally great fishing spots and hillocks perfect to settle villages on…
The reality of course is that these had all been man-made and very much occupied a hundred or so years before the settlers dropped by.
I think the title of the thread should be amended to end with: “… in recorded history”. I am sure that there have been mas wipeouts of populations and civilizations well before recorded history on this planet.
I would have said the poor dinosaurs, but I guess they are not considered “people” by most.
In 1948 the newly formed United Nations adopted the “Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” which stated that:
Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
This remains the formal definition today but various people have pointed out it does no really cover all the bases, it excludes the destruction of a group by the suppression of its culture, it does not include political and social groups, and the wording is insufficient with regard to intent. The best modern definition I’ve seen was developed by the sociologist Helen Fein in the nineties:
Genocide is sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of the group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat of the victim.
The important bits are “sustained and purposeful” and “lack of threat of the victim”. Worrying about formal definitions might seem like hair splitting but it is important if the uniquely awful nature of genocide is not to be diluted by massacre, cruelty and general acts of war time horror.