⚠️Disclaimer! I am not a denier or even questioner of any genocides I'm aware of!⚠️ I swear to fuck I am genuinely asking this question because I don't know the answer, and using a search engine for something like this is only going to yield crackpot denier misinformation.

I have used the argument in the past, "If given all available evidence you're still not sure a genocide is happening, you can probably safely assume that it is, because humans just constantly do genocide."

And I wanted to be prepared in case whoever I'm debating says something like "well in 19XX, group A accused group B of genocide and it turns out group A was just lying to make group B look bad!"

Basically, would they be full of shit, or have humans been proven to have sunk that low too? :/

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[–] 30 points 1 day ago (1 child)

I don't have an example for you. I see another left hook coming your way unexpectedly and that is from the term "genocide." It's fairly new. It was coined during WW2. And people still argue about the definition. We have killed each other for time immemorial but we didn't have that label that stuck to slap onto the most egregious cases. So anything before the Holocaust is given the label after the fact. And that will have some historians at the ready contesting it. So most genocides are contested not because they don't want to admit a lot of killing was going on. But because they cannot agree on what genocide means.

They hold ten-year trials in The Hague to figure out if a Milosevic or similar asshole is guilty of it. There is wiggle room in the definition. Were enough people killed? Was it targeted enough? And other distasteful questions.

We talk about genocide like it's a fixed term and everybody knows what it means. But it's more in that "I know it when I see it" category and the resulting wiggle room will make any argument you're having harder. You can't get to the slam dunk of your argument when your opponent withdraws from it on this technicality.

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