Slaughter and Genocide

There have been a lot of claims and cross-claims that genocide is being committed in the Ukraine. Putin has accused “Neo Nazis” of committing genocide of ethnic Russians in the Donbas region. Zelensky and the Neo Liberal peanut gallery in the West accuse the Russians of committing genocide in Bucha and elswhere. Perhaps it would serve to remember what genocide is under international law.

Very simply: genocide is a mass killing of people but not every mass killing of people is genocide. Genocide requires a motivation or intent to substantially erradicate an entire group based on that group's racial, ethnic or religious identity.

The term “genocide” was coined during the World War by Rafael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer, who wrote a study of Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944). He derived the term from the Greek γένος (meaning genos, "race, people") and “cide” meaning to kill. Lemkin's study became the basis for the 1948 definition of genocide as adopted by the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. As formulated, genocide requires the killing of a group's members or the imposition of conditions calculated to result in the group's physical destruction in whole or in part. The abduction of children or prevention of births within the group also qualify.

But howsoever accomplished, the acts must be motivated by an intent "to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." The phrase “in whole or in part” means a “substantial” number which is significant enough to have an impact on the group as a whole in absolute, relative and qualitative terms. For example, killing all the doctors within a group would qualify even if that number was relatively small, provided the intent was to bring about the biological demise of the group. Since 1948, sexual rape, torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment have also been held to constitute genocide when committed with the requisite intent to eradicate the group in question.

It is clear that the distinguishing feature of genocide is not dead bodies (dramatic as these might appear in photographs and footage); it is the intent to liquidate a designated group, as such. Without that intent, every mass killing on the battlefield would be “genocide.” However, mass killing on the battlefield (or in bombings) is not genocide because the soldiers being killed are killed because they are enemy soldiers trying to kill you. Similarly, civilians killed in a bombing or an artillery barage is not genocide because the motive involved is (typically) the accomplishment of a military objective.

With these accepted definitions in mind, it is clear that President Biden and the chorus hysterics that surround him, might well keep their mouths shut when it comes to bandying about accusations of genocide. There is simply no evidence that Russia is seeking to liquidate as such that ethnic group known as Ukrainians. This does not mean that Russians have not committed atrocities or specific war crimes. For example, they may have slaughtered, without any just cause, a large number of people in Bucha. If so, that would be a war crime, but not genocide.

Far more plausible, was Putin's claim that the Ukrainians were committing genocide in the Donbas region. Russia has done a lousy job of making its case in the press, so I don't have sufficient detailed information on which to base a reasonable opinon. It is clear, though, that armed Neo Nazi groups wanted the ethnic Russians out of the Ukraine. They said so publicly. The intended displacement of an ethnic group (so-called “ethnic cleansing”) has been held to qualify as “genocide” if accomplished by violent or homicidal acts that further that intent.

Now it must be said, that Putin has made his own case worse by making statements to the effect that Ukraine never was a real country anyway and that they were always part of Russia. Such statements were historically inaccurate and colossally stupid. Whether or not they were at one point or another incorporated into Russia or into the Soviet Union, it is beyond dispute that Ukrainians are a separate and distinct ethnic group, with their own language and literature. Language has always been a key determinant in defining an ethnic or national group; as for example, differentiating between the Germans and the Dutch. Ukrainians may be part of the larger Slavic biogenome, as are the Poles and the Czechs, but that does not make them ethnic Russians. For Putin to imply that he was seeking to “absorb” Ukrainians into the larger mass of Russians qualified (in Lemkin's words) as seeking to bring about the “disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence” of that “national group” known as Ukrainians.

However, I do not believe that Putin actually intended to wage a genocidal war; that is a war designed to bring about the forced assimilation (and hence eradication) of Ukrainians as such. There is something of a fine line between conquering a people and diluting them out of existence.

The relations between the Ukraine and the Soviet Union are an example of the fine line. Prior to the Great War, ethnic Ukrainians were seeking independence from Tsarist Russia. After the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks actually assisted in creating a Ukrainian “sub-state” within the Soviet Union. Moscow pursued a policy of “Ukrainization” promoting the use and the social status of the Ukrainian language and the elevation of ethnic Ukrainians to leadership positions. This was in line with the general conception of the Soviet Union as a federation of distinct “people's republics.” Highlighting the ethno-cultural variety of the USSR was a key element of Soviet propaganda.

Great controversy attends Stalin's catastrophic policy of agricultural collectivization which resulted in anywhere from 3 to 10 million deaths by starvation. That Stalin's policies caused mass death is indisuputable. That it was intended to liquidate Ukrainians “as such” is far less certain. In 1984, an ad hoc commission of Ukrainian jurists and scholars examined the evidence and concluded that there was no clear evidence of an intent to “de-nationalise” the Ukraine or to commit genocide.

During and after the World War, Stalin pursued a policy of “russification” with respect to all of the peoples' republics in the Union. After Stalin died, Khrushchev reversed the policy once again fostering the image of the Soviet Union as a federation of different ethnic groups. It was at this time, that Khrushchev gave Crimea to the Ukrainian Republic. Khruschev's successor, Brezhnev, reversed the reversal and once again pursued a russification policy (across the board) only for Gorbachev to reverse course once again.

What I would suggest is that extending the concept of genocide so as to include cultural hegemony and political assimilation would be the extension that destroys the rule. At all times in history, nations and ethnic groups have exerted pressures on one another. Rome “romanized” the Mediterranean world; the Franks “frenchified” Gaul; Ghengis Khan, “mongolized” China... and so on. To classify these world historical events as genocide would mean that virtually all human history is genocidal, at which point the category of “genocide” simply dissolves. Stated another way, we should not forget the “-cide” in the word.

Fundamentally, genocide begins with killing by one means or another; and the killing must be aimed at eliminating a designated group as such for no other reason that that it is that group as such. What the Nazis did to the Jews was genocide. What they did to the Poles and the Russians is actually less clear, although some Nazis talked as if they wanted to commit genocide on those groups and wrote incriminating memos to that effect.

What all of this shows is that genocide is not an easy thing to define or to prove. The best definitions are narrow ones for the simple reason that the broader a de-finition gets the less -finite it gets. It is true that “killing” can be done indirectly by means such as impoverishment, starvation, overwork, neglect or by deprivating a group of the essential prerquisites for health and life. But the line between economic exploitation and social neglect, on the one hand, and exterminating people by indirect means short of an actual act of killing, on the other is difficult to draw. Was the Irish Potato Famine intended genocide or an act of outrageous, inhumane callousness, of the sort the British upper classes are trained in at English public schools? What about conditions such as obtained during the Industrial Revolution? What about America's treatment of its African American citizens? Perhas genos-abuse should be a separate category.

In my view, geo-political aims such as establishing political or economic hegemony over a country or region should not be classified as “genocide” under Lemkin's rubric of “disintegration.” The essence of genocide is killing and it must be a killing done with no other excuse, justification or cause such as would give rise to an inference that killing was motivated by none other than an intent to eliminate a defined group simply because it is that defined group.

That mass killings have occurred in the Ukraine; that these killings may be war crimes for which the perpetrators should be punished, does not raise an inference that Putin intends or is waging a genocidal war against Ukrainians. For politicians in the West to be running about raising a noisy spectre of genocide is both unfounded on the facts we presently know and certainly unhelpful to the effort that needs to be made; namely, not extending or prolonging the war, but seeking to bring it to a negotiated end.