Killing Hardware is Genocide, Software Not So Much

Now comes Jonah Golberg, commenting on a recent resolution by the Russian parliament. They want to make sure Russia isn't remembered for genocide.

Are they denying that the Russian government under Stalin deliberately starved millions of Ukranians? Well, no. They're insisting that "[t]here is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines" and victims included "different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country."

Mr. Goldberg goes on:

The United Nations defines genocide as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Left out of this definition are "modern" political labels for people: the poor, religious people, the middle class, etc.

The oversight was deliberate. The word "genocide" was coined by a Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, who was responding to Winston Churchill's 1941 lament that "we are in the presence of a crime without a name." Lemkin, a champion of human rights who lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust, gave it a name a few years later. But to get the U.N. to recognize genocide as a specific crime, he made compromises.

Pressured by the Soviets, Lemkin supported excluding efforts to murder "political" groups from the U.N.'s 1948 resolution on genocide. Under the more narrow official definition, it's genocide to try to wipe out Roma (formerly known as Gypsies), but it's not necessarily genocide to liquidate, say, people without permanent addresses. You can't slaughter "Catholics," but you can wipe out "religious people" and dodge the genocide charge.

So: it's genocide if you kill a bunch of people because of their ethnicity--in other words, you make decisions on who to kill based on their hardware. But if you kill a bunch of people because of their belief or behavior (their software), it's not genocide.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest it's not good to kill a bunch of people. Maybe these sorts of definitional exercises are why I don't care much for the so-called "moral authority" of multinational organizations like the United Nations.