On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, Jim heartfield wrote:
>Hold on a minute... Genocide means to murder the Tribe, surely.
What makes one group of people different from another? One thing is
culture. Genocide is different from murdering people precisely because
genocide is with the purpose of erasing a culture. Erasing culture can be
accomplished in many ways besides mass murdering people of a particular
culture.
>Otherwise the injunction against genocide would be an injunction to hold
>all cultural change in absolute abeyance.
The point is absurd. All cultures change. But there is a world of
difference between cultural change, on the one hand, and cultural
liquidation/erasure, on the other. All people will die one day. But this
doesn't means that there should be no law against murder. I could think of
a thousand analogies to demonstrate the hyperbole of Jim's point.
>What about voluntary assimilation? Would that count as genocide?
How does a culture voluntarily decide to liquidate itself and be absorbed
into a larger culture? Can Jim show me where and when a culture
voluntarily erased itself, where a people turned their back on their
customs and traditions willingly and assimilated consciously and peaceful
into a dominant culture? Who would make that decision? It is another
absurd point.
If an individual or a family decides to lose their culture and adopt
another, then this is not genocide (although there may be other words that
properly characterize it).
>Genocide means genocide, and cultural assimilation means cultural
>assimilation.
"Genocide means genocide." How completely tautological. This doesn't even
pass as a legitimate definition. Wisdom from the cult who wants to
modernize and assimilate the world.
Genocide is the deliberate extermination of a people or a nation.
Extermination may include murder. But it also includes many more things.
If Europeans take over a territory and erase the culture of the indigenous
people there and assimilate the people who lived there into the colonizing
culture, this is by definition genocide. Those people as a people have
vanished just as surely as if they had been murdered. A people will have
been exterminated. This is what what makes the concept of genocide
different from mass murder.
Andy
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