It is a notable feature of a lot of online debate— especially those involving marginalized groups— that whenever a position is taken that Left advocates think is wrong and will harm members of the group they are concerned with, they immediately accuse the other person of advocating genocide. So, for instance, articles about alcohol addiction in an Indian community get written up in The Guardian as “liquid genocide”. This tactic is so common in debates involving Blacks and involving trans people that there are Wikipedia pages specifically devoted to the phenomena. In my experience, you cannot debate an issue related to trans people for any length of time online without someone making an accusation that someone else is trying to commit genocide against trans people.
Hyperbolic argument, of course, is not new, although perhaps the Internet has turbocharged it. But the tactic of associating one’s opponents with the Worst Thing In the World long predates online discourse. For instance, for literally decades, a segment of conservatives basically labeled anyone with even center-left or moderate liberal beliefs a Communist, a junior varsity Joe Stalin. It was just a part of politics and for the most part, everyone ignored it (you will note that liberals and Democrats managed to get elected to many offices even during the heights of the Red Scares despite the conservative catastrophizing over this).
But I think the “genocide” thing gets at something that actually is harmful in a way that perhaps ordinary political hyperbole is not. To understand this, we have to go back and look at how “genocide” attained the status it holds as the Worst Thing In the World.
The term “genocide” was the attempt of the international law community to describe what happened in the Holocaust. The Holocaust was an attempt by Nazi Germany to eliminate all the Jews in Europe. They not only got scarily close to achieving their ultimate goal, but they killed millions of innocent people, tortured them in camps, stole their belongings, destroyed their place of worship, and drove millions more into exile, in many cases permanently. From this you get the elements of genocide, i.e., the various ways that this was uniquely bad— (1) it was targeting a specific ethnic or religious group; (2) it had a goal of eliminating that group within a large amount of territory; and (3) it used mass murder as a tactic to achieve its goal.
There are some other episodes in history that meet those criteria and are thus similar to the Holocaust. For instance, the Armenian Genocide attempted to eliminate Armenians in the territories of the Ottoman Empire and used mass murder to achieve that goal. Similarly, the Rawandan Genocide, in which Hutus attempted to eliminate the Tutsis from Rawanda and committed mass murder to achieve the goal, also would qualify.
It’s important, though to understand why, exactly, we think genocide is so uniquely bad. We think it worse than mass murder for instance. Joseph Stalin probably killed 20 million Russians. He was an awful person. And he was also anti-Semitic, singling out Soviet Jews for all sorts of mistreatment. But he never instituted a policy that intended to kill all the Jews in the Soviet Union, and this is considered an important difference because part of the unique horror of the Holocaust was its murderous racism and anti-Semitism, singling its victims out because of their ethnicity and religion and trying to wipe the group off the face of Europe.
Similarly, there have been many brutal warriors who killed millions of people. Genghis Khan killed 40 million, but he did it by fighting wars and attempting conquest. It’s not that conquest was some lovely thing— indeed, international law has gone to great lengths to ban it (one reason why Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is so clearly illegal)— but people dying because they were unfortunate enough to be in a war zone is simply considered to be different than singling people out because of their membership in a particular group and killing all of them in an attempt to eliminate the group.
Now maybe you disagree with all this and think all of those things were equally bad to the Holocaust. After all, Genghis Khan killed many more people than Hitler did, and far far more if you consider it as a percentage of the world’s population at the time. That’s certainly a position one could take— but if you take that position you are basically rejecting the notion of a term for genocide at all. You are just saying that all of it is mass murder and mass murder is equally bad whether it targets a group or not. And the notion of the specific horror of the Holocaust is that it targeted a group and attempted to eliminate it with mass murder. That it was somehow different and more evil than what one might call ordinary aggressive warfare.
And if you accept that there’s something uniquely bad about committing genocide as oppose to ordinary mass killing (as I think most of us do), then the dilution of the concept is quite dangerous. The point of the unique condemnation of the Holocaust is the understanding that there’s something different, and objectively worse, about trying to eliminate a group through mass murder and we ought to have special rules for and reserve special condemnation for those who do this.
Now to be sure, some of the weakening of the concept of genocide has been done by international human rights lawyers themselves. It’s understandable why this happened— lawyers want to have causes of action and the ability to sue or charge wrongdoers, and genocide, as a universally accepted human rights norm, cuts through a lot of the defenses that can sometimes be interposed against accusations. So when genocide was written into treaties, it got broadened. The Genocide Convention defines it this way:
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.
I hate to say this, but this was deliberately written so that while the definition of “genocide” in court could still be held reasonably tight (because courts would construe it strictly like any other criminal statute), activists could peddle broad definitions in public. Think about “in whole or in part” and “causing serious… mental harm to members”. Literally, if some drunk white douchebag walks into a bar full of Black patrons and yells out that he wants to kill them all, you could argue that constitutes “genocide”. Obviously a court would throw out that case if you charged him with genocide, but didn’t that person have the intention of destroying the part of the racial group that was in the bar (he expressed it)? And didn’t he cause serious mental harm to group members?
And none of this, of course, is to say that anyone should actually do that. As I said, the guy who did such a thing would be a douchebag- or worse. But he would not be a genocidaire. “Genocide” is about things on the level of the Holocaust- deliberate, racially, ethnically, or religiously motivated attempts to eliminate large groups through mass murder.
Having said that, even the lawyers’ broadening of the definition didn’t get us where we are now. Let’s take the commonly made argument that police abuse against Black people is genocide. First of all, how many cops actually want to destroy Black people as a group because they are Black? There are certainly white supremacists on police forces, but they are far from a majority. Most likely, most police abuse against Black people is a product of a combination of violent tendencies and fears cops have, department policies that encourage them to target enforcement against Black people, and implicit biases that make them think that young Black men are more dangerous than other people. Even the worst most abusive cops— the cops who beat Rodney King within an inch of his life or the cops that killed George Floyd— weren’t trying to implement some grand project to eliminate the Black race as a whole. That’s just not what is going on.
The same thing goes for arguments about trans genocide. There are a variety of gender critical arguments against various claims of trans activists. There are right wingers who simply want to restore traditional gender roles that they think are Biblically mandated. There are feminists (often labeled “TERF’s”) who are concerned about the implications of certain arguments for cis women. And there are moderates and skeptics who simply don’t agree with all the arguments that trans activists make.
None of these people are calling for a program of violence and mass murder of trans people in an attempt to eliminate the group. None of these people are proposing throwing trans people in concentration camps, or using the military to clear them out, or anything similar. Nobody’s advocating genocide.
And the threat of this sort of rhetoric is that it may undermine the international social consensus, hard earned after the Holocaust, that genocide is the worst crime against humanity. There are plenty of people out there, especially outside America, who believe in aggressive policework or who are highly skeptical of trans people. They may be quite wrong in their beliefs. But we want them to oppose genocide nonetheless. We don’t want to shatter the hard-won consensus that the Holocaust won’t be allowed to happen again. That consensus was won precisely by getting even people who may have held some objectively harmful beliefs to agree nonetheless that the Holocaust was uniquely evil. For instance, the representatives of many highly anti-Semitic populations ratified the Genocide Convention. We wanted them to. We want them to recognize that whatever their prejudices, pursuing elimination of a group through mass murder is a crime against humanity.
If you really don’t want the Holocaust to happen again, “genocide” can’t mean “anything I disagree with” or “any attack on my group”. We need a term for the Worst Thing In the World. We have such a term. Activists should find other terms to express what they are opposed to and stop trying to redefine “genocide”.
I've been thinking about this article a lot over the past month.